1) Genesis One
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. 6 And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. 8 And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. 9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. 14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. 20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. 24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1, ESV Bible)
Genesis One Summary
Drawing from the insights provided in the commentary below, I have distilled the key themes and ideas into the following summary:
The Torah reveals who God is and showcases His glory. In Genesis, we learn that God is the Creator of the heavens and the earth. While this cannot be scientifically proven, it becomes a matter of faith, as Hebrews 11:1 describes as “the conviction of things not seen.” Genesis is not a scientific manual or a detailed account of how creation occurred; rather, it is written as a poetic chiasm, rich with deeper layers of meaning.
Belief in God's existence is only the first step to what the Bible calls "the fear of the LORD." The New Testament explains, "Without faith [in His existence] it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him" (Hebrews I:6). Belief in His existence is supposed to inspire us to seek Him. Not only does God exist, but He also rewards and punishes. The "fear of the LORD" is the belief that God exists, that He rewards righteousness, and that He punishes sin.
Creation itself testifies to the existence and majesty of God. Rabbis suggest that God created the world for the sake of Messiah, who existed before creation and who will ultimately inherit it. God created for Messiah and through Messiah, who is the Wisdom of God, the Word of God, the light of God, and the Spirit of God hovering over the waters.
Humanity was created in God's image, endowed with morality, reason, and free will. In some Jewish traditions, God fashioned humanity in the image of a prototype—a heavenly Adam. The Messiah is understood as the heavenly Adam and the second Adam. Through the first Adam came sin and death as the result of one man’s disobedience, but through the second Adam’s righteousness, all humanity is offered the gift of righteousness. Death entered through the first Adam, but through the second Adam comes the hope of eternal life.
God declared His creation to be good. He commanded humanity to be fruitful and multiply, granting them dominion and stewardship over the earth. This responsibility reflects humanity's role as caretakers of God’s creation, entrusted with its care and flourishing.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2, ESV Bible)
B'reishit bara Elohim et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz. V'ha'aretz hay'tah tohu vavohu v'choshech al-p'nei tehom, v'ruach Elohim m'rachefet al-p'nei hamayim. (Genesis 1:1-2, Transliteration)
The Origins of Creation and the Eternal God: Understanding the Torah’s First Chapter
The Torah scroll is the oldest and most sacred of all of Israel’s Scriptures, containing the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Hebrew name for the first book is B'reisheet (בְּרֵאשִׁית), which is also the first word of the Hebrew text and the name of the first parashah(Torah portion). B'reisheet means "in the beginning."
The English name "Genesis" comes from the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. "Genesis" means "origins." Therefore, the Greek name for the first book of the Bible translates as "The Book of Origins." Genesis describes the origins of everything: it starts with the origins of the universe, focuses on the origins of humanity, and then transitions to the origins of the nation of Israel.
As we study the first portion of Genesis, we will learn much about God and, perhaps even more importantly, about ourselves. This is the story of our origins, and when understood correctly, the story of our beginning helps guide us toward our ultimate destination.
When we look up at the sky and marvel at the stars and planets in all their glory, the sight can be truly breathtaking. The rabbis tell a story about Abraham, who once gazed at the night sky, shining like a palace in the darkness, and wondered, "Could it be that the universe is without a guide?" In that moment, he realized that there must be a Creator behind it all—a God who oversees the vastness of the heavens.
The Torah is a book that guides us toward finding that God. It’s not a science textbook, nor is it a formal history book. It doesn't serve as a manual on the afterlife or a step-by-step guide to heaven, though it touches on these topics. At its core, the Torah is about discovering the Creator—the owner of the universe.
The Torah tells the story of Israel, the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As a disciple of Yeshua of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel, this is also your story. The Torah has the power to transform your life. It invites you to join the family of God and experience what it means to be His child.
"This verse says nothing but 'Expound Me!'" That’s how Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchak, commonly known as Rashi, described the opening verse of the Torah. Rashi explained that this verse could be misunderstood in a few ways—perhaps as suggesting that God existed in the beginning, as if "the beginning" were a distinct entity containing God. Another possible misunderstanding is that God first created the heavens and the earth, and only later created everything else mentioned in the chapter.
Rashi, a master of Hebrew, delved deeply into the language of the Torah, which was originally written in Hebrew. What we read in our English Bibles is a translation of that text, commonly called the Hebrew Scriptures. Rashi carefully examined the Hebrew structure of Genesis 1:1 and explained, "According to its simple meaning, it says, 'In the beginning of the creation of the heavens and the earth.'" In other words, it doesn't refer to an earlier time called "the beginning." Instead, it means that everything we know—everything above, below, and around us—began when God started His act of creation.
This understanding reveals key truths about God. Everything we know is bound by dimensions—length, width, height—and time. But God existed before there was length, width, height, or time. He is eternal because He exists outside of time. He is transcendent because He is not part of creation itself. And He is all-powerful because He is the force behind all creation.
Now, try to imagine something that has no width, length, depth, or presence in time. It's impossible for us to fully grasp. Therefore, we shouldn't try to imagine God as if He were bound by any of these dimensions. He is beyond the limits of time and space.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Unrolling the Scroll.
Elohim: Creator of Order from Chaos
In the beginning, Elohim (a Hebrew word that is used in the Bible to refer to God) created. The Hebrew word "bara" means to create. The earth was formless and empty, a chaotic void. Marty Salomon says the best way to envision a chaotic void is to picture putting nothing in a blender and hitting "whip"—that’s tohu va-vohu—chaotic nothingness. The Spirit of God hovered over the waters. Then God spoke, bringing the word into action. Elohim is creator, spirit, and word.
References
This section is from teachings by Marty Salomon on BEMA Podcast, Episode One: Trust the Story.
Genesis One is not a Scientific Document. It is a Poem
The Torah tells a story much bigger than physics or biology because it is the story behind physics and biology. Without creation, there would be no physics or biology. We need not abuse the text to make it fit scientific or pseudo-scientific theories of origin. Instead, we should let the story speak for itself. If we do, we will discover that Genesis 1 reads like an ancient creation poem. It might seem strange to us that "evening and morning" marks each day, but that’s how time was understood in ancient Hebrew culture. Another refrain in the poem is "It was good" (A refrain in poetry is a repeated line, phrase, or group of lines that appears at regular intervals throughout a poem, typically at the end of stanzas or sections).
There’s a deeper message here than just a scientific account of creation. For example, plants are made on day three, but the sun doesn’t appear until day four. The poem isn’t focused on scientific details. Instead, it reveals something deeper—about creation and rest. The structure of the days corresponds: Day 1 parallels Day 4, Day 2 with Day 5, and Day 3 with Day 6. In days 1-3, God separates; in days 4-6, He fills. If you fold the poem in half, the days line up, forming a literary pattern called a chiasm.
References
This section is from teachings by Marty Salomon on BEMA Podcast, Episode One: Trust the Story.
Genesis One is a Chiasm
Chiasms are an Eastern literary device used to teach through discovery. Unlike Western methods that emphasize explanation, Eastern storytelling hides a truth to be uncovered. The beginning of a story mirrors its end (e.g., ABCD, DCBA), and the structure leads us to a central treasure. In Genesis 1, the first three days parallel the next three (ABC, ABC). The poem reflects God's creative work but also something more profound about His nature, the world He created, and humanity’s role within it.
Breakdown of the Chiasm
Day 1 (Separation): God creates light, separating it from darkness.
Day 4 (Filling): God creates the sun, moon, and stars to fill the heavens and govern the light and darkness.
Day 2 (Separation): God separates the waters above from the waters below, creating the sky (firmament).
Day 5 (Filling): God creates birds to fill the sky and fish to fill the waters below.
Day 3 (Separation): God gathers the waters to reveal dry land and creates vegetation.
Day 6 (Filling): God creates animals and humans to fill the land, with vegetation for food.
Here is another visual:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
References
This section is from teachings by Marty Salomon on BEMA Podcast, Episode One: Trust the Story.
See a Pattern? Look for more Patterns
Patterns are everywhere in Genesis 1. Number patterns are very common. The poem repeats refrains like "It was good" and "evening and morning." There are three days of separation, then three days of filling. The creator is described in three ways: spirit, bara (creation), and word. The word bara appears three times—at the beginning, middle, and end of the poem. The poem also uses the number seven repeatedly. The first verse in Hebrew has seven words, the second has 14. “Earth” is mentioned 21 times (7 x 3), and “God” is mentioned 35 times (7 x 5). The phrase “it was so” occurs seven times, and "God saw" appears seven times.
Since we have patterns of three and patterns of seven, the eastern mind would ask, “are there patterns of ten (7 + 3)?” We also find patterns of ten. The phrase “to make” appears 10 times, and "according to its kind" appears 10 times. “And God said” occurs 10 times—three times for people, seven for creatures. “Let there be” occurs 10 times—three for things in the heavens, seven for things on earth. Genesis 1 is a treasure chest of patterns.
References
This section is from teachings by Marty Salomon on BEMA Podcast, Episode One: Trust the Story.
If You See a Chiasm, Try to Find the Treasure
The chiasm points us toward the center, where the treasure is. If you look at Genesis 1 closely, you see it begins with "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" and ends with God resting. The story starts with nothingness and ends with rest. At the center of the poem is the word moed, translated as “seasons,” though it also refers to sacred times, festivals, or the Sabbath. On day four, God creates the sun, moon, and stars to mark time and seasons, pointing to the importance of the Sabbath—a key concept throughout the Bible.
Why is moed the treasure? The Israelites first heard this story after being freed from 430 years of slavery in Egypt, where their value was measured by how many bricks they produced. Now, God was teaching them to rest, to Shabbat. Their worth was no longer in what they produced but in who they were—God’s creation. Isn’t it interesting that God calls creation “good” after He makes mankind? Humanity is the crowning moment, standing out in the narrative, showing how deeply God loves and values us.
Why does God rest? Rabbi David Foreman explains that God, like an artist who knows when the work is complete, rests because there is nothing more to do. Creation is dynamic, capable of going forward on its own. The absence of the “evening and morning” refrain on the seventh day suggests this day goes on endlessly—an invitation for us to trust the story.
Our culture, like Egypt, ties value to production. We ask ourselves, “Am I successful enough? Do I have enough possessions? Am I impressive enough?” But God is teaching us something different: we are valuable because we are His creation, not because of what we produce. The Jewish day begins in the evening, with rest. Our identity starts not with what we do, but with who we are in God’s eyes.
This story calls us to Shabbat, to rest, play, and know that we are loved by God not for what we accomplish, but because we exist. Sabbath is a gift, reminding us that creation is good, even in its brokenness. It helps us reject the lies of scarcity and fear and embrace the abundance of God’s love. While many focus on Genesis 3—the fall of man—we must first learn the truth of Genesis 1: we are loved. Sabbath reinforces this truth.
The book The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel explores these ideas further. Genesis 1 may not be the easiest chiasm to understand, but it’s how God chose to begin His story. The core message is clear: we are human beings, not human doings. Our value is in who we are as part of God’s creation, not in what we produce. We are loved, valued, and accepted simply because we exist. That’s the starting place for everything else.
How does this truth make you feel? Does it bring freedom or resistance? The practical outworking of this truth is Sabbath. Sabbath reminds us of the deeper truth: that God created, loves, and values His creation. It’s not just a weekly practice—it’s a posture toward life. The seventh day goes on forever, inviting us to rest in God’s love.
References
This section is from teachings by Marty Salomon on BEMA Podcast, Episode One: Trust the Story.
The Revelation
Revelation means to “reveal” or “to lift the veil.” Torah reveals God. Ordinarily, people refer to the Torah as God’s Law. Instead of beginning with a list of laws and commandments, the Torah starts with the story of creation, the story of Adam and Eve, the story of the patriarchs, their children's sojourn in Egypt, and the birth of the nation of Israel. Does that sound like a "Law"? Obviously the Torah contains much more than a legal code. The Hebrew word Torah does not mean "law," it means "instruction." Torah is more than just law, and it is more than just instruction. The Torah is primarily a revelation.
Prior to the revelation of Torah, human beings might have deduced the existence of a creator, but our knowledge of that creator would be limited to inferences from observation. The Torah introduced God to the world. He disclosed Himself to His creation within it. When God revealed Himself to mankind through the revelation of His Torah, it was as if He declared, "Allow me to introduce myself. I'm God."
That makes the Torah a benchmark against which all subsequent revelation must be checked. Divine revelation may be progressive as the prophets reveal more about God and His plan, but subsequent revelations cannot contradict or supplant the initial revelation. We cannot use a later revelation of God to supersede an earlier one because that would deny God's integrity and immutability. In other words, the God who revealed Himself in Torah is the same God who reveals Himself in His blessed Son, Yeshua of Nazareth. The New Testament does not supplant the Torah. God has not changed His mind; He has not gotten soft in His old age; He is the same, unchanging and unchanged.
The Book of Glory
Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. (Ezekiel 1:28)
The Torah is a book of glory. It is not just a list of rules, it is a revelation of who God is. When God reveals Himself, He reveals the kavod (כָּבוֹד) of God. Kavod is the Hebrew term commonly translated as glory. In Hebrew, the word glory (kavod) derives from the verbal root kaved (כָּבֵד), a word that implies weight and heaviness. One might describe the "glory of God" as the "weight of God." In that case, to glorify God is to ascribe appropriate weight to Him.
Better yet, to "glorify God" means to accurately reveal God's true person. For example, in the book of Exodus, Moses said to God, "Show me your glory." He meant, "Show me who you really are. Reveal yourself to me." The LORD did so by telling Moses the meaning of His Name: "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin" (Exodus 34:6-7).
When we receive an insight about God or see an accurate depiction of God's person, we perceive a little bit of His glory. To know something about God is to know a portion of His glory. The prophets called this type of divine revelation "the knowledge of the LORD." This is how we should see the Torah. Moses wrote out a revelation of the Almighty's glory.
The revelation of the glory of God, which is also called the "knowledge of the LORD," thematically unifies the whole of Torah and the whole Bible. It ties all the stories of the Bible together from Genesis all the way through history to the end of Revelation and back again. The Bible tells the story of the glory of God; it is God's book. We can sum up the whole Bible in five simple words: "The LORD reveals His Glory."
Those same five words describe the Messianic Era, a day in which the Almighty will pour out His Spirit on all flesh so that even the least of the least will receive a revelation of God on par with the greatest prophets in this current era. In that day, no man will need to teach his neighbor about God. No preacher will need to say, "Know ye the LORD!" They will all know Him, from the least to the greatest and "the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11:9). It is the business of the disciple to live now for the realization of this Messianic Age.
Book of Faith
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval." (Hebrews 11:1–2)
The Torah is a book of faith. Faith is not a creed or a denomination or an institution. People tend to think of faith as something they do on Saturday when they attend the synagogue or on Sunday when they attend church, as if faith is a compartment of life that one can check into and out of like a man checking in and out of a hotel room. The majority of people who identify themselves as religious are merely that: religious. A small minority are actually in the faith around which the religion is built.
The New Testament Greek word for faith is pistis (πίστις). The corresponding Hebrew word, emunah (אֱמוּנָה), means faithfulness. Emunah sounds similar to the common Hebrew word Amen (אָמֵן), which, more or less, means “true” or “certainly.” The two words sound similar because they share the same Hebrew root: aman (אָמַן). In Modern Hebrew, Israelis say, “Be’emunah (בֶּאֱמוּנָה),” which means, “of course,” “definitely,” “really,” “with certainty.” That type of language is similar to how the apostles understood faith.
According to our apostles, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Notice that faith consists of two aspects, both of which imply paradox:
Assurance of things hoped for
Conviction of things not seen
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for. This is paradoxical. If a person has assurance of a certain thing, he does not hope for it. For example, if you have one dollar in your hand, you do not say, “I hope I have one dollar.” Instead, you are certain that you have one dollar. So faith functions paradoxically. A man who does not have a dollar might hope to acquire one, but faith goes a step further; it is convinced of the thing hoped for. Faith is being certain of something that, at best, you can only hope for. The man is certain that he will acquire the dollar.
That definition of faith does not justify the popular “name-it-and-claim-it” prosperity message. A person might have faith that God will give him a Mercedes, but if God did not say He would give him a Mercedes, that faith is misplaced.
To qualify as genuine faith in God, faith must be the assurance of hope in the character of God and the promises He has made to His people through His word, His Torah, and by His prophets.
The "things hoped for" include reward for righteousness, punishment of evil, the great redemption, the coming of the Messiah, the ingathering of exiles, the end of tyranny, life after death, reward in the hereafter, the resurrection from the dead, the Messianic Era, and the World to Come. The Torah is a book of "things hoped for."
Faith is also the conviction of things not seen—another paradox. This definition does not refer to things that you have not seen personally. For example, a man who has never seen China does not need faith to believe that it exists. More than one fifth of the population of humanity sees China every day. He may rely on second hand knowledge of China's existence without actually seeing it.
Faith requires a conviction of things not generally seen at all by human beings. By "things unseen," the apostles mean things empirically and scientifically unverifiable. We can neither prove nor disprove their existence. They stand outside the realm of perception and observable, testable phenomena: unseen.
Of course, sometimes people do catch glimpses of the unseen. The Torah will tell us the story of Balaam whose eyes were opened to see an angel, which previously only his donkey could see. A person's subjective experience, vision, revelation, or spiritual sight, cannot be objectively assessed. It remains subjective and, from an objective perspective, it remains "unseen" because no one else (or very few people) saw the same thing. Generally speaking, one cannot see God or spirits or angels or demons. One cannot peer into the Garden of Eden or the fire of Gehenna. Like Balaam on the donkey, our blind eyes do not see the angel in the road with a drawn sword, but faith is convinced that the angel exists. The Torah is a book of "things not seen."
The Seen from the Unseen
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. (Hebrews 11:3)
Our apostles contrast the unseen world, the "things not seen," against the seen world--that is, the material universe. According to the apostles, we accept that God spoke the universe into existence, creating "what is seen" from things that are unseen, completely as a matter of faith.
The Latin words ex nihilo mean "out of nothing." The apostles say that God did not create the universe ex nihilo. He created the universe out of something, but that something was unseen, not part of the universe, not part of time or space, neither energy nor substance, not a wave, not a particle, not a solid, not a gas, not a liquid-not even a quantum fluctuation or singularity. Rather, He created all things by His own Word. God spoke, "Let there be," and "there was."
This cannot be proven. Bible apologists, Christian creationists, and Intelligent Design scientists have wearied themselves attempting to prove the unprovable. If the act of creation could be proven, it would no longer be a matter of faith. Instead we could rewrite Hebrews 11:3 to say, "By rational deduction and based upon the scientific evidence, we understand that the universe was created by the word of God."
According to the apostles, that approach to the creation narrative barks up the wrong tree. No one can prove that God created the world. No one can prove that God exists, much less that He created the heavens and the earth. It can only be a matter of faith.
The writer of the book of Hebrews is no fool. He states that there is an unseen world behind the seen world. He speaks of an unseen reality that informs what is seen and is actually the source of what is seen. He says that belief in the existence of this unseen thing outside the limits of human perception requires faith.
A modern man believes only in what can be seen, tasted, touched, heard, smelled, measured, calculated, and proven, but the man of faith believes that the material world derives its very existence from the unseen world.
The man of faith knows that a material world not sustained by the unseen would be an impossible contradiction, a non-reality, like a body without a soul, a sterile counterfeit. What is unseen transcends that which is seen. The person of faith carries a conviction of things unseen from the very beginning of the universe.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
The Fingerprints of God
The creation can tell us something about the Creator. All creation is marked with the fingerprints of God. King David says, "I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers! The moon and the stars which You have ordained!" (Psalm 8:4(3)). As believers in a divine Creator, we must learn to sharpen our sense of wonder to detect the glory of God that permeates creation:
The heavens are telling of the Glory of God;
And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.
Day to day pours forth speech, And night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
Their voice is not heard. (Psalm 19:2-4[1-31)
The modern and post-modern world discredits the testimony of creation by saying, "All of this marvel and all of this wonder has come into being only by chance. It only looks miraculous." The naturalist believes in poems that write themselves.
The biblical view of the cosmos teaches that creation itself provides revelation about God. The Apostle Paul says, "He did not leave Himself without witness" (Acts 14:17); "for since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that [human beings] are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). What are the "invisible attributes" of "His eternal power and divine nature" that are revealed in the creation?
HE IS CREATIVE AND SUSTAINING: Not only did He create, but He created the universe to run itself, to be governed by natural laws of physics. The universe is not illusory; it is not nothingness. It is substance, sustained, and real-even if transient and quickly vanishing.
The consistency of the laws of physics indicates monotheism. All observable matter and energy submit to the same laws of physics and quantum physics, thus there cannot be multiple deities each making up their own sets of rules.HE IS TRANSCENDENT, MEANING HE TRANSCENDS THE CREATION:
To create, He must not be a part of the creation, rather the Creator must be uncreated. He must exist outside of our universe in order to transcend it. Therefore, He is not apprehensible within the limits of creation. That explains why we do not see or experience God in the normal sense in which we see and experience one another.
Man's five senses are part of the created order and cannot perceive something outside that order.HE IS SELF-SUFFICIENT: His transcendence indicates that He is above and beyond creation, therefore He certainly does not need any element from within the creation. No need compels Him to further involve Himself with the creation. If He does so, He does so only because He wills it.
Observers can ascertain all the above from the complexity of the veins of a leaf or the microbiological organs of single-celled creature or the stripes on a zebra or the chemical adhesion of water molecules. They testify to the Creator's glory. They testify about the Creator, but they are not the Creator. Knowing creation is not the same as knowing the Creator. The universe alone is insufficient to teach us the knowledge of the LORD. Paul Levertoff explains:
The picture is not the artist, nor is the voice of a singer the personality of the man. We may admire the artist because of the picture, the singer because of the voice, but we do not really know either man ...All this is true of God. Creation is merely His picture. It is in knowledge of Himself that true knowledge consists ... Only Moses had, to some extent, this vision; yet it is the business of all to try and reach this stage.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
The Sake of Messiah
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but why did He create them? Why did God create the universe? For the Messiah's sake alone the entire world came into being. This means that God made the world for the sake of Messiah and for the goal of the Messianic Era. From the beginning, the creation has been working toward the kingdom of heaven on earth: "The important thing is the way to Messiah."
Rav said, "The world was created only for the sake of David." Shmuel said, "Only for the sake of Moses." Rabbi Yochanan said, "Only for the sake of Messiah." (b.Sanhedrin 98b)
The apostles teach that the Messiah existed before the creation and that God made the whole creation for the Messiah. God appointed Him to be the heir of all things, and through Him, He made the world. By Him all things were created: the things above and the things below, the visible things and the invisible things, supernatural powers and authorities, spiritual beings and physical things -God created all things through the Messiah and for the Messiah.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
The Wisdom of God
From the beginning, with Wisdom the Word of the LORD created and perfected the heavens and the earth. (Genesis I:1, Targum Neofiti)
God created all things through the Messiah. This is a difficult idea to grasp. Does it mean that the human being whom we know as Yeshua of Nazareth, who was born in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago, was also present at the moment of creation as a human being? If He always existed as Yeshua the man from before creation, why and how was He born of a woman at a certain time and place?
When the apostles said things like this, perhaps they meant that the Messiah's spiritual essence pre-existed the creation and that God made the physical and spiritual worlds through the Messiah's divine, pre-existent, spiritual essence. If so, what was this spiritual, pre-existent essence?
The Messiah is called "the Wisdom of God," and He existed before creation in the form of God's divine Wisdom. The Bible says that when God created the universe, He did so through His Wisdom. That Wisdom is the Messiah. Speaking in the voice of Wisdom, the Messiah says, "The LORD possessed me at the beginning"
[Wisdom says:] From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills I was brought forth; while He had not yet made the earth and the fields, nor the first dust of the world. When He established the heavens, I was there, when He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep, when He made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed, when He set for the sea its boundary so that the water would not transgress His command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth; then I was beside Him, as a master workman; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him. (Proverbs 8:23-30)
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
The Word
Another answer to the question, "What was the spiritual, pre-existent essence of Messiah?"
In the days of the apostles, Jewish people in the land of Israel spoke Aramaic. They used Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible. An Aramaic translation of the Bible is called a Targum. The Aramaic versions of the Bible depicted God's creative and personal being as a sort of temporal and finite expression of the infinite God. Since the Jewish theologians of the day understood God to be infinite, they did not think it possible for Him to intersect with the finite world. Think about it. How can the infinite God fit in the finite universe? Therefore the Aramaic translators avoided using language that placed the infinite God in contact with the finite world in a revealed way. Instead, they spoke of a condensed and abbreviated emanation of the Almighty whereby God interacts within finite time and space. They regarded this abstraction of God as a projection of the Infinite One into finite form, and they called it "the Word." The Aramaic term is Memra (מֵימְרָא), a word that literally means "word."
God's Word is the active, finite expression of His infinite being. Although His Word acts as the active agent of God, ordering and creating the universe, God creates all things through His Word, and His Word is the one doing the creating. The Gospel of John uses the Greek word Logos (Λόγος) as an equivalent for the Memra of God. Logos also means "Word":
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. (John I:I-3)
The Word was not something different than God; instead, the Word was God. It was His Wisdom. The Word was the emanation of the infinite God within the finite universe. In other words, the "Word" was the facet of God involved with creating the physical world and interacting with it and its creatures.
It came to pass that, in a certain definite time and in a certain finite place, the infinite God sent forth His Word to intersect the finite and to be clothed in garments of human flesh, as the Scripture says, "And the Word became flesh" (John 1:14). At that time Mary, a daughter of the house of David, "was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 1:18). "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." This means that the Word clothed Himself with a human body and dwelt in it, like a man camping in a tent.
This man was the Messiah. In that sense, the Messiah existed before the creation, and through Him God made all things.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
Before Creation
God created seven things before He created the world. They are the Torah; repentance; the Garden of Eden; Gehenna; the Throne of Glory; the Temple; and the name of the Messiah ... The name of the Messiah, as it is written [in Psalm 72:17], "May His name endure forever; before the sun His name endures." (b. Pesachim 54)
The rabbis say that before God made the world He created seven things: 1) the Torah; 2) repentance; 3) the Garden of Eden; 4) Gehenna; 5) the Throne of Glory; 6) the Temple; and 7) the name of the Messiah. This list teaches the plan of redemption. God created the Torah, which reveals His righteous standard. He knew that man would fail to meet the standard, so He created repentance. If man repents, he may enter the paradise of the Garden of Eden. If he does not repent, he faces judgment in Gehenna. At the appointed time every man must stand in judgment before the Throne of Glory. The righteous will enter God's dwelling place, His holy Temple, by the merit of Messiah who brings the redemption and raises up the Temple.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
Before the Sun
What is the name of Messiah? The school of Rabbi Yannai said, "His name is Yinnon, for it is written [in Psalm 72:17], "May his name endure forever; before the sun His name is Yinnon." (b.Sanhedrin 98a)
Psalm 72 is a messianic psalm about the Son of David and his righteous reign over the kingdom. The rabbis teach that this psalm contains information about the Messiah, including a secret name for the Messiah. We know that Messiah existed before the sun was made because it says in Psalm 72:17, "Before the sun His name is Yinnon." The rabbis explain that "Yinnon" is one of the Messiah's names.
The Talmud quotes this psalm to prove that God gave the name of the Messiah before the foundation of the world. According to this idea, God established the Messiah's name before He made the sun. He gave Messiah the mysterious name "Yinnon" before He created the heavens.
A parallel verse from the psalm contains another cryptic reference to the Messiah: "Let them fear You while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations" (Psalm 72:5). These words make an acronym for the Hebrew word mashiach (משיח), which we translate into English as Messiah and Christ. If you combine the final letters of the phrase iM shemeSH velifnel yareaCH (עם שמש ולפני ירח), translated here as "while the sun endures, and as long as the moon," it spells mashiach (משיח).
The first letters of the same phrase contain all the letters in the name Yeshua (ישוע): Im Shemesh Velifnei Yareach (עם שמש ולפני ירח), albeit not in letter order of the name. This means that the same psalm that the rabbis use to prove the pre-existence of Messiah's name happens to contain the words "Messiah" and "Yeshua" encrypted in the same four-word phrase.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
Beginning With Wisdom
Nothing is a problem. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. How did He do it? Did He form creation from some primeval substance, like a potter who starts with a lump of clay before spinning a pot? Or did He create everything out of nothing-ex nihilo?
If everything came from nothing, its essence is nothing. Nothing might appear to be something for a little while, but it's not. Anything that's nothing must inevitably revert to nothing.
Another way to ask the question: Is there some plan or purpose behind the universe? If not, our lives have no meaning, and neither does anything else.
Secular materialism believes that everything comes from nothing and ultimately returns to nothing. There's no meaning. No real purpose. No moral absolutes higher than human expedience. No real meaning to ideas like good or evil. No punishment for sin. No reward for righteousness. Death is the end, and oblivion is our final destiny. It's all for nothing.
Some religions place their hopes on nothing. Buddhism and the New Age fads teach a path of salvation from the burden of existence with the goal of reaching blissful nothingness. According to that worldview, this world of form and matter is artificial and meaningless. Salvation from this world requires transcending the illusion of form and returning to the perfect primordial state of nothing. Alas, when the goal is nothing, nothing is a goal.
From our human perspective, it might appear as if God created the universe out of nothing. That's not what happened. "The worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). He didn't start with physical matter or energy or anything visible that we can perceive. Instead, God created everything by the authority of His word. God said, "Let there be," and there was. But it doesn't say He started with nothing. His "word" is something substantial.
The Bible explains that God created with wisdom: "O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all' (Psalm 104:24). That means there's a wise plan and a wise purpose behind everything that exists, including your life. Even the very fact that you are reading these words right now has been ordained in God's wisdom. The existence of the universe is neither accidental nor the result of the random caprice of a higher power. We are not an accident, and neither is anything else. Matter matters. Everything is according to God's wisdom.
The whole Bible begins with the Hebrew word bereshit, which means "in the beginning." You could say that the whole universe begins with that single word. The same word appears in Psalm III:10 in connection with God's divine wisdom: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning (reshit) of wisdom" (Psalm II1:10).
What does it mean to "fear the LORD"? Well-meaning preachers try to soften the meaning. They don't want us to be scared of God. They explain, "To fear the LORD only means to respect Him." However, in the Bible, the fear of the LORD involves being afraid of God.
Believing in God without fearing God is called "folly." There's nothing really special about believing that God exists. Even the demons have the good sense to fear Him: "The demons also believe, and shudder" (James 2:19). It's possible to arrive at a belief in the existence of God on purely rational grounds. Many philosophers have concluded that God exists but deny that He takes any interest in human affairs. Some people believe that God created the universe like a clockmaker who makes a clock, winds it up, and lets it go, involving Himself no further with its mechanical functions.
The clock isn't worried about seeking the clockmaker or giving an account of itself to Him. Such a person might say, "So what if there's a God? What has that to do with me?"
The God of the Bible is not like a disinterested clockmaker. He's completely invested in every one of His creatures, down to the smallest of details: "Are not five sparrows sold for two cents? Yet not one of them is forgotten before God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Luke 12:6-7).
Belief in God's existence is only the first step to what the Bible calls "the fear of the LORD." The New Testament explains, "Without faith [in His existence] it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him" (Hebrews I:6). Belief in His existence is supposed to inspire us to seek Him. Not only does God exist, but He also rewards and punishes. The "fear of the LORD" is the belief that God exists, that He rewards righteousness, and that He punishes sin. That's called "the beginning of wisdom." Without the fear of the LORD, wisdom doesn't even get started.
The connection between "the beginning of the universe" and "the beginning of wisdom" becomes clearer when we hear Wisdom herself tell the creation story. In his book of Proverbs, wise King Solomon personifies Wisdom as a noble woman offering her assistance to human beings. She is trying to steer us away from the paths of folly:
Wisdom shouts in the street, she lifts her voice in the square; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the gates in the city she utters her sayings. (Proverbs 1:20-21)
Solomon depicts Wisdom as his sister (Proverbs 7:4), and he personifies her as an "excellent wife" whose "worth is far greater than jewels" (Proverbs 31:10). He makes Wisdom female and gives her a woman's voice because the biblical word for wisdom (chochmah) is a feminine noun in Hebrew (and also in Greek).
Solomon says, "The LORD by wisdom founded the earth" (Proverbs 3:19). That's why Wisdom reports being present at the time of the creation. She says, "The LORD possessed me at the beginning (reshit)" (Proverbs 8:22).
She was the master workman at God's side, the architect of creation. She was present with God before the depths existed, before the mountains, before the earth, before the waters above, before the waters below, before the heavens, and before the starry host. She says, "I was beside Him, as a master workman; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him' (Proverbs 8:30).
Here is Wisdom's version of the creation story:
The LORD possessed me at the beginning of His way,
Before His works of old.
From everlasting I was established
From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
When there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills I was brought forth;
While He had not yet made the earth and the fields,
Nor the first dust of the world.
When He established the heavens, I was there,
When He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep, When He made firm the skies above,
When the springs of the deep became fixed,
When He set for the sea its boundary
So that the water would not transgress His command, When He marked out the foundations of the earth;
Then I was beside Him, as a master workman;
And I was daily His delight,
Rejoicing always before Him, Rejoicing in the world, His earth,
And having my delight in the sons of men. (Proverbs 8:22-31)
Anyone who reads this poem realizes that the Bible's idea of "wisdom" is supposed to convey something more than the quality of having life experience, knowledge, sound judgment, and a dash of common sense. In the Bible, wisdom is a much broader concept than in English. She's the agent through whom God created the heavens and the earth. She's the meaning and purpose behind all of existence.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ The Beginning of Wisdom, Book One.
2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)
Formless and Void
If God is infinite and timeless, how can He intersect a finite and time-bound universe? If He transcends all creation, how can He have any interaction with creation? The paradox implied by these questions puzzled the rabbis in the days of the apostles and gave rise to an esoteric teaching called the Work of Creation. The sages considered the Work of Creation a subject of profound, deep mysticism, filled with secrets and divine wisdom, but they discouraged laymen from learning it, and they dissuaded even their own students from delving too deeply into its mysteries. They believed that the subiect matter was dangerous and could lead to blasphemous heresies. They never taught it publicly.
How can God (who is completely infinite and a consuming fire, whom no man can see and live) interact with His creation and with finite human beings? The answer is that the LORD must conceal Himself to some extent in order to have any relationship with mankind and the rest of finite creation. Jewish mysticism explains that creation can exist and God can interact with creation only because He has deliberately limited Himself through contraction of His infinite being. This "self-limitation" of the infinite God is one of the fundamental principles of mystical thought.
If the LORD did not first reduce Himself and limit Himself, we would be completely incapable of comprehending or withstanding the full revelation of God. Even Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock and granted only a glimpse of God's back, as it were, as He passed by. If God did not first limit and humble Himself (so to speak), we could not begin to conceive of Him:
Rabbi Yochanon said, "Wherever you find the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, you will also find his humility." (b. Megillah 31a)
Rabbi Yochanon means to tell us that if we have experienced a taste of the glory of God, in any measure, we should know that it is only because God first humbled Himself enough for us to perceive Him.
Jewish mystics call God's act of self-limitation tzimtzum (צמצום), which means "contraction" or "concealment." They realized that before God could even create the universe, He needed to, in some sense, withdraw Himself enough to create a void. Unless the creation was actually to be God (as the pantheists believe), it required the absence of God. To make something that isn't God, God had to create a non-God space. Therefore, the first step of creation required formlessness and void that resulted from the concealment of His presence. Then, to enter the void and form the creation, the Almighty needed to reduce Himself, so to speak, into a finite form that could interact within the finite without negating it. He needed to projech as it were, a finite expression of His blessed Self. This act of self-limitation (tzimtzum) condensed the fullness of His person to a perfect expression of His being. Some sources refer to this perfect expression of the Infinite God as the Word (Memra/Logos). Some sources refer to it as the Wisdom. Others identify the finite expression of God as the light of the Infinite One.
The light of God is not disconnected or separate from God, rather, it extends and projects from Him, like light shining forth from the sun. The light of the Infinite One shone in the darkness, or to put it another way, the Spirit of God moved over the surface of the waters. These are not literal waters. They represent the chaotic state of non-existence created by the absence of God. So too, the darkness has no real substance, it exists only as the absence of the Light. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light-the first act of creation. The universe began in a blaze of light.
These concepts are all represented in the prologue to the Gospel of John where the Light of the Infinite One is described as the divine "Word" that was with God from the beginning and was God. All things were made through it. The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. It was the true light, which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. The Spirit of God that hovered over the water of chaos is the Spirit of Messiah, and the light that shone in the darkness is the light of Messiah. "God saw that the light was good" (Genesis I:4).
The divine light was not ordinary light. It appeared independent of any luminary. God had not yet created the sun, moon, or stars. The sages teach that God has concealed this original light until the Messianic Era and the World to Come: "And for whom did He conceal it? For the righteous in the age to come, as it is written, 'God saw that the light was good."
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
This Was the Spirit of Messiah
One Sabbath morning in the Nazareth synagogue a young Jew, a local carpenter, the son of a carpenter, stood up to read the Torah. They handed Him the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll "and found the place where it is written, The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, because He anointed me to preach the gospel." Then He told those in attendance, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
In so doing, He declared Himself to be the Anointed One of God-the Messiah.
Another prophecy in the scroll of Isaiah speaks of the same anointing Spirit of the LORD resting upon the Messiah:
Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit. The Spirit of the LORD will rest on Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. (Isaiah 11:I-2)
The Prophet Isaiah foresaw a king from the line of David, a "stem of Jesse" and a branch from David's roots. He saw that the Spirit of the LORD would rest upon this Son of David.
According to the Midrash Rabbah, an ancient collection of Jewish lore and Bible interpretation, this Spirit of the LORD that Isaiah depicted resting upon the head of the Messianic King is the same Spirit of the LORD that moved over the primeval waters of creation:
"The Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters." This was the Spirit of Messiah as it is written, "The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him." (Genesis Rabbah 1:2 quoting Isaiah 11:1-2)
According to the ancient rabbis, the Spirit of Messiah spoken of in Isaiah I:I-2 is the Spirit of God that was present at the creation of the world. The Spirit of God that anointed Yeshua is the same Spirit that moved over the surface of the water before creation.
As it is written in Psalm 77:19, "Your way was in the sea and Your paths in the mighty waters, and Your footprints may not be known." His footprints on the water may not be known because a foot upon the water leaves no print. In the ancient world, the waters of the sea symbolized the forces of chaos. God's Spirit moved above the chaos. In the gospel story the Messiah strides over the waves, as Scripture says, "He came to them, walking on the sea" (Matthew 14:25).
Chasidic discourse teaches that the Spirit of Messiah is more exalted than that of Moses. Whereas the Torah depicts Moses as one drawn out from the water, who later divides the sea and walks through the midst of the water, it depicts the Messiah as one above the water:
The Messiah has superiority even higher than that of Moses our teacher. On the phrase at the beginning of the Torah, "And the spirit of God hovered," the sages teach, "This alludes to the spirit of the King Messiah." That verse continues, "over the surface of the waters." This intimates a level higher than that of Moses, who was so called Moses (in Exodus 2:10] "because from the water I drew him." (The Maamarim of the Alter Rebbe on the Parshivos)
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
Exile and Redemption
God created the material world formless, void, dark, and chaotic like water. The Spirit of God hovered over this material world and began to order it and separate it into light and dark, above and below, sky and ground, land and sea, and so forth.
The rabbis did not look at Genesis 1:2 merely as a literal description of the primordial earth. They believed the verse hinted toward the future of Israel's exile and ultimate redemption in the Messianic Era:
The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)
The words "the earth was formless" allude to the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles. The word "void" alludes to Israel's subjugation under Persia and Media. The words "and darkness" allude to the triumph of Hellenism under Alexander the Great. The words "surface of the deep" refer to the Roman Empire. The words "and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters" refer to the Messiah. The rabbis said, "This alludes to the Spirit of Messiah, as it is written [in Isaiah I1:2], 'And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him?'
The Spirit of Messiah hovering over the waters symbolizes the Messianic Era when the knowledge of the LORD will cover the earth. The whole creation aims for the kingdom of heaven, as it says, "The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea."
When the Messiah comes, He will transform the formless, the void, the darkness, the deep, and all the sorrows of this present age of exile into the light and joy of a new world and a new creation. Rabbi Bechaye says, "The word 'in the beginning alludes to the Temple, 'formless and void' alludes to the exile, 'and there was light' alludes to the Messianic Era."
Our Master taught us to repent because the kingdom of heaven is near. The waters over which the Spirit of the Messiah hovers symbolize repentance:
In what merit will the redemption come? For the sake of the one who hovered over the waters. That is to say, in the merit of repentance which is likened to water, as it is written [in Lamentations 2:19], "Pour out your heart like water." (Genesis Rabbah 2:4)
The waters correspond to Israel's repentance in exile. Just as the Spirit hovered over the waters, the Spirit of Messiah blossoms over Israel during the exile. This teaches that the Holy One, blessed be He, creates the cure, which is King Messiah, before He inflicts the wound, which is the destruction of the Temple and the exile. The LORD anticipated the destruction of the Temple and the exile, so He set the name of Messiah over it as the chief cornerstone.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)
The Divine Word
God spoke His Word and the universe snapped into existence. His spoken Word is the creative power through which He made all things. The Word of God is not something distinct from Himself, rather it is an extension of Himself--a revelation of Himself. Like light shining forth from a luminary into the darkness, His word went forth from Himself into the void. The ancient Targums (Aramaic translations) on the Torah speak explicitly of the divine Word playing a direct role in the creation narrative. Here are some examples from Targum Neofiti on the Genesis narrative.
From the beginning, with wisdom the Word of the LORD created. (Genesis 1:1)
And the Word of the LORD said: "Let there be light"; and there was light by his Word. (Genesis 1:3)
And the Word of the LORD separated between light and darkness. (Genesis 1:4)
And the Word of the LORD called to the light, "Daytime." (Genesis 1:5)
And the Word of the LORD said, "Let there be a firmament" (Genesis 1:6)
And the Word of the LORD said, "Let the waters below be gathered" (Genesis 1:9)
And the Word of the LORD created man in an image and likeness from before the LORD, He created male and female, He created them. (Genesis 1:27)
On the seventh day the Word of the LORD completed His work which He had created, and there was Sabbath and repose before Him on the seventh day from all His work which He had created. (Genesis 2:3)
This type of language informs the prologue to John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... all things came into being through Him" (John I:I-3). In his letter to the Colossians. Paul speaks in a similar manner regarding the Divine Word that was made flesh:
He is ... the firstborn over creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. (Colossians I:I5-17)
This Divine Word did not fall silent after the completion of Creation. Instead He continues to speak. His Word goes forth yet. The writer of the book of Hebrews reminds us, "In these last days [God] has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world" (Hebrews 2:2). The Son is the Word, that creative and vivifying force of God, the speech that spilled forth from His mouth, His revelation of Himself. When the Word became flesh, "we saw His glory." John 1:14).
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
The Concealed Light
The first light of creation was not ordinary light. In the story, the Almighty had not yet created the sun and the moon and the stars. No natural source of light existed, yet there was light. Imagine light that shines forth without a light source.
In the days of the apostles, Rabbi Eleazar taught that the light of the first day of creation was a miraculous, wondrous light, independent of a luminary. It enabled a person to see "from one end of the world to the other," and some say, from one end of time to the other.
The Almighty foresaw the future, and He saw that man would sin and wickedness would prevail upon the earth. He concealed the divine light from the world, as Scripture says, "From the wicked their light is withheld" (Job 38:I5). He removed the divine radiance from the world and concealed it for the pleasure of the righteous in the days of Messiah and the World to Come.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge
The LORD spoke, and the world came into being. When God speaks, His word goes forth from His mouth as a word of wisdom, a word of understanding, and a word of knowledge. "For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding" (Proverbs 2:6). The whole universe is built upon and sustained by His wisdom, understanding, and knowledge:
The LORD by wisdom founded the earth, by understanding He established the heavens. By His knowledge the deeps were broken up. (Proverbs 3:19-20, emphasis mine)
Wisdom generally refers to the capacity of reason with a moral component to choose the good and reject evil. The Proverbs describe biblical wisdom as the antithesis of wickedness and folly. Understanding presents insight into the complex, the ability to conceptualize beyond the obvious surface of a problem and propose a solution, and the discernment to tell the difference between one thing and another. Knowledge pertains to the realization of truth, spiritual revelation, and experience of other things and beings outside of oneself.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ The Beginning of Wisdom, Book One.
4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1:4-5)
God of Distinctions
God is a God of distinctions. The traditional prayers for concluding the weekly Sabbath refer to Him as HaMavdi(המבדיל), a name that means, "The One Who Separates." He separated light from dark. He separated day and night. He separated the waters above from the waters below. He separated dry land from sea. Creation was an act of separation.
God also separates between the holy and the profane. He divides space into holy places and normal places. He divides time into holy time and normal time. He separates between the Sabbath and the six days of labor. Without such separations and distinctions, holiness could not exist.
The same God separates His people, all of us, from the children of the world. He separates us through a process called sanctification, a word that means being set apart unto the LORD. The Apostle Paul told the Gentile believers in Ephesus, "You were formerly darkness, but now you are Light in the Master. Walk as children of Light. For the fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth" (Ephesians 5:8-9). The God who separates between light and dark separates the children of light from the children of darkness.
The same God separated Israel from the nations. He set apart a chosen people-the Jewish people. If everyone was the chosen people, being chosen would have no meaning. Gentile disciples of Yeshua have direct connection to the chosen people through Yeshua, but that connection does not eliminate the distinction between them and the Jewish people.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
The Light of the Messianic Age
The original light of the first day of creation is called "good," because on the first day of creation, "God saw that the light was good." He hid away the divine light of the first day of creation, concealing it until He will reveal it in the Messianic Era and the World to Come:
This is the light of Messiah, as it is said, "God saw the light, that it was good." This teaches that before the world was created, the Holy One, blessed is he, looked forward to the generation of Messiah and its deeds. He hid [the primordial light] for Messiah and his generation beneath his throne of glory. (Yalkut Shimoni, 11.499)
Darkness symbolizes the exile--a time of spiritual blindness when the presence of God is concealed from view. We pray for an end to the exile when we ask God to "shine a new light upon Zion." In the Messianic Age, they will say to Zion, "Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you" (Isaiah 60:1). Jerusalem will become a spiritual lamp as the spiritual capital of the entire world. At that time Jerusalem will be called "the light of the world, as it says, 'Nations will come to your light." The presence of the Messiah in Messianic Jerusalem will offer spiritual revelation to all of humanity. The LORD tells His servant the Messiah, "I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth" (Isaiah 49:6):
At that time, the Holy One, blessed is he, will make the light of King Messiah and of Israel gleam, and everyone will walk by the light of King Messiah and of Israel, as it is said, "Nations will walk by your light and kings by your shining brilliance." (Yalkut Shimoni, 11.499)
The coming of the Messiah brings light to Israel, but it brings darkness to the wicked:
At the time that King Messiah comes, he will stand on the roof of the Holy Temple and proclaim to Israel, "Humble ones, the time of your redemption has come! And if you do not believe me, see my light that is shining upon you! As it is said, 'Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. And it has shone upon you only, and not on the idolaters, as it is said [in Isaiah 60:2], For behold, darkness will cover the earth." (Yalkut Shimoni, 11.499)
In that day the LORD will bring devastating judgments against the wicked, but those who survive from the nations will see a beacon of light from Zion. The nations will walk in the light of this Messianic revelation as they make pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship the LORD and learn Torah, as described in Isaiah 2:2. Likewise, the Talmud calls the Temple "the light of the world," citing proof from Isaiah 2:2 and the nations streaming to Jerusalem in the Messianic Era:
Jerusalem will ultimately prepare a lantern for the nations of the world, and they will walk by her light. What is the reason? "Nations will come to your light." Likewise, it says (in Isaiah 2:2), "The mountain of the house of the LORD will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all the nations will stream to it." (b.Bava Batra 4a)
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
Light of the World to Come
The Apostle John received a glimpse of the revelation of the hidden light shining forth in the World to Come. He saw New Jerusalem and reported, "And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light" (Revelation 21:23).
In the World to Come, all of humanity will see the light of the glory of God. The source of the illumination is the Lamb: "They will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the LORD God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever" (Revelation 22:5). John saw the original "good" light-divine light of the first day of creation-revealed for the sake of the righteous.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
The Light is Messiah
The divine light of the first day is the revelation of the Messiah. "Light" is one of the names of the Messiah. The Light dwells with God. Messiah is the true light. "True light not only illuminates; it also warms."
Yeshua told us that He is the light of the world, which is to say, the light of the creation. The world was created through His light, and His light will shine again at the time of the great redemption. The Apostle John taught that the divine light is the divine Word--the Logos--through which all things were created. The Logos is the light of men that shone in the darkness:
All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. (John 1:3-5)
The Torah tells us, "God said, 'Let there be light," to reveal that God will ultimately illuminate Israel with the light of the Messiah, of whom it is written, "Arise, shine; for your light has come..."-the light being, of course, the Messiah ... The verse "Let there be light" teaches that God created the world through this light, for immediately after these words the creation began. (Tz'enah Urenah on Genesis 1:3)
Just as God revealed the light of creation, concealed it, and will reveal it again in the final redemption, so too, He has revealed the Messiah, concealed Him, and will reveal Him again. Messiah is the original light that is reserved for the righteous in the time to come, "the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints" (Colossians 1:26).
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
6 And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. (Genesis 1:6-7)
Waters Above and Waters Below
When God separated the upper waters from the lower waters, He placed a firmament between them. The lower waters represent the physical universe. The upper waters represent the heavenly realms. Both are part of the creation. The Hebrew word for water is mayim (מים). The lower mayim corresponds to the physical world within the creation. The Hebrew word for the heavens is shamayim (שמים), and it corresponds to the spiritual, angelic, and heavenly realms. Notice that the word shamayim contains the word mayim in it.
Paul Philip Levertoff explains the origin of the symbolism in the lower and upper waters:
The idea underlying this symbolic interpretation is evidently suggested by the difference between the tangible heaviness of the ocean and the aerial lightness of the clouds, and perhaps also the fact of tides governing the seas, while clouds float hither and thither at the whim of the wind.
After each of the six days of creation, the Torah says, "and God saw that it was good," except at the completion of the second day on which the upper and the lower waters were separated. Levertoff teaches that the lower waters weep and say, "I want to be with the King." To say that "the lower water weeps: '1 want to be with the King," is to say that this lower world mourns its separation from the heavenly worlds. The rabbis derived this idea from Psalm 93:3, which says, "The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the foods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their pounding waves." The lower waters want to be reunited with the upper waters, a metaphorical picture of all creation groaning to be reunited with the King in the messianic redemption: "The whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now" (Romans 8:22). The soul of man groans along with the soul of nature, just as our apostles state: "We ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body" (Romans 8:23).
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. (Genesis I:8)
The Heavens: Mysteries of Creation and the Divine Realm
In the creation narrative of Genesis 1, God separates heaven and earth, creating a firmament above the earth where He places the sun, moon, and stars—what we now call the sky. In Hebrew, the word for "sky" is the same as the word for "heaven" (shamayim, שָׁמַיִם). To the ancient mind, the heavens represented the realm of the divine, far above and unreachable, becoming a powerful metaphor for divinity itself. As the Psalmist declared, "The LORD’s throne is in heaven" (Psalm 11:4).
However, God's throne is not physically in the sky. Today, we understand the heavens as distant stars and planets spread across the vast cosmos. The moon orbits the earth, the earth orbits the sun, and the sun is but one of countless stars in the universe. As King Solomon wisely said, "The heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain Him" (2 Chronicles 2:6).
We still speak of heaven as a symbol of the divine. We say that God looks down upon us from heaven, but God's dwelling place is not within the sky or the cosmos. He transcends the universe, just as the stars and planets are beyond the earth.
Early Jewish tradition spoke of seven heavens. The Talmud—a collection of rabbinic teachings, law, and biblical commentary from the centuries following the apostles—describes these seven levels. The first heaven is our atmosphere, the second is the firmament where the sun, moon, and stars reside. The third heaven is the realm where manna was created. The fourth heaven is home to the heavenly Jerusalem, the Temple, and the altar. In the fifth heaven, angels sing praises to God by night. The sixth heaven is where God stores the elements. The seventh and highest heaven is the dwelling place of righteousness, life, peace, and the souls of the righteous, as well as those yet to be born. It is where God’s throne is surrounded by angels—the Ofanim, Seraphim, and Holy Creatures—who serve Him.
But is this idea of seven heavens true? The Apostle Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12:4, spoke of being caught up into the third heaven, where he experienced "paradise" and heard things he could not express. Paul may have been referring to the traditional Jewish concept of the seven heavens. However, even after introducing this concept, the Talmud itself advises against delving too deeply into mysteries beyond human understanding:
"Do not seek things too difficult for you, nor search for what is hidden from you. Reflect on what has been permitted to you, for you have no business with things that are secret." (b. Chagigah 12b, quoting Ben Sira)
This caution reminds us to focus on what has been revealed, rather than speculating on the unknowable mysteries of God and the cosmos.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Unrolling the Scroll.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19, ESV Bible)
The Logic of Monotheism
Not all cultures have arrived at the same understanding of the supernatural. In ancient religions, the natural world was explained through a pantheon of spiritual forces, each controlling different aspects of life. The sun was governed by a sun-god, the moon by a moon-god, and rain was brought by a rain-god working with an earth-god to produce vegetation.
The biblical account of the six days of creation carries a profound message: monotheism. It teaches that, despite the beauty and grandeur of nature, it is not to be worshiped as divine. The Torah cautions against this very temptation:
“Beware not to lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship them and serve them” (Deuteronomy 4:19).
Instead, we are to worship God—the Creator of the sun, moon, stars, and everything in existence. Since there is only one Creator, there is only one God. Any other spiritual entities are created beings, subordinate to the Creator. This is the essence of monotheism: the belief in one God.
From a scientific perspective, monotheism also makes sense. If polytheism were true, it would imply multiple gods, each shaping reality according to their own desires, resulting in a chaotic and unpredictable universe. Different gods imposing conflicting wills would lead to disorder, randomness, and lack of consistency in the natural world. Monotheism, however, presents a universe governed by a unified set of physical laws—an orderly system of cause and effect established by a single Creator. Modern scientific discoveries have confirmed the presence of this underlying order, proving that polytheism doesn’t hold up. Scientifically, monotheism makes the most sense.
This idea can be compared to a man with seven secretaries, each responsible for a different day of the week. Every secretary had their own filing system, creating chaos—no order, no consistency, no clear patterns from one day to the next. Schedules were constantly changed, important tasks were lost, and nothing functioned smoothly. So, what did the man do? He fired all seven and hired one secretary to bring order and consistency. MonoSecretarianism.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Unrolling the Scroll.
21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:21)
Leviathan
What are the "great sea monsters" that the LORD made on the fifth day? Literally this refers to large fish, like whales and sharks, but according to Jewish legends, God created two enormous sea creatures: Leviathan and its mate.
He killed the female Leviathan so that it would not reproduce, because if it reproduced and multiplied, the world would not be able to sustain them. He salted the meat of the female Leviathan and has preserved it since the six days of creation. He will serve it to the righteous at the banquet in the time to come. At that time, He will also slay the male Leviathan:
In the future, the Holy One, blessed be He, will prepare a banquet for the righteous from the meat of Leviathan ... He will make a booth for the righteous out of the skin of Leviathan ... and the rest of the skin He will spread out upon the walls of Jerusalem, and its splendor will shine from one end of the world to the other; as it is said [in Isaiah 60:31, "Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising." (b.Bava Batra 74b)
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)
Creation of Man
Man is the image of the invisible God, the revelation of the unseen. God revealed His glory through the creation of human beings.
The Torah says, "In the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27) to teach us that both man and woman bear the image of God. This does not mean that God created Adam and Eve simultaneously. Our apostles say, "It was Adam who was first created, and then Eve" (I Timothy 2:13).
When God created man, He wanted to create an independent and spiritual being like Himself but part of His created, physical world. Rashi notes that "Everything else was created through an utterance of God, but man was created with God's hands ... Man was made with a stamp, like a coin that is made through a die." The human being is the stamp of God.
What is God's image? Is God man-shaped? Does the Almighty possess limbs and digits, a face, hands, and feet? No, that would be man making God in our image. Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (aka Rambam or Maimonides) offers a rational interpretation:
Among all living creatures, Man alone is endowed - like his Creator-with morality, reason and free will. He can know and love God and can hold spiritual communion with Him; and Man alone can guide his actions through reason. It is in this sense that the Torah describes Man as having been created in God's image and likeness.
According to this opinion, man is made in the image of God in that he is a thinking, reasoning animal, with free will and self-determination. He has free agency and moral obligation. In short, man's sentience makes him godlike.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
Dispute Among the Angels
The Almighty addressed His angelic retinue, saying, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness." Although the Creator did not need the permission of the angelic court, He consulted them out of courtesy. He knew that, since man is made with angelic qualities such as the ability of speech and the ability to gain understanding and wisdom, the angels would be jealous of him. The ministering angels objected, "King of all worlds! 'What is man that you take thought of him, and the son of man that you care for him?"
The Holy One, blessed be He, replied, "This man whom I seek to create has greater wisdom than you. "
The ministering angels divided into two competing factions. Some of them argued, "Let him be created," but the other objected, "Let him not be created." The great angelic prince, Sammael, argued persuasively against the creation of man, and he convinced many to join him in the resistance. While the ministering angels disputed the question, thoroughly distracted by the argument they were having with each other, the Holy One, blessed be He, created Adam. Then He said to the angelic hosts, "Your argument is pointless. The man has already been made!"
The LORD made man a little lower than the angels, but He crowned him with majesty and glory and put all things on earth under his feet: "All sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens and fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the sea." He wore luminous garments of light, and his height extended from earth to heaven. When the angels and created beasts saw Adam in his splendor and his glory, they mistook him for the Creator, and they attempted to worship him. Although he existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. Adam told the angels and the creatures that he was only a created being, and he instructed them to worship God.
Sammael burned with jealousy. He and his loyal followers who had opposed the creation of Adam rose up in indignation and descended into the created world. They plotted against Adam, and they found an ally among the creatures. Sammael entered Eden as Ezekiel says, "You were in Eden, the garden of God."
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
Vessels of Wisdom
God made Adam in His image. This is why the Bible calls Adam "the son of God" (Luke 3:38). Human beings are animals, not unlike the other animals God created, but there's something different about us. All of God's creatures express the design of His wisdom, as it says, "In wisdom You have made them all" (Psalm 104:24). Human beings are special: not only are we made in wisdom, but we are also made to acquire God's wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. God "has put wisdom in the innermost being" and "given understanding to the mind" of human beings (Job 38:36).
He created us to be vessels of His wisdom so that we can visibly represent the invisible God within this world. The Torah explains our purpose in the words, "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27).
Human sentience is godlike in that it makes us into thinking, reasoning animals, possessing free will and self-determination. The free will to choose is part of being made in the image of God. God has free will (so to speak): "Whatever the LORD pleases, He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps" (Psalm 135:6). Therefore, a creature made in His image must have free will. The exercise of our free will allows us to express Gods wisdom by choosing good and rejecting evil. This is one of the things that sets us apart from other animals.
Moreover, God created human beings to rule over His world on His behalf. He designed humans to reign as wise kings and queens, stewarding His creation: "Let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." Wisdom of Solomon explains that God's wisdom gave Adam the "strength to rule all things" (Wisdom of Solomon 10:2).
Adam is called the "first-formed father of the world" (Wisdom of Solomon 10:1) because God created all the other creatures only through His utterances, but He created Adam with His hands. Clement (the disciple of Peter) believed that man is superior to the animals because God handmade us and gifted us with "understanding," i.e., wisdom. That's what it means to be made in His image:
Above all, with His holy and undefiled hands He formed man, the most excellent of His creatures, and truly great through the understanding given him the express likeness of His own image. For thus says God: Let us make man in Our image, and after Our likeness. (I Clement 33:4-5)
The idea is simple. God wanted to populate this world with physical versions of Himself who could stand in for Him within the world He had created. "God created man to be immortal, and made him to bear an image of his own eternity" (Wisdom of Solomon 2:23 KJv).
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ The Beginning of Wisdom, Book One.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
The Heavenly Man
According to Maimonides reasonable explanation (cited above), to be made in the image of God merely means that man possesses a developed sense of the self, sentience, reason, and free will. The early mystics offered a more mysterious explanation. According to some schools of Jewish thought, God made Adam in the image of a prototype human being, the primordial man, a heavenly man that may be likened to the physical image of God, so to speak. They called the ideal, heavenly man, Adam Kadmon ("primordial man," אדם קדמון). Adam Kadmon entered the creation as the self-limitation of God (tzimtzum). He is "the great light ... the precursor of everything."
The theology of the heavenly Adam attempts to reconcile the conflict between the idea that God is incorporeal, that is, without image and form, and the idea that man is created in the image of God. Adam Kadmon is God's blueprint for man.
Paul Philip Levertoff points out that some form of the Adam Kadmon theology must have existed already in the Apostolic Era. He notes that both the Apostle Paul and the Jewish philosopher and theologian Philo of Alexandria allude to the concept. Philo mentions the primordial man in his Allegorical Interpretation:
There are two types of men; the one a heavenly man, the other an earthly. The heavenly man, being made after the image of God, is altogether without part or lot in corruptible and terrestrial substance; but the earthly one was compacted out of the matter scattered here and there, which Moses calls "clay."
Paul also alludes to Adam Kadmon imagery when he states: "Just as we have borne the image of the earthly [i.e., Adam], we will also bear the image of the heavenly [i.e., Yeshua] (1 Corinthians 15:49). He notes that "the first Adam is from the earth, earthy; the second Adam is from heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:47). Paul also says that Adam was *an impression of Him who was to come." That is to say that Adam was made in the image of Messiah.
King David asks, "What is man that You take thought of him, and the son of man that You care for him?" (Psalm 8:5[4]). The apostles answer in regard to the Messiah, "He is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians I:I5). Messiah is "the radiance of [God's] glory and the exact representation of His nature" and has therefore inherited a more excellent name than angels.
Yet You have made him a little lower than God, and You crown him with glory and majesty! You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet. (Psalm 8:6-7(5-6])
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
Image of God
The Almighty scooped out earth from the Temple Mount. He took dust from the four corners of the world. He took water from all the waters of the world. He mixed them all together in His hands, so to speak, and He created Adam. He created him in a pure place, at the center of the earth, on the top of Mount Moriah, the future place of the Temple. He created him in His own image.
The mystics say that God made Adam in the image of a prototype human being, the primordial man, a heavenly man that may be likened to the physical image of God, so to speak. The mystics called the ideal, heavenly man, Adam Kadmon ("primordial man," אדם קדמון). He is the firstborn of all creation, the spiritual image of God.
The theology of the heavenly Adam attempts to reconcile the conflict between the idea that God is incorporeal, that is without image and form, and the idea that man is created in the image of God. Adam Kadmon is God's blueprint form for man.
Paul also alludes to similar mystical ideas when he states: "Just as we have borne the image of the earthly [i.e., Adam], we will also bear the image of the heavenly li.e., Yeshua)" (I Corinthians 15:49). Paul calls Adam "the first Adam" and Messiah "the second Adam." According to Paul, "The first Adam is from the earth, earthy; the second Adam is from heaven" (1 Corinthians 15:47). Paul also says that Adam was "an impression of Him who was to come." That is to say that Adam was made in the image of Messiah.
"Just as Adam was created in God's image, so the Messiah is anointed by God, and God's Spirit will be upon him. God created Adam in His image, and the Messiah is the image of God: "He is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians I-I5); "He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature" (Hebrews 1:3). Luke even refers to Adam as "the son of God" (Luke 3:38).
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
The Second Adam
The Messiah, as the second Adam, provides humanity with a fresh start. In Messiah, the human race can go back to Eden, so to speak, and start over in perfect innocence and righteousness. How does this work?
Adam's name means "man." Sin and death came to humanity as the result of one man's sin. We are all guilty of our own sins and punished for our own misdeeds, but disobedience first entered the world through our first father (and mother). Through one single act of disobedience, Adam forfeited his right to the tree of life, so human death came through Adam. Death came "even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam" (Romans 5:14), which is to say that everyone dies, whether they sin or not. An unborn child who dies (God forbid), though he never had the opportunity to commit a single sin, dies all the same.
It does seem frightfully unfair that one man's single transgression consigns all humanity to death, but it is equally unfair that one man's righteousness also offers all of humanity the reward of righteousness: "The right to the tree of life" (Revelation 22:14). Those who cast their allegiance with "the last Adam," the life-giving Spirit, receive that reward.
As human beings, we are all sons of Adam, and we share in Adam's physical nature, including the fallen aspects of it. We share in his condemnation. Messiah is also a son of Adam, sharing in Adam's nature as it was prior to his disobedience and expulsion. He is in the form of the original man. He referred to Himself as "the Son of Man"; that is, "the Son of Adam." He is a second Adam, but unlike the first Adam, He did not transgress. If the first Adam's sin was sufficient to merit death for all mankind, the righteousness of Messiah--the last Adam-is sufficient to merit life for all of us: "For as in Adam all die, so also in Messiah all will be made alive" (I Corinthians I5:22). And this life is not only a spiritual, ethereal idea. This is the hope of eternal life through the resurrection of the dead. Resurrection reverses Adam's bane.
The following chart demonstrates Paul's parallelism in discussing the correspondence between Adam and the Messiah.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Shadows of Messiah, Book One.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
The First Mitzvah: Be Fruitful and Multiply
Did God bless Adam and Eve, "May you be fruitful and multiply," or did He command them, "Go be fruitful and multiply"? According to Rashi, he blessed them but did not command them. (Rashi derives the commandment from Genesis 8:7.) Maimonides says he commanded them. In his view, Genesis 1:28 contains the first of the Torah's 613 commandments. Maimonides enumerated all 613 commandments, and he lists the commandment "Be fruitful and multiply" as Positive Commandment 212 (P212):
We are thus commanded to be fruitful and multiply for the perpetuation of the species. This is the law of propagation, being implicit in His words: Be fruitful and multiply. (Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvot, P212)
The Torah's first commandment applies to the Jewish people, to Gentile Christians, and all human beings. It belongs to a special set of laws called commandments of Noah (Noachide Commandments)-those commandments that God requires of all human beings regardless of their race, creed, or religion. The Talmud records an argument among the sages about whether the command to be fruitful and multiply was incumbent upon men alone or upon both genders:
The commandment of reproduction is given to men, but not to women. Rabbi Yochanan ben Beroka, however, said: "Concerning both of them it is said. 'God blessed them saying [to them]: "Be fruitful, and multiply."' (b. Yevamot 6§b)
Despite ben Beroka's argument, the sages decided that the commandment must be incumbent only on men because only men can initiate a union. They ruled that every man is obligated to take a wife and attempt to fulfill the commandment of having children.
That interpretation seems to contradict an earlier teaching of our Master. Long before the sages came to that conclusion, Yeshua sanctioned His disciples to opt to remain single as He Himself did. The Master Himself never married. Likewise, the Apostle Paul considered the celibate life a viable option for believers.
Perhaps we should understand the commandment to reproduce as incumbent only upon a married man. As ben Beroka pointed out, God blessed both Adam and Eve and commanded them both together to be fruitful and multiply. Obviously, the commandment to have children cannot apply to a single man. The biology does not work.
In the maiority opinion of the sages, a husband and wife with a minimum of two children fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. With two children they replace themselves for the next generation.
Every child is a gift from heaven and a mitzvah, further fulfilling the commandment to reproduce. People of faith should not hesitate to have large families if possible. The world needs more godly people. The Bible does not place a limit on how many children we can have, and God is faithful to supply according to our needs. The people of the world limit the size of their families based upon their financial resources, but the children of God have no need to fear. Our Father in heaven owns the cattle on a thousand hills.
Naturally, not everyone can have children. One who cannot have children should not feel as if he (or she) has failed to keep the commandment because God Himself arranges these matters, unlocks the womb, and withholds children or sends children into the world. John the Immerser taught, "A man can receive nothing unless it has been given him from heaven" (John 3:27).
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
Dominion: The Kingdom on Earth
God gave Adam dominion over the creation. He entrusted Adam with the administration of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Adam functioned as the free agent of God's will in the created order:
You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the seas. (Psalm 8:7-9[6-8])
When Adam and Eve lost Eden, they also lost much of their authority over creation. The LORD said, "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you" (Genesis 3:17-18). Paul speaks of the creation as "subject to futility" and in "slavery to corruption (decay) until the new order when man is restored to his Edenic perfection.
In the coming kingdom, the LORD will heal the earth and make it, once again, like a garden paradise. The second Adam (Messiah) will administer the kingdom during this green age. Then the whole creation will rejoice: "The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn bush the cypress will come up, and instead of the nettle the myrtle will come up" (Isaiah 55:12-13). Then "the land will yield its produce and the trees of the field will bear their fruit" and the "threshing will last ... until grape gather-ing, and grape gathering will last until sowing time" (Leviticus 26:4-5). It is the business of the disciple to strive for this future kingdom now by fixing that which is broken in the world (tikkun olam).
According to the prophecies in the book of Revelation, God's wrath comes "to destroy those who destroy the earth" (Revelation I1:18). God entrusted humanity with a position of stewardship over the creation. He appointed Adam as the first environmentalist. We have abused that stewardship, slaughtered His creatures to extinction, and marred His world.
In the modern political world, liberal progressives, who often do not believe in the Creator, advocate environmental causes while conservative Christian voters, who do believe in the Creator, do not support environmental issues. Why have people of faith dropped the ball on this issue? The Torah places dominion over the earth into the hands of man. Believers should lead the charge for environmental responsibility, sustainable solutions, pollution control, and conservation. Those issues should matter to believers because the creation should matter to us:
When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man, He took him and led him round all the trees of the Garden of Eden, and said to him, "Behold My works, how beautiful and praiseworthy they are! All that I have created, I created for you. Pay heed that you do not damage and destroy My universe; for if you damage it there is no one to repair it after you." (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:20)
Herr Mieller, the disciple of Messianic Jewish pioneer Abram Poliak, took his concern for God's creatures so seriousiy that he became a strict Vegan and made it a habit to go out after rainstorms to rescue worms from the sidewalk before they were trampled.
Rabbi Shalom Dov once rebuked his son for absently plucking a leaf from a tree as they walked by. "The LORD has a purpose for every tiny thing. Even a leaf! Don't you realize that a leaf is also a living thing? It breathes and grows."
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)
It was Very Good
God created. God made. God did. He looked. He saw that it was good. And it is good: life, time, space, light, dark, cosmos, the heavens and the earth, the spirit and the flesh, the deepest depth, and the highest height. He spanned it with His hands. He measured it, marked it, made it, and it was good because He is good.
Second-century Gnostic forms of Christianity taught that the spiritual world is good but the physical world is evil. They taught that the physical world is corrupt and that man's only hope was for his spirit to escape into the higher spiritual realms. In his first epistle to Timothy, Paul refers to Gnosticism as a "doctrine of demons." Paul foresaw an ascetic form of Gnosticism that would forbid marriage and command abstinence from certain foods "which God has created to be gratefully shared in" (I Timothy 4:3). Paul forcefully rejected the Gnostic argument: "Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer" (1 Timothy 4:4). This does not mean that every food is permissible any more than it implies that every sexual relationship is permissible. Paul means only that nothing should be rejected on the basis of dualism, which considers the creation as evil. To reject the good creation as evil infers a reiection of the Creator. The Gnostics did reject God as evil.
Contrary to the heretical Gnostics, the Torah teaches that God's physical creation is also good. The waters above are good and so are the waters below. When we delight in the creation, we delight in the Creator. The Jerusalem Talmud expresses a similar sentiment:
A man will have to give an account on the judgment day for every good and permissible thing which he might have enjoyed and did not. (y.Kiddushin 4:12)
Sometimes we speak of "the world" in a way that devalues the material world of tangible reality. "I am just passing through on my way home to heaven," the old hymn writers sighed, but the Torah teaches that Gods creation is good and not to be rejected as evil. It should be enjoyed and celebrated. Human beings are made for this world, not for the ethereal, spiritual, bliss of heaven. That is why Judaism teaches that the afterlife will be a corporeal, physical existence - both in this world during the Messianic Era and in the World to Come. In other words, the main goal is not to get to heaven. We should be aiming for the kingdom, as our Master says, "Seek first (to enter) His kingdom" (Matthew 6:33), but the kingdom is on earth: "On earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10).
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Depths of the Torah, Book One.
Evening and Morning: A New Way to See Time
Did you notice how, after each day of creation, the Torah says, "There was evening and there was morning"? We usually think of a day as beginning at dawn or midnight, with night following day. However, in the Bible, the sequence is reversed—day follows night. This phrase is significant in Jewish tradition, as it marks the start of a new day at sunset, ending 24 hours later at the next sunset. This is why the Sabbath begins on Friday night and ends on Saturday night. It may take some getting used to, but it's valuable to begin thinking about time from a biblical perspective.
Perhaps God arranged daylight to follow darkness to teach us not to lose hope. Day and night are powerful metaphors for light and dark, good and evil, life and death. From our human perspective, night seems to follow day—light is overtaken by darkness, good is overshadowed by evil, and life ends in death.
But from God's perspective—biblical perspective—it’s the opposite: day follows night, darkness is overcome by light, evil is conquered by good, and death gives way to life.
References
This section is from teachings from FFOZ Unrolling the Scroll.