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[derekleman]

Happy Valentines Shabbat!

[derekleman]

A couple of bizarre facts and biblical paradoxes are at the center of understanding God, Messiah, and the transformation of earth into its destiny as a messianic paradise. DerekLeman dotCom /Musings

[derekleman]

I am a serious Tumblr blogger now. Someday, a human being will even see what I post here!

[derekleman]

Avoiding the Hereafter Heresy (Mussar Foundations). How can something so good as a promise of living forever in an exalted state of consciousness become a “heresy”?

http://www.derekleman.com/musings/avoiding-the-hereafter-heresy/

[derekleman]

Theories About Messiah's Divinity.

http://www.derekleman.com/musings/theories-about-messiahs-divinity/

[derekleman]

Sometimes we have to hit bottom to see ourselves as we really are. Always, we have to believe that God will show mercy in order to be healed. Isaiah 1:4-9, explained in detail, a passage about our need for healing from heaven. http://www.derekleman.com/musings/isaiah-14-9/

[derekleman]

Hmm, playing with Table of Contents thoughts for the upcoming eBook I am writing on the Divine Messiah … provisional TOC: DIVINE MESSIAH Derek Leman (c) 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Seated at the Right Hand 2. God’s Nature in the Hebrew Bible 3. The Early Believers’ Devotion to the Divine Messiah 4. The Jewishness of the Divine Messiah Realization 5. Being Followers of a Divine Messiah

[derekleman]

5 posts!

[derekleman]

Yeshua’s predictions of his suffering and resurrection can easily be doubted. It is easy to come up with a plausible, non-supernatural scenario, in which a Jewish teacher believed he would be martyred and used scripture from Hosea to vaguely speak of a third day raising of the dead. Against this reductionist view of Yeshua’s predictions of his death and raising, we can level some objections. 

http://www.derekleman.com/musings/history-yeshua-and-his-predictions/

[derekleman]

ISAIAH 1:4-9, Comments. Vss. 4-9 are not likely to have been a unified section, but look like a composite of excerpts from Isaiah’s prophecies strung together like pearls. Yet in the final form of the book, this sub-unit of verses coheres around a single theme: getting the people of Zion to realize their relation to Hashem must change. In short, vs. 4 looks like a woe oracle excised from the series of woe oracles in ch. 5 (more on this below, the theory is as per Williamson’s commentary). Vss. 5-9, excerpted from elsewhere in the collection of Isaiah’s prophecies, have unique connections to Isaiah 53 (as per Berges, 2012). And vss. 7-9 almost certainly refer to the situation in 701 BCE, after Sennacherib of Assyria’s armies had leveled forty-six Judean towns and only Jerusalem was left of the cities of Judah. These three excerpts have been strung together and form a powerful word to the final audience of Isaiah: the people after the exile. Isaiah chapter 1 is a microcosm of the whole book, put together by the final editors of the book of Isaiah, with connections to the last part of the book of Isaiah (chs. 65-66) to form the beginning bookend of the whole. Genuine words of Isaiah to his generation are now being re-preached to the people of Judah after the catastrophe of 586 BCE and the returns and rebuilding following 539 and 516 BCE.

From my forthcoming commentary on Isaiah.

[derekleman]

What they experienced could be compared to the mystery with which the Torah describes the Sinai manifestation of God. What they experienced was unexpected, unconventional, a conundrum. What kind of experiences convinced Jewish monotheists like the early believers to cross that dangerous line and regard Messiah as equal with God? How did they perceive Yeshua as equal with God and yet not as a second God? Something powerful must have happened.

http://www.derekleman.com/musings/divine-messiah-and-the-early-believers-part-6/

[derekleman]

Fighting Jesus with Christian-Style Bible Twisting . . . There is a Jewish case that can be made against the divine Messiah theology of the apostles. I am not saying that our beliefs are a simple matter of proofs and certainties. In all the discussion, my encouragement is simple, let’s read the Bible with finesse. http://www.derekleman.com/musings/fighting-jesus-with-christian-style-scripture-twisting/

[derekleman]

God is anything but boring. Our fear of a life-stifling, stern old man in the sky is misplaced. Our apathy about a dull encounter with bland, emotionless divinity turns out not to be true. God is full of pathos, caring love, risky emotion. And the intense joy we long for and adventure we seek is a far better clue to God's nature than any list of theological facts. Instead of being an answer we find, God is a mystery we can approach forever without arriving. --from ch. 2 of my upcoming eBook, Divine Messiah (coming May 2014)