Unlock Heaven’s secret to true freedom (Deuteronomy 14–16)

Hallel Fellowship

Highlights from the study recording

• 00:00:00 – Mountains of blessing and cursing
• 00:02:30 – Fear of the LORD and debt discharge
• 00:05:11 – Second, Third and Fourth commandments and festivals of the LORD
• 00:06:59 – Choosing the road to damnation vs. the path to life
• 00:16:44 – The Sabbath and entering the Creator\’s rest
• 00:26:48 – The New Covenant and the Messianic era
• 00:35:20 – Role of the community and the Golden Rule
• 00:35:41 – Economics and the Shemitah (release of debts)
• 00:42:56 – Attitude of those on the path to the Tree of Life
• 00:43:37 – The ultimate consummation of the New Covenant

6 ways to ‘choose life’

Here are some ways we can apply the lessons about choosing life and blessing over death and cursing in our daily lives and decisions:

• Recognize the gravity of our choices: Understand that the decisions we make, big or small, have eternal consequences. Be mindful that we are constantly faced with the choice between blessing and curse, life and death.
• Prioritize God’s ways over worldly allures: When tempted by the seductive but fleeting promises of the world, deliberately choose to align our thoughts and actions with God’s higher ways and eternal perspective.
• Cultivate a heart of wisdom and discernment: Regularly seek God’s wisdom through His word, prayer, and godly counsel to gain the insight needed to navigate the complexities of life.
• Practice generosity and release: Loosen our grip on earthly possessions and status, and instead open our hands to bless others and release them from debt or obligation. This reflects God’s heart of restoration.
• Find security — שלום shalom — in God’s presence, not circumstances: Anchor our sense of identity, purpose, and well-being in the unchanging reality of God’s love and the promise of His eternal kingdom, not in the shifting sands of this world.
• Encourage others to choose life: Share the hope of the gospel and God’s invitation to abundant life with those who may be struggling with difficult choices or walking down destructive paths.

The key is to daily surrender our will to God’s, trusting that His ways lead to true and lasting blessing, even when they require sacrifice or go against cultural norms.

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The title for Torah reading Re’eh is often translated as “see.” But what Moses wants the Children of Israel to “see” is not the physical, but the spiritual.

“See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you listen to the commandments of the LORD your God, which I am commanding you today; and the curse, if you do not listen to the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way which I am commanding you today, by following other gods which you have not known.” (Deuteronomy 11:26-28 NAS95)

Moses instructs the children of Israel to travel to the valley between the Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Ebal. He instructs them to literally bless one mountain and curse the other. Even though there’s a physical object lesson, its purpose is to teach a deeper spiritual lesson. They were meant to “see” something beyond the human eye.

“The fear (yirʾâ) of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” (Proverbs 9:10 NAS95)

The fear of the Lord holds great significance, as the use of the future masculine tense in Hebrew suggests divine foresight. God sees everything we do—nothing escapes His attention. When we grasp this truth, it leads us to make choices and take actions that are pleasing to Him.

Generosity as a pathway to restoration

In the ancient world, if you needed a lot of quick cash, you couldn’t just run up credit card balances or easily take out loans. Well, you could take out loans, but the way you secured them was different. Today, we often talk about secured credit versus unsecured credit.

Unsecured credit, like a credit card, isn’t backed by anything tangible. Creditors can pursue you through collection agencies if you stop making your payments and when the collection agencies publicize your delinquency, this will harm your credit record, but there isn’t any specific asset they can seize.

However, in the ancient world—and actually not so ancient, since the practice continued until just a few hundred years ago—debts were secured by something very personal: you. If you had a debt to pay off, you might have to sell yourself to cover it. Many people who came from Europe to the New World did so based on the credit of themselves. This practice was called indentured servitude and this is how many poor people or people heavily in debt from Europe were able to travel to the American colonies that would later become the United States.

Radical invitation to ‘choose life’

Mount Gerizim was for blessing, and Mount Ebal for cursing. In the valley between was the ancient city of Shechem, which is nowadays called Nablus.

This valley, between the mountains, is a deciding point for the generation who were first to enter the Promised Land after 400 years in Egypt. The prophet Eliyahu (Elijah), up on Mount Carmel, also gave an ultimatum of decision to the children of Israel between two altars, the altar for the Lord and the altar for the Ba’al, on the other side. And so you see the similar kinds of decision points in the Torah.

God does not want us to linger in the valley of indecision. Moses (and later Eliyahu) gave presented the children of Israel with two choices, either to choose life or to choose death. You’ll see that choosing death, as strange as that may seem, is extremely enticing. Choosing death, when wrapped up with a slick marketing program, as it has been all the way from the very beginning can definitely entrap you very easily.

As the old saying goes, “the road to damnation is paved with good intentions.” You can have all kinds of good intentions, but if you do not follow divine wisdom of seeing where the road you’re starting on will actually lead, you will end up on the road that leads to destruction. God’s message through Moses and the prophets is a consistent message. You’ve got two ways, and you can be in the middle, the valley between them, but you can’t stay in the middle.

You can’t linger in the valley of indecision.

In the book of Revelation, as Yeshua speaks to the congregation in Laodicea, He says how God would rather His people either be hot or cold, not lukewarm. The Bible begins with a garden and ends with a garden. The mountain of cursing will be gone and you can’t linger in the valley, you must decide which mountain you want to climb.

Loosening our grip on the fleeting to grasp the eternal

Deuteronomy 14 focuses on the 4th commandment, which is the command of Shabbat rest but it also covers other important spiritual disciplines:

• Tithe: remembering the source of where everything comes from
• Shemitah: or the year of release: opening your hand of blessing to the poor
• Passover: release from slavery and bondage

The wealth we have in our possession came into our hands from God, from His blessing. We are called by God to give 10% to Him and to open our hands to the less fortunate and not grip tightly to what God has given to us.

God liberated the children of Israel from Egypt, brought them to the mountain and promised to take them to a blessed land. because the first generation thought that they would be taking the land in their own strength rather than God’s strength, refusing to say “amen” to God, a trip that should have taken a couple of weeks took 40 years to get there because the first generation did not say “Amen” to the Lord. When the Lord said, “I’m taking you in, I’ve got this. I’ve got all those people with their high walls, the tall people, etc. I’ve got this.” They did not believe Him, expect for Joshua and Caleb.

The first generation, who are so afraid that their children would not survive in the land and would be destroyed by the people there, God said that those children, the second generation will be the ones to go into the land.

God not only offered the children of Israel freedom from slavery to the Egyptians, but also offered them freedom from their dependence on their own flesh.

We need to be liberated from our dependence on the flesh and on the self. The children of Israel groaned as they traveled from one place to another in their tabernacles. The Apostle Paul takes up that image in 2Corinithans:

“For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.” (2 Corinthians 5:1-4 NAS95)

God created in 6 days, rested on the 7th day. But the Shabbat is not only a commemoration of God’s creation of humanity but also His liberation of humanity. It’s a memorial of His great concern for us with His mighty handy and outstretch arm. His concern and love for us is not casual.

In the garden of Eden, the Lord would come in the cool of the day, in the evening time, and come walking with Adam and Even. And thus, the first man, the first woman, were dwelling with the Lord, and Lord was dwelling amongst them. So in the book of Revelation the great promise there is that the Lord is in the midst of the people. The Lord is dwelling with them, and all the people then will come to flow in and out of that place.

The Shabbat is a weekly memorial, of who the creator of heaven and earth is. But it is also a memorial that the Lord is not only the creator of heaven and earth, but he is the redeemer of heaven and earth, the one who takes you out of the house of bondage and brings you into freedom.

When God says in Psalm. 95 that “you shall not enter My rest.” This rest references being in the presence of God, which is Shalom. Shalom is not merely a cease fire or the break in hostilities when one rans out of ammo.

So thus you can have Shalom in the midst of war. You can have Shalom in the midst of an argument. You can have Shalom in the midst of terrible traffic. You can have Shalom in the midst of your whole life falling down around you. Why? It’s because being in God’s rest is not a geographical location, it’s about a complete transformation of our being from the inside out.

The Bible gives us many examples as a foretaste of the ultimate Shalom:

• • Foretaste: Testimony of God (10 Words/Commandments, etc.)
  • Foretaste: Tabernacle and Temple)
  • Foretaste: Promised Land (Abram, Moshe/Yehoshua, Ezra/Nehemiah)
  • Foretaste: New Covenant (Jer. 31:31–34) = “Put My Spirit in you”; the Comforter; “Messiah in you”
  • Destination: Messianic era (“God with us”)

Is our focus on ourself or on what is higher than ourselves? We need to look up to the heavens for our salvation and liberation, rather than waste time navel gazing and worrying about ourselves and wallow in your own problems all the time. God tells us to look up because, there are watchmen on the watchtower.

“Furthermore, if two lie down together they keep warm, but how can one be warm alone? And if one can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.” (Ecclesiastes 4:11-12 NAS95)

When families and communities come together and lift each other up, the world can’t pick them apart. God is the one who can see to the horizon and beyond, not only literally but spiritually. Man can see far with technology such as Google Earth but God can still see much further.

The renewing of our mind is something that God gives us. God’s thoughts are not like ours; His thoughts are higher than ours. It is only because of Him that we can see beyond the horizon at all. The One who created all of this says that He wants to recreate us, to fix this world that has gone horrifically wrong because of our actions. Therefore, our destination, in entering His rest, is the Messianic era with God among us, and we see a foretaste of it with God on Mount Sinai.

We see the various appearances of the Lord throughout the Tanakh and throughout the Torah, and we see God with us in the tabernacle and later the temple. We see God with us in the Mashiach, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us. And then we see the ultimate consummation of that where the Mashiach comes, returns to Earth. And then eventually we have the dwelling place of God is with mankind.

“They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”” (Jeremiah 31:34 NAS95)

When God says He will forgive iniquity, it means that He sends it away. We see this in the ritual of Yom Kippur where the goat is sent away. That is why we can go to the presence of God with confidence, not with arrogance, because it is not in our own righteousness that we’re showing up in front of God. That’s what the Messiah gave us.

““But when the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man there who was not dressed in wedding clothes, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes?’ And the man was speechless.” (Matthew 22:11-12 NAS95)

God calls us to come as we are, but we are not called to stay as we are. When we come to God, He gives us new spiritual garments, a new heart and if we reject these and wear what we want to wear and live how we want to live, that is an expression of ingratitude.

Beyond legal loopholes: Embracing empathy in times of economic hardship

The Sages of the Mishna and Talmud determined that the “law of the Jewish slave” applied only in the Land of Israel and only within and active יוֹבֵל Yobel (Jubilee) system for release of debts and servitude, based on Lev. 25:39–46; Deut. 15:12–18.

Just a few years ago, employers were desperate for workers, a situation that led to what they called “ghost interviews.” Companies would interview potential employees and extend job offers, only to never hear from them again. In some cases, people were officially hired but didn’t show up on their first day. Why? Because they had already received a better offer from another company and chose not to inform the first employer. During times when jobs were abundant, employers couldn’t exert control or bully their employees.

In an economic climate where employees have limited options, there’s a risk of exploiting individuals instead of showing empathy. It’s important to remember that we’ve all faced difficult circumstances at some point. When someone comes to us in a tough situation, we should avoid taking advantage of them.

The economic system that the people of Israel lived under is somewhat different but not radically different from how we live today.

As believers in Yeshua, we are not called to live by legal loopholes when it comes to caring for the less fortunate. The world often takes advantage of those who are vulnerable, but we should reject such temptations entirely. In times of economic uncertainty, when jobs are scarce, employers might be tempted to mistreat employees, knowing they have few alternatives. However, exploiting others is not the way we are called to live.

Summary: Tammy