Today, we begin 2nd Samuel Chapter 12.
For the Complete Jewish Bible, click HERE.
For the King James Bible, click HERE.
There’s a man I wanna introduce to you.
If you’re a Christian or a gentile…
I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of him.
His name is Rabbi Nosson Scherman.
He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where his parents ran a little grocery store.
He went to public school during the day, but in the afternoons, he went to a special Jewish school called a Talmud Torah.
It was started in 1942 by Rabbi Shalom Ber Gordon.
This Rabbi was sent from the Lubavitcher Rebbe to teach kids Torah.
And he did a helluva good job.
Under his influence, many of his students went on to enroll in yeshiva.
One of those boys was the young Nosson Sherman.
Long story short, Rabbi Sherman went on to become the general editor of ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications.
And is now considered to be the father of modern-day English Torah literature!
I wanna share a quote of his that I pulled from Tom Bradford’s Torah class.
“From its very beginning, the process through which the Davidic dynasty and the eventual King Messiah were to come into being has been mysterious and hidden. The nation of Moab (the nation that Ruth, the ancestress of David came from) came into being when Lot lived incestuously with his daughter. Peretz, the ancestor of David, was born from the strange relationship of Judah and Tamar. David descended from the marriage of Ruth and Boaz, a relationship that some criticized as being a violation of halachah. David’s dynasty descended from his marriage with Bathsheba, which was so shrouded in obvious impropriety.”
After sharing this quote, Bradford makes a good point.
He says that while there have been some Rabbis who have treated David as if he were perfect, denying any wrongdoing despite the whole Bathsheba affair…
There is a lot we can learn from the Jewish sages concerning “the nature and purpose of Messiah if only we’ll get outside of many of our own manmade Christian doctrines that act more like barriers to enlightenment than road markers to truth.“
Now that’s a freaking, darn good point homies!
And the quote above from Rabbi Sherman illustrates that point perfectly.
Christianity has for too long written the Rabbis and Judaism off as useless simply because in their own words “the Jews rejected Christ.”
But we shouldn’t descend to that level of stupidity.
Why?
Because there are depths upon depths of wisdom to be gained from studying what they had to say about Messianic principles in Scripture.
Now, if you really wanna understand David…
And gain profound insight into messianic prophecy and patterns…
We should go to the Biblical literature that King David himself penned.
Of course, I’m talking about the Psalms.
The big mistake a lot of folks make is they try to read the Psalms straight through like a regular book.
That’s not the way to do it homies.
The truth is each individual Psalm makes more sense when you understand the specific circumstances surrounding David’s life when he wrote what he did.
We’ll get into this again the next time we meet.
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