Your Daily Slice

Tammuz 18

All of the Above

“He who does THESE is never moved.” (Ps 15:5 ISR, emphasis mine)

When I bake a cake from scratch, there are numerous ingredients required in order to make that cake a culinary delight.  Each one of the ingredients is necessary as part of the whole; should I neglect to add any one of them, it changes the composition, the texture, and the taste of the finished cake.  For example, should I forget to add the sugar, the cake will be bland, and a cake with no flour of some sort will be flat.  All of the ingredients are necessary for a successful cake.

The same example is relevant to Psalm 15.  In the opening verse of the Psalm, the writer is asking, “יהוה, who does sojourn in Your Tent? Who does dwell in Your set-apart mountain?”  In other words, what are the qualifications, and what are the requirements (the ingredients?) that must be met for someone to be consistently close to our Elohim.  We Torah observant folk believe that the answer to that is more Torah, more Torah.  And while our knowledge and understanding of Torah is important, do we truly love Him so much that we just want to be in His presence?

The requirements needed to live with our Creator are those laid out for us in the remaining verses of this Psalm.  Yes, our walk is critical, as are the words that come out of our mouths, for it is ‘out of the overflow of the heart that our mouths speak’ (see Luke 6:45).  However, much of what is listed refers to our relationships with not only our brother/sister, but non-believers as well.  I submit to you that our vertical relationship, the one we enjoy with our Creator and Master, will never be all that it should be until we first clean up our horizontal relationships, with those people that are part of our world.  Only when we have achieved this goal, when we are walking in right relationship with those around us, will we reach the place from which we will ‘not be moved’ (see our opening verse).  Then we are qualified to live on His ‘set-apart mountain’.

“The one who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother stays in the light, and there is no stumbling-block in him. But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.” (1John 2:9-11 ISR)

“If someone says, “I love Elohim,” and hates his brother, he is a liar. For the one not loving his brother whom he has seen, how is he able to love Elohim whom he has not seen? And we have this command from Him, that the one loving Elohim should love his brother too.” (1John 4:20-21 ISR)

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