Unravel the craftsmanship of ancient Hebrews who were divinely inspired to create intricate jewelry and sacred garments. This engaging discussion highlights the themes of God’s covenant with Israel, the unique roles of the Urim and Thummim, and the creationist perspective on geological markers. Dive into the episode to deepen your understanding of the spiritual and historical contexts of Christianity.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today, join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
Jacob has 12 sons. And remember, Joseph becomes almost like Pharaoh in Egypt. And he has two sons. And Jacob goes to bless his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. And Joseph puts his oldest son on Jacob, who’s old and he can’t even see anymore, on Jacob’s right hand. But Jacob crosses his hands and he blesses the younger son. The same thing happened with Judah. and Tamar and their two sons. The first son is about to be born. They realize there’s twins. And so the midwife puts a scarlet thread around this first son. And then he pulls his hand back in and the other son comes out first. And so she says, this breach be upon you. You’re not supposed to be the firstborn. Your brother is. So what’s with all that? I mean, that’s an incredible emphasis on the firstborn needs the inheritance of the firstborn, but God violates that. Because Adam is not the one on whom he’s going to pour out the wrath for the judgment of mankind. He’s going to pour that out on the secondborn, so to speak, on Jesus, who’s Adam’s brother, so to speak, because they both have the same father. And so even though Jesus is eternal, in his humanity, he’s the younger son, so to speak. And there’s a sibling swap, and he takes what was due at him. That is the theme of the book of Genesis. And so here we have God saying, I want you to take the names of the 12 sons of Jacob, of Israel, and engrave six on one stone and six on another stone in their birth order. So who would be the natural son to inherit the Messianic blessing? Well, if it would be the firstborn, it would be Reuben. But we read, in Chronicles that the blessing did not follow the birth order because Reuben was so evil, he committed a terrible sin with one of his father’s concubines. So Reuben lost the blessing of the firstborn. So then who would it go to? Well, remember Reuben was the firstborn of Leah, But Jacob’s love for Rachel, Rachel’s firstborn was Joseph. So Jacob wants to bless Joseph’s children and he crosses his hands to give the younger one the blessing. But when they get into the promised land, the book of Judges shows us what basically amounts to Joshua and then mostly Judges, a tribal contest. Not that they were aware of it, but to see which tribe would inherit the Messianic blessing. And the tribe that prevailed over his brothers is the tribe of Judah. And so Judah became the Messianic tribe. And that’s what we read in Chronicles. I think it’s 1 Chronicles 5.1, that passage right there. And so Judah prevailed over his brothers and he got that blessing. Okay, so God says here in verse 10, engrave the 12 names. And so these are the names of the 12 sons of Jacob, and they became the 12 patriarchs of the 12 tribes of Israel. Remember, God changed Jacob’s name to Israel. Jacob means usurper because he eventually took his brother’s place. And God changed his name to Israel, he who struggles with God. And the first six sons of Jacob, the first four were from his wife Leah. And then he had two from his concubine, Billa. And his next six sons were from another concubine, Zilpah. And then Leah again. And finally, the two sons from his beloved wife, Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin. So those names were engraved on these two onyx stones. Verse 11, with the work of an engraver in stone, like the engravings of a signet, the way a craftsman would engrave a small seal like something on a ring, a signet ring. You shall engrave the two stones with the names of the sons of Israel. You shall set them in settings of gold. This is some talent that they had, right? 3,000 years ago. Throughout history, Jews have been excellent jewelers, and God gave them a good start here. Actually, they were great craftsmen before this. That’s evident in the text. And you think about history, the history of mankind today, If God had commanded the Navajo 300 years ago to make all these things that he told the Hebrews to make 3,500 years ago, though the Navajo were amazingly talented in their own ways in other areas, because of their very different culture, they wouldn’t have known how to do all these things, to make the furniture of the tabernacle and these various garments. They couldn’t have done it unless they had been instructed in the ways of these trades. Now in ancient Mesoamerica the Incas, Aztecs, Mayans They had gold that they worked with, but generally speaking, and especially then in Native American history, they did not work with the hard metals. They didn’t work with iron as much of the ancient world did in Mesopotamia and then in Europe. They didn’t develop the wheel. which is really a shocking aspect of history. And as a result, they were severely disadvantaged when a clash of civilizations arose. So at any rate, I love the thought of these ancient Hebrews being so talented at things like jewelry. And regarding the Jews and jewelry, You know, online, if you look it up, they’ll say, no, there’s no connection at all. That’s ridiculous. But the prophet Joel, his name means the Lord is God. And some see, and I wouldn’t doubt, having read about it, of the origin of jewel, our modern English word jewel through its romantic roots, so to speak, going back to Joel. And if so, there very well may be a relationship between Jew and jewel and jeweler and jewelry. Basically focusing on God with what we today use as a J, but Yah or Jehovah. For in Him is the source of all beauty. Verse 12, and you shall put the two stones on the shoulders of the ephod as memorial stones for the sons of Israel. So Aaron shall bear their names before the Lord on his two shoulders as a memorial. So notice the importance to God of the identity of the nation of Israel, the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and then Jacob. God has these two covenant peoples in the Bible, Israel and the body of Christ. And the number 12 characterizes Israel’s kingdom. The number one characterizes the body. For Israel had 12 patriarchs, 12 tribes. Jesus said to the 12 apostles that there will be 12 thrones in the new Jerusalem. You will sit on the 12 thrones. You, each of his 12 apostles. And the New Jerusalem, we’re told in Revelation, has 12 walls with 12 foundations. And whose names are engraved on the 12 foundations? The names of the 12 apostles. We read in the book of Revelation. Now there are many different variations of theology that say all that is not literal. None of that is relevant. That’s all symbolic. But there’s so much of it. If we’re to say that all the details of Israel’s covenant that differ from the gospel of grace, if they’re all symbolic, then you take about maybe 20% of the Bible, including much of Ezekiel, much of the minor prophets, much of the major prophets, much of the first five books of Moses, much of the book of Revelation, much of the Gospels, and you say it’s all symbolic. Well, what is it all symbolic of? Well, it’s symbolic that God is nice and He’s going to do nice things for us. Because it pretty much loses all of its meaning. So the thousand year kingdom on earth after Christ’s second coming, that parallels the thousand years of the kingdom from David’s throne in Jerusalem until Christ’s first coming, that second thousand years where Revelation says there’ll be a thousand year kingdom, that’s all symbolic. That and 10,000 other verses, they’re all symbolic. Of what? There’s too much symbolism to put any meat to any of it. So, the fact that the number 12 is Israel’s number, and then for the body of Christ, the number is one. There is one body, one Lord, one baptism, not the many baptisms of Israel, as we read in the book, the epistle to the Hebrews, that there are many baptisms, as we see in the Mosaic Law and in the Gospels, there are many baptisms. Plural. But for the body of Christ, Paul writes there is one baptism because there’s one body, one Lord, who is the one head over the body. So is Paul over the body of Christ? No, he’s not. Are the twelve apostles over Israel’s kingdom? Yes, they are. Because Israel’s kingdom is a political entity and the body is a living organism, not a political entity. And a living organism only has one head and that’s Christ. There’s no room for a second head for Paul. But in a political entity, you could have a king and you could have governors and you could have all this authority structure. But in the body, we don’t have that. Paul has no authority over us in the body of Christ. And by the way, he wrote 13 epistles. He didn’t write 12. That would be too much like Israel. He didn’t write 14, but he wrote 13 epistles where he never became one of the 12 apostles, but was the 13th, so to speak, or the apostle to the rebellious Gentiles. Verse 13. You shall also make settings of gold and you shall make two chains of pure gold like braided cords and fasten the braided chains to the settings. And now we read about the breastplate that we saw in the animation. You shall make the breastplate of judgment. So that’s an interesting name for this piece of clothing, almost like a soldier’s equipment. artistically woven according to the workmanship of the ephod, you shall make it. Of gold, blue, purple, and scarlet thread, and fine woven linen, you shall make it. So God calls this here the breastplate of judgment, partly because of two stones that are associated with it that we will talk about in a few verses from now. And so at times, it appears the high priest would be called upon to render judgment, and not unlike Israel’s use of casting lots, where God told them, now cast lots to figure out which of the 12 tribes will get which piece of land in Israel. And when the apostles needed to replace Judas, they cast lots, and the lot fell on Matthias. So on our website, we have about 10,000 pages. One of the top 20 most popular pages, it’s bizarre really, is our article on casting lots in the Bible. Because Christians all over the world, when they study the Bible and they see all this emphasis on casting lots, they say, why did God tell them to cast lots? It’s like drawing straws or rolling dice and see what comes up, and then that’s what you do. And so our article, we’ve covered it a few times in our Bible study, so I won’t get into all that, but it’s really become popular. One of our top 20 pages on our entire website. showing biblically why God told the Israelites to cast lots. And today, if we take what we learned from that and apply it today, it helps, as the Bible says, keep the mighty apart. Because when two sons can’t decide how to split their father’s inheritance… It’s really wise to use some degree of chance in that final decision. So let’s continue. Verse 16, it shall be doubled into a square, a span shall be its length, and a span shall be its width. So in ancient Israel, weights and measurements, a span is the length. We talked about a cubit from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. A span was from the tip of the thumb to the pinky when the hand is spread out. And so think of that on the priest’s chest. So that’s the size of this breastplate. Verse 17, And you shall put settings of stone in it, four rows of stones. The first row shall be a sardius, probably a ruby. A topaz and an emerald. The topaz is a crystal. And the emerald we’re all familiar with. This shall be the first row. the second row shall be a turquoise a sapphire and a diamond and diamonds are a creationist best friend you have heard the atheistic story of the age of diamonds that they’re about a billion years old they came up from a hundred miles or so beneath the surface of the earth that’s how much pressure they say they need to make a diamond they don’t understand the history of the earth and the hydroplate theory so the diamonds don’t have to come up from way down there. But they say diamonds are a billion years old. If that were true, then they’d have no carbon-14 in them because carbon-14 only lasts thousands of years, not millions. Yet diamonds have plenty of carbon-14 in them. It’s very hard to get some spurious material inside the middle of a diamond. How do you do that? A diamond is the hardest naturally occurring substance on earth. So a diamond is a creationist best friend showing that they’re only thousands of years old, as in fact is the entire earth and the universe that God made us in the recent past. So the second row has turquoise, a sapphire, and a diamond. The third row We’ll see jacinth here. That’s an orange or reddish-orange gem of zircons. And just a quick note about zircons. They’re also these amazing little crystals because they have helium in them, and they’re said to be a billion or billions of years old also. Everything’s got to be millions or billions of years old. It’s just the knee-jerk response. So they’re billions of years old, except that they’re loaded with helium atoms. And we know by laboratory measurements and laboratory tests that helium atoms being so tiny on the periodic table, helium is so tiny that it works its way out of everything. So if you have a balloon for somebody’s birthday and it’s real expensive and it’s made to float for a long time and it’s filled with helium, those helium atoms find their way out. They eventually get out. Those zircon crystals, if they were a billion years old, they wouldn’t be loaded with helium atoms. The helium would be gone, but they’re loaded with helium as predicted by creationists and as then published before the laboratory test to show how quickly helium escapes zircon crystals. So this third row. A jacinth, which is formed of zircons. An agate. That’s a mineral that has these amazing, vibrant bands of color. And an amethyst. So that would be a beautiful violet color quartz. Verse 20, in the fourth row, a beryl. So that could be orange or green gem. An onyx, again, as we saw above. And a jasper. So jasper, it’s not transparent, but it is opaque. And it has a brownish color. It’s a quartz. So all these precious minerals, they shall be set in gold settings. So this is what a jeweler does to a diamond. He sets a ring. The stone, the diamond in the ring, only of course these would be much larger than a typical stone in a diamond ring. Verse 21, And the stone shall have the names of the sons of Israel, twelve according to their names, like the engravings of a signet, each one with its own name, and they shall be according to the twelve tribes. So again, God’s focus on the identity of the nation of Israel and the 12 tribes and his reconstituting of the 12 tribes after the Babylonian exile. And he reconstitutes the 12 tribes and the Levites and the Aaronic priesthood. This is all important to him. And in the book of Revelation, again, the 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes, 144,000. Theoretically, it could all be symbolic. Or, there’s no reason that it has to be symbolic. We find out that the Bible is rich with meaning and that God has two covenant peoples, Israel and the body, and the reason He’s making a new heaven and a new earth is because Israel, they will inherit the new earth, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, that they will inherit the earth. Isn’t that something? Do we inherit the earth? We don’t inherit the earth. We’re citizens of the heavenlies. So the body of Christ, we’re all taught, and rightly so, no matter what kind of theology church we go to, that when we go to be with the Lord, we live forever in heaven, so then why make a new earth? Just for the animals? No, because the 12 apostles will be on the new earth with the new Jerusalem, and their names… Their names inscribed in the foundation of the walls of the New Jerusalem and the 12 thrones being in that New Jerusalem. The 12 apostles were real people. They were not symbolic. So when Jesus said to them, when He said to Matthew, or when He said to Thomas, that you will sit on one of these 12 thrones and ruling over… the kingdom of Israel, he was making a promise to an individual person about what they will be doing. It’s not symbolic. Verse 22, you shall make chains for the breastplate at the end like braided cords of pure gold and you shall make two rings of gold for the breastplate like we’ve seen in the animation and put the two rings on the two ends of the breastplate Then you shall put the two braided chains of gold in the two rings which are on the ends of the breastplate. And the other two ends of the two braided chains you shall fasten to the two settings and put them on the shoulder straps of the ephod in the front. Now when we started these studies a quarter of a century ago, they were all audio. Today we do them in audio and video. So if there is anyone listening to this on an MP3 CD or an audio download and you think, hey, I didn’t get to see the animation, easily you could go online, go to YouTube, and just search for the things that we’re looking at. So search for animation of the tabernacle of the altar, of the Ark of the Covenant, of the priestly garments, of the ephod, and you’ll find all these simply. Verse 26, you shall make two rings of gold and put them on the two ends of the breastplate on the edge of it, which is on the inner side of the ephod. And the two other rings of gold you shall make and put them on the two shoulder straps underneath the ephod toward its front, right at the seam above the intricately woven band of the ephod. They shall bind the breastplate by means of its rings to the rings of the ephod using a blue cord so that it is above the intricately woven band of the ephod and so that the breastplate does not come loose from the ephod. So God is the designer. He doesn’t want it to come loose. Here’s how I want you to do this. And look at His design of living organisms from insects to falcons, microbes to trees. How strong a tree is and an eagle’s beak. It’s astounding what God’s able to do. Spider webs are stronger than steel. Molecule by molecule. And human beings are beginning to use these things in manufacturing. Verse 29, So Aaron shall bear the names of the sons of Israel on the breastplate of judgment over his heart. when he goes into the holy place as a memorial before the Lord continually. And of course, the heart, wear this over his heart, the heart in the Bible is used as a metaphor to represent the person, your heart, to represent your soul, or your spirit, or the totality of the human being. So it’s a metaphor. So some atheists will make fun of the Bible and say, oh, your heart is just a pump. Well, that’s agreed. The heart is a pump. But it is the metaphor for when you have a strong emotional feeling and you feel it in your chest. Because of the way that God made us. It’s as though this has gone to the core of your being. God could have made us so that when you see a loved one rescued at the last moment from what looked like certain death, and you get this incredible feeling in your toe, in your little toe. God could have made us like that. But it would send the wrong message, right? It’s like, well, you’re important to me, but not too important. But when you feel it in the core of your being, God recognized when He made us with all the hormones that go into a living human being, that this is how we could relate and understand the importance of the things that really matter. Verse 30, And you shall put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim, and they shall be over Aaron’s heart when he goes in before the Lord. So Aaron shall bear the judgment of the children of Israel over his heart before the Lord continually. So this is a very unusual aspect of Scripture. There are passages about this Urim and Thummim like in 1 Samuel when Saul, who’s in rebellion against God, he goes to inquire of the Lord and the Lord did not answer him. It didn’t matter if he asked by dreams or by the prophet or by the Urim. God would not answer Saul. So this Urim and Thummim were used like the casting of lots for the high priest occasionally to be able to hear directly from the Lord. And again, I’d rather not get into all that, but we have a very popular article that’s helped a lot of people. So feel free to go online. It’s kgov.com slash lots. L-O-T-S. But God gave to Israel the use of the casting of lots so that occasionally, rarely, he would supernaturally intervene and affect the outcome of the lots. But generally speaking, this was to promote humility so that every man didn’t think he had to get his way. I’m going to get what I want out of this situation. But humility, and the Bible says the casting of lots keeps the mighty apart. Because we learn that we can’t all get what we want. There may have been some of the apostles who would not have chosen Matthias. Because there were a couple guys that were both qualified. So they cast lots.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hey, this is Nicole McBurney jumping into the broadcast. We are out of time for today, so be sure to come back next Thursday to hear the rest of this study. To find other resources and Bible studies, be sure to go to kgov.com slash store. That’s kgov.com slash store.
