THE GIFT HORSE

This week we will do more work with the gift exchange between the bride and bridegroom. These exchanges occur from the time between their betrothal at Mt. Sinai and when the Bride is drawn into the Cloud of His Presence at the resurrection. To review from last week, the Bride sent gifts to the Groom to build a place for His Presence to dwell. In return, the Groom gifted Betzalel and Oholiav with the Divine ruach to transform those gifts into the Mishkan (Tabernacle). The Bride brought the Bridegroom thirteen items as gifts for the building of the Mishkan:

Gold

Silver

Copper

Turquoise wool

Purple wool

Scarlet wool

Linen

Goat hair

Red-dyed ram skins

Tachash skins

Acacia wood

Shoham stones

Stones for the settings

This list does not include items that were depletable, such as olive oil and spices for anointment. Then the Bridegroom gave her similar gifts, each mirroring one of her gifts to Him for the preparation of a Mishkan to make a place for His Presence to dwell with her:

“I also clothed you with embroidered cloth and put sandals of porpoise skin on your feet; and I wrapped you with fine linen and covered you with silk. I adorned you with ornaments, put bracelets on your hands and a necklace around your neck. I also put a ring in your nostril, earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your dress was of fine linen, silk and embroidered cloth. You ate fine flour, honey and oil; so you were exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. Then your fame went forth among the nations on account of your beauty, for it was perfect because of My splendor which I bestowed on you,” declares the Lord GOD. (Ezekiel 16:10-14)

Enumerated for easier reading:

Embroidered cloth

Tachash (porpoise or badger) sandals

Fine linen (priesthood)

Silk (“cloud of glory”)

Ornaments

Bracelets (tablets of Ten Words)

Necklace (words of Torah bound around the neck/heart)

Nose ring (justice)

Earrings (Shma)

Crown of beauty (Divine Presence Is 60:19)

Gold (purity of Torah)

Silver (redemption)

Fame (of the Groom’s Name)

Again, the pattern is that the Bride brings earthly gifts, which the Bridegroom matches with spiritual gifts. The Bride contributes earthly resources, and the Groom mirrors them with Heavenly resources.

If she understands that that are two realms, and she understands He is Creator and she is created, she realizes the gifts weren’t hers at all. It was because of Adonai that the Hebrews plundered the Egyptians. He redesignated the wealth of the Egyptians to the Hebrews. The gifts Israel gave were His. He created them. It’s all His.

Adonai puts wealth in our pockets, so we can’t think when we contribute something to the congregation that it’s coming out of our pockets. It’s coming out of His creation. He even gives the ability to earn that money or that gift. Without His giving the ability to earn, we could bring no gift. Lots of people on this earth do not have the ability to earn anything at all. They have disabilities. Some can only earn a little. Simply to be born with the ability to go out and earn, labor, and collect that paycheck is a gift from Heaven.

We are brought up to believe we earn our paychecks, but they all originate in His Creation, and Elohim chose to make us able-bodied and healthy so we could give back to Him. He lets you put it in your pocket as if it’s yours. But we can’t be too sassy because He created both the Bride and the earth that yields its resources to her. That’s hard to acknowledge when we associate reward with the work that we do.

Yes, you contributed. You contributed your earthly natural resources to that paycheck, and you contributed some of that treasure back to Him. This made it holy. Designated. Just like the Bride. She is holy to the Groom. Designated to Him alone. The Groom rewarded you with the spiritual resources so that its status changed. It’s no longer secular, mundane, but a holy offering or tithe. The earth and its fulness belong to Elohim, yet He wants His unique creation, human beings, to take from that earth and offer a fine gift to Him. By passing the resource through the human being, it is elevated to holy status as the gift completes the circle back to the Creator.

Some believers, for whatever reason, choose not to give gifts to their Creator, or they give only sparingly…even though they have enough to do so, like Kain. Whatever the reason, they are limiting what the Groom will give them. The pattern is that He responds with a similar spiritual gift to the natural gift the Bride sends Him. Worse yet, there are non-workers. They have the ability to earn, they are believers, yet they have a pattern of not working at all or being such a lousy worker that they ensure they cannot hold a job to provide for their families, much less give holy gifts to the Creator. While the stingy believer withholds what he has, the non-worker refuses to even earn anything that could lead to the willing heart decision to give.

The Bridegroom wants us fully involved in the gift transaction, contributing to the welcoming of His presence. When we contribute earthly resources, we draw down His presence. He responds with similar gifts from the spiritual realm.

The future temple is the way that the Bridegroom imagined His creation. Every creation starts with an imagination, and so He imagined a creation that would be a fusion of earth and spirit, a perfect fusion that would be willingly obedient. Not spiritual beings, not more angels, but rather, messengers of obedience that would also respond from the earthly side of them. He would respond again with the spiritual, and it would be a marriage of realms.

Isaiah’s list of spiritual gifts to the Bride is an example of how the bridegroom in this interim sends gifts to the bride. She also sends gifts to him, and it heightens the anticipation. You get to know the other person sometimes by the gift. If somebody gives you a gift who’s never given you a gift before, you might be a little anxious because you don’t really know what kind of gift they’re going to think is a gift compared to what you think a gift is. I knew this sweet little old lady years ago, and she would go to thrift sales and bring me the moldiest smelling used clothes when she cleaned her closet. To her, it was the greatest gift of all, and I had to respond as if it was the greatest gift of all, because I understood the heart that was behind it.

There’s some trepidation when someone we don’t know well says, “I brought you this gift,” and we have no idea what’s going to be in the package when we open it! It will tell you a lot about the person, though. When we open the gifts of the Bridegroom, and when He opens our gifts, it tells us a lot about each other. We’re learning the nature and the character, the likes and the dislikes of one another in this interim period.

There’s times when I love to open these spiritual gifts because they’re awesome. They’re splendorous. They’re wondrous. I wouldn’t have even imagined to ask for the gift because I didn’t even know it existed until He gave it to me.

And then there’s other times the Groom gives a gift, and I have some reservations, because, it’s like a gift horse. If you look that gift horse in the mouth, you know that with this gift is going to come greater responsibility, greater demands, greater tests, greater trials. And you know that’s the reason it’s a gift is because those tests and trials are going to take you to another level of holiness, not because He’s unloaded some worn out old nag on you and called it a gift.

There’s going to be a price to pay for accepting this gift, but who would refuse a spiritual gift? We’re supposed to earnestly covet them. That’s a thing we’re allowed to covet, but they do sometimes come with a price when we open them. The bridegroom’s spiritual gifts are designed to increase our holiness because this fusion of heaven and earth called the New Jerusalem will be a completely holy place. Many people will visit from the nations; they will come up and visit at the feasts, but they go home.

Those who are recorded for life in Jerusalem will be called holy:

In that day the Branch of the LORD will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth will be the pride and the adornment of the survivors of Israel. It will come about that he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy—everyone who is recorded for life in Jerusalem. When the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and purged the bloodshed of Jerusalem from her midst, by the spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning, then the LORD will create over the whole area of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, even smoke, and the brightness of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory will be a canopy. There will be a shelter to give shade from the heat by day, and refuge and protection from the storm and the rain. (Is 4:2-6)

There will be people recorded for life, but life somewhere else.  

The Bride is recorded for life in Jerusalem, because, remember, there’s no rebellion in her. She has completely embraced the pomegranates (mitzvot) of the Bridegroom, the customary gift of the Bridegroom to the Bride while she awaits his coming. She has completely embraced His will, and there is no vestige or shred of rebellion left in her that would cause her to violate His will in this extremely holy place. If you violate His will in this extremely holy place, we have the pattern in Genesis. You get kicked out.

You can be recorded for life somewhere else, but not in the most holy place, where there must be 100% obedience and submission. “We will do, and we will hear” is the agreement of the Bride to the Bridegroom’s conditions of the marriage. Through the power of the Ruach HaKodesh, Yeshua is “grooming” the Bride to conform her will to his and the Father’s will.

This gift horse is no nag, but it can be a challenge to ride because it constantly transforms our earthly gifts into holy gifts of willing obedience. Accepting that gift horse is the only way to complete the circle of personal holiness required for residence in New Jerusalem, a place where natural and spiritual have a perfectly harmonious marriage.

In that day there will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, “HOLY TO THE LORD.” And the cooking pots in the LORD’S house will be like the bowls before the altar. (Zech 14:20)

As she prepares, dedicating her earthly work to Him, allowing Him to turn it into a sacred offering, the Bride transforms more and more into the image of the Creator.

Just as He imagined.

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