Noach 5782 Noach and the letter Bet

Noach 5782 Noach and the letter Bet

Torah Portion Noach (Noah) 5782

    The letter Bet

    The second letter of the Alephbet is bet. It has the value of 2. Bet means house, it has a roof, a floor, a back wall and a door and it means duality.

    Aleph stands for the Father and bet represents the son.

    Bet Lechem (Bethlehem) means house of bread and Yeshua is the Bread of Life, so there is a clear connection to the letter bet.

    The word Father – is Av (spelled aleph bet) and the word for son is ben (spelled bet aleph nun-sofit). When we put the letters of these two words together, they spell aven – which means stone.

    Matthew 21:42 Yeshua said to them, “Haven’t you ever read in the Tanakh, ‘The very rock which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone! This has come from Adonai, and in our eyes it is amazing’

    Yeshua was and is the cornerstone – The Torah and Yeshua are the same - the very stone that Jews and Christians alike stumble over.

    The bet is like a fence - imagine you are the parent of a young child that has just started crawling - your instinct will be to surround your child with a play pen until they have the understanding of their surroundings. As time goes on and they mature, so you allow them more freedom. Just like this picture, the Torah is there to protect us and Yeshua is the Torah! He is our protection.

    When shepherds watched their flocks at night they slept at the entrance of the pen to keep the sheep safe in the pen. The sheep had the three walls to protect them and they were free to roam in the pen. When the sheep were released in the day, they were free from the sheep fold but they grazed with their ears tuned to hear the voice of their shepherd and responded to him in obedience.

    Both the shepherd and the pen protected the sheep but following the shepherd was much more exciting. The walls of the sheep pen are like the written Torah, an external restraint but obedience to the shepherd is internal and more demanding but more exciting.

    Source: Mark Biltz, El Shaddai Ministries https://www.esm.us/

    A brief summary:

    • HaShem instructs Noah—the only righteous man in a world consumed by violence and corruption—to build a large wooden teivah (“ark”)
    • There is a global flood.
    • When the ground dries completely—exactly one solar year (365 days) after the onset of the Flood— HaShem commands Noah to exit the teivah and repopulate the earth.
    • Noah builds an altar and offers sacrifices to HaShem.
    • HaShem swears never again to destroy all of mankind because of their deeds and sets the rainbow as a testimony of His new covenant with man.
    • Noah plants a vineyard and becomes drunk on its produce.
    • The descendants of Noah remain a single people, with a single language and culture, for ten generations.
    • Years later the nations begin the building of the tower of Babel and their language is confused, scattering the people.
    • A chronology of the ten generations from Noah to Abram (later Abraham)

    The name Noach

    At his naming ceremony his father Lamech prophetically declared concerning him: He will comfort us in the labour and anguish of our hands caused by the soil the Holy One cursed.”

    nacham [comfort, console]

    Noach literally means:

    1. to bring something that is moving to a condition of rest;
    2. to cause something noisy to become quiet;
    3. to set something down after having picked it up and moved it; and /or
    4. to remove something from a crowded place where its essence is hidden and put it in solitary place where it can be displayed.

    Last year when we focused on the meaning of Noach’s name it was linked to the Shabbat rest, this year when I looked at the meaning of Noach’s name I saw the mikvah (baptism) and the cleansing of the entire world to bring rest from the evil, to bring stillness from the chaos, to restore holiness and wholeness so that rest could come. The world desperately needed comfort from the intense evil that had filled it to saturation.

    This evil was the result of listening to the enemy, from mixing the truth with half truths and  doctorines outside of the ways of HaShem. It started in the Garden and continued to grow and fester, one small lie building into another until it began to poison all that was good.

    A few years ago I remember asking HaShem what the days of Noach would look like, because we know that when Yeshua returns that is what the world will look like, a scary thought to behold. What I saw was everything that we consider evil and wrong not only being allowed but also endorsed! It was not a picture I really want to dwell on but one that I am fast beginning to recognise in the world today.

    The most incredible part of this story of Noach is how, in the midst of this incredible evil, in the midst of this judgement there was the gift of grace – chenan. It was not an unmerited grace but a merited favour – a grace through obedience – the obedience that Noach showed in his generation.

    How does the story of Noach link to the letter bet?

    The world is a like a house and HaShem created this house, the earth, to house His Creation. A creation that came into being through His Words. This house was designed to worship Him and to have life within the covering of His glory and life that came from His Light.

    Like the letter bet, I see the earth being protected by HaShem’s olam (His ancient ways) and Yeshua the Lamb, slain before the foundations of the world and our Great Shepherd, guarding the entrance of this “pen”. Through sin the world has stepped further and further away from the Shepherd and further away from the protective boundaries of HaShem’s ways that the way back to the house of HaShem became lost. The only way to restore the house was to remove the evil and to wash the world of the decay that had poisoned all that was good.

    Father wants to restore His people, His House and bring them back into His Garden as it was in the beginning. "B’resheit" - Abba's first words of the Torah, "in the beginning" -  is where we should all be focused on returning to – a restored house. 

    We know that Yeshua taught that the 950-year period in which Noach lived is filled with prophetic significance.

    Yeshua said, “ . . . as the days of Noach were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be". Matthew 24:37

    How do we prepare ourselves at this time and how do we not find ourselves panicking in the midst of what we can see is fast becoming a world where good is becoming evil and evil is becoming good?

    We need to return to our Shepherd’s fold – we need to step into His covering and the covering of is His Torah – the Cornerstone. We cannot choose to live outside of His ways and hope that we will be unaffected by the evil of this world. Our Shepherd Yeshua calls us back to the house – the House of His Father – the Bet Lechem – the place of The Bread of Life and we need to make the choice. We can either choose life and the ways of His Word or we can choose to wander outside the house into the ways of darkness which only leads to death.

    Now is not the time to be on the fence or to be living in compromise.

    Now is the time to start walking in the maturity you have been working on for years, to stand in the faith HaShem has been helping you build and to trust the God that created all heaven and earth and rescued us out of sin and bondage though His sacrificial love and stand!

    Stand and be counted as the Righteous Remnant for His Kingdom – be the Noach of your generation and be counted as part of HaShem’s house today!

    Baruch HaShem!

    Michelle


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