Ki Tetzay (Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19)

Posted on Sep 7, 2014

090614tp by Rabbi Paul Falk.  …which would translate, “When you go to war against your enemies and Yahweh your Elohim delivers them into your hands.”  So, some of you may have read, “Various laws,”  Yahweh Has His teachings, Yahweh has His word, and quite often it’s set together on a concept.  This weeks concept is the idea of valuing that which most don’t value.  They seem to be like little details.  Oh, we can discard little details– they are not important,  we can discard the people, like the orphan the widow and the stranger, they are not important, these are little details.  No, no, no, no, there is no such thing in the Kingdom as little details.  So my focus today is this idea of details to Yahweh, and you notice the heart, we’ll get to the heart later in that regard why it’s a heart.    But its important too, in this picture, that it is a puzzle. Yahweh puts His truth throughout the scripture, and you have to find the puzzle pieces, and they may fit, but not all of them, because you know what?, they are not meant to fit here, they may fit with other verses and other places in scripture.  But you know what? That means you have to go looking.  You have to study, you’ve got to dig– you’ve got to spend time.  Today I’m going to give you the lessons before we start.  Usually I do that at the end.  So, the first lesson is that scripture is not always literal.  We have to be very careful about that, because a lot of us are very concrete thinkers.  We think about things about what we can feel and touch and smell.  But Yahweh tries to give us, metaphors, pictures of things so we can understand Him.  Because you know what, Yahweh is a spirit.  He doesn’t have eyes, He doesn’t specifically have a face, He doesn’t have arms, He’s a spirit so why does he speak of Himself with those metaphors? Because we see them in the people around us and it helps us understand Him.  There is no scriptural detail too small to be important.  Doesn’t exist.  Yahweh could have edited it.  He could have omitted it.  If He didn’t omit it, it is important to know.  And the scriptures are an amazing beautiful puzzle to put together, …(continue in audio)