Act 2:3
And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and
rested on each one of them.
The English narrative that
concludes God’s uttering of His Ten Statements at Mt. Horeb tells us, Now when all the people saw the thunder and the
flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking …
(Exodus 20:18). The Hebrew on the other hand literally reads, “And all the people 'saw' the voices and the torches”.
One may see a ‘torch’, but how does one see a “voice”? The question may have
pushed English translators to stray from a literal rendition of the verse, but not
the Hebrew sages. Also, the congregation at Horeb was composed of people from
many nations, so for everyone to ‘understand’ them (a Hebrew synonym for ‘seeing’),
the Ten Statements would have had to be uttered in several languages.
How do you see a voice, and
how does a single voice speak in many languages? When Moses recounts these events to the
second generation of the Children of Israel in the desert he says, Then Adonai spoke to you out of the midst of the fire (Deuteronomy
4:12). One of the sages saw this verse through the lenses of the following passage,
Is not my word like fire, declares Adonai, and
like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces (Jeremiah 23:29)? The sages
of Israel have always described these events as the Voice of God splitting into
seventy voices speaking seventy different tongues and that these voices were
actually like hot sparks flying forth from a hammer’s blow on a stone and
becoming tongues of fire. This may sound farfetched, but is it really?
Fourteen hundred years after
these events Yeshua, the Prophet 'like unto Moses ',
(Deuteronomy 18:15) came to give His elucidation of the Heavenly Voices. When
He was on earth, like Moses He climbed a mountain and His disciples came to Him
(Exodus 24:9; Matthew 5:1-2). Later, on the same Jewish calendar date as the
Horeb events (Pentecost, or fifty days after the resurrection) as the disciples
were celebrating the festival of Pentecost they saw these voices in the form of
tongues of fire that gave them ability to speak in the languages of all the
foreign pilgrims then present for the festival in Jerusalem (Acts 2:1-5). These ‘voices’ were later to be sent to the
whole world to reach out to the lost sheep of the House of Israel and to the
nations with their message.
Today we, followers of the
Jewish Messiah Yeshua HaMashiach, are these ‘Voices’ of fire from Sinai. Today,
from where ever we are in the world we are Hashem's emissaries and apostles of
the great message spoken at Sinai. I usually teach my students that the Words
of the Ten Statements uttered at Horeb elucidated by God’s Agent Yeshua,
constitute the solution to all of the world’s social problems.
But the people must not only
hear the message, they must also see it. They must see it in the exemplary walk
of our lives. A tall order maybe, but a lot is at stake and His Spirit is ever
present to help us. Truly, Yeshua ever lives to make intercession off us (John 14:26; Hebrews 7:25). May we not fail in our
mission!
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