Weekly Scriptures: Numbers 4:21-7:89 Judges 13:2-13:25; Acts 21:17-26

This week's Torah portion is called Naso in Hebrew, which translates as take up or lift up, referring to the Lord's command to Moses to take a census of the priestly families (Num 4:21). Numbers 6:1-21 concerns the Nazirite vow.

Nazir in Hebrew means one devoted or consecrated. Applied to a vine, it means 'untrimmed'; similarly, Nazirites were unshorn: they did not cut their hair as a distinguishing public mark of their vow.

The Haftarah passage from Judges 13 is about the early life of Samson and his call to be a Nazirite and the related New Testament passage from Acts 21:17-26 concerns Paul's fulfilment of a Nazirite vow.

The Nazirite Vow in Scripture

The Nazirite vow could be taken by either a man or a woman (Num 6:2), and were taken for a period of time (usually 30 or 60 days). Samson's mother had to live as a Nazirite during her pregnancy (Jud 13:4).

There are only three life-long Nazirites mentioned in Scripture: Samson, Samuel the Prophet and John the Baptist. Samuel's mother had been barren, like Samson's mother, and in gratitude she vowed: "LORD Almighty, if you will only look on your servant's misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head" (1 Sam 1:11).

Regarding John the Baptist, the Lord's command before his birth via an angel was: "He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born" (Luke 1:15).

Paul and the Nazirites

In Acts 21, Paul is challenged about keeping the Law of Moses or Torah:

Then they said to Paul: 'You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. They have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs. What shall we do? They will certainly hear that you have come, so do what we tell you. There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join in their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law. As for the Gentile believers, we have written to them our decision that they should abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.'

The next day Paul took the men and purified himself along with them. Then he went to the temple to give notice of the date when the days of purification would end and the offering would be made for each of them. [emphasis added]

Paul had just been meeting with James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem Church. Later Christian historians (e.g. Epiphanius and Eusebius) describe James as a being Nazirite, which may have given rise to the epithet 'the Just' after his name.¹ The Hebrew behind this would be Tzaddik, meaning righteous or just one, which is still used in the Jewish community to describe holy people.

The vow of the four men can be identified as the Nazirite vow because of the hair shaving and the offerings in accordance with the Numbers 6 instructions. Paul was challenged to pay for the expenses of these four Nazirites because it was common for poor people's expenses in fulfilling this vow to be paid by others as a good deed.
He was also being challenged to prove Torah obedience: to show that he kept or guarded (phulassó) the Law (Acts 21:24). The same idea of guardianship describes Torah observance today. If a Jewish person tells you they are shomer Shabbat, it means they are a guardian of the mitzvot, or commandments relating to Shabbat - in other words, they observe the Sabbath.

Paul and the Law

Commentators have struggled to understand why Paul would demonstrate obedience to the Law by agreeing to take part in this vow. This is because most have misunderstood obedience to the Law as belonging to a system of works-righteousness which should therefore not be continued by believers in Jesus, since righteousness only comes through faith in him.

However, Israel was always under a covenant of grace. The Law was given after they were saved through the Passover and rescued from Egypt. Therefore, they were not commanded to obey the Law in order to win God's favour, but to be able to draw closer to a holy God. However, Paul points out in Romans that his Jewish brethren had missed righteousness by faith "because they pursued it [the Torah] not by: faith but as if it were by works."

This caused them to "stumble over the stumbling stone" (Rom 9:32), who was Messiah. They did not comprehend the New Covenant because they were not keeping the Old Covenant in the way God intended. So, although Paul could say that he had kept the Law faultlessly (Phil 3:6), he could simultaneously bemoan the weakness of the flesh (Rom 7:21-23) because obedience to the Law was a matter of external action; it could not deal with the sin struggles of the inner man. Circumcision of the heart was required by the inner cleansing of the Holy Spirit, through submission to the new covenant in Messiah's blood, in faith.

Messianic Jews and the Torah

However, this still does not answer why Paul obeyed the Nazirite vow to prove Torah obedience. Was he simply trying to avoid or postpone trouble?

The issue here is specifically about Jewish obedience to the Torah. Acts 21:25 makes it clear that Gentiles were being taught to obey four basic purity laws only. The disciples had disputed at the Council of Jerusalem about Gentile obedience to the Law, describing it as a heavy yoke: "Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear?" (Acts 15:10).

In Galatians 5:1, Paul calls Torah obedience a "yoke of slavery". However, he is writing to Gentiles and is pointing out that you do not need the badges of Jewish belonging – circumcision, keeping food purity laws (kashrut) and Sabbath observance - in order to share in the righteousness that only comes through faith in Jesus the Messiah.

Torah vs Traditions

To describe the Torah itself as a heavy yoke goes against Scripture's own teaching about it (see Psalm 119, which celebrates the Law). It was the traditions and the spirit of works-righteousness associated with it that had become a burden. To his Jewish followers, Jesus said that his (Torah) burden or "yoke" would be "easy and light" compared to the teachers of the Law of his day. But he made sure to tell them to obey the Pharisees' teaching about the Torah or Law because they were the successors of Moses, though to do it in the right spirit Matt 23:2). So Jesus did not instruct his Jewish followers to reject Torah observance.

Paul allowed freedom of conscience for all believers (Rom 14:5-6). But at the same time, he did not encourage Torah disobedience for Jewish believers in Jesus. He himself went so far in proving his Torah-observance as to take part in a Temple sacrificial ritual, such as that entailed in the Nazirite vow. He risked his life to do so, since giving "notice of the date when the days of purification would end and the offering would be made for each of them" was telling his enemies his whereabouts.²

Many point to Romans 10:4: "Messiah is the end of the Law" to assert that Torah obedience was meant to cease. However, "end" here is telos, meaning goal rather than cessation. Acts 21 shows that Paul remained a Torah-observant Jew after he came to faith in Jesus as Messiah. He had no need to reject the Torah. After all, Jesus was Torah ('the Word') made flesh and obeying it simply took on new meaning. Everything in it pointed to Jesus and confirmed his Messiahship.

Freedom in Messiah

Properly understood, the Torah was to be seen as a "tree of life" (Prov 3:18) and obedience to it "rejoices the soul" (Ps 19:7). The whole of Psalm 119 celebrates it. In Christian tradition, we have a negative view of Law as onerous and burdensome. It is, if you obey it as works-righteousness, but as already pointed out, that was not the spirit of the Torah - it was how man chose to obey it.

Followed in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24) as an act of worshipful obedience, it brings joy. Many Jewish and Gentile believers have found profound satisfaction, joy and enriching of their faith in observing the biblical feasts and the biblical Sabbath (starting on Friday evening with prayers and a family meal).

"It was for freedom that Messiah has set us free" must be the banner of both Jew and Gentile. Jews are free to observe Torah - but in Messiah, not as a means to salvation. Gentiles should not seek to take on the 'badges of covenant' (as circumcision, dietary laws and Sabbath observance have been dubbed) in order to belong to Messiah.

Both Jew and Gentile have direct access to the Lord, by faith in Messiah Jesus.

The Value of Consecration: Rees Howells

However, as we consider Acts 21's implications, we may lose sight of the fact that Paul may also have been approving those who obeyed the Law in order to consecrate themselves to the Lord, which was what the Nazirite vow entailed.

One of the greatest intercessors of the 20^th Century, Rees Howells, was called to live set apart, like a Nazirite or consecrated one.³ He had to sacrifice appearance and reputation, in line with the prophets Ezekiel, Hosea and Isaiah, who were required to adopt unconventional behaviour in order to communicate God's message.

Rees Howells had the habit of praying with his head uncovered and would often pray while walking, but would only uncover his head when quite alone. It was unheard of then to go outside without a hat. It was a disgrace not to do so. The Lord challenged him to be in prayer all day long and to go hatless as a sign of this. "I was to be a spectacle before the whole town. Never had they seen a man out of doors without a hat!"⁴

The Lord said to him that he could not preach on being dead to the world until he could prove that he was dead to the world's opinions. He realised that being respectable, conforming to the world's expectations, was very important to him. But he obeyed and every day he went out hatless. In the end it became harder to disobey than to obey and people became used to it.

A harder test was to come, when God called him to deep intercession for a particular man's soul and challenged him to take the Nazirite vow of Numbers 6 – which meant he could not cut his hair or shave. He said, "I told the Lord it would be far better to die than to do this...To go without a hat was bad enough but this was a thousand times worse...The devil whispered, 'In six months [your hair and beard] will be down to your knees and the only place fit for you will be the asylum. It would not be so bad if you only went there yourself, but the worse of it is, you will send your parents there also.' He said, "I told the Holy Spirit that I knew of no one who had been called to do such a thing in this generation, and how could I ever give in to it?"⁵ Again, the Holy Spirit showed him that his fear of the world's opinion was the reason for his reluctance.

Many of his Christian friends criticised him and said he had gone too far. Some thought he really had gone mad. Only a very few of his friends knew that the Lord had called him to this for the purpose of intercession and to make him dead to the world. But gradually his vow began to affect the world around him. One old man in the village would tell people he was a modern John the Baptist. Another time a man who did not know his name, simply asked the ticket collector at the station where "the man with the Holy Ghost" lived and was directed to Rees Howells.

Afterwards he said, "I thought I would have no fear of going against the world and its opinions, and that it was the easiest thing to be dead to it, but it was the greatest error I have ever believed. I had to be pulled through inch by inch...the self-nature and all its lusts had to be changed for the divine nature. Daily I decreased and he increased."⁶

After six months of walking as a Nazirite, the Lord gave him the assurance that the purpose of the intercession had been achieved. And this was confirmed when he received a letter saying that the man whose soul he had prayed for had been converted.

How different would the Church and our nation be if more of us were really to die to self and radically consecrate ourselves to intercession and to the work of the gospel?

Author: Helen Belton

References

1 E.g. see Ephiphanius, Panarion, 29.4:4,1; also Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 2.23:4.

2 Tannehill, RC, 1994. The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation, Vol Two: The Acts of the Apostles. Fortress, Minneapolis, pp270-271.

3 Grubb, N, 2003. Rees Howells: Intercessor. Lutterworth Press.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.