Parshah 38 Korach – Korah Torah – B'midbar/Numbers 16:1 – 18:32. Haftarah – 1 Samuel 11:14 – 12:22. B`rit Hachadashah – Acts 5:1- 11. What is your obsession? B'midbar / Numbers 16:14 - " You haven`t at all brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey, and haven`t put us in possession of fields and vineyards. Do you think you can gouge out these men`s eyes and blind them? We won`t come up!" (CJB) The commentary of Rabbi Marcelo Guimarães (B’midbar page 112) begins with a warning so strong that when reading, I was fully aware of the moment we are living. I was on a bus returning from Ipiaú to Salvador, Brazil, and reading his comment. I had to stop reading, pondering, praying and re-read until the end of his comment. In fact, with each sentence of the comment I read, God was opening my spiritual eyes to the current situation how the Messianic Movement is going through. I proposed that as soon as I got home, I would call Rabbi Marcelo. No need, he called me, and we had a long talk about it. Rabbi Marcelo's comment is a prophecy. While talking to him, he realized that when he wrote this comment in 2007, he was not aware of it, but now things became clear. Let us see what Rabbi Marcelo says in this comment: "We will speak of Korah, whose life marked the life of Moses, Aaron and the interesting things that happened to him, Dathan and Aviram. When one person does not accept the anointing that is on the other, the first thing he does is stand up against it. Moses had an enemy before him, Korah and more than 250 men, who bought his idea rising in rebellion against the authority of the leader Moses. The act of rebellion generated presumption, daring, false religiosity, envy against one who had been placed to serve the people of Israel, to lead it. With this attitude they said that they did not accept authority, the anointing, the calling, nothing that related to the authority that Moses exercised over them. The same spirit of rebellion that took possession of Korah and his coreligionists is also present today, spreading the arrogance, feelings of envy of the leaders. Let us consider that by accusing Moses, inflaming the congregation against his authority, they were revolting against God Himself. " Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno (1470-1550 CE) suggests that the rebels thought Moshe was deliberately playing with them and deceiving them: You must be joking with us not to have brought us to the earth that you said would bring us to. You still speaking as if it were given to us as an inheritance, commanding us these commandments that are bound only to the earth- "When you harvest your land, you will not reap the corners of your field altogether, nor gather the fallen ears of your harvest. Your vineyard, and you shall not gather the fallen berries of your vineyard; You shall leave them to the poor and to the stranger. I am Adonai your God." (Vayikra - Leviticus 19: 9-10, ESV). What we see here is that people developed an obsession for the land. With so much desire to possess it, it became the way to decide whether the promises of God were real and if they would come to reality. Although they were no more than landless slaves in Egypt, they clung to the idea of owning their own piece of land and made it the scales by which they measured their relationship with God. It is as if all the way through the desert, until that time, they had the image of their own vineyard or field as their personal target. It seems that the only reason for leaving Egypt was to bring them to their own fields and vineyards. Now because of their unbelief to God, they had missed a chance to ever achieve this. They try to lay the blame on Moses, claiming that he had broken the promises made to them and did not respect their rights. We want our rights! Jonathan Allen wrote: "The writer to the Hebrews draws a very different picture of the relationship between the Lord, the patriarchs, and the promised land. Had God promised the Land of Canaan to Avraham? Surely, "Arise, travel the length and breadth of the earth, for I will give you whatever your sight reaches." (B'resheet / Genesis 13:17, NIV). What did Adonai say to Yitzchak son of Avraham? "I will give this land to your descendants." (15:18, ESV). And what about Ya'akov? "The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac, I will give to you and give the land to your seed after you." (35:12, ESV). The promise of God is then repeated by Moses, almost forty years after the rebellion, to the people who were about to enter the earth: "Go, take possession of the land which the Eternal swore to your fathers, Avraham, Yitzchak and Ya'akov, to possess them and their heirs after them. "(D'varim / Deut.1: 8, JPS). This was a promise often repeated and known to the patriarchs who were contemplated for their faith in believing in the promise, even against all odds: "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go to a place that he was to inherit. He went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs of the same promise. "(Hebrews 11: 8-9, NIV) None of them received the inheritance, ownership, and possession of what had been promised to them: "All these died in the faith, not having received the promised things, but having seen and greeted them afar off, and having acknowledged that they were aliens and pilgrims on the earth."(verse 13, ESV) But they stood firm, believing in Him who had made these promises. How did they manage to achieve that? What prevented them from being trapped to the idea of a piece of land? Why does they not complain about the lack of fields and vineyards, the lack of security and the possession of the land? The writer to the Hebrews explains: "For he [that is, Avraham] waited for the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God." (V.10, ESV). The patriarchs knew that they were called to something far greater than lands and vineyards. They had been called by GodHimself, to partake of His kingdom based on promises made by God. They could trust in His faithfulness. They trusted in theEternal God, who daily provided them with a home, food, peace in times of insecurity. The Eternal provided them with a posterity, even though their wives were barren (Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel)." So, the question for us today is: do we have a fixation for "land", for commodities that we think is our right? Have we transformed the Word of God? When He says, "I know what thoughts I have of you, says the Lord ... plans to make them prosper and not evil, plans to give them hope and a future." (Jeremiah 29:11, NIV) in promises of a comfortable home, of material and financial prosperity, of good health and family, of ephemeral goods to satisfy all our whims? Today, most believers are more worried about having things than being something! There are people who are disappointed and even doubt the existence of God, when He does not respond to their demands. After all, He has promised, it is our right! Society today has become insistent about its rights: the right to have and spend money, even at the expense of others or by means of bribery and kickbacks. The right to practice abortion and kill unborn children. The right to worship all that they like, even mortal beings. The right to waste natural resources, as and when we want. The right to abuse our own bodies with drugs, alcohol and tobacco or food harmful to health. The right to be right about everything, uncensored or critical. We need to learn that with rights (or privileges) come the responsibilities. With freedom comes the responsibility of how we use this freedom. As Yeshua said, " From him who has been given much, much will be demanded." (Luke 12:48b, CJB). Those who rebelled in the desert quickly discovered that "The moment he finished speaking, the ground that was under them split apart, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with their families, and all the men that were with Korah, with their goods." (B'midbar / Numbers 16: 31-32, CJB) God was executing judgment against them with no right to appeal. We, the believers of today, must be careful not to find ourselves insisting on "our rights" and to not defy God, so that we too aren't subject to His judgments. We create a theology of prosperity that masks another reality: What man plants this will also reap! Many believers are completely ignorant of God's Word concerning rebellion and its consequences. In 1 Samuel 15:23a, we see one of the strongest statements in the entire Bible about this sin: "For rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft and stubbornness is like the crime of idolatry …"(CJB) It seems that God has changed. It seems that He closes His eyes to our sins and "just pats us on our shoulders" even when we live outside His will.