(Ver 1.1) This will be “Part 2” in the Bible study series, revealing the Lord Jesus in the ancient Hebrew Alphabet. Today, we will begin with the first letter of the alphabet called the “Alef”. This is one of the two most obvious letters that Jesus claimed to be directly related or named by. We learned this from the 4 statements of Revelation, where Jesus said “I am the Alpha and the Omega”. We also learned from these references that these signify the beginning and the ending, since this is clearly what they are in Alphabetic terms. What we have concluded based upon this revelation, is that all of the letters must represent Jesus in some form of identity. Therefore, the reason for these lessons.

If you have not read the series from the beginning, it is recommended that you go back to “Part 1” to begin.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ALEF

The Alef is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It has a number value of “1”. The sound of the letter is transliterated into English as “alef” or “alif”. This letter in the ancient Hebrew paleo pictogram representation, is as the image of an “Ox” or “Bull’s” head. It is noted by possessing two large horns on the top of its head with its snout pointing downward to the earth’s ground. Again, this letter also signifies the meaning of “beginning”, since it begins the alphabet.

This picture representation of an ox is very profound in association with our main subject of Jesus. An ox was a “servant” type of animal. It was identified to be useful because it is a very powerful and strong animal. It was used by ancient civilizations as the main worker in the farm harvest field. This beast was used to plow the ground in order to plant and sow seed for crops. The ox also was used during the harvest of grain to break up the harvested fruits of grain heads to make required substance of use for bread making.

This was only a quick introduction, and it should be easily seen how this ox picture letter introduces us to the concepts of the work of Jesus Christ. This work was fulfilled on the earth, during His physical natural appearance in Israel, approximately 2000 years ago. We will now go through some Bible examples of this letter representation to verify this relationship to being Jesus.

JESUS THE PROMISED SERVANT OF THE LORD

Let us begin this part of the lesson, by comparing Jesus’ first coming to being a fulfillment of a servant, like the pictograph ox prophesied by the Alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  We will not go over every verse possible, but rather will only hit the major highlights, beginning with Old Testament prophets:

Isa 42:1  Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. 

Isa 43:10  Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. 

Isa 52:13  Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. 

Isa 53:11  He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. 

Zec 3:8  Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, thou, and thy fellows that sit before thee: for they are men wondered at: for, behold, I will bring forth my servant the BRANCH. 

As we can read in these 5 verses from Isaiah, and Zechariah, Jesus is clearly prophesied to be the coming “servant” of the LORD. These are certainly speaking of His first coming appearance, in His natural human mortal form. Clearly these can be compared to be like a symbolic ox pictogram. These should be very interesting to you.  They should also help you to see how they were fulfilled when we confirm Jesus in the New Testament to be God’s servant:

Mat 12:17  This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet:

Mat 12:18  “BEHOLD, MY SERVANT WHOM I HAVE CHOSEN; MY BELOVED IN WHOM MY SOUL is WELL-PLEASED; I WILL PUT MY SPIRIT UPON HIM, AND HE SHALL PROCLAIM JUSTICE TO THE GENTILES. (NASB)

Matthew writes plainly about Jesus being the fulfillment of the Old Covenant prophecies that call Jesus, God’s coming “Servant”. Matthew is literally quoting Isaiah 42:1. If we go back to Isaiah and examine the Hebrew word that God selected to describe Jesus, we will find that it is H5650. This Hebrew word was used to define a slave or bondservant. It is used by the LORD to describe this condition of slaves, approximately 800 times. Therefore, we have no doubt what God was describing Jesus to be, when He would come into the world. Let us move to another interesting account of what Jesus claimed to be when present on the earth:

Mar 10:42  Calling them to Himself, Jesus said to them, “You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them.

Mar 10:43  “But it is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant;

Mar 10:44  and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all.

Mar 10:45  “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” (NASB)

Wow, these are amazing words spoken by God in the flesh while physically walking among us (John 1:14). Jesus makes the personal claim to be a servant to every human on the earth. He further claims He did not come into the world to be served, but to serve all of us, by giving His life as our ransom. This was God buying us out of our spiritual slavery to Satan (Rev 5:9) through His shed blood (1 Peter 1:18-19).  In doing this great saving work of a servant, He is also claiming to be the “Greatest” among us ALL, which He was.

Let us now move to another set of verses about Jesus being the fulfillment of the prophesied servant of the LORD:

Php 2:5  Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 

Php 2:6  Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: 

Php 2:7  But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: 

Php 2:8  And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. 

These are more amazing verses of ultimate truth. Verse 5 identifies the key subject of the next 3 verses, “Jesus Christ”. Then in verses 6 and 7, we find very radical claims, that this humble man named Jesus the Christ, was God personally appearing in the form of human flesh. This reveals an Old Covenant hidden divine mystery. These verses should raise important questions in your mind. How could this natural looking human named Jesus, be God who created us? This is where we find the answer in Luke 1:37, “For with God, nothing shall be impossible”. But, why would the eternal Spirit of God who made us, be made manifest to become like us within His physical natural creation?

Remember, Jesus looked like an unspectacular human (Isa 53:2), he walked (John 7:1), and he talked (John 18:1), like humans, but His words were observed to be spoken with noted authority (Mark 1:22). He got hungry (Mat 21:18), He ate (Luke 21:41-43), He slept (Mark 4:38), and He prayed (Mat 26:36) like any normal human. And He died (Luke 23:46), like the natural sinful humans, that were hung with Him on crosses, except His legs were not broken (John 19:32). Yet He had not sinned even once (Heb 4:15)

These are radical truths and questions to think on. But these facts demonstrate a confirming revelation, that God’s ways are not our normal human ways (Isa 55:8), and He is nothing like most humans have imagined growing up in the natural world. We think of God in so many ways that are not truthful and did not exemplify Jesus Christ’s example.

For example, God gets the blame for every major disaster that occurs in the world today. God normally gets questioned about, His existence because it appears that He does nothing to stop all of the great evil that we can see all around us. But all of these thoughts of reasoning are promoted by the devil to get us to not believe in a God as a loving Creator.

We can see very clearly in verse 7, where God took upon Himself an appearance of the form of a strong but lowly “servant”. This is a major confirming reality for Jesus calling Himself the Alef, a picture of the ox.

Notice we can see the true revealed nature of God in verse 8. This verse identifies God’s heart to be filled with immeasurable LOVE! The God who created everything around us, that has infinite knowledge, understanding and wisdom, power and ability, could come to the earth in the form of a slave servant to die for you and I? Wow, what a God we should want to serve. His example that was set before us to become a humble servant, should cause us all to humble ourselves to become like Him. Let us move to a new topic about the God man servant Jesus, learning about oxen “yoked” together.

TAKE MY YOKE

Mat 11:28  Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 

Mat 11:29  Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 

Mat 11:30  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. 

Notice that these words are usually written in Red Ink, because they were spoken directly from the lips of Jesus while here upon the earth. Jesus begins by asking people to come to Him in order to be relieved from the extreme burdens of this world. In order to not be “burden” with the sin and death of this world, we are told to take upon us a new concept about servant oxen. This is really a new concept to many Christians.

There are too many people in the world, that do not know they are in bondage as slave to sin and Satan. They are living their lives, having fun, living without a care in the world, not knowing they are being trapped into an eternal destiny of captivity in a lake of fire. Jesus is asking us, very plainly to leave that evil bondage to take a much better path for an easier servant life path next to Him.

Did you notice in verse 29, Jesus said to take “His” yoke?  Did you know that Jesus claimed to have a personal yoke? Do you recall when we read about this was part of an ox in the introduction? The servant ox that was working in the field, would always have a yoke placed around its neck. This would be where the master would hook the plow for the strong animal(s) to pull forward to make a straight row. Jesus is identifying Himself to be this ox wearing the yoke, believe it or not!

You also might recall in the Part 1 introduction, we learned about the “Alef” and the “Tav” being Jesus’ identifiers, by His own claim. We learned this symbol occurs over 7000 times in the Old Testament. We also learned how this symbol was an ox plowing to a mark. It just so happens this mark was a cross in the ancient Hebrew Paleo alphabet. This was not an accident. We will hopefully get this letter later in the series, the Lord be willing.

Jesus is asking us in Matthew 11, to “join” with Him in doing God’s work for the coming world harvest. We do this by coming alongside Him, by being “joined” with Him in covenant marriage (Isa 54:5). This concept was established in God’s LAW in Genesis 2:24. God states in this verse: “for this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife”. The term “cleave” literally means to be joined together, like with glue.

A farming “yoke” joined a pair of animals together. In Biblical days, an older mature beast was hooked up with a younger new worker, in order to train them into service to learn how the work would be done. The more mature animal would show the younger new animal how each of the farming tasks were performed. This is exactly the normal Christian life, or at least it should be.

Jesus our mature brother, gives us His yoke and we come alongside Him, to learn what He has for us to do as a fellow laborer. Because He is God, our work is not as hard as we think, or at least it should not be. If we try to work in the flesh, we will be cumbered with a lot of stress, but if we work in the Spirit of Christ, we will find that this is where He claimed “His burden would be light, and His yoke is easy”. It is only when we do it our way, that we will struggle, stumble and can even fail.

CONCLUSION

Can you see it? This is pretty amazing and potentially new information for some. But all of this was found in the Bible. The Alef first letter of the ancient Hebrew alphabet is a picture of a bull or an ox. This animal is useful as a servant in a field. This letter represented Jesus the ultimate “Greatest Servant”, that died for all of our sins!

We are told to become a yoked servant to Jesus. This yoke provides us eternal security, as long as, we stay yoked with Him. Because God loves you so much, He will give you the “freewill” right to become detached if you choose to. This usually happens when Satan tries to place some enticing trap to distract you off of the yoked path being with, and in Jesus. This is not necessarily one “sinful” act, but it can begin that way. It would also be an opportunity to become rich or famous in the world. Whatever it is, it is your choice to who, you will join yourself to. Either direction you take, you will be joined to, or yoked with either Satan or Jesus, there are no third options available.

Thank you for reading and studying the Bible with us. We are blessed to be a blessing to everyone that will receive the Word of God. God is so very awesome, loving and kind. If you do not know Him today, it is past time to take off Satan’s yoke and for you to offer yourself as the servant of the “Most High”. Praise be to the LORD in advance, for everyone that accepts Him today. Please click on the link “Are You Saved?” to help you get started, and then leave a comment to tell Satan and his world you have renounced and left his ways, for the way of Christ.

God Bless you until next time, the LORD be willing.

Intro Alef Beyt-1 2 Gimel Dalet Hey Vav Zayin Chet Tet Yod Kaf Lamed Mem 1 2 Nun Samekh Ayin Pey Tsade Qof Resh Shin Tav Chart (Series updated as LORD directs and permits)

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