Now they saw the tallit as the presence of God. Later on in the second session I'm going to talk about some steps in a Hebrew wedding. We visited that last year a little bit too, but it was only to about 30 people and we have to - to be ministers of the kingdom of God we have to understand tassels and the fact that we're a bride, and what that meant Hebraically. So we're going to have to revisit those things and I want us to revisit them, like it will change our lives forever. So tallit was the presence of God. They would use this for all kinds of things. Primarily they would wear it around them like this and then they would take the tassels and they would wrap their hands in the tassels, so they would take the tassels on the end of the garments and they would wrap their hands in it. They saw the tallit as the presence of God. One of the main uses of the tallit in that culture was at the fifth step of a wedding was called the [chuppah 00.05.14], the chuppah. What would do, they had two chuppahs and we're going to talk about this in the next session.
The second chuppah was actually this and they would take this and they'd make a canopy over the marriage bed. They would take four stakes, they would plant the stakes in the ground. They would secure the stakes around the marriage bed and they would take the tassels and wrap the tassels around the stakes so that this thing made a huge canopy over the marriage bed, so that when the husband and the wife consummated their marriage for the first time they did so underneath the presence of God, okay. So they would do this, so they saw this as the presence of God and where they got that from was in Exodus, when it describes the veil that separated the holy place from the holy of holies. It's a big one of these, so what they did was they made a microcosm of one of those big veils and they said we're going to wear it all the time, because that is wearing the presence of God.
You see this all the time in Hebrew writings. You see Paul saying things like put on the garment of praise, put on Christ, put off the old man, put on the presence of God. They would do this sort of stuff and so there was all this really cool imagery with the prayer shawl. I'm going to get a little higher so maybe you can see this, because this is small but if you could see that, there's five knots in that tassel so there's one, two, three, four, five. There's five knots in that tassel, one for each Book of the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. So effectively what they were commanded to do is they were commanded to tie the word of God to the presence of God that they were wearing. Now this is so important, because how many of you realise that we can wear the presence of God in all kinds of different ways? So what it was doing was it was putting boundaries around how you wear and present God; that you can only present the presence of God in a way that He establishes okay?
Otherwise you'll present God in your own way which perverts everything. I mean come on, this is not just about the Jews. This is about me and about you and our tendency to even take God and make it about us. I mean come on, alright, so there was five knots, one for each Book of the Torah. There were four spaces between each knot and those four spaces stood for the four letters in the holy name [Yahweh, 00.07.41] yud, he, vav, he. So there was the word of God and there was the name of God attached to you, so you would wrap the word of God and you would wrap the name of God around your hands and you would wear it. Also to tie a tassel properly took 613 loops. There are exactly 613 loops - there's exactly 613 commands in the Torah, so you had the word of God, you had the name of God, you had the ways of God. Also when you tied the tassel properly it came off at the end with eight strands; eight is the number of grace. It's the number of new beginnings. If any man be in Christ he's a new creature; the old is gone, the new is come.