THE MIKVEH
The Mikveh, or immersion is the obedience ritual one does to honor our LORD and is between that person and God. When the church separated from the Hebrew way of life, it also lost track of the meaning and significance of baptism. Christian baptism has evolved into several different types of rituals with a broad range of meaning and significance to various sects of Christianity. It has become a message of salvation, of resurrection, to sprinkle, walk, kneel or dunk.
The Mikveh or immersion changed to the Christian name of Baptism. John the Baptist was really Yochanan the Immerser. In the past, Christian missionaries forced Jewish believers in Yeshua to undergo baptism to become members of their respective churches. Those baptisms required Jews to break from their Jewish roots and their community. Once a Jewish person was baptized as Lutheran or Catholic or Methodist or Baptist, he or she was no longer considered Jewish or able to practice and keep the Torah. Some unscrupulous missionaries were known to pay Jews to undergo baptism.
Yeshua walked into the waters, and He became the Living Water. A Mikveh is a change of status - a change of our lives into the direction of Yeshua. In Jewish practice, immersion into a pool of water (called a mikvah) indicates such a change in status. For example, a ceremonially unclean person immerses to change from a state of ritual impurity to one of purity.The Mikveh has many parts: It instructs the person to place himself or herself in a radically different physical environment--in water rather than air. This leaves the person submerged in a suspended way without breathing--substituting the usual forward moving nature and stride that is his or her waking movements with a weightlessness, a detachment from the previous environment. Individuality, personal interests, and most important our ego--all are submerged into the Living Waters. Ritual immersion is the total submersion of the entire body in a pool of water. The water can not be stagnant and must be running in and out. Traditionally, the mikveh was used by both men and women to regain ritual purity after various events, according to regulations laid down in the Torah and in classical rabbinical literature.
The Mikveh gives us a status to teshuva, or to return. What are we returning to? We are returning to that which we were never meant to leave, the Living Torah.
Hosea 14:1 ‘Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, For you have stumbled because of your iniquity.’
Zechariah 1:3 ‘Therefore say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Return to Me,” declares the Lord of hosts, “that I may return to you,” says the Lord of hosts.’
Nehemiah 1:9 ‘But if you return to Me and keep My commandments and do them, though those of you who have been scattered were in the most remote part of the heavens, I will gather them from there and will bring them to the place where I have chosen to cause My name to dwell.’
Job 22:23 ‘If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored; If you remove unrighteousness far from your tent,’
Jeremiah 24:7 ‘I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart.’
Lamentations 3:40 ‘Let us examine and probe our ways, and let us return to the Lord.’
Hosea 6:1 ’Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us;He has wounded us, but He will bandage us.'
Today, we Mikveh to immerse into cleanliness, for a status change, and to immerse out lives into obedience with Yeshua.
