Category: A Drash to Start the Day

Should We Pray for America?

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Before I start, let me inform those of you who may not know, I served as a First Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, 3 1/2 years active service and a year in the reserves, and because I served this country I have the right, as do all Americans, to talk about what is wrong with it.

And there is a lot wrong with it.

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We have kicked God out of our courtrooms and schools, (almost) made it a crime to pray in public, gone out of our way to prevent Godly worship because it offends those who reject and hate God, and our youth are not only ill-prepared for adulthood, but they are being taught anarchy and disrespect for authority by the very examples of authority within our culture -their teachers, professors, and political leaders.

Not to mention that in the very heart of our democracy we have elected officials who are against democracy, against Israel, and against the system of government that made this country the greatest example of freedom in the world.

Notice I said “made” not “makes”: we used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but today we are the land of the frightened and the home of the cowardly.

So should we pray for America?

I am sure most every person who professes to be a worshipper of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will say, “Yes, of course, we should!” because prayer is what we do when we need God to intervene.  But have you considered this: does God want to intervene? Maybe, just maybe, this is all part of God’s plan.

We read in the Tanakh about the Acharit HaYamim, the End Days, and in the book of Revelation, we are given the most detailed account of what to expect. Of course, there have been doomsday warners since the first report of doomsday, but I can’t help to think that we are really close this time.

Logically, since the End Days are still to come, every day brings us closer, but today there is so much distress, fear, and anxiety in the world that it seems ready to explode.

So, nu? Should we pray for God to intervene and save America? I say don’t bother because this is all part of what God has planned for us. He told us about it, he’s making it happen, and to pray for him to stop and change his mind is almost like refusing to cooperate.

Yes, I know Moses intervened for the Israelites, more than once, to ask God to change his mind about destroying the people, but this is different. They were a newly freed people who did not know their God; we have had thousands of years of God showing us who he is and what he wants us to do, so we don’t have that excuse.

The very last request being made of God in the Bible, which we find at the very end of the book of Revelation, is for Yeshua to come. I think just about everyone looks forward to that, but I also think too many ignore what must happen before he comes. That part no one wants to deal with, but it is here, now, and we have to deal with it.

I feel such sorrow for those who do not know the LORD, God, or Yeshua. My own people, the Jewish people, God’s chosen, have not really rejected Yeshua as much as they have been conditioned to reject anything about him. They have been taught to reject him, and as such, they don’t really reject him from knowledge but from training and conditioning.

But, to God and Yeshua, rejection is rejection, no matter what the reason, so I pray for my own people and my family, loved ones, and friends who do not know who Yeshua really is to be made aware of him before the shoe drops. That is why I have written the books I have written- so that people can make an informed decision about where they want to spend eternity.

The reason we are here, the reason we are given this time on earth, is to decide where we will spend eternity; and the time left to decide is running out.

So, if you want to pray for America, as far as I am concerned, don’t waste your time, or God’s, praying for peace or for relief from disease because we are past that point. However, you can pray for the repentance of the people. Ask God to spread a spirit of repentance, so that the people will realize what they have done, how they have rejected and disrespected God and his instructions to us, and for them to do T’shuvah, to turn from their sins.

Peace will not come to an unrepentant people, so if you want to pray, pray for America to repent, for that is the only way God will forgive us.

Learn the lesson from the book of Jonah: God relented of his destruction of Assyria only after they repented, truly repented, of their sins. America has become a sinful and Godless society, and until we change that we will not be spared the destruction that God will send to all who reject and deny him.

Personally, I don’t think America is going to get out of this one unscathed: God is taking aim, the safety is off and his finger is on the trigger. My friends, I really think the hammer is about to drop!

Thank you for being here, and sorry about the bad news I had to spread today. No one likes to talk about destruction, but if we don’t then aren’t we ignoring God’s warning?

Until next time, (God willing we are all still here)…L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

 

Shavuot Message 2020

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Today is Shavuot, the second of the three pilgrimage festivals that God decreed we should celebrate. The instructions regarding this Holy Day can be found in Leviticus 23:15-21.

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There is a difference, in my opinion, between a Holy Day and a holiday; the former is decreed by God, and the latter is man-made. Shavuot (Hebrew meaning “weeks”) is a Holy Day, but the way Shavuot is celebrated today (and has been since around the Third Century C.E.) is really a holiday.

According to the information in “The Jewish Book of Why” (which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn about the Jewish lifestyle and Judaism in general), in the Talmud, Rabbi Eleazar said that we should celebrate this day as the giving of the Torah to Israel (Pesachim 68b), and from then on Shavuot was no longer a divinely decreed harvest festival but became a man-made holiday.  The justification for this change was that the country no longer was exclusively an agrarian economy and bringing the first fruit of the harvest to the temple was no longer something being done, so to keep the day alive in Jewish life, they made it into a celebration of the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai.

You might ask how anyone who studies the Bible, especially Torah-observant Jews, would ever accept that redefinition of what God said we should do. It doesn’t even come close to what the Bible says, from the timeline in Exodus, because we are told in Exodus 19 that it was the first day of the third month when the Israelites arrived at the Sinai Desert.  Shavuot is 50 days after the first Shabbat after the Seder, and since that first Seder was while still in Egypt, there is no way that Shavuot could have been at the time they arrived at Sinai, which was nearly 90 days later.

But, the Rabbis won out and since that time, Jews have celebrated Shavuot as the giving of the law, and I believe most Jews today don’t even know that they are celebrating incorrectly.

This day is also known as Pentecost, which almost everyone believes to be a Christian holiday, even though the word Pentecost means 50 days. It is clearly a Jewish celebration, based on the counting of the Omer after Passover. In the Book of Acts, we are told there were thousands of Jews in Jerusalem, from all over the world, when the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) was given to them. The reason there were thousands of Jews in Jerusalem is that it was a pilgrimage Holy Day! Pentecost is a Jewish Holy Day that was renamed and re-branded to become a Christian holiday.

Seems that the Rabbis and the Church leaders had something in common- they thought they could remake what God said to do to be what they want it to be.

But, there is some good that comes from this. I think that the physical slavery to sin, which the Torah can free us from, and the spiritual freedom from sin, which the giving of the Ruach can lead us from, is a good thing to teach at this time of the year. The Torah teaches us how to live a life free from sin (as Shaul tells us in Romans) by defining sin, and the Ruach helps us to know what is right and lead us to righteousness. The law defines sin, and the Ruach leads our actions by giving us divine guidance to keep us from sinning.

Of course, the weak link in this whole process is that humans are self-serving and sinful by nature, but with knowing what the law says and listening to the Ruach, we can become greater than what we are.

I don’t like it when man-made creations overrule what God has decreed, but in the case of Shavuot being turned from a harvest festival to the celebration of the giving of the Torah, and how relating that with Pentecost can be used to bridge the gap between Jewish and Christian understanding of God and his Holy Spirit, well… I am OK with it.

Besides, with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, we can’t celebrate Shavuot as God decreed, just the same way we can’t celebrate Passover as he decreed, either. Yet, we DO celebrate Passover in our homes to keep the commandment as best as we can. I would think that to celebrate Shavuot in a different manner in order to fulfill the commandment as best as we can, just might be acceptable to God.

If you go to Shul on this day, keep the tradition of bringing a loaf of bread with you. This is one of those rare times when the bread being offered is baked with leavening, and enjoy this day because it is a joyful day.

We are not celebrating it exactly as God decreed, but we are celebrating the instructions God gave and are gratefully worshiping God, thankful and obedient to Torah as best fits the world today. Personally, I don’t think God will have a problem with that.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages with others, and check out my books; if you like what you read in these messages you will like my books, as well. And remember that I always welcome your comments.

Until next time, Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom!

How to Interpret the Bible Correctly

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Let me start off by saying I am not professing to be an expert on Biblical exegesis (although I do know some of the fancy words), and that I am not saying this is the absolute and only correct method of Bible interpretation, but I have seen and corrected many wrong interpretations and know that what I am going to talk about is valid and necessary.

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Something happened just recently which made me think it might be a good idea to (at least) give a small lesson on how to properly interpret what we read in the Bible.

Two methods I always incorporate when interpreting the Bible are PaRDeS and Hermeneutics. PaRDeS is a Jewish form of exegesis and is an acronym for the following:

P=P’shat, the literal meaning of the written word (i.e., what you read is what it means);

R=Remes, the deeper, more spiritual meaning (as Yeshua demonstrated in his Sermon on the Mount);

D= Drash, a story or lesson which has a spiritual meaning (such as the parables Yeshua told); and

S =Sud, a mystical meaning that no one can fully comprehend.

That is one method I use, and the other is Hermeneutics, which is defined as:

The purpose of Hermeneutics is to bridge the gap between our minds and the minds of the Biblical writers through a thorough knowledge of the original languages, ancient history and the comparison of Scripture with Scripture.

What that means, in simple language, is that we must have a thorough knowledge of the entire Bible, that is, Genesis through Revelation,  and that whatever is written in any part of the Bible should mean the same in any other part of the Bible.

Too often we read or hear someone who has taken a number of passages from the Bible and put them together to form an idea or interpretation. This is not wrong, per se’, unless the passages are taken out of context and used to create the interpretation someone has formed, instead of forming an interpretation from what is written.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about, which happened the other day:

I was reading an article someone posted about the use of the Hebrew word “Seraph” in the story of the snakes sent to punish the Israelites when they were in the desert (Numbers 21.) The writer wanted us to believe that the bronze statue Moses made wasn’t of a snake but of a seraph, an angelic being. This was confirmed when I looked in the Torah to see what word was used in the original Hebrew and saw that it was, indeed, the word seraph, which is what God told Moses to make an image of. The people asked Moses to pray for the removal of snakes (Hebrew word Nachush) and God told Moses to make an image of a seraph.

So, it looks like the writer was correct! But when we use hermeneutics to confirm the interpretation, we find out that this isn’t the case.

I looked at the different uses of the word seraph, to see if it was used anywhere else to represent a serpent, and did not find anything. I then looked through the Bible for other places where nachush was used and found another use in 2 Kings 18. 

In 2 Kings 18, we read how the serpent Moses made in the desert was being worshiped by the people, and they called it Nehushtan, which is a form of the Hebrew word for snake. This confirms that the bronze statue was not a celestial being but a snake, otherwise the people would not have named it “Snake.”

There have been many, MANY times I have corrected people’s attempts to make the Bible say what they wanted it to say, such as how the Kosher laws were removed, or how the Torah was done away with, or how the Jews have been replaced by Gentile Believers. All of these traditional Christian teachings are based on misinterpretation and taking passages out of context, stringing them together and making what appears to be a proper interpretation, but it is really nothing more than a lie.

We must take whatever God says and interpret it in relation to everything else God says, and if there seems to be a contradiction, then one or both interpretations are wrong. God does NOT contradict himself; likewise, what Yeshua taught he told us was only what God told him to say, and this is evident throughout the Gospels (especially in John), so any teachings that indicate Yeshua said something in the Old Covenant isn’t valid anymore is not hermeneutically valid.

What we read in the Epistles are not the words of God but the lessons that the Talmudim (disciples/students) of Yeshua were teaching to the Jewish and (mostly) Gentile Believers, more so to Gentiles who did not understand the instructions the Jews already knew. The letters from Paul to the congregations he started were not meant to change anything, but to teach these Gentile Believers how to live according to God’s instructions, a little bit at a time.

Of course, the Epistles are a totally different lesson, but it is important to know how they fit into today’s lesson because of all the misinterpretations within the Bible that I have seen over more than two decades, the majority of them come from the letters Paul wrote.

God has made his instructions to all the world, which we find in the Torah, pretty simple to understand, and what we can’t fathom we can study and try to understand; or, what I consider to be the better path, we can just accept that God knows best and follow the way of life that God has laid out for us.

Always use these two methods to objectively study the Bible, and when I say objectively, I mean to not just accept what someone tells you; rather, listen and then verify everything, especially before you repeat it to others.

Just like with Hebrew National hotdogs, teachers of God’s word are held to a higher standard, so make sure what you teach is biblically correct.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, check out my website, and share these messages with everyone you know (after verifying, of course, what I say is accurate and biblically correct.) And if you have a comment or correction, please do not hesitate to let me know: I welcome them all.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Revelation About Revelation?

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If you have been following my ministry, you know that I rarely talk about anything dealing with Eschatology, which in Hebrew we call the Acharit HaYamim (End Days.) Different narratives of this event are found throughout the writings of the Prophets in the Tanakh, and in the great detail in the Book of Revelation.

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But today I thought I might go a little far afield for me and discuss something that I was thinking about. I am not saying this is a definitive understanding or a new “revelation” regarding Revelation, but I think it is interesting.

We read about the 7 seals that are broken and the 7 bowls of God’s wrath which are released upon the earth and its inhabitants.  There is a pattern I noticed that we could use to ascertain if these seals and bowls are being put into practice at this time.

By the way, you don’t have to agree and can certainly disagree with whatever I am saying; I am no expert on this topic, by any stretch of the imagination. I welcome any comments or corrections from those who have made a deeper study of this topic.

The order of events with the seals is that there is an authority established throughout the world, perhaps meaning the one-world government? Next, there will be wars and the economy will suffer. This is followed by plagues and famine, and the 5th seal states those who have been martyred ask for justice, which they are told is coming soon. This might mean that the previous events will create an environment where the government declares martial rule, for the “protection of the people”, but in fact establishes a totalitarian state where people will be placed under arrest and incarcerated without due process, being denied justice by the government. Sounds reasonable, right?

The 6th seal results in ecological disasters and with the opening of the 7th seal, nearly 2/3 of the earth, plants, animals, and people are totally destroyed.

I don’t know about you, but that does not sound like fun to me. Not at all.

The bowls of wrath seem to be in a similar order, but they concentrate more on the ecology. First, there is disease released upon the people, which is followed by the oceans becoming polluted.  The 3rd bowl pollutes the freshwater sources, and this is interesting because the freshwater sources feed the oceans, not the other way around, yet in God’s plan it will be the oceans that are first affected.

The 4th bowl will burn people, and I think that might be caused by the loss of the Ozone layer around the earth, which would allow the sun’s damaging rays to penetrate our atmosphere. After these disasters, we read how the 5th bowl will affect the non-Believers worse, and with the 6th bowl the Middle East rivers, especially the Euphrates, will dry up completely.

Finally, there is a total ecological disaster, with the earth and everything in it being nearly totally destroyed.

In Revelation these seals and bowls appear to be released upon the earth in order, starting with the seals and ending with the bowls, with other events occurring between them. I am not sure, though, if the bowls and seals are different, or just another way of announcing within the vision what is to come. We have to remember that this is a vision, which means it isn’t literal all the time and also may not be in any chronological order.

I think the main thing to understand is that there will be a single authority established in the world, which should be the signal that these events will begin. These events will affect people, animals, and the environment. We will see our natural resources disappearing or becoming unusable, which will lead to disease, leading to unrest, leading to conflict for resources (wars), leading to government take-over, leading to rebellion, leading to destruction, death, and disorder on a worldwide scale. Eventually, given the destructive weaponry that nearly every country has available to them, the nearly total destruction of the earth and everything in it will be accomplished.

We read that God instructs the angels to release these terrible events upon the earth, but (again) this is a vision, and the angels may represent us! God promised Noah he would never again destroy the earth, but he never said he wouldn’t allow mankind to do it.

God allows sin to continue not because he is weak or unwilling to punish, but because he is giving us time to repent. Once we reach the limit of his allowance, he will act! We have seen this happen to the tribes that were outside Israel (Gad, Rueben, and Manasseh), later to Israel (the Northern kingdom), then to Judah (the Southern kingdom), to the enemies of God’s chosen people living in the Middle East (Assyrians, Babylonians, Philistines, etc.), to Spain after the Inquisition, and most recently to the Nazi’s. There are plenty of reasons to expect this will happen to all the nations of the earth, as well, once God decides to drop the hammer.

And given the rise in anti-Semitism that we are seeing throughout Europe lately, the red flags should be waving and the bells should be ringing.

I don’t know if what I am sharing with you today is anything new; most likely, my revelation about Revelation is no real revelation to anyone.  But I believe the logic behind the order of how things will be destroyed may help us to realize what is happening because once the fecal matter hits the air circulation unit, it will be very hard to stand back, observe, and reconcile what it all might mean because the world will be a total mishigas.

Thank you for being here. Please, subscribe to my YouTube channel and my website so that you can be notified when I post; and also share these messages with others.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Everyone Gets Rained On

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During the Sermon on the Mount, Yeshua tells the people that they should love their enemies and pray for them because that way they will become children of their father in heaven.

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He then tells them that God makes the sun to shine on good and bad people alike, as well as makes the rain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous, alike.

I have always thought this passage meant that God is such a loving God that even those who reject him and ignore his instructions will be able to receive goodness from him. The sunshine and the rains have always represented life to me, in as much as they both are necessary for growth, so when Yeshua said that God provides sun and rain even to the unrighteous, I felt that this was a good thing.

Recently, though, I have thought differently about this. I read Jeremiah 49 and I saw a totally different meaning to what Yeshua said.

In this chapter of Jeremiah, he is prophesying against the different nations surrounding Israel, and in his prophecy against Edom, he says this in Jeremiah 49:12 (CJB):

For this is what Adonai says: “Those who do not deserve to drink from this cup will have to drink it, anyway, so should you go unpunished? No, you will not go unpunished; you will certainly drink it.”

When I read that, even though it is in a distinctly different part of the Bible and is not the same subject matter as the Sermon on the Mount, I realized that what Yeshua said might be understood in a totally different light.

How many times have we heard people ask “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Now, after this revelation (if you will) of mine, I think one answer might be that it’s because they are “collateral damage.”

God loves all people, even the ones who hate him, and even though he knows every hair on every person’s head (which, finally, I will be able to get cut this evening), when he judges a nation, it is the entire nation. How many times has he told us, through the Prophets, that Israel is his son? Israel is seen by God as a unique and singular entity, meaning that God sees all the people that live in Israel as one. And how many times do we hear the Prophets confess the guilt of the people? Not for an individual or a select few but it is always the “sins of our fathers” or “the sins of your people” that they reference when praying to God for forgiveness. And, again, not for the forgiveness of a person or persons, but of the nation.

I came to realize that when God gives sun and rain in abundance at the right times, which is his blessing to the righteous, the unrighteous will be collateral beneficiaries. But, too much sunshine with too little rain, or too much rain without enough sunny days and you don’t have a blessing, you have a curse. And when God sends his curses on the unrighteous, the righteous will be collateral damage.

In other words, we are sometimes guilty by association.  And perhaps that is why when God first gave us his instructions for how to live, he was very clear that those who were not clean were to be separated from the rest of the community and placed outside the camp. For example, in Numbers 16 before the ground swallowed up Dathan and Abiram, Moses told the people close by to separate themselves and get away from them, or they too would be swallowed up.

Too often things happen that we cannot explain, and when we look to God for answers, too often there are none to have. God is so far above us, and he doesn’t really care about our existence on Earth- he is focused on eternity. He is an eternal being, and although he can understand the finite, we, as finite beings, cannot understand the infinite. God has given us this life for one purpose, and one purpose only, which is to choose where we will spend eternity.

If a righteous person is taken from this life along with unrighteous people, then as sad as that may seem to us, it isn’t that bad for the righteous person taken because he or she is now in the eternal presence of the Lord. C’mon, really? What’s the downside of that? This existence is merely a wisp, a mist, and because we have only the amount of time God gives us, and we don’t know how long that is, it is best to make sure we are right with the Lord, first, then try to separate ourselves from evil and unrighteousness as much as possible.

I am not saying to cut off all relationships with non-Believers and run to the mountaintops, living as a hermit, but just to always try to be right with the Lord, and try to associate with the more righteous people as much as you can. It is a fallen and cursed world, and there are more evil and unrighteous people in it then righteous people, so you can never be fully separated from them. But when you know you are living as righteous a life as you can, then even if you end up as collateral damage, it won’t be so bad for you.

When you see good people suffer, it might be because they are collateral damage from someone close to them or something they were associated with. It doesn’t, by itself, means they were guilty of anything. Just like with Job, or the man born blind in John 9:3, whose blindness was not the result of anyone’s sin but so that God’s power and goodness could be made known, we can’t know why bad things happen to good people, nor should we feel it is unfair when bad people receive blessings because the one thing we can be sure of is that in the end, the good are rewarded and the bad receive their punishment.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe and share these messages with everyone you know.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Just for the Lost Sheep of Israel

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In the Gospel of Matthew, we read in Chapter 15, verses 21-28 about a Canaanite woman who asked Yeshua to heal her daughter. This is what he replied to her (CJB):

He said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Isra’el.” But she came, fell at his feet and said, “Sir, help me!” He answered, “It is not right to take the children’s food and toss it to their pet dogs.” She said, “That is true, sir, but even the dogs eat the leftovers that fall from their master’s table.” Then Yeshua answered her, “Lady, you are a person of great trust. Let your desire be granted.” And her daughter was healed at that very moment.

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More than any other misunderstanding within Christianity is the teaching that Jesus is their Savior. Most every Christian I have ever met has been taught that Jews rejected Jesus and so they can’t be saved; Jesus is now only a Christian savior, and to be saved you must be a Christian.

I believe the wrongful teachings and doctrines of Christianity were developed after the original Disciples and many of the Jews who accepted Yeshua when he was still teaching had all died. The Jewish population of Believers was far outpaced by the Gentile converts to this (now) new religion calling itself Christianity. And, by the time Constantine got his fingers in the pie, what was supposed to be a group of people looking for salvation through the sacrifice of the Messiah, Yeshua, had turned into a new religion that worshiped Jesus Christ, who died for their sins.

He didn’t die for the sins of Jews, but for the sins of Christians.

I have seen many postings and had discussions with Christians who have held to the belief that because the Jews rejected Jesus, God has rejected the Jews; this is called Replacement Theology. I have also heard people say that the only laws that apply to Gentiles are the 10 Commandments, and the rest of the Torah instructions are just for Jews.

The truth is there are many, MANY traditional Christian teachings that are totally created by people, and not in accordance with anything that God said.

So, where is all this leading to? It’s to remind the Gentiles who accept Yeshua as their savior that he is not a Savior for the Gentiles: he is the Messiah of and for the Jews. It wasn’t until AFTER Yeshua did what he was supposed to do as the Messiah, providing the pathway to salvation for the Jewish people, that the Gentiles were also allowed to enter.

I don’t mean this to sound as derogatory or insulting, but the fact is that Gentiles who accept Yeshua/Jesus as their savior are getting the scraps that fell off our Jewish table. You are allowed to walk the path of salvation that was created for the Jewish people and to enter salvation through the doorway made for the Jewish people. There has NEVER been a separate path or door for Gentiles.

As such, when you are walking the pathway made for Jews, you are expected to walk the same way the Jews walk.

God has no religion, he only has his instructions for the way we are to worship him and the way we are to treat each other. There is not one passage in the New Covenant that is a direct instruction from God; in fact, the only place that God says anything in the New Covenant is in the Gospels, right after Yeshua has the Ruach (Spirit) fall on him and at the transformation on the mountain.

The letters from Shaul (Paul) to the Gentile congregations he started are not divine instructions or even against the existing instructions in the Torah- they are Shaul’s teaching the Gentiles, who had no idea how to live as God wants them to, in a way that the Gentiles could accept. The letter to the new believers written by the Elders (Acts 15) was never meant to be interpreted as the only things new Believers (later all Christians) had to do. It was meant to be understood as these things must be done immediately, and the rest of the Torah they will learn eventually (Acts 15:21), clearly showing that the Elders expected the Gentiles who were following Yeshua to adopt the Torah.

I am glad that God allowed the Gentiles, meaning everyone who is not Jewish by birth, to be saved. It was always his plan, which is why he told Abraham that his descendants will be a blessing to the whole world and told Moses that the Jewish people would be his (God’s) nation of priests.  It was always meant for the Gentiles to be given the opportunity to receive forgiveness of sins.

It was never meant that the Gentiles would create their own religion with different holidays, a different Sabbath day, and different doctrines. And God never wanted them to bow down and pray to statues or bury their dead under the Sanctuary floor, or teach each other that God’s instructions are not for them.

Shaul knew this and tried to warn the early congregations about this in Romans 11:17-18 where he says:

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you — a wild olive — were grafted in among them and have become equal sharers in the rich root of the olive tree, then don’t boast as if you were better than the branches! However, if you do boast, remember that you are not supporting the root, the root is supporting you.

The fact is that Yeshua was sent only to, and only for, the Jewish people in order that God’s promises regarding the Messiah could be completed in Yeshua. Yeshua, himself, says this to the Canaanite woman. In other words, the Salvation Party was only for Jews, hosted by God, and paid for by a Jewish Messiah. Salvation has always been a Jewish event; when salvation was made possible for the Gentiles that was simply the after-party.

Anyone who accepts Yeshua as their Messiah and asks forgiveness for their sins through his sacrificial death will be saved, and once saved we are all in the body of Messiah, which means we are to try to live as he lived. And he lived according to God’s instructions in the Torah, where God told us how to worship him, which celebrations to observe, what to eat, how to treat each other, as well as many other instructions on how to live.

It comes down to this: you have to choose whether you will listen to what men say, or to what God says.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages with everyone you know, and check out my books. If you like what you hear in these messages, you will like my books, as well.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Is Tolerating the Same as Condoning?

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When it comes to condoning something or tolerating it, we often use these terms interchangeably, but at the root of their meaning, they are different.

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Let’s see how the Internet dictionary defines them:

Condone: accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue.

Tolerate: allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference. 
They seem to be the same, don’t they? In both cases, we do not like what is being done, but the difference is that what we condone, we accept, but what we tolerate we don’t accept, but we do not interfere with it.
For example, I do not condone the traditional “church” teachings that the Torah is just for Jews and Christians only have to obey the Ten Commandments. I tolerate it because I cannot change 2000 years of Christian doctrine, but I do not condone, meaning I do not accept, that it is correct and I demonstrate that by arguing against the idea whenever I get the chance.
Now, let’s take today’s lesson to the next level.
I often see many arguments (which really should be discussions) between Believers about topics that are hot potatoes, such as the pronunciation of God’s Holy Name (called the Tetragrammaton), which calendar is correct, whether the Earth is flat or round, and the whole idea of the Trinity. And, not to be forgotten, the “Once Saved, Always Saved” teaching.
And let’s not forget what I already mentioned, the idea that the Mosaic Law is just for Jews.
Today, I am not going to discuss any of these topics, and if you comment about them I will not post or answer your comments because this message is not about these topics; it is about how we should react (or better yet, act) when we are in one of these discussions. I will tell you right now, absolutely, that you will never change anyone’s mind about any of these topics. Why do I say that? History. I have never seen, in many years of these discussions, anyone who said, “Gee! Now that you mention it, I think you are right!”
Maybe there are some rare instances where this happens, and I put that down to the old saying, “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then” meaning that there are always exceptions.
As for me, I do not design my life around the exceptions – I concentrate on the 90%, not the 10%, and for that reason, I have pretty much stopped arguing these topics.
I am tolerating them, but I do not condone them; tolerating them means I won’t interfere in these discussions because the more people argue something that can never be answered, the more division within the body of the Messiah it causes. I will not be a part of that, so I leave those discussions alone.
I recommend you do the same because history shows that arguing your side of any topic with others who refuse to listen will not build but will tear down, and too often when people pridefully try to convince someone else that they are wrong, the discussion becomes an argument which quickly devolves into one or both attacking the other on a personal level.
This sort of activity doesn’t serve God, but it does do wonders for the devil. He loves to see Believers fight because, as the Messiah himself said, a house divided against itself cannot stand (Matthew 12:22.)
If you really know something to be true, but someone else disagrees with you, you owe it to them to show them the truth. Once, maybe even twice, you can argue, compassionately, respectfully, and intelligently for your side. However, if you have made two or three good points, and that person is just absolutely set that they are right and you are wrong, then LET IT GO!  Wake up! You’re throwing pearls before swine, and you need to follow Yeshua’s advice, which is to stop wasting your time (Matthew 10:14; Luke 9:5).

If you find yourself arguing with someone and you have attempted three times to show them the truth, as you know it, and you find their argument is not making any sense to you, then stop. Tell them you will have to agree to disagree, and if they also stop, then you have both done well. Neither one of you condone the other’s beliefs, but you are willing, for the sake of not “dividing the house”, to tolerate each other.

If either one of you cannot stop trying to convince the other, then it isn’t about the truth anymore, it is simply pridefulness. When someone cannot tolerate someone else disagreeing with them, they are not working for God’s kingdom by continuing to argue; what they have done is to switch masters and they are now working for Satan’s kingdom. When someone is causing division and strife within the body of Believers, they are not serving God or Messiah.
Listen to yourself when you are in a discussion with someone, and once you have failed to convince them three times, be willing to stop. If you continue to argue, you have crossed the line from teaching to pridefulness and you are causing division within the house of God.
Look, I know how hard it is to allow someone to continue to believe that which you know is wrong, but everyone has a right to decide for themselves what they will believe. God gave them that right, and so who are you to abrogate it? You are not condoning (meaning accepting as correct) sin or wrongful teaching when you tolerate someone else’s opinion. And, after they prove that they will not change their mind, you need to let them alone and pray that one day God will open their heart to hear the truth. In the meantime, keep yourself from falling into sin with them by continuing to argue and cause division.
Here’s today’s lesson in a nutshell: don’t beat your head against a wall because the wall will always win.
Thank you for being here and please subscribe to my website and YouTube channel. Check out my website, and I always welcome your comments.
Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

America Today and Biblical Israel

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I am not a prophet, nor do I pretend to be one.  Nor would I consider myself a futurist, but I am very good with patterns of behavior and this is what I see when I read the books of Kings and Chronicles, the Prophets, and then look at what America has become today.

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A laundry list of the sins committed by Israel (the Northern Kingdom) can be found in 1 Kings 17; in that chapter, we are told that Israel feared other gods, practiced witchcraft and soothsaying, sacrificed their children, and rejected God’s laws.

Despite being warned by the prophets, over and over again, about the results of these sins, they continued to do evil.

In the Southern Kingdom of Judea, Solomon set the stage for Judea to suffer as Israel would by marrying women for political reasons, women who were still practicing the pagan religions of the Semitic tribes surrounding Israel (which was still one kingdom at that time), and in his last days, he even set up standing stones, performed child sacrifice and worshiped other gods with his wives.

After Solomon died and the kingdom was split, the Northern Kingdom (Israel, later called Shomron) continued to worship the Golden Calf and never stepped one foot back to proper worship. Eventually, they were destroyed by the Assyrians, and when the Southern Kingdom (Judea) didn’t learn from Israel’s fate, doing the same as Israel did, they, too, were destroyed, but they were destroyed by the Babylonians.

Now let’s look at America. I am not going to make this a textbook lesson, citing the time and day for the following actions because I am sure you all are very aware of what I am about to point out.

America has long worshiped other gods: gold, silver, sports stars, celebrities, cars, and pretty much anyone who is popular. People spend thousands of dollars to get season tickets, but won’t tithe at their house of worship, if they even go to one.  They spend hours waiting on a line to get into the movie theater to see their Hollywood idol’s newest show, or to wait to get the newest version of the smartphone they love, or concert tickets, but will they spend an hour volunteering with a charity to help the poor or feed the hungry?

As for soothsaying and witchcraft, just look at any newspaper and there will be a section for horoscopes.

We don’t burn babies at the altar of Molech anymore, but we legalized abortions. If you don’t think that getting an abortion is tantamount to child sacrifice, then you haven’t ever seen or read about how they are done, and you certainly have no understanding of God’s hatred of killing innocent children for personal gain, which is why people sacrificed their children to Molech. Today, children are sacrificed because (other than for medical reasons) the mother doesn’t want the child to interfere with her life.

And if you want to talk about rejecting God’s laws, we have kicked him out of our courts. We don’t allow prayer in schools, we don’t accept that it is okay for a child to pray on his own, in private, and we reject the idea that we can worship the way we want to, for fear of “offending” someone else.

The governments at both state and federal levels have endorsed gay marriage, and there are even gay and lesbian churches. Not to mention how many “mainstream” churches and synagogues are supporting these laws so that they are politically correct, even though you would think they should know that by doing so they reject God’s commandments. It is obvious that many of our religious leaders are more concerned with pleasing people instead of pleasing God.

Our politicians are so focused on destroying each other that they are taking the entire country down with them. Remember what the Bible says in 1 Kings 15:30, with reference to the destruction of the family of Jeroboam, the first king of Israel:

This happened because of the sins Jeroboam had committed and had caused Israel to commit, and because he aroused the anger of the LORD, the God of Israel.

Throughout 1 and 2 Kings, we read how every succeeding king of the Northern Kingdom continued to sin, always referring back to the sins of Jeroboam, who caused all Israel to sin. Our leaders are sinning, and really sinning a lot, and because of this the entire country is suffering, and will eventually come to ruin.

We no longer care about doing what we know is morally right but instead, we ignore our sense of righteousness in order to be politically correct. We reject our God so that people who worship a different god aren’t offended. Some of our leaders prostitute themselves to invading foreigners in order to win their approval, just the same way that the prophets accused Israel and Judea of doing with the Philistines, Egyptians, and Babylonians.

Today we are seeing biblical prophecy come to fruition: God’s chosen people are being regathered to Israel from all four corners of the world and Israel is becoming the oasis that God said it would become, again. We also see the world (i.e., the United Nations) coming against Israel, economically and politically. We see the world rejecting God and a new world order coming into existence, a Muslim world order that will soon overtake the indigenous population of many European countries. There will be one world religion, one world economy, and one world ruler, and I can tell you now, it ain’t gonna be a God-fearing person.

America began as Israel did under King David, a God-fearing land whose people worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and set their government up asking for God’s guidance and blessings. But today, America is a land of sinfulness. We kill our children, we worship other gods, gods of money and of popularity, and we have leaders who are more concerned with destroying their political opponents than to work with them to better the lives of their populace.

God gave Israel and Judea more than enough time and warning to get back on track with him before he took action, but once God decided that enough was enough, he dropped the hammer. I believe that America is in the same place Israel and Judea were just before they were destroyed: we have sinned too much for too long to be saved anymore, and now it is just a matter of time before God drops his hammer on us.

I was in the Marine Corps and although I didn’t see any action, I was willing to die to uphold and protect the freedom that America offered to its citizens. But today, well…I just don’t know. I see so little of the “America” I knew when I was a child that I don’t think it is the same country anymore. We want to change history by removing the reminders of it, which can only lead to teaching our children propaganda instead of facts, and we reject what is right for what is popular. America used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but today many of our freedoms have been taken away from us, and why? Because we are afraid. We are afraid of getting sick, we are afraid of offending a people who have proven all they want to do is kill us, and we are afraid of standing up for God. We are no longer a home for the free, and our people are cowards.

The Bible tells us of how the chosen people of God have been judged, and today they are being regathered as we enter the End Days, which means that the judgment coming will now be on the nations, and America is placing itself at the front of that line.

I thank you for being here, and today I will also say I am sorry to bring this bad news to you. If you have never shared anything before, and never intend to, at least please share this message with everyone you know. The destruction is coming, but people can still get themselves right with God before that happens.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Are You Giving Up Now So You Feel Better Later?

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Are you wondering what the title means? Are you asking yourself, “How can I feel better about something that I give up on? Giving up is failing, it is quitting, so how can anyone feel better about doing that?”

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Well, giving up could be okay to do if we were talking about a sport or a very challenging class at school. In my case, I often think of giving up golf, but then I get a par and think, “That wasn’t so hard…I bet I can do that more often.”  Foolish me.

But no, I am not talking about something as menial as a sport or a class, I am talking about life. And this is not about giving up on life, itself- we are not discussing suicide; this is about giving up on relationships in your life.

How many people do you know who are afraid to get close to someone because they have lost loved ones and feel that if they don’t get really close to someone, then when that person dies they won’t feel such a tremendous loss? They rationalize their fear of loss, which turns into a fear of intimacy by telling themselves that this way they won’t have to suffer as they did before when their parent or sibling, friend, or pet died.

They give up intimacy now so that they won’t have to feel bad later.

What they are really doing is ignoring the fact that they are going to feel bad, anyway. They think giving up on closeness now will make them feel better later. But they are wrong, and when they realize that because they stayed emotionally distant then, they don’t have the kind of beautiful memories they could have now, they feel even worse. And to throw salt on their wounds, they can never recover that lost opportunity.

The same thing happens when we don’t want to work on our relationship with God. We take God for granted. We go to services, we do what we think is okay, based on what our religious leaders tell us, and we send cards to friends and family for the holidays. But we never really try to get to know God on an intimate, personal level, which can only be done through reading the Bible. And when we don’t get close to God, we lose out on that wonderful, peaceful feeling he gives us through his Spirit. And we also lose out on the blessings he has for us, which we can only receive through following his instructions. Not what a Rabbi or Priest or Minister says, but what God says, and you know what God wants only when you have an intimate relationship with him.

So many of us think we have the time to get to things later but the truth is we never know when we will be facing God. And just like losing the chance to be close to people now who we are afraid of losing later, we lose all the blessings that God has for us right now when we put off strengthening our relationship with him.

I used to sell Revocable Living Trusts as part of someone’s estate plan, and when people told me that they liked the idea and would call me when they needed to set up their estate, I would reply with this:

“That’s smart. Why spend money for the Trust until you have to. It takes us about 6 weeks to get the Trust set up for you, so (taking out my calendar) let me know when you are going to die and I will set an appointment for us 6 weeks before then.”

That was a very powerful closing line, and I am sure you can see why.

If you have lost loved ones and decided that you will never get that close to anyone again so you will never have to feel that much pain, again, please reconsider. Especially when it comes to God, who (unfortunately) too many people blame for the pain they feel when they lose a loved one. Death is part of life, and we all have to deal with it. What matters is not what we lose when someone dies, but the quality of the time we had with them while they were still here.

You will always have to suffer the loss of a loved one, but what is worse than having someone taken from you is when you reject them while they are still here.

Thank you for being here; please subscribe and share these messages with others to help this ministry grow. I don’t ask for money and I will never tell people what they have to do or think, I only want to make sure that whatever decision they make about their relationship with God is based on what he says and not what some religion tells them.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

 

Where It All Went Wrong

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Do you know anything about construction? I was a Combat Engineer when I was in the Marine Corps, and we built stuff; bridges, buildings, roads, minefields, and the best part was that we also got to blow things up.

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One of the valuable lessons I learned about construction was that when you are making copies of something, such as cutting roof rafters, you always measure and cut succeeding rafters from the first one. The reason for this is that there is always some small change, an eighth of an inch here or a quarter of an inch there, which won’t really affect that one rafter so much. But, when you cut the second rafter, then the third is cut from the second, then the fourth is cut from the third, and so on, by the time you get to the 10th or 12th rafter, you are off by inches and the rafters will not fit the roof.

The same holds true for teaching. If someone teaches a lesson that makes sense which others like, they will copy that lesson exactly. But when somebody decides to tweak it a bit and teaches that, they are no longer cutting their rafter from the original.

God told Moses the Jewish people would be his priests to the world (Exodus 19:6), meaning that they would learn how to do what God said we should do, then teach the world how to do it, exactly the same way they learned it.

But something happened to disrupt that plan, and that something was human intervention.

This is where it started to all go wrong for the Jews: over the years, the leaders of Judaism decided that what God said wasn’t enough, so they enhanced our understanding (I’m being facetious) with their own interpretations of how to obey the instructions in the Torah, and that became the traditional or Oral Law, which we find in the Talmud.

When Yeshua (Jesus) came to earth one of the things he did was teach the spiritual meaning of what God taught the Jewish people in the Torah. Those teachings were to help us understand correctly what God wanted from us, meaning not just obedience to the letter of the law, but a heartfelt desire to do what is right in God’s eyes. Yeshua was helping to bring us back into alignment with the original rafter measurements.

But something happened to disrupt that plan, and that something was human intervention.

As more and more Gentiles were added to this Jewish movement, that’s where it all started to go wrong for the Gentiles. There was both a political reason and a social reason for this: politically, the Jews in Judea were rebelling against Roman rule and the Romans didn’t take very kindly to that, so the Gentiles (who never before had any problem with Rome) didn’t want to be associated with the Jewish population.

Socially, the change in lifestyle from a hedonistic pagan to a righteous God-fearing person was a real paradigm shift, and the Elders in Jerusalem knew this, which is why they sent a letter to the (now mostly) Gentile congregations forming throughout the Middle East and Asia, which gave them only 4 commandments to obey immediately (Acts 15.) The intention was to make it easier for these people to convert to a Godly lifestyle and it was expected they would eventually incorporate all of God’s instructions into their lives (if you have been taught differently, see Acts 15:21and adjust your rafter measurement.)

By separating the Yeshua-following Jews and Gentiles from the mainstream Jews, the leaders of this new movement created a rift that God and Yeshua never wanted to have. Believers in Yeshua’s teaching and that he was the Messiah were never supposed to become a separate religion, but (if anything) maybe another form of Judaism. Today within Judaism we have the Chasidic, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist sects of Judaism (I will also include Messianic Jews, although the other sects reject us.)

The letter the Elders sent was OK, but they should have specified more clearly that it was only temporary and the Gentiles accepting Yeshua were still required to learn all of the Torah and live it. The letters from Shaul (Paul) certainly did NOT help to get this idea across. Later, the Gentile leaders of this movement, which by the end of the First Century couldn’t be called Judaism anymore, changed the Sabbath day and when Constantine took it over, he created new holidays, doctrine, laws, commandments, traditions, and ended up with the religion we call Christianity.

The Jewish Messiah, Yeshua, was forgotten and a Gentile savior, Jesus Christ, was created, with his own religion called Christianity.

God never intended that Yeshua would start a new religion, and Yeshua never wanted that, either. When God gave his instructions to Moses, which outlines exactly how God wants us to worship him and treat each other, he wanted that to be a lifestyle, not a religion. God has no religion, and he doesn’t want his creation to have a religion: he wants us all to be as he says we should be. He is clear about that throughout the Torah and what he said through his prophets.

The Torah is like God’s first rafter: we are supposed to live exactly as he told us in the Torah, and the Torah was to be understood exactly as Yeshua taught.  Everyone should have been “cut” from that one rafter, but that didn’t happen.

The Jews neglected using the Torah and cut rafters from the Oral Laws, and when Yeshua came those rafters didn’t fit the house God had designed. Yeshua tried to get them back onto the correct measurements and gave us a perfectly cut rafter to use as our model, but the followers of Yeshua decided to change the angle and cut their rafters from the changed rules and now we have so many different forms of Judaism and Christianity that we can’t find any two rafters that fit the same roof.

It all went wrong at the very beginning, and it has been so wrong for so long that today we can’t fix it. But God can fix it, once and forever, and he has even told us how he will do that; those architectural specifications are found in Jeremiah 31:31. 

Messianic Moment is a teaching ministry, and I will never tell you what you must do, only what I believe God has told us we should do. The choice of what you do is yours, and yours alone, but that also means that when you have to face God and tell him why you did what you did, you won’t be able to blame anyone else. Whatever you do, however you live, no matter who told you what to do, you choose to obey someone. If it isn’t God, then you will be in trouble.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages with everyone you know, and check out my website and the books I have written. I always welcome your comments.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!