First of all, we need to remember that when Yeshua (Jesus) walked the earth, the only “word of God” that existed then was the Torah.

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Do you really understand what the New Covenant is? I’ll give you a hint… it isn’t found anywhere in the New Covenant writings.

Here is the new covenant that God made with Israel, which Yeshua also made available to the Gentiles, and it is in Jeremiah 31:31-33 (CJB):

Here, the days are coming,” says Adonai, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Isra’el and with the house of Y’hudah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers on the day I took them by their hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt; because they, for their part, violated my covenant, even though I, for my part, was a husband to them,” says Adonai. “For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Isra’el after those days,” says Adonai: “I will put my Torah within them and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will any of them teach his fellow community member or his brother, ‘Know Adonai’; for all will know me, from the least of them to the greatest; because I will forgive their wickednesses and remember their sins no more.”

That is quite a covenant, wouldn’t you agree? It also happens to be the last covenant God made with us and I believe that is because it is the last one we will ever need.

In essence, God is saying that the Torah will be more than just a document we read, it will become a physical part of us, like blood or an organ, something that is an integral part of our very existence.

And that is what Yeshua brought to us- when he says in Matthew 5:17 that he fulfilled the law, he was teaching us the Torah’s spiritual meaning, the very “heart” of the Torah, and so that when we accepted him, and received through his name the Ruach haKodesh (Holy Spirit), we were having the Torah written on our hearts.

In other words, what Yeshua really fulfilled was not just a proper interpretation of the Torah, but he fulfilled the new covenant God gave to us through Jeremiah.

And as Shaul (Paul) points out in Romans, it was to the Jew first, then to the Gentile.

But then, the problems began: the main population of the Jewish people, having been coerced and threatened with excommunication by the power elite of Jerusalem, rejected Yeshua as the Messiah.

Later, after all the Jewish leaders of this new sect within Judaism died off, the movement was led by Gentiles who then rejected the Torah and created their own religion in order to not be targeted by the Romans, who were dealing with a Jewish rebellion.

Of course, that only worked to get the Jewish power elite coming against them. Later on, after the Romans destroyed the temple and killed thousands of Jews in their final battle, these Gentile believers thought they would be OK.

NOT!

Surprise! Now Rome came after them because the one thing Rome hated more than rebellion was some new religion being formed within their controlled territory.

So, what we have now, two millennia later, are Jews who stick to Torah obedience as God directed us to, and Christians, who profess to worship God, who say they follow in the footsteps of Yeshua, but reject nearly every single law, ordinance, regulation, and commandment God gave, which Yeshua obeyed perfectly, in order to follow man-made regulations, ceremonies, holidays, and tenets.

You know, within Judaism there are 5 different sects (6, if you count Messianic Judaism), but the one thing that is constant in all is that the Torah is the ultimate user Manual for Righteousness. From the Ultra-Orthodox (Chasidic) all the way down to the Reconstructionists, we go from extreme Torah observers to a humanistic viewpoint, but we all are trying to be Torah-obedient, in one way or another.

But Christianity, well, Christianity has a lot more than just 5 or 6 sects.

According to Google, there are as many as 45,000 different religions or sects that fall within the term “Christian”.

Forty-five thousand!

Now, as I recall, that nice Jewish tent-maker from Tarsus, in his letter to the Corinthians, said that God is not a god of confusion, but of peace.

You know what? If you ask me, when a religion has as its root tenet that it worships God and follows in the footsteps of Yeshua, but has some 45,000 different ways to do that, well… I am sorry, but I’ve gotta say that is one confused religion!

Hey, Folks- it’s easy! Really! God made the Jews his nation of priests to the world (Ex. 19:6), then he gave us the Torah, then he sent us the Messiah to teach us the true, spiritual meaning of the Torah, then the disciples of the Messiah brought the Torah (being God’s priests to the world) to the Goyim, which is Hebrew for the nations.

Simply stated, God gave Jews the Torah for us to learn so we could bring it to everyone else in the world.

Then the Goyim screwed it all up by rejecting the Torah, making up their own religions, and forcing us Jews to either convert or be tortured and killed.

Talk about killing the messenger!

So, what should you do? My suggestion is simple: read the entire Bible (that means start at Genesis and go through to Revelation) and then pray on it, asking God to guide you to HIS truth.

And let me offer this thought: when you stand before God at Judgement Day (which we all will have to do), and God asks why you didn’t do any of the things he said you should do, I guess that you will answer saying that you did what they told you to do because you thought they knew what they were talking about. I can’t speak for God, but I think he might say something to this effect…

“I know you only did what they told you to do, but it is what I say that counts.”

Thank you for being here and please remember to share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!