In his second letter written to believers, Kefa (Peter) warned against something that I believe the early Gentile leaders (of what was becoming Christianity) failed to listen to.
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So, nu? What was this warning? It was given near the very end of the letter, in Chapter 3, verse 16.
Kefa was talking about how what may seem like God not taking any action to bring about the Day of Judgment, really was God being patient and giving those who are sinning the chance to repent, but he reminds them that the day will come swiftly and without any warning. Therefore, they should be ready by always acting faithfully and leading godly lives, as Kefa’s good friend, Shaul (Paul) has written to them.
Now, here we come to the warning, and verse 16 goes like this (CJB):
Indeed, he speaks about these things in all his letters. They contain some things that are hard to understand, things which the uninstructed and unstable distort, to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
Christianity has pretty much done exactly what Kefa said they shouldn’t do, using Shaul’s letters as a foundation for teaching to ignore the Torah, which was never his intention.
What they have done is exactly the wrong thing- they have ignored most of the Torah and justified that by misusing Shaul’s letters (especially Romans) to teach the Torah is not necessary for Gentiles.
More than that, Christianity teaches that Yeshua lived the Torah perfectly as an example to all of us, then did away with it.
I know, I know…when you think about it, how can anyone believe that makes any sense, at all? I mean, if Yeshua was showing us all how to live Torah correctly, why bother if he was going to do away with it?
That’s like going to school to learn how to repair something that no longer exists or is in use anywhere.
But, I digress…
If you are fair-minded and open to hearing something different than what you have been taught, I think as you review the tenets and foundations of Christianity you will realize that it isn’t based on anything other than what Shaul wrote, with some occasional reference to the 10 Commandments.
Basically, they say Christians do not have to follow the law of Moses but the Law of Christ (for the record, the Laws of Moses aren’t really his laws but the laws of God, Almighty: Moses only wrote them down).
Okay, well, then… what is Christ’s law?
The only time Yeshua proclaimed the importance of following a law is when he said the two most important laws are to love the Lord and to love each other (Matthew 22:37-40).
Well, those aren’t really his laws because God said to love each other in Leviticus 19:18, and the Torah says to love the Lord in Deuteronomy 6:5. So, really, the only “Law of Christ” is not his law, but God’s law.
This is one example of the many ways that Christianity misused Shaul’s letters, ignoring Kefa’s warning, in that the so-called “Law of Christ” is actually the Torah- the very thing they say to ignore!
My experience with most Christians, whether born-again or of the more standard variety (traditional Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, etc.) is that almost to a fault, when we talk about the Trinity, or holidays, or what God wants from us, or names for God, they all quote either from John’s Gospel (which I have often shown to be a false gospel) or the letters Shaul wrote.
Now, Shaul did use many quotes from the Tanakh, which is the only real scripture in any of his letters, but he never came right out and said, “God told me to tell you… (whatever)”.
The only place in the entire Bible where we read that God dictates, directly, how the people must live or worship is in the Torah.
So, Shaul never did get any direct instructions from God, or Yeshua for that matter, except maybe that Yeshua told him to go to Damascus and find a man named Ananias.
The letters Shaul wrote are not God-breathed scripture.
When you read them, without already knowing what they are supposed to mean, you can see that they are merely managerial directives to congregations of Gentile believers who were having issues of faith and inter-personal relationship problems. And, in almost every letter, he had to address the pressure they were put under by the Jewish believers to make total conversion (specifically B’rit Milah/Circumcision) instead of learning how to live a Torah observant life step-by-step, which is what Saul was doing with them.
He knew that if these hedonistic pagans had to give it all up at once, the paradigm shift in lifestyle would be so great as to cause many to fall away before they had a chance to be saved.
So, what Christianity has done is to misuse Shaul’s letters, even though Kefa warned them, to eventually create a new religion that is anti-Torah.
And if something is anti-Torah, it is anti-God.
Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and 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 this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!