Author: Steven R. Bruck
What Commandments Did Yeshua Ever Give?
I have read that Yeshua gave 6 commandments, and we read about them in Mark 10:17-20 when Yeshua relates a story about when a young man asks what he has to do in order to be saved. Yeshua answers that he has to follow the commandments, and the six he gave were:
Do not kill,
Do not commit adultery,
Do not steal,
Do not bear false witness,
Do not defraud,
Honor thy father and mother.
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I found this on the umass.edu website, and that article states these 6 commandments are the only ones people have to follow, essentially replacing the original 10 Commandments, as well as everything else in the Torah. Of course, that idea is just plain ridiculous, if for no other reason why would Yeshua, the son of God, not consider it important that we acknowledge there is only one God and that we should not bow down or worship other gods?
I also found on the Internet from the “Institute in Basic Life Principles” (some title, huh?) a list of commandments that Yeshua gave that is quite extensive. Some examples are: to go the extra mile, give charity in secret, beware of false prophets, repent, follow me, keep your word, do not lust, and many other things, all of which are from the Torah. I don’t see these as being new or unique commandments, but repetition of what God already told us to do in the Torah.
The only place I can find where Yeshua, himself, says he is giving a commandment is in John 15:12 (CJB) where Yeshua says to his Talmudim right after the last Pesach Seder:
This is my command: that you keep on loving each other just as I have loved you.
And that is not new: it is found in Leviticus 19:18.
Yeshua did not give any new commandments. In fact, he stated clearly in Matthew 5:17 that he is not changing anything that is already in the Torah. Now, we have to remember that “Torah” does not mean “law”, but “instruction” or “teachings”, and that being said, what Yeshua did was not give any commandments but teach the spiritual meaning of the existing commandments.
Yeshua didn’t change the Torah: he changed the understanding of the Torah.
I believe it is very dangerous when Christianity teaches that we should obey Yeshua’s commandments. The danger is that by even implying Yeshua gave commandments to us which are different from God’s commandments and that those are the ones we must follow, it means Yeshua placed himself above God. If Yeshua had ever said that we must do what he says and not what God said, that would be rebellion against God and, as such, a sin!
Do you recall that one of the issues Yeshua had with the Pharisees was that they considered some of their man-made traditions more important than the commandments God gave? If he had a problem with that, how could he possibly go even further astray from proper worship and teach that we should obey him and could ignore God’s commandments?
You know what they call that? Rebellion!
No, the truth is that Yeshua never did anything to override or ignore what God taught us to do in the Torah; he simply taught the spiritual meaning of those commandments. That is the only thing that is “new” in the New Covenant.
Yeshua is the Messiah, and as such he is to be listened to, respected, and acknowledged as God’s true representative on earth. He now sits at the right hand of God and when he returns, he will then be recognized as King Messiah, ruling the entire earth. He would be the first person to tell you not to worship him but to give your worship to his father in heaven, just as he told the young man in Mark 10:17.
The Torah is where God tells us how we should worship him and treat each other, and everything Yeshua taught was from and about the Torah. He did not give any new commandments or instructions, only the deeper, spiritual understanding of what people already had been taught.
Think of it this way…First Century Judea was the place where people could go to attend Salvation University, and both the Pharisees and Yeshua taught there, using the same textbook, the Torah. The Pharisees taught the Undergraduate level and Yeshua taught the advanced Ph.D. course.
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Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!
We all know this statement, the one Yeshua made to Kefa (Peter) when Kefa chided him for saying that he must die.
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Yet, I don’t think anyone really believes that Yeshua was accusing Kefa of being the Devil. What he meant, as he explained right after saying this to him, is that Kefa was thinking not on a spiritual plane, or in accordance with what God has decided should be done, but on a personal, selfish, and human level.
In other words, Kefa wanted things to go the way he wanted, not the way God wanted; the feeling of “Your will be done, not mine” was not in Kefa’s heart.
So, how many times have we been like Kefa?
For example, right now Israel has been under the worst attack it has been through for a while, and all I see are postings about praying for peace there. And, yes- we are told to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6), but if we pray for men to make peace, is that really God’s will? Are we “pulling a Kefa”, meaning are we asking for what we want even when we know that God has a different plan?
How do I know that God has a different plan for Israel? Well, he’s told us he does, and quite often! All the way back to even before the Israelites entered Cana’an, God showed Moses the apostasy that would take place in the future, the punishment they would have to endure, and the eventual regathering of the dispersed tribes to Israel.
Through the Prophets, God told us what the people living then should expect in their immediate future and at the Acharit HaYamim (End Days).
And if there is still doubt that God’s plan for this world is terrible, full of violence, injustice, anti-Semitism, hatred, and worldwide destruction, then you must not have ever read the vision given to John, who recorded it in Revelation.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned or feel pity for those being tortured and mistreated throughout the Middle East, and the rest of the world, for that matter: no, what I am saying is that we should pray for this tsouris to stop, but not by anything men do. On the contrary, history has proven that the best peace men can make is a temporary one, and since the Middle East conflict of brother verse brother has been going on since the time of Abraham, it doesn’t even make sense that it will stop until something more influential and powerful than mortals intervenes.
And we all know who that is- Yeshua!
So, when you see the rockets coming down on innocent Israelis, as well as the Arabs who are innocent but forced to live with Hamas and Jihad in their backyards (did you know that there were hundreds of Arab deaths caused by Hamas and Jihad rockets that misfired and landed in the Gaza Strip?), and you read of the torture and imprisonment of Christians throughout the world, and you see the United States of America, the symbol of freedom and independence, turn into a socialistic enabler giving housing, food and medical service to foreign invaders while ignoring their own people and the veterans who are sleeping on the streets, then you know that this is all coming about as part of God’s plan for the world.
So, yes- pray for peace, but not for the peace that men make- pray for the ultimate and eternal peace that will come ONLY when Yeshua returns. He told his disciples that if not for the short period of tribulation, no one would survive (Matthew 24:22), so pray that the tribulation comes quickly and is over quickly… and that you survive it.
Don’t pray for what goes against God’s plan; and, whether or not you like what God has planned, get with the program because IT WILL HAPPEN! What God has planned for humanity is going to come about, no matter how we feel or what we pray for, so pray for that which is keeping with God’s will.
I hate to see the suffering and the injustice being done to Israel by the media and the world, especially by the American public and government, but this all has to be!
You can pray for whatever you want to, but as for me, I pray that the Tribulation comes and goes and that those suffering will be able to find eternal rest in God’s presence because I never want to hear “Get thee behind me!”
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Parashah B’haalotecha 2021 (When you light) Numbers 8 – 12
This parashah begins with the anointing of the tribe of Levi to perform the service of the Sanctuary. They are washed and all Israel lays their hands on them, then the Levites laid their hands on and sacrificed a bull and a burnt offering. God reminds Moses to tell the people that the firstborn of everything belongs to the Lord, but that he has substituted the Levites for those who are firstborn.
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When some who were unclean to celebrate the Pesach asked Moses why they shouldn’t get to participate, he asks God for help. God says that those unable to celebrate in the month of Aviv (now called Nissan) can celebrate it on the 14th day of the following month (Iyar.)
We are told how the people traveled based on the cloud over the Sanctuary: when it moved, they moved. We are also given the rules for the silver trumpets. Moses’ father-in-law is asked to join the people and it sounds like he refuses to go with them. But in Judges 1:16, we are told that the descendants of Moses’ father-in-law went from the City of Date Palms (Jericho) with the tribe of Judah into the desert of Yehuda, so it seems that he did travel with the people.
The people kvetch, which may have been initiated by the Gentiles with them (Numbers 11:4), about not having meat and Moses cries to God asking that he kill him instead of having to make him endure these constant complaints. God places some of the spirit he had given to Moses on 70 of the Elders to help out, and then sent quails to appease the hunger of the people. But, no sooner had they started to eat, then a plague God sent killed many of them, as punishment for their complaining and faithlessness.
In Chapter 12, we read how Aaron and Miriam spoke out against Moses for taking an Ethiopian woman as his wife, and God punished Miriam by giving her leprosy. Moses begs God to heal her, and God makes her stay outside of the camp (after healing her) for 7 days. Aaron, on the other hand, isn’t stricken with the disease. Most likely this is because as Cohen HaGadol (High Priest) he couldn’t become unclean for that long a time. But it seems that he was scared to death when he saw what happened to Miriam.
This chapter has special meaning to me because this was the parashah reading I did for my Bar Mitzvah.
I mentioned above that in Numbers 11:4 we are told the people complained how they missed eating meat, and also craved the vegetables and spices that they had in Egypt. To me, this is an example of the difficulty of being set apart, as well as having to be set apart while still living in a dark and faithless world.
The lesson for today is simple: salvation is free and easy to get, but costly and difficult to keep.
To be forgiven of our sin and set up for life eternal, all we have to do is confess our sins, repent of them and accept Yeshua (Jesus) as our Messiah, asking for forgiveness by means of his sacrifice. If we do that and mean it (yes- you DO have to mean it! God isn’t stupid, you know) then we will be forgiven.
That’s the easy part, now for the hard part.
Once you accept Yeshua as your Messiah, you are grafted into the chosen people of God and an adopted child of Abraham (Romans 11); as such, you are to be treated just like all the other chosen people (Exodus 12:49), which means not only do you receive the same rights as they do under the law but you are expected to obey that law, just as they do.
In other words, to be a child of Abraham and grafted onto the Tree of Life, you must draw from the root of that tree, which is the Torah.
You can’t have salvation without the obligation to obey God’s instructions.
And, to make things even harder, just as the Israelites in the desert had Gentiles with them who complained, influencing them to complain as well, in the world we have faithless and evil people who will try to influence us to join them in their sin.
As I often say, it is very hard to work in a fish market all day and not come home smelling of fish. Likewise, living in the world and trying to remain free of its stench is what makes being set apart so difficult to maintain.
And it is costly, in that many Believers have lost friends and been ostracized by family for their beliefs.
But you must maintain your separation! That doesn’t mean going from home to shul or church, and nowhere else, or never talk to anyone but other Believers; no, it means going into the darkness to be the light we are but not allowing the darkness to overcome you.
How can that be done? Through constantly recharging your spiritual battery by communing with other Believers, by choosing to stay faithful to what you have learned from reading God’s word, which you should do every day, and by constantly looking for God’s blessings in your life, which confirm you are on the right track.
That’s right- sometimes we have to look really hard to see the blessings, often disguised as bad things happening to us because God always blesses those who obey him (this is his promise in Deuteronomy 28) and he always answers prayer, although very often it isn’t what you expect or when you expect it.
If you would like to know more about prayer, please get my book, “Prayer: What It Is and How It Works”. It is available on Amazon and there is a link to it on my website.
We are to be holy as God is holy, which means set apart from the world, even though we still have to live in the world. That is the hard part- working with fish but not smelling like one, and the only way to do that is to keep washing with the blood of the Messiah and cleaning your hands with God’s word, which will also keep your spirits up and your mind cleansed.
Salvation cannot be taken away, but we can throw it away. To avoid doing that, even by mistake, we must obey God’s instructions in the Torah and not what some Rabbi says in the Talmud or what some Apostle says in a letter.
It is what God says that counts.
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That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and Shabbat Shalom!
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Better NOT Call Saul
One of the issues Yeshua had with the Pharisees and their teachings was that some of their man-made traditions were given precedence over what God said. These traditions have become part of Halacha, the Way to Walk, which is defined in the Talmud.
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Today, more often than not, religious Jews seek to get their answers from the Talmud before they look to the Torah or any other part of the Tanakh. This is, in my opinion, no different than the mistake of placing what men say over what God says that we made way back then, in the First Century.
But that’s what the Jews do, so what does this have to do with calling Saul, whose Greek name used in the New Covenant is Paul (get the reference in the title, now?)
Christians have based most of their beliefs and doctrines not on the Torah or the Gospels, but for the most part on the letters that Saul, and other people, wrote to the (mostly) Gentile congregations throughout the Middle East.
God told us exactly what he wanted from us in the Torah- that is the ONLY place in the entire Bible where we often read “And God said to Moses, ‘Tell the children of Israel (whatever the commandment was)'”.
What we read in the Torah isn’t divinely inspired, it is divinely dictated! It isn’t someone telling us what God told him, which could be subject to interpretation, but it is the very words God used.
Saul was never given direct instructions from God, and when he talked of God’s commandments, he quoted from the Tanakh, but mostly what Saul told his congregations to do was from Saul.
Oh, yes, I know what you are saying: all those instructions were divinely inspired. Well, if they were, since God told Isaiah (Isaiah 55:11) that his word never returns void, then why is it that most of Christianity’s doctrines and dogma, based mostly on the Epistles of Saul, ignore God’s word? Isn’t that the epitome of God’s word returning void?
If someone said something that caused people to reject the Torah, how can that come from God? Didn’t God tell us the laws in the Torah are valid throughout our generations?
Oh, wait, I know- you are going to tell me that those laws are just for Jews, right? Well, think about this: throughout the Torah, God says there is just one law for both the Israelite and the foreigner joined with them and Saul says, in Romans 11:11, that when you accept Yeshua as your Messiah you are now grafted into Israel and an adopted child of Abraham. So, you are now an Israelite (spiritually, if not physically), and as such God says you are to be treated just as a native-born Jew, and like it or not, that means you are also subject to the same laws that Jews are, which is the Torah.
Perhaps that is why Saul also warns his Gentile converts to Judaism, which is what they were becoming when they accepted Yeshua, not to brag or feel superior to the Jews they were now joining.
Look, it isn’t Saul’s fault his letters, which he never intended to override God’s commandments, have been used that way. But what it comes down to is this: the complaint Yeshua had against the Pharisees for making man-made laws more important than God’s commandments has been repeated by Christianity. Instead of learning from the mistakes the Jews made, they not only made the same ones but made them even worse because:
Jews following Talmudic Halacha do not reject the Torah but Christianity misconstruing the Epistles Saul and others wrote, does reject the Torah.
And when you reject the Torah, you reject God. That may be a hard word to hear, and I am sure most Christians reading this right now are shaking their heads back and forth, saying to themselves, “No, no- he is just plain wrong: what about 2 Timothy 3:16-17 where we are told:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Well, you are right! All scripture IS God-breathed, but what was scripture then? It was the Tanakh!!! There was no other scripture, and the instructions from Saul were not some future prophecy or divinely inspired to also cover the not yet written New Covenant, which is (in fact) a bible put together by Gentiles who had already rejected any and everything Jewish.
NO! What Saul was talking about was the Tanakh, the “Jewish Bible” which was the only scripture he knew, and what was being taught to these neophyte Believers so that they could be thoroughly equipped for righteousness.
And that, my friends, means that if you are not following the scripture Saul meant, which is the Torah then, by definition, you are not being equipped for righteousness.
That should be a scary thought, and I pray that you are open to hearing what I am saying. Not because I am saying anything of my own, which I’m not, but because what I am saying is the same thing that God told Moses, that God told Isaiah, and what Saul really meant when he told Timothy how to teach the Gentile Believers under his authority.
God has no religion, but men created religion so that they could have power over other men. This is obvious just by looking at all the different religions, with different forms of worship, but all are supposed to worship the same God, who said he never changes. If he never changes, doesn’t that mean his instructions will never change? If he says everyone who sojourns with (i.e., is grafted into) his chosen people are to be subject to the same law as they must, doesn’t that mean they are also to obey the same laws?
We all have Free Will, and so we can each make our own choice of who to listen to regarding how we live which is, essentially, the way we worship God. For Jews, we can choose to follow Halacha from the Talmud or what God says in the Torah; and for Christians, they can choose to follow the doctrines and dogma created by Constantine (and any number of Popes over the centuries) based on letters from Saul and other men, or they can choose to follow what God says in the Torah.
To me, this is a no-brainer, but to the Jewish Orthodoxy and most Christians, it represents making a major paradigm shift in their lifestyle.
And we all know how people feel about change, even when it has eternal consequences.
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Can Sinners Still Get Into Heaven?
It seems ridiculous that a sinner would be allowed in heaven, doesn’t it? I mean, really? If I sin, then I cannot be in the presence of the Lord, God Almighty, can I?
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No, of course not.
But then why does Yeshua say this, in Matthew 5:19 (CJB):
So whoever disobeys the least of these mitzvot and teaches others to do so will be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But whoever obeys them and so teaches will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Yeshua just finished telling those thousands who were listening to his Sermon on the Mount that he did not come to change anything in the Torah, and when he follows that up with this statement it is clear that he is saying there are those who will sin and teach others to sin, but they will still be allowed into heaven.
How can that be? Well, I think I know the answer!
There is a difference between sinning by volition, and sinning accidentally. We are told throughout the Tanakh that God sees the heart and he knows our mind, which means when we are praying or acting in some way, God knows better than we do our true motivation. We may know we are sinning but don’t care, or we may know we are sinning and regret it, asking God for help to overcome it, or we may be sinning and not know we are sinning, at all.
If you sin, you know it, and you just don’t care that makes you an unrepentant sinner, and I don’t believe an unrepentant sinner is going to be allowed into heaven.
If you are sinning and hate that you do so, which is often the category I find myself in, and constantly asking God to help you overcome this sin, that is repentance. And, I believe any repentant sinner asking for help and forgiveness will be heard by our compassionate and understanding Father in heaven. I also believe he will help you to overcome that sin, but it is not something that he will not just do for you. Just as he told Cain, sin is crouching at everyone’s door and we must overcome it. God will help, and he will forgive when we repent and ask forgiveness through Yeshua, but it is up to each and every one of us to overcome sin in our lives.
The last type of sinner I identified, which is the one I believe Yeshua was talking about, is the sinner who is sinning and has no idea that he or she is sinning. As such, this person will teach others to sin, all the while thinking it is a proper form of worship because this is what they were taught, by those who were taught the same thing, by those who were also taught the same thing, going back for millennia.
In other words, just about every Christian who has been taught that the Torah is just for Jews, or that Born Again Christians are now God’s Chosen people (Replacement Theology), or that Jews have to convert to Christianity to be saved has been sinning. Not on purpose and not even knowing it, but still and all, sinning. And not only have they been sinning, but they have taught others to sin, as well.
These are the ones I believe Yeshua was talking about, but wait a minute! – there were no Christians when Yeshua walked the earth, so how could he be talking about them?
The very next lesson Yeshua gave after talking about those who sin and teach others to do so was to teach the Remes, which is the spiritual meaning of the Torah commandments. He taught the spiritual meaning of “Do not murder” and “Do not commit adultery” and implicitly identified the Pharisees as having taught only the P’shat, the plain or literal meaning. Because of this teaching, the people were not being properly instructed in what God really wanted from them- a heart for obedience, not just obedience for the sake of earning salvation.
The Pharisees were teaching performance-based salvation, and Yeshua was teaching that obedience should be from faithful desire to do what God wants from us, spiritually as well as physically.
The Pharisees weren’t really teaching to sin, but their rabbinic traditions did, as Yeshua pointed out, often take precedence over what God said, and THAT is a sin. They never intended to sin, and they never wanted anyone else to sin, but there it is- they were sinning and teaching others to do so.
At that time, the means for forgiveness was there- the temple still stood in Jerusalem and anyone could bring their sacrifice to receive forgiveness, but before that century ended, the temple was gone and the only means of forgiveness, the only path to Adonai, was through Yeshua.
So, today we have Christians who are sinning and teaching others to sin by rejecting the Torah completely, and we also have Jews that are sinning and teaching others to sin by rejecting Yeshua as the Messiah, leaving them with no means of forgiveness, at all!
Yet, so long as these people do repent of the sins they know of, and ask forgiveness, I believe God will hear their prayers and act, because he is an understanding and compassionate God who is more than willing to work with us, so long as we want to work with him.
So, yes, Virginia- there are sinners in heaven, but not those who do so on purpose without repentance. A repentant sinner- as King David points out in Psalm 51 – is someone who approaches God with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and (if they have accepted Yeshua) will find forgiveness and be allowed into the kingdom of heaven.
I feel for my Jewish brothers and sisters who reject even hearing about Yeshua because even though God will listen to them, they will have no Intercessor on their behalf when they come before his Throne of Judgment.
Let’s all pray for those who sin and teach others to sin, that their eyes be opened and their hearts softened so that they will not be the least in the Kingdom of Heaven.
And give thanks to God who sees the heart and judges fairly, with compassion and mercy.
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