Author: Steven R. Bruck

How’d We Get to This?

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In the beginning, there was God. Then he created the Earth and placed mankind in charge of it, and mankind screwed everything up to the point where God had to send the Flood. After the Flood, God chose a man, Abraham, to become the progenitor of a people God would make his own special people.

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Later on, God grew Abraham’s descendants from a family to a nation. Then, in order to train his chosen people how to become a nation of priests to the world (Ex. 19:6), he gave them instructions to teach them how to worship him and how to treat each other. This was the Torah, which if someone could live their lives in total and perfect accordance with all the 613 different “laws” that God gave, they would be righteous in God’s eyes.

But, as Shakespeare would say, “There’s the rub”: no one can live their life in perfect accordance with the Torah. For us sinful humans, it just ain’t gonna happen.

So, in order to ensure that God’s plan for his creation to be with him throughout eternity succeeds, he provided for us that which we could not provide for ourselves: a Savior, the Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus) who became the substitutionary sin sacrifice by voluntarily giving his physical life so that we could attain spiritual salvation.

Our part in this is to accept him as our Messiah and try to live as God said we should.

Yeshua was, and still is, the Messiah God promised to send, which he promised as far back as when he was talking to Abraham. When Yeshua sacrificed his life, he didn’t do away with the sacrificial system, he just substituted himself for the need to bring an animal to the temple in Jerusalem. We still need to accept that we sin, repent in our hearts and ask forgiveness from God for each and every sin we commit; it is thanks to Yeshua that we don’t have to bring a sacrifice to the temple because as the Messiah, God’s savior to mankind, is it possible through Yeshua’s one-time sacrifice that everyone’s sins can be forgiven each time they ask for forgiveness.

Let’s review… God gave the Torah so that we could know what he wants from us, and because we always failed to meet all those requirements, God sent the Messiah to provide us the chance to be saved from ourselves.

Guess what happened next? After all that God did for us, someone threw a monkey wrench into the engine, and that was the Enemy; HaSatan, that old snake. When he realized that he lost the battle for people’s souls, he confused people about Yeshua’s message. The way he did that was as more and more Gentiles came to know God’s Grace through the Messiah, he created confusion and misinterpretation within the newly formed congregations of Gentiles who didn’t understand the Torah.

He sent agents of distraction into these neophytes to Judaism to confuse them so much that they ended up rejecting the very principles of salvation that Yeshua taught, which were from the Torah. The end product of this demonic counter-attack is what we see today: so many different Christian religions and sects that reject almost all of God’s commandments.

Yeshua talked against the man-made traditions of the Pharisees that were given precedence over God’s commandments, and yet Christianity is composed of nothing BUT man-made traditions, holidays, rites, rituals, and laws. They have rejected God’s commandments regarding food (Leviticus 11); they reject all 7 festivals that God said we must observe (Leviticus 23), which does include the Sabbath because they changed the date; they bury their dead under the very altar of God; they fill their houses of worship with statues and pictures of human beings before whom they prostrate themselves and pray to; they have rebranded the Torah observant Jewish Messiah into some Blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryian who created his own religion which rejects the Torah and hates Jews, and they teach and do many other things that the Torah tells us are an abomination to the Lord, God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the father of the Messiah!

Another example is that today there are many Christian churches that not only condone homosexuality, but support it: some are even anointing as pastors and ministers people who are openly gay.

Now, this is not a homophobic thing with me, so any gay person reading this, please pull in your reins: all I am stating is that the Torah clearly says homosexuality is a sin and as such, no church or synagogue that professes to worship and obey God should be accepting of homosexuality. That’s all. Just like they shouldn’t accept as leaders adulterers, murderers, or anyone else who openly rejects God’s commands and rules.

Let’s get back on topic: don’t think I am excluding the Jews because I am Jewish- far be it for me to do that! When we place more emphasis and importance on Talmudic regulations than on God’s commandments, that is just as bad as rejecting God’s commands. For instance, the regulations within Judaism against eating meat and dairy together; did you know that the Ashkenazi Jews have different regulations than the Sephardic Jews about this? And why? Because one group likes milk with their after-dinner drink and another doesn’t, so they have different times for how long you have to wait after eating meat before you can have dairy. The entirety of Halacha is based on the idea of “putting fences around the law” to prevent us from accidentally trespassing the law, which in and of itself isn’t such a bad idea, but it has become so cumbersome that now the fences are more important than what they surround!

God chose a people to bring his instructions to the world, and he blessed the world through those people, the greatest blessing of all was to have his Messiah come from those people to bring the salvation that God had for them to everyone.

The Enemy of God stepped in and messed things up, and for the most part, people have gone along with the “easy salvation” that the Enemy created and those poor, misguided and delusional souls will be sorely surprised when they come before God.

I suggest you make sure you know what God wants from you, based on what he says, because despite what anyone tells you, it is what he says that counts.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages, subscribe to this ministry (I never ask for money, but if you want to buy my books that is fine with me), and I always welcome your comments.

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

God Empowers; He Doesn’t Enable.

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We are to ask God for whatever we need, and never stop praying. When we ask of God, invoking the name of the Messiah, his son, Yeshua, we will receive that which we ask for.

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This is a promise we have been given by Yeshua, himself, and it is trustworthy, so why is it that not everything we ask for is received?

Did Yeshua lie? Does God reject prayers in his son’s name haphazardly?

Of course not!

Often we pray for things we don’t really need but we want, stemming from worldly desire and not from wanting to better serve God. In other words, pray all you want to to win the lottery or for a new car because you’re bored with the one you have, but those aren’t the types of prayers God will honor.

Well, probably not: truthfully, I can’t speak for God, but I believe the types of prayers Yeshua was talking about are those in which we can do more for God’s work in the world. If you pray for money so that you can continue to run a ministry, that is more likely to be answered than asking for money so you can get a new lawnmower.

And any righteous prayer you make is heard, but God will not always do all you ask. More often than not, at least in my personal experience, God expects you to make an effort to achieve that which you are praying about.

If you are suffering from some disease and pray for healing, God will hear you but I think he will expect you to continue to take your medicine, listen to the doctors, and work towards getting better.

If you are having financial difficulties and need to find a better job, pray to God for help, but don’t expect to get a phone call out of the blue offering you a job. You need to write that updated resume and get it out there so that God can then make sure the right people see it.

Our God is a God of action, not a God of sitting around waiting for it to happen.

Abraham is a great example of what I am talking about: maybe you haven’t thought about it, but Abraham was in his late 90s and Sarah in her early 90s when God said he would have a son through Sarah. Abraham believed him, so what do you think he must have done that night, and for a number of nights after that? Uh-huh, that’s right, even though they were both way past the age for doing that. Abraham knew that God would empower him but not do it all for him.

When God told the Prophets to take his word to the people, except for Jonah (at first), they immediately told the people what God told them to say, despite the “flak” they took for speaking it, especially Jeremiah!

In my own life, if I may share this with you, I asked God repeatedly to help me see people as he sees them and not the way TV and marketing companies have taught me to see people, which is as sexually attractive things. Let’s face it: we are indoctrinated by TV and the media to identify people by their sexual attractiveness or by some other physical attribute. I mean, how many ugly people do you see on the TV or in magazines drinking Pepsi or driving a new model car?

Back to the point: I asked God, and still do, to simply excise this part of my brain and you know what he told me? He said it doesn’t work that way: I have to take charge of myself and try to control what I do, remembering what it is that he wants from me. But he hasn’t left me alone: he does help me.

For instance, if I look at a cute woman jogging and think she is attractive, even though it isn’t lustful, just seeing her as a sexual entity instead of as a person is what I have asked God to help me stop doing, or when I have arguments in my head that I have asked him to help me overcome (I have posted in the past about how wrong it is to rehearse our anger), I find that something happens to take my mind off those thoughts. Most of the time this happens when I am driving somewhere, and as I start to do what is wrong, all of a sudden the car ahead of me will hit the brakes for no observable reason, shocking me back into reality. Or I will bite my tongue or something unusual will take my mind away from what I am doing.

It took me a while to realize that these weren’t coincidences, they were God answering my prayer by empowering me to overcome that which I asked him to take away from me. You see, by having things take my mind off what I am thinking, he is taking me off the wrong path and allowing me to get back onto the right path. It’s like we are working together, and you know what? It’s kind of cool being able to team up with God.

So here is the point: pray for what you need and not just for what you want, pray for that which helps you to do more for God, and then get off your tuchas and do what needs to be done, as if you have ready been answered.

Now, that doesn’t mean pray for a new job then go quit- no, that isn’t smart. And don’t pray for something in order to test God- he doesn’t really like it when we do that, and that prayer probably won’t be answered.

Pray to God, ask for what you believe you need to be a better and more obedient servant to God, and then trust in God to answer. The answer may not come right away, and the answer may not be what you expect or ask for, exactly, but it will be for what you need. And the answer may also be…No! No, not never, or no, not just yet, but that doesn’t mean your prayer isn’t going to have results. Maybe God is saying “No” because he needs you to reevaluate what you are asking about.

There is no easy answer to why prayers are answered sometimes and why they aren’t other times, but the idea is to keep praying and keep asking, just as in the parable Yeshua told about the woman asking the unfair judge for justice. She became such a nudge that the judge finally gave her justice just to get her off his back.

God already wants to do good things for you and he knows what is best for you; he will answer your prayers but he won’t do it all for you because he empowers us but he won’t enable us.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages and I always welcome your comments.

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

Does the Real Messiah Reject God?

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I’ll bet you are thinking, “Now, what kind of a stupid question is that? How can the Messiah, the son of God, the servant of God, the savior of the world, possibly reject God?”

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Frankly, I don’t see how that is possible, but, then again, Christianity has been teaching that for millennia.

“What do you mean, Steve? When did Christianity teach that the Messiah rejected God?”

When it told people that the Torah is no longer valid or necessary for salvation.

“But, wait a minute…isn’t legalism wrong? Isn’t it true that we are saved by faith? “

Yes, we are saved by faith, but only the right kind of faith.

“Huh?”

Faith is, in its basic form, the result of a choice we each make to believe in something. When it comes to Yeshua (Jesus) and God, Christianity pretty much says believe that God exists and that Jesus is the Messiah and you can be saved. But that isn’t the kind of faith that will save you, because, even as we are told in the Bible, Satan and every demon in hell believes that God exists and that Jesus is his Messiah. Not only are they not saved, but they have already been thrown out of heaven and doomed to eternal damnation.

So what good is their faithful belief in God and Yeshua?

And as for Torah observance, that isn’t going to do you any good, either, not if you depend on performance being able to save you. No one can be in total accordance with the Torah, ever. That is why we need a Messiah, DUH!

And if you say you have faithful obedience to the Torah, if your faith is not heartfelt and internal, such as with David, then your obedience will also be useless. Saul sacrificed to God but for the wrong reasons and it cost him his kingship, and through the Prophets, God told us, more than once, that he doesn’t care about our going through the motions- he wants us to be obedient because we want to be obedient to demonstrate our love and respect for him.

So how does this come together to be the right kind of faith?

First, we must understand that belief in God and Yeshua as the Messiah is not the guarantee of salvation, it is just the beginning of being saved.

Second, we have to understand the difference between legalism and Torah observance: legalism is the belief in performance-based salvation, meaning that salvation comes only through the performance of everything that is written in the Torah. Torah observance can be faith-based salvation when that observance is the result of wanting to obey the Torah as the means of showing God we respect and trust him, and because when you love someone you want to do what pleases them.

So, we know legalism is useless, faith has to be more than accepting the existence of God and Messiah, and that Torah observance is not wrong so long as it is based on wanting to please God.

And now, we learn from James the final part of this lesson about correct faith (James 2:14-17):

What good is it, my brothers, if someone claims to have faith but has no actions to prove it? Is such “faith” able to save him?  Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food, and someone says to him, “Shalom! Keep warm and eat hearty!” without giving him what he needs, what good does it do? Thus, faith by itself, unaccompanied by actions, is dead.

The “actions” James talks about are what we call mitzvot, which means both “laws” and “good deeds”, and what deeds are better than those that God tells us to perform, which (by the way) are also laws?

So, let’s make certain we are all on the same page: legalism is performance-based salvation and useless while faith-based salvation (which is how we are saved) must be more than just accepting the truth that God is God and Yeshua is the Messiah. And, the way we demonstrate this proper faith is through doing good works, which is the same as obeying what is in the Torah.

Yeshua the Messiah clearly did many good works, and he also told us that he only does and says what his father in heaven tells him to do and say, meaning that he obeyed everything in the Torah.

So, back to the original question: does the real Messiah reject God?

Of course not, and this is how we know Yeshua is the real Messiah, or better yet, how we can know who is NOT the real Messiah.

Now, here comes the kicker, Folks: the “Jesus” that Christianity presents as the Messiah, the one who says love is all you need and who teaches that the Torah is no longer necessary, is NOT THE REAL MESSIAH!

I know that because when you teach to reject the Torah, you are teaching to reject God. And this wrongful teaching, which has been taught throughout the millennia, telling people that ANY Torah observance is legalism and thereby useless to them, is how this false Messiah has gotten people to sin while thinking they are actually being saved.

The Torah has the only direct-from-God instructions on how to worship him and treat each other, and he tells us that is all we need to know. It defines sin and tells us the rewards we receive for obedience and the consequences of disobedience (Deuteronomy 28).

Yeshua lived in perfect accordance with the Torah because he was the only one who could, and because of his perfect obedience he was able to receive salvation, and as such, become the sin sacrifice for everyone. His Torah observance was not from trying to earn salvation, but from being trustfully and lovingly obedient to his father.

That is the type of Torah observance I try to maintain, and constantly fail to do. Thank God for Yeshua! Without him, none of us would have any chance of being saved from ourselves. Being obedient to God is what God requires of us: not just for salvation but also to receive blessings, which we CAN earn!

Here is all you need to know to be saved: salvation must be based on faith, and that faith must be the correct kind of faith, the one that results in wanting to do good works, which is (here we are again!) those things that God tells us to do in the Torah.

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

And please remember that I always welcome your comments.

That’s it for this week- I have new sliding glass doors being installed all day tomorrow so I will be skipping my usual Friday Torah parashah message.

Until next week, then…l’hitraot, Baruch HaShem and an early Shabbat Shalom!

Oy Vey!! I almost forgot to say Chag Sameach because tomorrow is Purim! I am taking my first try at making hamantashen today, so wish me luck!

Shalom.

Different Religion: Same Mistakes

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I have always been so disappointed when I think about all the different Judeo-Christian religious doctrines.

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Don’t we have only one God, one God who is the same today, as he was yesterday, and will never change throughout eternity?

Didn’t this one God give us just one set of rules and send only one Messiah?

You say “Yes”? Then why are there scores of different religions, each one professing to worship this one unchanging God, but they all have different ways to do that, with different rites, ceremonies, holidays, and traditions?

I am Jewish, born and raised, and what is even cooler is that I recently found out that I have the genetic marker of the Levite! But I was raised Reform, and when I was a child I recall some Orthodox Jew calling me a “Goy.”

The Hebrew word “Goyim” means “nations”, as in everyone else except the Jewish people, and the term “Goy” has come to be a derogatory expletive within Judaism for any Gentile.

And when I was a child, my Catholic friends, well…they accused me of killing God.

Judaism isn’t really, in my opinion, a religion as much as it is a lifestyle. God gave us, through Moses, instructions on how to worship him and how to treat each other, and God also gave us a mandate, which is to be a nation of priests to the world (Genesis 19:6), which means that we are to teach everyone else how to live in accordance with God’s instructions. And despite having these instructions written down, we failed to comply with them, over and over.

Let’s review just some of the mistakes that we Jews made since receiving the Torah:

  • We created an idol (the Golden Calf);
  • We failed to obey the Sabbath rule regarding resting of the land (which is why we had to spend 70 years in Babylon);
  • We rejected God’s authority through his prophets and demanded a king;
  • Our rabbis have added many difficult traditions to the relatively simple rules God gave us in the Torah by creating Halacha (the Walk) in the Talmud; and
  • We have rejected Yeshua as the Messiah (this was a BIG mistake!)

These are just a few of the main ones. So, if you were creating your own religion from Judaism (since that was the original and only religion that worshiped Adonai, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), wouldn’t you avoid all those mistakes, mistakes which the Tanakh had identified and which you could see, over the centuries before Messiah came, resulted in disaster and destruction for the Jews?

Don’t you think that someone creating their own religion would do everything they could not to make those same boo-boos?

Apparently not.

Let’s look at Christianity (this includes all forms of it):

  • They created an idol: just walk into any church and see a graven image on a cross, or statues of saints all over that people bow and pray to;
  • They created holidays that God never gave us, which by itself may not be so bad, but they totally ignore the ones God commanded us to observe;
  • They not only changed the day we observe the Sabbath, but they totally changed the rules about how to observe it;
  • They reject most of God’s instructions which he gave in the Torah;
  • They created their own king and call him the Pope; and
  • They rebranded the Messiah as an ex-Jew who negated his father’s laws and created his own religion, in which he is God!

WOW! I mean, really? Just make up whatever rules you want to, ignore the ones you don’t like, and keep only what you don’t mind doing. Label some commandments ceremonial and therefore, unimportant, even though God told us to do them! Wouldn’t that imply it is important to him?

And, in my opinion, what is worse of all is that traditional Christianity ignores most of what truly came directly from God (the Torah and the books of the Prophets) and teaches almost exclusively a misinterpretation of the letters from a man who wasn’t receiving what he wrote from God, but was micro-managing congregations of Gentiles learning to be Jewish.

That’s right- I am talking about the Epistles of Paul. Everything he wrote was to congregations of Gentiles that he formed, who were learning how to live a “Jewish” lifestyle instead of the pagan lifestyle they had lived, previously. What he wrote was not a direct commandment from God, like what Moses and the prophets received, but letters to micro-manage the internal, interpersonal problems that his congregations were facing.

Paul never taught to ignore the Torah: he was teaching how to obey it, but little-by-little, line-by-line, precept-by-precept.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, you can find it in Isaiah 28:10 when he was chiding the Israelites about how they were ignoring and disobeying God and how they had to learn like children.

As we can now see, the Christian religions, as well as within the different sects of Judaism (we’re still making mistakes!), have all made their own sets of rules, ceremonies, rites, and holidays that are different from what God commanded us to do. So, nu? What do we do now?

The obvious answer is to get back on the program. But that will never happen, I am sorry to say, simply because we have been doing this for so long that the people are comfortable with what they have learned and refuse to change. Humans, in general, hate change; if you don’t believe that, at your workplace try to institute a different procedure- any procedure- and see how willing people are to do it.

No, these tares have already been growing with the wheat for so long that there’s nothing left to do now but wait for the harvest (Matthew 13).

The good news is that until the harvest comes, those tares have a chance to become wheat!

This is what I believe (in a nutshell): the Torah is still valid, Yeshua is the Messiah God promised and through our repentance and by means of Yeshua’s sacrifice, we can be forgiven of our sins.

I am not preaching performance-based salvation (you might know it as “legalism”) but faith-based salvation, remembering that in James 2:14 we are told faith without works (meaning obedience to the Torah) is dead. No one can be sinless, but we all can sin less by not trusting only in our religious leaders but verifying what they tell us by reading the Bible and asking the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) to guide us in our understanding of what God wants from us.

God has wonderful blessings for us, but we won’t get them by making up our own rules, so STOP making the same mistakes we have all, always made and get with the program GOD laid out for you.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry grow, and remember that I always welcome your comments.

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

Parashah Teruma 2021 (Offering) Exodus 25 – 27:19

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From this point on, the remaining chapters of Exodus deal exclusively with the construction and dedication of the Tent of Meeting, also called the Tabernacle.

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The details that are specified throughout these chapters are extensive and very exacting. The number of cubits for each area of the tabernacle, from the section we call the Holy of Holies (where the Ark of the Covenant was placed) to the outer courts and the surrounding area, is very exact, as are the types of metal and weight of the materials for the various articles that are to be used in the service of the Lord.

The message here for us is…well, I’m not sure. There are a number of places in the Torah, as well as within the writings of some of the Prophets, where exacting detail of a structure are found, and sometimes, I confess, I wonder why so much attention is paid to such minutia. I am sure there is a purpose for it, and now that I think about it, maybe I have a reasonable explanation:

God gave Moses such exacting detail in order to test the dedication and obedience of the people.

The reason I think this is the explanation is that when we get to the end of the book, in Exodus 39:43 we are told that they did it all, just as they were told to. This leads me to believe that listing every single exacting detail of every single item associated with the Tabernacle was how God tested the people. He wanted to see if they would obey, would be willing to do the hard work without complaint, and how willing they were to donate, or maybe I should say give away, the goods and valuables they had attained from the Egyptians.

I am sure that living their entire lives as slaves, after they had looted Egypt and received jewels, fine linens, expensive skins, etc. they might not have wanted to give them up. But the requirements for the tabernacle were gold, silver, fine linen, precious jewels, colored threads, and expensive woods, just to name a few. Having these wonderful articles for the first time, maybe, ever, and then being asked to give them away for the Tabernacle’s use, is quite a request and called for some real dedication.

If we were asked to give up something valuable that we had just attained in order to further God’s work, how willing would we be to do that? It is easy to say, “Sure, I’d give something to God if I had a lot to give.” but that doesn’t count. Remember how in Mark 12:41-43 Yeshua told how the rich gave their tithes, which they could easily afford, but the poor widow gave all she had? And that because of her dedication, she would be remembered?

Many years ago, I received an inheritance that at the time, to me, was significant, and I am somewhat proud to say I tithed it correctly. I also have to confess that there was somewhat of a trust issue, meaning I wanted to make sure the monies I gave to my synagogue were being used correctly for the furthering of God’s work. Fortunately, I was on the Council at the time so was able to make sure those funds were used in God’s name, but I can understand how someone without that ability to verify where the money goes to might think twice about making a large donation to any house of worship, or charity.

I think when giving to a charity, no matter how wonderful their sales pitch is, one should first find out how the monies are utilized.

For instance, as a veteran, I am open to giving to Veteran charities, such as one I often see advertised on TV (to be fair I won’t give the name), but when I checked them out this is what I discovered: In 2016 only 54% of all monies went to the program, the rest to administrative and marketing expenses. In 2018, that went up to 64%, and here’s a surprise: the CEO makes $280,000 per year.

And when I checked that out, according to the charity watchdogs, that CEO’s salary is NOT unusual!

Now, if we look at another charity, one we all know but shall remain un-named (I will say it is really popular around Halloween), they spend 88.9% of the money received on their charity programs, the rest going to administrative and marketing expenses.

In general, a charity is expected to spend 15% or less on administrative and marketing expenses. So, when you give to a charitable organization, make sure that what you are giving is going where you expect it to go.

The Israelites knew where all they gave went because they got to see it, and in fact, worked with it.

Charity is something that we are commanded to partake in since the Torah often tells us to care for the orphan and the widow, and that is NOT tithing- that is charitable giving. We are also told that God loves a cheerful giver, yet be wise and use discernment when you give.

The Israelites gave so willingly that Moses had to tell them to stop contributing (Exodus 36:5), and that is how I believe, God wants us to be- cheerfully willing to share the blessings he has given to us with others.

And here’s the really good news: God never runs out of blessings so there is no way you can ever give away more than what God can resupply to you.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages, subscribe, and I always welcome your comments.

That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and Shabbat Shalom!