Author: Steven R. Bruck

2020 Rosh Hashanah Message

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As we begin a new year (civil new year, that is), I think it would be wrong to not review some of what has happened in the last year.

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.

Of course, you know that I am going to talk about the pandemic, which I (as well as others) believe might be the long-awaited “birth pains” of the tribulations related to us in the Bible, which indicate the coming of Messiah Yeshua.

We can discuss the way that trusted organizations, namely the WHO and the CDC, have tried to hide certain facts and have skewed their reports and numbers. And although this country has always been somewhat polarized, on both a racial and political level, it hasn’t been this bad since the race riots of the 1960s, and before that the Civil War.

Concern for proper health care, racial tensions, political adversity, and the propagandizing media are all working together with anarchistic elements within our government and society to try to bring this country into financial and social ruin.

And what really scares me is that it seems to be working!

The traditional reading for Rosh Hashanah is the Akedah, the binding of Isaac we read in Genesis 22. There is one aspect of this that I find relevant to the social upheaval in the world, especially in America, and that is how the things happening in this biblical story must have seemed from Isaac’s viewpoint.

Isaac first starts to suspect something is off when he and Abraham are walking to Mount Moriah to sacrifice, and there is no animal. We aren’t told anything about what Isaac might have said to his father when, after building an altar, he was tied up and laid upon it. Then, when Abraham drew the knife and was about to bring it down into him, I think Isaac must have thought something along the lines of, “This ain’t lookin’ very good for me!”

And that is how I have felt over the past 7 months watching the news, reading the Facebook posts about violence and looting, and seeing the political advertisements about how each candidate does everything right and the other candidate does everything wrong. If we believe what we are told by the political campaigns, we are either going to be taxed to death or we will be under a dictatorship.

I feel like Isaac must have felt watching his father raise the knife.

Isaac was saved at the last possible moment by God’s intervention, but I do not see that happening for America or the world. This time the knife will have to fall; with Isaac, it wasn’t his time because the whole thing was a test of Abraham’s faith. With us, now, I believe there is no longer any testing- we have proven, as a country, as a world, that we prefer to sin, we prefer to ignore and reject God, and his patience has run its course. He has unlimited patience, and when he doesn’t act to punish it is only because he is giving us time to repent. But I believe that time has come, and gone, and because God is holy and cannot reject his own laws, the time for punishment has come, and I mean soon.

We have bound ourselves to the altar. There is no ram waiting on the sidelines to replace us, and this is not a drill. This is the real thing, so what can we do?

Accept God’s will, trust in his judgment, and try to stay out of trouble by avoiding the hot spots in the world. If you feel your faith isn’t strong, then work on it. If you know people who have not turned to God, try to convince them to turn to God now, and show by example the inner peace we can have, even in the midst of terrible tsouris, when we know we are with God.

I may be wrong, and this whole mishigas may be over after the election, depending on who wins. Who knows? Maybe the leadership of this country will get its head back on its shoulders to straighten this mess out because where the government’s head is now, the only way to see what is happening is to peek through its belly button.

Nineveh was saved by immediate and decisive action, and if we are to have any chance of saving ourselves from destruction, we also need immediate and decisive action against the terrorists working under the guise of social reform, which is all being managed by HaSatan.

As we enter this new year, which should be a joyful celebration, let’s not allow the world’s disorder to ruin our fun. Of course, being Jewish, we always add a little tsouris to every happy occasion, so as we enjoy this festival, let’s also reflect not just on the world’s sins, but on our own, as we enter the 10 Days of Awe approaching Yom Kippur.

I wish you all a joyous and fun-filled Rosh Hashanah, and may the peace of the Ruach HaKodesh fill your heart and make you forget all about the world, even if just for a little while.

שנה טובה!!!

Happy New Year!

 

Rehearsing Our Anger

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I am not talking to you right now- I am talking to myself. This topic is one I can claim to be an expert about: not because I have overcome it, but because I still do it all the time, and you know what they say: practice makes perfect.

Except this is a perfectly awful thing to be good at doing.

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Not all anger is bad because there are things that we should be angry about: injustice, hypocrisy, blasphemy, and when people do things that hurt other people.

Shaul tells us that being angry is not bad, but we should not sin in our anger (Ephesians 4:26), so if and when we feel that “rise” coming, we need to show the sort of compassionate patience that is a Fruit of the Spirit (you’ll find those listed in Galatians.)

The type of anger I want to talk about today is not justified anger with people when they do wrongful things, but when we are angry with people who aren’t even there.

We get angry when people with us do something to us or to others, but rehearsing our anger is when we are all alone!

Sometimes we rehearse our anger (which I do all too often) as we review a past event, and sometimes it happens when we are preparing for some future event. We think of the comments that were or might be made, what we want to say, and what the other person may say in response to us. The conversation goes on and on (now remember- this is all happening just in your head) and soon you find your blood pressure rising, the discussion becoming more passionate, and next thing you know you are totally pissed at this person, who isn’t even there.

That is what rehearsing our anger is all about, and it is not only a useless waste of energy, but it actually creates the same physiological responses that being in a real argument would do.

Some people may say, “C’mon, Steve- I am just venting and doing so when no one is there is safer than doing it when they are there, right?” Well, yes, to a degree, but in my experience that there is no such thing as “getting it off your chest”; in fact, my experience is that venting doesn’t release the anger, it enhances it. Anger is an all-consuming fire, and even when it dies down, there are embers that could burn for days, or months, or even years. Venting is like trying to put it out by throwing gasoline on it.

And in my case, my anger is not always righteous; the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) in me makes me righteous before God but that’s because it is the righteousness of the Messiah in me. When I don’t pay attention to what I am doing and don’t allow the Holy Spirit to lead my actions, I am acting on my own, in the flesh, and my flesh is not righteous. That is when I find myself rehearsing my anger.

It is usually in the car when I am driving somewhere and let my mind wander to past events. It is also in the middle of the night, when I am having trouble sleeping or when recent events are still gnawing at me. The embers that I didn’t even realize were there suddenly burst into flame.

When we rehearse our anger we are sinning.  Why? Well, for one, you can be certain that a degree of pridefulness is involved. We allow our anger to control us and we lose our compassion and forgiveness.

We are bearing false witness since the argument in our head is making someone say something that they haven’t really said. We are putting words in their mouth, which is essentially giving false testimony.

And the worst part of it is that by rehearsing our anger, we remove any opportunity for the other person to make atonement. Rehearsing the anger is a means of being able to “tell them off’- how often when we do this do we allow them to ask forgiveness? The point of this fire we have stoked is to burn brighter so we make sure they can’t make it all better.

In our rehearsed anger we want them to be, to say, and to do exactly those things that, in real life, we don’t want them to be, to say, or do. When we rehearse our anger we take away someone’s opportunity to make atonement, and by doing this we are trampling the blood of the Messiah into the dirt.

And that does not glorify God or Messiah Yeshua.

So nu?  how can we stop this self-destructive behavior?

One way is to gain more humility, and thereby the ability to just let it go. Give it up to God, faithfully believing he will handle it, just as we are told in Proverbs 20:22. That doesn’t mean asking God to make the other person stop what they do, it means asking God to help us stop doing what we are doing! Giving it up to God, totally, means if we find ourselves starting to rehearse our anger, we stop dead in our tracks and say, “Oops, sorry Lord- this is not mine anymore, it’s yours.”

Another way is to learn forgiveness. The pain of being wronged will never go away until you forgive, really forgive, the one who caused the pain. Once we learn to forgive as God forgives (sound familiar? think Matthew 6:9-14) then the embers will be doused completely because the sin would have been forgiven, and forgotten.

When we forgive and forget, but never forget what we forgave, then we never really forgave, in the first place.

Jewish wisdom tells us you can’t stop a bird from landing in a tree but you can keep it from building a nest there. When you smell the smoke, turn off the heat. Proverbs 26:20 says “Without wood, a fire goes out; without gossip, a quarrel dies down.” The only way to stop a fire is to take away the fuel so we must turn our thoughts away from anger and instead turn them towards something pleasant, something that will be fun to do, and I don’t mean imagine wringing their neck!

One really good way to not rehearse your anger, which is also a very righteous thing to do, is to pray for that person. I have found that when I pray for someone, all my bad feelings towards them disappear.

Overcoming rehearsing our anger is a hard thing to do, especially for me as I have been doing it all of my life, but as Yeshua told us, that although something may be impossible for a human to do, with God all things are possible.

I trust that God will grant my prayer to stop rehearsing my anger; I just don’t know when it will happen so I’ll keep doing my best until he steps in and finishes the job.

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

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Understanding Galatians 3:24-25

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Before we discuss this specific passage, let’s review what Galatians is all about.

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It is a letter written by Shaul (Paul) to a congregation of mostly Gentile Believers in Yeshua as the Messiah, and who were, essentially, converting from their pagan Roman religion to Judaism. These Gentiles were being harassed by Jewish Believers in Messiah who demanded that their conversion process be immediate and complete. Shaul was trying to maintain control of his fledgling congregation by keeping them on track with his slow introduction to the proper worship of God, and understanding of how Messiah Yeshua fit into God’s plan of redemption.

We can see this in all of Shaul’s letters to the different congregations he formed (there were no “churches” in the First Century), each battling with their own problems in keeping on the right track to developing proper worship. There was NEVER any condemnation of Torah or instructions to ignore or abandon Torah- there were slow, step-by-step instructions helping people to make a spiritual paradigm shift in both worship and lifestyle.

Now that we know the context of the letter to the Galatians, remembering that understanding the context is essential in any biblical study, we can take a look at the passage:

Accordingly, the Torah functioned as a guardian until the Messiah came, so that we might be declared righteous on the ground of trusting and being faithful.  But now that the time for this trusting faithfulness has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

We are all children of God, right? And anyone who has ever raised a child knows that the one thing children do, the moment they are able to understand boundaries, is to push the envelope of those boundaries. We, as parents, or should I say guardians, do all we can to allow them to explore their world while keeping them within the very boundaries they want to be free of. And when they cross those boundaries, we bring them back into righteousness through a time out, or grounding them, or sometimes a good slap on the tuchas.

Yet, even when understanding what will happen when they cross the boundary line, why do they continue to push those boundaries? If you’re asking me (and even if you’re not, I’m gonna tell you, anyway) it’s just basic human nature. We are always trying to push beyond whatever boundaries we are given.

We are bound by the sea below and the sky above: we can’t breathe underwater and we can’t fly, yet we pushed against those boundaries and eventually found ways in which we can now do both.

The Torah is a guardian that establishes boundaries; not natural boundaries like water and gravity, but moral ones. The Torah defines these boundaries, and human nature, being what it is, urges us to push those boundaries as far as we can to see where they break. That is who we are. The Torah accounts for this, in that not only does it establish the boundaries for proper living and worship, but as our guardian, it also provides the means for us to be brought back within those boundaries if, and when, we cross over them into sin.

When the Messiah came, he replaced a specific part of the Torah. It wasn’t the part that established the boundaries but the part that brought us back into righteousness when we crossed those boundaries. Yeshua’s sacrifice replaced the need to bring an animal to the temple in Jerusalem, which is the requirement under the Torah in order to be forgiven. The Torah states that we must bring our sacrifice to the location where God places his name in order for the sacrifice to be accepted (Deuteronomy 12:11), so when the temple was destroyed in 73 AD, there was no means of attaining forgiveness of sin.

Now we come to the most misunderstood truth about the Messiah:

The sole purpose of the Messiah is to be the means through which people can be forgiven of their sins.

Yes, Yeshua taught the deeper, spiritual meaning of the Torah (in Jewish exegesis it is called the Remes), but that wasn’t why he came. He performed many miracles, but that wasn’t why he came- that was only to prove who he was. The one and the only reason he came here was to provide the means by which we can be forgiven.

Once we understand this essential truth, then we can understand what Shaul meant when he said with the coming of the Messiah we are no longer under the guardianship of the Torah. He wasn’t talking about the boundaries set by the Torah, he was talking about the means to be brought back within those boundaries.

Let’s get back to kids for a second: as their guardian, we teach them the way to act and we enforce those rules, but when they get old enough to be on their own, they are no longer under our guardianship. That doesn’t mean that what we taught them as their guardian is no longer valid and necessary; it simply means that they are now the ones who are responsible to enforce the rules. The way we do that is through self-discipline and being responsible adults.

Do you now see the logic and relationship between the Torah, Yeshua, and guardianship? A guardian defines our boundaries and is the one who brings us back into righteousness, and the Torah did both of these before Yeshua came; now, after Yeshua, the Torah still establishes the boundaries, Yeshua is the one who brings us back into righteousness, but we are each of us responsible to stay within the boundaries the Torah defines.

The boundaries are still valid, the means to be brought back within the boundaries is through Yeshua, but we are now our own guardians.

Thank you for being here, and please share these messages and subscribe to the website and the YouTube channel. And remember: I always welcome your comments.

Please also check out and join my new discussion group, Just God’s Word (there are a few groups with this name, and mine is the one with the Torah as the cover photo.)

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

 

How To Argue Like A Believer

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I am a member of a number of different discussion groups, most of which are religious, meaning they profess to be composed of Christian, Hebraic Roots, or Messianic people.

Too often you wouldn’t know that by how they talk to each other.

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The topic of God, sin, or how to live our lives is a hot potato, no doubt of that, and engenders some really passionate discussion. Passionate is OK, really, so long as it is compassionately controlled. That means you can destroy someone’s argument but when you start to destroy the person making the argument, you have lost.

There are a few verses in Proverbs about arguing with a fool, but not everyone who argues is a fool. In fact, most are intelligent people who, sometimes, just believe in the most ridiculous things. And when we try to convince them of the truth (as we see it), we often feel like we are running headfirst into a brick wall.

And the fact of the matter is…we are.

That is the point at which I often see the discussion devolve into an exchange of personal insults.

Here’s what Socrates said about this condition:

When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. 

As Believers, we should represent God well. And what I mean by “Believer” is anyone who professes to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; you may (or may not) accept Yeshua as your Messiah, which isn’t necessary to believe in God. Anyone who believes in God should act in accordance with the way he says we should.  Of course, being human that won’t happen all the time, but that’s no excuse why we can’t make it happen all the time we are in a discussion with others.

I was once told by a boss, whom I respected as my boss and (I am happy to say) still respect as my friend (that’s you, James M.), that what I say is usually the right thing, but I say it the wrong way.  Ultimately, the right thing is lost because of the wrong way I say it.

A proper argument or discussion is when we exchange ideas without anger, and we should never tell the other person what they must believe. If we want to have any chance of convincing them of our position, we must first demonstrate that we respect their right to believe what they choose to believe. If we don’t start off that way, we will never get them to listen to our side. That’s a given. So, before we begin to argue for our side, ask them why they believe in their side. Asking them questions why they believe will give us the ammunition we need to shoot down their “facts”, and we may even learn something new. Just because we believe differently doesn’t mean we are always right.

Sometimes they may be the ones who are correct! If you aren’t willing to listen to their arguments, attentively, then you have already lost, even if you are correct.

There can often be more than one “truth” to a topic, and listening is the best way to realize that.

Never tell anyone they are not spiritual enough (even if they aren’t), or that they don’t know what they are talking about (even when they really don’t) because that is a personal attack, and all you will hear is “Shields up, Scotty!!”  And when that happens, you have lost. And not just lost the argument but lost the chance to possibly save someone’s soul from eternal damnation.

We need to first ask why they believe, and then tell them why we believe otherwise, giving biblical references or established facts. If you don’t know, absolutely, where your facts come from, then be prepared to say “I have heard” or “I was told”, in order to let the other person know you aren’t really sure, but chose to believe.

The best start to winning an argument is not to try to get the other person to believe as you do, but to get the other person to doubt what they believe. That is the first step; once they doubt their facts, then you can provide your reasons why you believe and let them make their own choice.

And if you find yourself getting frustrated with their refusal to accept your ideas, then stop. Recognize that the moment you are frustrated, you are no longer working to spread God’s truth, but to satisfy your own prideful need to be recognized and accepted. At that point, sin is crouching at your door and you must master it before you start to insult the other person.

We mustn’t allow ourselves to represent God poorly, as not only will this weaken our position, but it could also turn the other person, who may not be a Believer, away from God. The very last thing we ever want to hear is someone say to us “And you call yourself a Christian!”

Everyone is given free will to choose what they will believe and since that is a gift from God, who are we to take it away from them? They will be held accountable for what they believe, and when someone believes something that will hurt them, eternally, we should try to convince them of God’s truth, and if they refuse to listen, pray for them.

But never, ever insult them or their beliefs: that won’t change their minds, and in my opinion, is an insult to God.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages, and check out my new discussion group, Just God’s Word .

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

When Is It Enough, and When Is It Too Much?

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Are you as fed up with the facemask protocol as I am?  I am not at all against trying to stop the spread of a contagious disease, even one that is as relatively safe for some 98% of the population as COVID has proven to be, but I am against the hypocrisy of wearing a face mask to help protect others when the mask being worn is useless in doing so.

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.

The spiritual arguments against wearing the mask are also proliferating, and I agree that we are being conditioned, or controlled (in a way) by being forced to wear the mask. But at which point is it doing as the authorities command, which is what the Bible says we should do (Hebrews 13:17), and at which point is it like taking the mark of the Beast? Where do we draw the line?

My answer? I don’t have one. I think that it is going to depend on each case, each time we are asked to do something that, in our spirit, tells us it might not be right. But what we have to be careful about is to ask ourselves, “Is it my spirit, or my pride?”

If there is one thing that just about everyone in the world has copied from the Israelites when they were in the desert, it is being a stiff-necked and rebellious people (Exodus 32:9), so when it comes to doing what we are told to do by competent authority (OK, that may be an oxymoron) we tend to tell that authority what they can do with it.

I wear a mask when I go shopping because the grocery store requires it. I need to buy things, and if I don’t wear the mask I can’t go in the store. Is that a fulfillment of the verse in Revelation 13:17 about those who don’t take the mark won’t be able to buy anything? No, it isn’t, simply because I can always get what I want from Publix by going online and they will deliver it to me. So, no- I can still buy things, therefore wearing a mask is not taking the mark.

However, that doesn’t mean things won’t escalate. The next step may be refusing to allow me to buy using cash, which still isn’t quite at that point in prophecy, but when we add wearing a mask and not using cash, we are getting closer.

And the more they try to tell me how to live, the more I want to tell them where to go.

The lesson for us today is not to allow pride to get in the way of cooperation, and not to allow ourselves to cooperate to the point where we are now working for the wrong guy. The important question is: “When is it enough, and when is it too much?”

I wish I could give you an easy to follow answer, but there isn’t one, so read the Bible, pray, ask God to guide you through his Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit), and stay alert.

I have a really good mask I just bought which is made in Israel, guaranteed to stop Coronavirus for a year, and it’s reusable. And let me add one more thing: it had better work because it was expensive!

I believe we ARE in prophetic times, and although I am wearing the mask when I have to, I am trying to be as wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove, even though I look like some 1880’s stagecoach outlaw.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, and check out the Picture Album tab on my website, where I share my personal life with you. I just added a video of the vacation I took last week with my best friend at his timeshare in Cabo San Lucas.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!