Author: Steven R. Bruck
Those With Faith Have No Fear and Those With Fear Have No Faith
Do you think that fear is the lack of courage or is courage the lack of fear? I have always heard, and agree, that courage is when we overcome our fear.
Fear is an instinct, it is designed to help us survive, but when we let our fear rule us that is when we have lost ourselves to the enemy.
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The enemy of God uses fear: fear of loss is the strongest of all fears, but there is also fear of pain, fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of success, and there is even fear of being afraid. When your fears are controlling you, they are called phobias.
Courage is how we overcome the basic and instinctive fears that we have. There are different ways that people can find courage, and I believe the best way is through faith in God.
Humans want to be in control of themselves and what happens in their life, and I think when people don’t believe in God or believe he exists but they don’t think it is important to follow his instructions, they believe that way because they don’t want to cede control to him. They fear losing control and that fear is why they have no faith.
I also know people who say they believe in God and are faithful but go through life afraid of everything. They won’t drive on the highway, they won’t take a plane ride, and they won’t try to improve their condition or even try to do something different. These people are afraid of living.
And yet, they believe they are in control. Oy!
The Bible is rife with verses that should encourage us, meaning to literally put courage into us. Verses such as these:
Psalm 32:8…I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Romans 8:31…What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
Joshua 1:9…Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.
Psalm 23:4…Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Psalm 27:1…The LORD is my light and my salvation— whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life— of whom shall I be afraid?
And this is just a small sampling.
To place our faith in God means, more than anything else, to accept his sovereignty and to trust him to always take care of us. That doesn’t mean we will never have tsouris in our lives: we need to have trials and tribulations because gold is only made pure after going through the fire. We can be anxious and even afraid of the suffering, but we must not be ruled by that fear. Again, fear is normal and we cannot help but feel it. That doesn’t mean we should be afraid of the fear or allow it to rule us: we gain the courage to overcome and control our fear through our through faith in God, knowing that even as we suffer he is working towards reducing or relieving that suffering.
Suffering, loss, and emotional trauma can, and often does, overwhelm people; we can find the strength to survive from our steadfast knowledge and faith in God, believing absolutely that he is always there to prevent our destruction.
Faith is not something that God will give us, and the kind of faith that comes from some miraculous event is fleeting, and (I believe) dangerous because a faith that is the result of a miracle is a faith that could be turned to Satan, who is capable of performing miracles. In fact, aren’t we told in Revelation that the prophets of Satan will perform many miracles and that many will be turned from the true faith?
Faith is a choice; it is a conscious decision to believe. It isn’t something we can see or feel (Hebrews 11:1), and our faith is strengthened when we follow the instructions God gave us in the Torah (James 2:14.)
When we choose to cede control of our lives to God and faithfully trust God to always take care of us, no matter what, we can be confident and encouraged because, well… who can beat up God?
(I just thought about something: when I said to “faithfully trust”, that’s actually redundant, isn’t it?)
Too many people today put their faith in technology or in someone in politics, or even in a sports figure or a newspaper. They trust quickly in what they hear and what they see, not thinking for a moment how easily those senses can be fooled.
Trust in God, choose to believe in what you will (probably) never see in this lifetime, and stick to that faith no matter what anyone else tells you. When you trust in God and demonstrate that trust through following his instructions, you will be given confirmation that your faith is well-founded.
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Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
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Don’t Camouflage the Truth
When I was in the Marine Corps one of the important lessons we learned was how to apply camouflage correctly. Camouflage is designed to allow you to be in view of the enemy but not be seen because, when applied correctly, it lets you blend into the background colors and also breaks up the recognizable contours and shapes of your face and body.
So, what does this have to do with truth?
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How many times have you read or heard someone talking about the Bible or a biblical truth to someone else in a derogatory or judgmental way? And when they were told they didn’t need to be nasty, they played that old, “I am just telling you the truth” card?
When someone does that, they may be telling the truth, but they have camouflaged the truth with their pridefulness. And the result is that no good will come of it because the one who needs to see the truth will not be able to see it: it’s been camouflaged by pride and arrogance.
NOTE: When I say people camouflage the truth with their own pride, what I mean is that they are more interested in showing off what they know instead of using what they know to help someone else.
Shaul said he may have many gifts but if he doesn’t have love, he is nothing (1 Corinthians 13), and the same is true regarding telling the truth to someone about God’s word or Yeshua’s teachings. If you can’t show someone the truth without being nasty, sounding judgmental, or insulting them, then whatever truth you may actually have will not be seen because it has been camouflaged by your attitude. In other words, no matter how correct you may be, you might as well be talking to a wall.
The moment you start to insult or demean someone in any way their response will be “Shields up, Scotty!!” And whether or not you think you are being nasty doesn’t matter: another thing I learned in the Marine Corp is that if they think you are being nasty, then you are being nasty. When people camouflage the truth with their pride and arrogance, they have not only failed to help that person but have actually helped the enemy of God because they will turn that person off from any of God’s truth, even from hearing it from another person who knows how to communicate without letting their ego get in the way.
So here is the truth about speaking the truth: if you can’t say it nicely, then please don’t say it at all because your camouflage will prevent them from seeing it from you, and maybe even from someone else.
The bottom line is that if we cannot tell someone the truth about God or Yeshua without making them feel attacked, then we are wasting our time, failing to be effective, hurting the person’s chances of being saved, and dishonoring God and Yeshua, as well.
The next time you want to share the truth with someone, don’t camouflage it with pride but present it humbly and with compassion for the other person’s feelings. That way the truth will be obvious not just in your words, but in your attitude, as well.
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Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
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Parashah Yitro 2020 (Jethro) Exodus 18-20
Moshe and the people have been traveling and are nearing Midyan, so Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro (Jethro is the English version of his name), comes out with Zipporah and Moshe’s two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, to meet him and return them to him.
The Chumash notes that Moshe must have sent them back in Exodus 4:24 when he stopped along the way to Egypt and the Lord was angry with him, which was quelled when Zipporah circumcised Gershom.
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While with Moshe, Yitro sees him judging all the people, all by himself, and recommends that he delegate his authority to others who are trustworthy. This was to make it easier on Moshe, as well as to ensure that the people waiting for judgment also had it easier. Consequently, this was such a good idea that this form of management has been used ever since.
Next, the people come to Sinai, and God gives the 10 Commandments to Moshe, saying that so long as the people obey God’s words, they will be his chosen people and a kingdom of priests.
When the people hear the sound of the shofar, see the burning mountaintop covered in thick smoke, and feel the earth trembling under their feet, they tell Moshe that he should go to God and they will do whatever God tells them to do through Moshe, but they are too afraid to bear witness to God. This is where the parashah ends.
This parashah has the 10 Commandments: how can I even begin to start to talk about them without writing a book? There is too much, and even if I did one message on each of the individual commandments, it would take a book for each one to truly do them justice.
So I am copping out on this one- maybe, if enough people ask me, I will do a teaching series on the 10 Commandments, but I am not going to talk about them today.
Today, I am going to talk about what I have talked about many times in postings and answers to questions raised in different discussion groups regarding the validity of the Torah for Christians.
Here is what God told Moshe to tell the people just before giving him the Big 10 (Exodus 19:5-6):
Now if you will pay careful attention to what I say and keep my covenant, then you will be my own treasure from among all the peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you will be a kingdom of cohanim for me, a nation set apart.’ These are the words you are to speak to the people of Israel.
God has given a commission, if you will, to the Jewish people, which is to be his nation of priests. But priests to whom?
I tried to find a standard definition or listing of the responsibilities of a priest, but couldn’t find any two that gave the same answer. The one I am to show you seemed to be the most generic (I apologize for the length, but I believe the entire thing really has to be seen, and the part underlined is by me):
There is no common definition of the duties of priesthood between faiths; but generally it includes mediating the relationship between one’s congregation, worshippers, and other members of the religious body, and its deity or deities, and administering religious rituals and rites. These often include blessing worshipers with prayers of joy at marriages, after a birth, and at consecrations, teaching the wisdom and dogma of the faith at any regular worship service, and mediating and easing the experience of grief and death at funerals – maintaining a spiritual connection to the afterlife in faiths where such a concept exists. Administering religious building grounds and office affairs and papers, including any religious library or collection of sacred texts, is also commonly a responsibility – for example, the modern term for clerical duties in a secular office refers originally to the duties of a cleric.
When Moshe was alive, he was the one who taught the people what God required of them; the priesthood was restricted to physical and clerical care of the Tabernacle and the performance of rituals, such as sacrifice and cleansing of those who had become unclean.
This role expanded after Moshe’s death and entry into the Land of Israel to include the teaching of the Torah and judging of the people in religious and civil matters.
Today the role of a priest or rabbi is pretty much to be the intermediary between the congregants and God and to teach them the way to live as God requires.
Now, let’s go back to God telling Moshe that the Jews will be his nation of cohanim: because the cohen serves God in the performance of the rituals and (God knew this) would eventually also be the ones to teach the congregants how to live and worship according to God’s commands, that means the answer to the question, “To whom will the Jews be a nation of priests?” is: to the world!
God separated within the Jews the tribe of Levi to serve as cohanim to the Jews; he then separated the Jews to be cohanim to the world, which means that the question of whether or not the Torah is still valid for everyone who worships the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is unquestionably declared by God to be: YES!!
God gave the Torah to the Jews to bring to the world: God never said all laws were for Jews but only these for Catholics, those for Episcopalians, and here are 15 just for Protestants. No, he didn’t do that: he gave Moshe his instructions on how we worship God and how we treat each other and told him that the Jews would be the ones to bring this to the rest of the world.
This means that if you have been taught the Torah is only for Jews, then what you have been taught is against what God said. Sorry- that is a hard word to hear: it means your religious leaders and family members who you love and trust have led you not to eternal joy but to eternal damnation for sinning against God, but, well…that’s how it is. They didn’t do it on purpose because they were told the same lies by those they trusted and loved, as well, who were told the same lies by those who they loved and trusted, all the way back to somewhere around the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd Century CE.
So, there you have it. This parashah contains the most important set of rules that have ever been created or written down but are meaningless if people think these are the only rules God gave that apply to everyone.
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Until next time, Shabbat shalom, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
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Which Books Make up the Torah, Really?
I mentioned in my last message to you that I would be talking about which books really make up the Torah, and what I mean is the Torah that Moses knew to be the Torah.
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Yes, we all know that the Torah is the first five books of the Bible, but when I did a search using the Complete Jewish Bible (because many other bibles – most, in fact- do not use the word “Torah” at all) I found that it was used only a few times outside of the book of Deuteronomy.
So let’s take a look at Deuteronomy, where Moses uses this word the most times.
But before we do that, let’s review the other books: Genesis talks about creation through Joseph, Exodus tells us of how God brought his people out of slavery up to the establishment of the Priesthood and construction of the Tabernacle. Leviticus gives the laws regarding food, worship, the sacrificial system, and moral standards. Numbers is the narrative of the travels through the desert and ends with the preparations for dividing the land when the people enter it.
Each of these books is a separate narrative, each dealing only with one aspect of the history of God and his chosen people.
Now we come to the last book of the Pentateuch (Greek for “5 books”), Deuteronomy. The Hebrew name for this book is D’Varim, which means “the words”, and these are all the words Moses spoke to the people of Israel just before they entered the land God promised them.
Remember, this isn’t the generation that left Egypt, all of whom died in the desert; this generation, the ones entering the land God promised to their fathers, are the children that were babes when Moses led them from Egypt or who had been born and grew up in the desert. Moses takes this time, before he dies, to make sure that God’s rules and instructions are clear to them.
Within this book, we have Moses retelling how the people assigned Moses to be their intercessor with God. Moses reminds them of the sinfulness their fathers demonstrated throughout their travels, and how God punished them for it, yet here they are proving that God kept his promise to bring them, this new generation, to the land he promised their fathers.
In Chapter 5 he reviews the 10 Commandments; in Chapters 12 and 13 Moses instructs them about proper worship, warning against idolatry of any kind. Chapter 14 reviews the laws of Kashrut (Kosher), Chapter 15 is about societal rules, Chapter 16 instructs the proper celebration of the festivals of the Lord, and Chapter 17 instructs how to establish the government.
The remaining chapters deal with the penal system, torts, criminal and sexual crimes, and marital regulations.
At the end of this book, Moses tells the people that they are to confirm this covenant, and when they enter the land to write in on the mountains and declare it publicly to the peoples living there.
Throughout this book, Moses also promises that if they follow these instructions he is giving them that God will keep his promise to protect and bless them. If they choose life (i.e., to follow God’s instructions) then they will live long and happy lives; but, if they rebel and reject his instructions and live as the people that live there now do, then God will punish them and eventually the land will vomit them out, as it is doing to the ones there now. This is in Chapter 28, known as the Blessings and the Curses chapter.
This is important to Note: the instructions Moses constantly talks about throughout this book are the ones he is giving to the people then and there- these are found in all of the other books, but he is condensing them all in this one book and giving them to the people right at that moment!
Now we come to my original question: Which books make up the Torah, really?
My answer is that the Torah Moses speaks about is the book of Deuteronomy, alone. When he says to obey all the laws and regulations he is giving them that are in the book, he means Deuteronomy, alone. That one book has all the important aspects of worship and interpersonal relationships that God wants us to obey.
In the days when Moses first put all this down on parchment, although I couldn’t find any historical confirmation, I think it makes sense that we would not expect Moses to have written the entire Torah scroll we have today as a single scroll. Because of the diversity of the first 4 books, I believe that each was, at first, a separate scroll and only when they were put together did they become the one Sefer Torah (Book of the Torah) we use today. I believe that when we read in 2 Chronicles 34 how Hilkiyahu found the scroll of the Torah and it was read to the king, it seems to me that even though he had no plans to binge-watch Vikings on Netflix that night, to read the entire 5 books would have been too much at one time. However, to read through one book, Deuteronomy, would take only a few hours, if that much. And later, when they sought the advice of the prophetess Huldah, who said that Adonai will bring upon them all the curses written in this book, she must be referring to Deuteronomy, where curses are stipulated in Chapter 28, as well as in Chapter 11.
I believe the “Torah” Moses talks about throughout the book of Deuteronomy is just that one book, and the references to Torah in the other parts of the Bible were assumed scribal translations added later. The separate scrolls comprising the 5 books of the Torah we know, were probably put together sometime after the people entered the land, maybe in the time of Joshua or the Judges. The oldest known Torah dates back only to 1250 CE. The oldest Jewish manuscripts we know of, I suppose, are the Dead Sea Scrolls and they are all separate scrolls. According to Wikipedia:
Of the scrolls found, about a quarter (220 in all) are books of the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament: all the books, in fact, except Esther and Nehemiah. The most common books found are Psalms and Deuteronomy.
So…Deuteronomy was, at one point, a separate scroll, which would seem to confirm my assumption that the scroll Moses refers to as the “Torah” is just the one book we know as Deuteronomy, which is the scroll found in the Temple by Hilkiyahu and read to King Yoshiyahu.
Does this message have anything to do with your salvation? Of course not, it is just something that I believe might help us better understand what Moses was saying to the generation of Israelites just before they entered the land, and also to help us better realize what Moses meant when he said that these laws were not so hard to know, or so far away from us. There are 613 separate commandments in the Torah we know today, the 5 books Moses wrote during the 40 years in the desert; however, all that Moses said we really need to know is found in the one book we call Deuteronomy.
Thank you for being here and I hope you found today’s message interesting, if not educational. Perhaps it will help someone, someone who doesn’t feel like reading the entire Bible but is interested in what it says. By reading Deuteronomy, they will get all they need to know.
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Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
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Why Did God Give Us the Torah?
That seems to be an easy question to answer, doesn’t it? I would think we are all thinking the same thing: God gave the Torah to the Jews so they could know the difference between sin and righteous living.
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That’s true; in fact, according to Shaul, the Torah created sin (Romans 7) and without it, we wouldn’t know what was right or wrong.
Now, as true as the above statement is, I would call it a Christian view because many Christians believe the Torah is just for the Jews. Which is, of course, absolutely wrong.
A more Jewish view, if you will, is that God gave the Torah to the Jews, who he chose to teach it to the rest of the world. That is why God tells Moses in Exodus 19:6 that he is choosing the Jewish people to be his nation of priests to the world. That statement can only mean that the Torah is for everyone, not just for Jews.
It is the same thing as when someone learns all they can about mathematics and after becoming an expert in performing mathematical calculations and finding solutions, becomes a teacher of mathematics so that others can learn how to do it.
God chose the Jewish people, descendants of Abraham, to be trained in the way God wants us to worship him and treat each other so that we could then teach the world through example and education.
What went wrong was when men invented religion.
The Torah has always been referred to as the first 5 books of the Bible, and most often misinterpreted to mean “laws.” In truth, the word “Torah” means teaching. It is more than laws, it is a constitution, a marriage certificate (in Hebrew, called a Ketubah) and it is also a penal code establishing the rights, and legal remedies for the abrogation of those rights, of each citizen of the Torah-observant community.
The real answer to the question “Why did God give us the Torah” is so that we could live long, happy lives in the land we possess. This is told to us more than 4 times in the book of Deuteronomy, alone. When we follow the instructions God gave in the Torah, then we will live secure, happy, bountiful, blessed, long and protected lives in the land we possess. For modern people, that means where you live, now.
The next question is “What books make up the Torah, really?”, and that will be for my next message.
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Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch Ha Shem!