Growing up Jewish, I was subject to many accusations from my Christian friends stating that it was us Jews who killed God (meaning Jesus Christ).

Of course, my reply was that it was the Romans who actually killed him, but now I know it wasn’t really them.

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

The answer to who really killed Yeshua is…. I did.

Actually, you did, too!

In fact, everyone killed him; without his death, God’s desire that no one should have to die (Ezekiel 18:23) cannot be accomplished.

God wants everyone, Jew and Gentile, to be in his presence forever because he doesn’t care about religion, he cares about faithfully believing in him and accepting Yeshua as the Messiah he promised to send. Without Yeshua’s sacrificial blood to cleanse us of our sins, no one has any chance of being forgiven.

God will not abide sin in his presence, so we need to be forgiven of our sins, which cleanses us, in order to be with him.

Yeshua’s sacrifice replaced the need to bring an animal to the temple in Jerusalem, which (according to the Torah) was the only place where any sacrifice would be accepted. With the destruction of the temple around 70-73 AD, there was no way for anyone to be forgiven, except by means of the innocent blood shed when Yeshua was killed.

That is why there is no way to the father except through Yeshua (John 14:6).

So, if everyone else on the earth was 100% righteous, with me being the only exception, I believe Yeshua would have undergone all the torture he did and even die…just to save me.

And he would have done the same just to save you.

So, it wasn’t the power elite in Jerusalem who killed him, although they set him up for death.

And it wasn’t Pilate who killed him because all he did was pass a judgement that he didn’t want to, but did so under duress from the people.

And the soldiers who nailed him to that execution stake didn’t kill him, because, well…he was alive even after they did it.

And even God, who accepted his spirit (Luke 23:46), didn’t really kill him since Yeshua asked him to do it.

No, it wasn’t Jews or Romans or even God who killed Yeshua- it was me, it was you, it was all of us.

If we had not been sinning, then even after being forgiven continuing to sin (because it is in our very DNA to do so), Yeshua would not have had to die.

Truthfully, if we were able to be sinless there would be no need for a Messiah at all.

Lucky for us, God knew better.

I believe he had planned for the Messiah since the very beginning, which is why John says that everything was made through him (John 1:3), meaning all that God did was designed with the Messiah in mind.

The next time you hear someone place blame on anyone for the death of Yeshua, you just tell them:

“Truth is the one who caused the death of the Messiah is…YOU!”

Thank you for being here and please comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

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

It is assumed that Yeshua was sacrificed in the year 33 AD, and that the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed around the year 72 AD, roughly two generations later.

I believe God sent Yeshua when he did because he knew the temple would be gone, and with it the only way we could be forgiven of sin.

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

To start with, the Torah states that God will not accept any sacrifice unless it is performed at the location where he will place his name (Deuteronomy 12:5), which was first at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting, then as the tent moved to Gilgal then Shiloh, and finally to the City of David, people had to travel there to make their sacrifices.

After Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem, that was the last (and still the only) place where God put his name, and therefor where sacrifices will be accepted.

Now, I think we all can agree that God knows what is going to happen, even if the only reason he knows that is because he can make whatever he wants to happen, happen, and happen exactly when he wants it to happen, and happen exactly the way he wants it to happen.

As my generation used to say, he is a real “happening” kind of guy!

So, knowing that Rome would soon be destroying the temple, and based on his never-ending desire to forgive us of our sins (Ezekiel 18:23), I believe he sent Messiah Yeshua before the destruction of the temple so that afterward, we could still be forgiven of sin.

Okay, now you may be thinking that he should have sent Messiah way back sometime before 605-587 BCE, when the Babylonian exile occurred and the first temple was destroyed. With that event, there was no way for anyone to receive forgiveness.

My answer would be that maybe since the exile was punishment for not having obeyed the Torah regulations, God wasn’t at that time willing to forgive anyone. After all, they were being punished. They violated many Torah commandments, not the least of which was worshipping other gods, and the people also failed to give the land a Shabbat rest every 7th year for 490 years!

God exiled the people from the land to give it rest, and he chose to exile them one year for each Shabbat rest the land did not get, which over 490 years means they would be exiled for 70 years.

God is really good with math!

Since the exile would be only for a short time, I think God was not willing to allow forgiveness until the punishment was over. That may sound harsh, but he is God and who will tell him what he can or can’t do?

Not me!

So, after the exile the people did return and rebuilt the temple, beginning what we call the second temple period, and forgiveness of sin was once again available.

Let’s now fast-forward to when Yeshua made forgiveness of sin possible by his sacrifice, which replaced the need to bring an animal to the temple; that is why he said the only way to the father (i.e., being free of sin) is through him (John 14:6).

After Yeshua made forgiveness possible anywhere and any time, Rome destroys the temple making the path to forgiveness under the Torah impossible.

Impossible, that is, unless you have faithfully accepted that Yeshua is the Messiah and through his sacrifice forgiveness is still available.

I started out by saying I believe the timing of Yeshua’s appearance two generations before the temple destruction was planned, and now I’ll explain why I say that.

At that time there was no Internet, mail service took a long time, and the best way for news to spread was by word-of-mouth as people traveled to trade their goods and while tending their herds and flocks.

For people to be aware of what happened in Jerusalem when Yeshua was crucified, and especially what happened for the 40 days or so after he was resurrected, needed time to get spread around. The Gospels make it clear that many thousands of people knew of him, but that was in the general area around Jerusalem, mostly in the Southern Kingdom territory.

I read that he covered about 20 square miles during his three year ministry, 80-90% of it in the area of the Galilee, while Israel contained about 8,000 square miles during that time, so he didn’t cover that much territory.

But over two generations, some 40-50 years, I believe that much of what he did had time to spread all over the land, and that gave people time to accept him before the temple was gone.

Those who rejected him as Messiah would soon find themselves, their kids, and all their descendants stuck without any way to be forgiven of sin.

Of course, there is no biblical justification for this drash of mine, and I often have preached how it is dangerous to try to make an argument out of nothing, but I still think “what if” or “why that” now and then. I mean, we humans are curious and there is that innate need to know “why?” that I have found in nearly everyone I have ever known.

Myself, included.

So, nu?.. do you think I’m making any sense with this? Would you agree that it is possible God timed Yeshua’s appearance for the reasons I believe?

Let me know, and thank you for being here. Please do comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!

We all know that after Yeshua was resurrected salvation became available to the Gentiles who were willing to faithfully accept that Yeshua is the Messiah the God of the Jews promised to send.

And in doing so, they also obligated themselves to accept the same laws and way of life that the Jews led.

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

Now, I’m sure that many Christians reading what I just wrote about the Gentiles being obligated to live as Jews lived if they accepted Yeshua as their Messiah are thinking:

“Well, no! We only have to do those 4 things in the letter they wrote (Acts 15) and the Torah is no longer valid for Gentiles because we have the law of Christ and we don’t have to follow the laws of Moses.”

I understand that is what many, MANY Christians have been taught, but I am here to say that is not correct.

Sorry, but the only place in the entire Bible where any of that church rhetoric comes from is not from God or Yeshua- it is a false teaching stemming from confusing language in letters written by a man to congregations of Gentiles he was teaching to be Torah obedient, but doing so slowly so that he wouldn’t lose them to their old habits.

Shaul (Paul) wrote to congregations that were started by him, teaching them the Torah but at a pace they could handle. That is why it has been so easy for Gentiles who did not want to worship God as God said to do (in the Torah) to change things around.

You see, at that time there was a constant rebellion against Roman rule by the Jews, and as these Gentiles began to accept Yeshua and be taught the Jewish way of worship, they felt they would be associated with the jews and, as such, become targets of Rome.

So, to politically protect themselves from Rome, they separated themselves from the Jews by changing how they worshipped.

And as for those 4 things in the letter James suggested, Christianity loves to teach that those are all Gentiles have to do, but James never said that! In fact, he suggested those 4 things as initial “must-do’s” never intending them to be the only things to do, and that is confirmed by Acts 15:21 when he said that these neophyte believers would learn the law of Moses while attending Shabbat services every week, when the laws were always being read.

So, again, sorry, but the truth is that Gentiles who accept Yeshua as their Messiah also have to accept the Torah as their way of life.

But they didn’t, and (as I mentioned) in order to separate themselves from the Jews, they decided to cover their own tuchas by changing how they worshipped from the way Yeshua worshipped to a way that was not pagan or Jewish, creating a new religion that was soon to be called Christianity.

And that is when they pruned themselves from the Tree of Life, which is the Torah. They created a new man-made religion which has rejected nearly everything God said he wanted from those who worship him.

They rejected his Holy Days and created their own.

They rejected his Shabbat and made their own.

In truth, they rejected God.

How did they reject God? Well, first off, when you reject what God says to do, you have rejected God, and by the middle of the Second Century they had created the idea of a Trinity which replaced God the Father with Jesus the Savior by making them one and the same entity.

Christians pray to Jesus, they ask Jesus for forgiveness of sins (which he, himself, said he could do only while on the earth in Matthew 9:1-8), and there is at least one Christian religion that says any priest can forgive your sins!

Personally, I think they came up with that idea because a celibate life is boring, and by creating this confession thing they could add a little vicarious excitement into their life by hearing what others were doing.

Remember the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Elmer chases Bugs up a tree? Bugs is at the end of a branch, with Elmer on that same branch sitting next to the trunk, sawing away at the part that Bugs is on. And when he saws all the way through the branch, the tree and Elmer fall, while the separated branch Bugs is on miraculously stays suspended in the air!

Christianity thinks it can do what Bugs did and get away with it.

If any Gentile states they have been grafted onto the Tree of Life but don’t obey the Torah, well they may have been grafted on at one time but by choosing to reject the Torah they have pruned themself from the Tree of Life, and are grafted onto nothing.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!

Time for another lesson in how to get people to listen to you.

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

Okay, first off let’s remember this very important rule:

People believe only half of what you tell them, but 100% of what they say.

Therefore, in order to get them to even listen to you, you have to first get them to doubt what they already believe.

“How do I do you do that?” You ask them why.

Ask them to explain why they believe what they believe, and that is how you start to get them to doubt themselves because, for the most part, they will give you parroted answers.

What is a parroted answer? Parrots learn to reply to instructions in a way that makes it appear they know what they are doing, but the truth is that they have no understanding- they are just repeating what they have been told in response to some stimulus.

No disrespect meant, but it’s like talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses- they know verses and passages but they don’t know the proper interpretation because they take everything out of context in order to make it fit into their programmed belief system.

Here’s an example based on Christians being taught that Yeshua did away with the law: you ask them why they believe Yeshua did away with the law and they will most likely say he completed it, maybe even quoting Matthew 5:17.

That’s when you ask this question: “If something isn’t what it used to be, does that mean it has been changed?”

(The best way to control a discussion is to ask questions, and you need to ask leading questions, in that the question leads to the answer you want.)

Of course they will have to answer “Yes”, so then you ask them if Yeshua said (in that verse) that he did not come to change anything, but you say he did away with the law, isn’t that changing something? He said he didn’t come to change anything, but you say he did change something? How do you explain that?

This is when you look at their eyes. If their eyes go up to the right top side of their sockets, according to Neuro-Linguistic Programming theory that means they are trying to create an answer that they don’t have.

Accept it- ministry is Sales and Sales is all about psychology.

You are now on the right track, so while they are thinking you provide an answer- the one you want them to hear, and you do it respectfully and softly, such as …

“What he said is that not one letter or stroke of the pen in the Torah would change, so Torah obedience is still required by those who accept him as their Messiah. He said things wouldn’t change until everything was done, so if you can show me the new Jerusalem or the new earth, which Revelation talks about, then it appears Torah obedience is still valid for those who believe Yeshua is the Messiah.

So, do you believe he is the Messiah God promised to send?”

Again, you asked a question you already know the answer to, which would have to be “Yes”.

Now you follow that up with the one question that makes them really wonder if they are right: “So if you believe Yeshua is the Messiah, and he said the law remains valid, what do you think you should do?”

At this time, don’t be surprised or disappointed if they still hold to their old belief, but what you have done is to put a small crack in the dam they have built holding back the truth, and maybe with enough of this type of ministering, that crack will begin to widen and some of the truth may seep out. Eventually, with God’s help and proper questioning, you will be able to break down the dam their improper teaching has created, and they will accept what you are saying.

Here is an important fact to remember: people who are immediately convinced of what you are saying will be just as easily convinced of what someone else says later- they are not the ones who will benefit from your ministering to them.

So, watch where their eyes go when you ask them leading questions- if they go up to the left, then all they are doing is repeating what they have heard; but, if they go up to the right, then you are having an impact.

The ones who are stubbornly holding on to their beliefs, but whose eyes keep going up to the right when you ask them a question are the ones who have a chance of (eventually) changing their minds.

Be patient and practice on your own with the questions and answers you know you will need because most everyone comes back with the same church rhetoric, and you need to be prepared for it.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believer. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

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

How many times have you seen that bumper-sticker that says “coexist” spelled out in different religious symbols?

It sounds like a good idea, but none of the religions represented by those symbols are called to coexist.  

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

In the Torah, God tells us that we are to be holy, as he is holy; I would give the biblical references but, frankly, there are too many of them so you can just take my word for it.  

Being holy doesn’t mean acting like some saint or being sinless (since no human being can be sinless), all it means is to be separate.  

And what should we be separate from? Why, the world, of course.

The idea of coexisting is fine with most Judea-Christian religions because we allow others to have the freedom to practice their religion without constraint or prejudice.

However, without naming names, let’s just say that not everyone is willing to do that.  

In reality, it’s pretty stupid to think that anyone is ever going to hold hands with a member of another religion that wants to destroy them and sing “Kumbaya“.

Get real, people- it ain’t gonna happen!

As for Israel, my spiritual homeland, I really wish they would stop trying to please the UN (which should be renamed to the United Nations Against Israel) and just wipe out the enemies that are attacking them, once and for all.

Joshua screwed-up by not eliminating all the enemies of God that he was told to eliminate, and that is why Israel is having so many problems, today. We need to learn from that mistake and not repeat it, which (sadly) is exactly what we are doing.

We know what the Bible says about the Acharit HaYamim (End Days) in Revelation, and also from many of the prophets, which is that the whole world will come against Israel before the return of the Messiah. And when he comes he will kick butt… and there won’t be any names left to take!

For those who may not be familiar with the adage, “Kick butt and take names“, the kicking butt part is easy to understand; for the ones whose butt you couldn’t kick, you take their name and send someone back who can kick it.

The truth is there is one God and he doesn’t have a religion, only his instructions for how to worship him and how to treat each other (that’s the Torah, God’s “User Manual for Righteousness”) and I don’t think he really doesn’t want to hear anything about any other way to do things.

People have free will, a gift from God, that no one should interfere with. That means anyone can practice any form of worship they want to without anyone forcing them to worship any other way. That ideal is a two-way street; in other words, you can do what you want and I can do what I want, but neither of us can force the other to do something else.

In Israel there are Jews, Christians and Muslims, and they all get along together, but in the rest of the world we see one religion (or political system) after another forcing conversions and torturing or killing those who remain faithful to their own beliefs.

The idea of different religions getting along is something that history has shown can’t happen, so get rid of the bumper-sticker and replace it with something that simply says, “In God, we trust” or maybe just leave the bumper clean.

Respect everyone’s right to choose for themself, and let them be- we all have enough to worry about regarding our own eternal condition.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

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

How about a nice, easy lesson today? Let’s talk covenants.

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

Before we talk about covenants, let’s make sure we are all on the same page as to what a covenant is: it is an agreement between two or more parties, and it can be conditional or unconditional.

Conditional covenants are those where each party promises to perform some act in order to make the covenant valid, and if either party violates their side of the agreement, then the covenant is rendered null and void.

Unconditional covenants are those where one side of the agreement promises to perform some act and the other side is not required to do anything.

Simple, right?

Okay, so the main 5 covenants we know from the Bible are these:

1. Noahdic Covenant– God promises unconditionally not to destroy life by a flood anymore, and the rainbow is the sign of that covenant.
2. Abrahamic Covenant– God promises Abraham that he will make him into a nation and give him the land of the Canaanites. He also promises that those who curse Abraham will be cursed, and those who bless him will be blessed. The sign of this covenant is that all the males of Abraham’s family and slaves must be circumcised.
3. The Mosaic Covenant- God promises to make us into a holy nation if we obey the laws he gives us. The sign of this covenant is the Shabbat (Sabbath).
4. The Davidic Covenant– God promises King David that so long as his children obey God’s commandments (in the Torah) then he will always have a descendant sitting on the throne. Most important about this is that he also promises to make David’s house a perpetual house, which is understood to be the promise that the Messiah will be a descendant of David.
5. The New Covenant– Despite what you may think, this is not in the New Covenant writings, but in Jeremiah 31:31. God promises to write his Torah on our hearts and forgive our sins so that no longer will anyone have to say “Know Adonai” because we will all know him.

So, now that we have the covenants down, let’s identify which ones are conditional and which aren’t.

There is really only one that is unconditional, the Noahdic Covenant. God doesn’t require anything from us in that covenant.

The other four are all conditional: for Abraham we need to be a circumcised male (although obviously females won’t have to undergo that), for the Mosaic Covenant we need to obey the Torah, and the Davidic Covenant is conditional upon David’s descendants obeying the Torah.

Although the New Covenant doesn’t specify any requirement, I have to believe that if someone has not turned their heart towards God they probably won’t be allowed into that covenant.

You may be thinking why God, who has always kept his side of the bargain even though we have often (actually, always) broken our side of his covenants, has still done what he said he would do regarding the conditional covenants.

I think the answer is this: God loves us so much that he is willing to allow us to screw up over and over, but he will not take advantage of his legal right to break his side of the covenant.

I believe this is pretty obvious when we see how many times God has allowed his people to violate his covenants yet was willing to forgive us when we did T’shuvah (turning from sin) in order that the covenant would remain in force.

Ezekiel 18:23 says it best: God doesn’t want to see anyone die (meaning an eternal death), which is why he maintains his side of broken covenants, just waiting for us to re-establish our side.

And when we fail to get around to replacing our heads on our shoulders from where we had them (I won’t say where, but the sun doesn’t shine there), God eventually runs out of patience and decides to give us some motivation, such as a plague, sending the sword against us, famine, etc. He still keeps his side, despite our violation, and instead of just leaving us be he tries to get us back on track.

However, for those who constantly and happily violate the covenants, God will allow them to go their own way, which I believe is very painful to him. But because he loves us so much, he is willing to allow us to kill ourselves, even when he doesn’t want that to happen.

One more thing about covenants- they are in force until one side breaks them or whatever time period they may have attached to them runs out. As for God’s Torah, he gives us a term limit- throughout all your generations.

That means as long as we are alive, those laws are valid and required to be in the covenant with God. Christianity has taught that you can violate the Mosaic Covenant without any repercussions, but that is a false teaching, unless you can show that you have no more generations.

Yeshua lived in accordance with all God’s covenants, including the Torah, which is why he was resurrected- like it or not, the Torah IS the path to salvation because it is God’s “User Manual for Righteousness”, and obedience to the Torah will result in salvation; Yeshua proved that by being resurrected.

The problem is that humans cannot do that, which is why God sent the Messiah, to cover our tuchas when we screw up.

Everyone is under the Noahdic Covenant, and can be under every other covenant if they choose to be obedient and meet the requirements for our side of the agreement. To be saved you do not have to be circumcised because being a member of the Abrahamic Covenant is not a requirement for salvation, but if you want to be saved you need to recognize that believing in Yeshua is NOT a part of any of the covenants, and salvation cannot be earned so it is not a covenental issue, either. Believing in Yeshua is required to receive forgiveness by means of the sacrificial blood he shed, replacing the need to bring an animal to the temple.

Salvation is eternal life, and it is a side-effect of the New Covenant, but (as I said earlier) I truly believe that anyone who rejects obedience to God’s Mosaic Covenant will not be allowed to participate in the New Covenant.

It just doesn’t make sense that God will allow those who purposefully reject his Torah to be forgiven, despite what your Christian religion may tell you.

Here is something to consider: at the end of time we will all face God, and some will say, “I tried to be obedient to your covenants” and others will say, “I did what my man-made religion told me was okay to do.”

So nu?… which of those people do you think God will accept into his presence?

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages, even with non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

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

I have often stated that I believe the Gospel of John is a false gospel, and by that I mean it is not written by the real apostle John, and even more than that, I do not believe it was even written by a Jewish person.

Warning: this one will be longer than most of my messages.

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

I think we first have to remember that what started out as a movement within the Jewish people, one where Yeshua was being recognized as anything from a prophet to the Messiah, had originally been (except for a very few exceptions) only within the Jewish population . It wasn’t until about 3-4 years after his resurrection that Shaul (Paul) changed his mind about Yeshua and began to open the path to salvation through Yeshua (now recognized as the Messiah) to the Gentile population throughout the Middle East and Asia. This was a paradigm shift in lifestyle for those Gentiles, and Shaul was bringing them into Torah observance at a pace they could handle.

The problem was that the Jews were rebelling against Roman rule and, as such, the Gentile believers started to get worried that their conversion would target them along with the Jews, so that by the end of the First Century, when most of the original Jewish leaders had been martyred or dead and the majority of Jews who would believe in Yeshua had come and gone, the movement that was Jewish mutated into a new religion called Christianity, which by the middle of the Second Century (after the Jewish rebellion had been put down, once and for all around 132 AD), this new religion was targeted by Rome, anyway, because the one thing Rome hated more than rebellion was a religion other than their own in one of their territories.

Okay, so now we have the historical background to support why this Jewish movement was moving away from Judaism by the time John wrote his gospel.

According to scholars, John was exiled to Patmos around 93 AD, spent anywhere from 18 months to 3 years there, then was released and eventually returned to Ephesus, He died there around 100 AD at the approximate age of 92. He wrote about his vision of the Apocalypse while on Patmos, but his gospel wasn’t written until after he returned to Ephesus.

According to scholars, the three narrative gospels were each written sometime within 40 years or so of Yeshua’s death and resurrection around 30 AD: Mark wrote his gospel around 70 AD, Matthew and Luke were written around 80-85 AD.

Now what is funny here is that when you look up when Matthew was supposed to have died, it is sometime between 68-70 AD, some 10-15 years before he was supposed to have written his gospel! And if the other gospels were written within 40 years or so of the resurrection, why did John wait over 60 years?

I contend that no one really knows when the gospels were written, they only have guesses. And we know that many times scribes would write letters from notes made by someone, signing that person’s name. This is suspected to have been done with a number of Shaul’s (Paul) letters.

(You can check that out in the teaching series I have written regarding the Epistles- here is a link to that series of teachings: the Epistles.)

So, with these questionable issues about any and all of the gospels, let me go into some of the reasons I feel that John is not a valid gospel, at all, and written by a Gentile using the name of John.

One reason is that he doesn’t write about the Torah or the Jews correctly. What I mean is that a Jew would never call the people “the Jews”, which John does nearly 60 times throughout this gospel; to a Jew, the other Jews are “the people”. And a Jew would never, ever refer to the Torah as “their Torah”, which John does in his gospel.

Another reason I doubt the validity of John is because it fails the test of Hermeneutics, which is the exegesis tool that says every part of the Bible should not contradict any other part of the Bible, since it was all (allegedly) inspired by God, who never changes.

How John fails this test is, for one, where he refers to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). The other three gospels are clear that Yeshua says he has come only for the children of Israel (Matthew 15:24) and explicitly says to his disciples not to tell anyone he is the Messiah (Matthew 16:20, Mark 8:30, and Luke 9:21), yet here in John he not only tells this Samaritan woman he is the Messiah (failing to match what the other gospels said), but he stays in her town and teaches there for 2 days (again, totally against what Yeshua says in the other gospels)!

And when it comes to the idea of the Trinity (which arguments for or against will not be part of this discussion), almost every justification for saying Yeshua is also God comes only from John’s gospel. Nowhere in any of the other Gospels does Yeshua even hint that he is God. And I also will go as far as to say the miracle of making wine from water (John 2) is designed specifically to show that Mary has some level of authority over Yeshua!

Think about it: the Roman Catholic Church (which was the only church until about 1054) has constantly had people pray to Mary to intervene with Jesus. This miracle indicates that she has that power, since he first said he didn’t want to do anything, but she went ahead and had him do it, anyway. And another thing: every miracle that Yeshua performed in the other three gospels had to do with healing of one sort or another- but in John he makes wine from water for a party! Why? I believe it is only to indicate the authority that Mary has over Yeshua and within the Catholic Church.

Another thing about John is that the writing is stylistically not “Jewish”. Even as confusing as Shaul’s letters are, John is full of double-talk and overly spiritualized metaphor that makes it almost impossible to tell when Yeshua is talking literally or figuratively.

I am Jewish and understand Jewish logic, which is that we Jews will tell you everything something is not before we tell you what it is, but John is written so confusingly that you don’t know what is real and what is not:
If you know me you know him, but you don’t know him so you can’t know me, and that is why you don’t know me because you don’t know him, yadda-yadda-yadda…

One last thing, and I appreciate anyone who has stayed with me this long: by the end of the First Century, the one thing that the Jews and (now called) Christians had in common was this: neither side wanted any more Jews joining this movement. Even Shaul recognized this shift by stating that the Jews will no longer accept Yeshua until the time of the Gentiles is over (Romans 11:25).

By the time John was supposed to have been written, already Christianity was separating itself from its Jewish beginnings by changing the Shabbat to Sunday (Ignatius of Antioch proclaimed that around 98 AD) and by the time of Tertullian’s influential writings (which, for the record, is where the term “trinity” originated) in the middle of the Second Century, Christianity had changed from a Jewish movement inviting Gentiles to a totally new Gentile religion that rejected the Jews and “their” Torah.

John’s gospel is written in a way that would turn-off any self-respecting Jew from even wanting to hear anything more about Yeshua. That is how I was raised, as many Jews have been for millennia, being taught that Jesus was a Jew but turned against Judaism and created Christianity.

Of course, that is untrue- Yeshua was, and still is, Jewish but he did not create Christianity! Men did, and they did so by misusing the letters Shaul wrote and doing everything they could to keep Jews from wanting to know anything about this new godhead of theirs called Jesus Christ.

And that is why I believe, for the reasons stated above, this so-called gospel was written by a Gentile leader of the new religion called Christianity designed specifically to keep Jews away and to further separate this new religion from its Jewish roots.

Thank you for staying through this, and I am sure it is very uncomfortable for many, especially Gentiles, to hear what I am saying. I am not telling anyone to change what they believe, only what I believe and why- you make up your own minds.

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

Being anti-something isn’t always a bad thing, depending on why anyone is against a certain thing. If a person is hateful and bigoted, that is usually based in ignorance and upbringing, whereas if someone is against something for moral or religious reasons, that doesn’t necessitate hatefulness.

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

This message came to me after a discussion with a friend last night, when he told me that I was Anti-Christian. I replied (as my defense) that I was Anti-Christian teaching, but not Anti-Christian.

I am grateful to him for telling me, straight out, that if I am Anti-Christian teaching then I am Anti-Christian. And, in response to that, I had to say he was right.

But I am not Anti-Christian, I am Anti-Christianity. That is the difference between being a bigot and just not agreeing with a religious belief system.

From my lifetime of knowing people who are Anti-Semitic (when you’re Jewish you get to meet a lot of people like that) I have found that the basis for their hatred is not religious, whatsoever. They are not against us worshipping God, or for being devoted to the Torah, although I have been accused of being a Christ-killer, but even that is not enough to generate the level of hatred and violence against us.

The main reason, from my experience, for people being Anti-Semitic is economic. We have been accused of controlling the media and the finances of the world. We even have been accused of being the children of Satan (John 8:44).

The fact that we have been very successful in business and finance has not helped dispel that lie.

But my being Anti-Christianity is not based on economics, social positioning, or anything other than the teachings that Christianity has been proliferating for nearly two millennia. I do not hate any Christians, but I do hate the things they have been taught.

Some examples of those teachings being replacing God the father with Yeshua the Messiah, bowing and praying to statues, telling people that they can ignore the Torah because Yeshua did away with it (which makes the son of God a traitor to his father misleading people away from proper worship), and (this is a biggie!) teaching that Jews are no longer God’s chosen people because God has rejected the Jews as a result of us rejecting his son.

Having a love and respect for God and Yeshua, those teachings are, to me, as annoying as someone insulting my wife in front of me.

So, yes, I am an Anti-Christianity person but I am not against Christians. You might call this one of those times where we hate the sin but love the sinner.

And despite being told, more times than I care to count, that I do not know the Bible or understand the Epistles or that I can’t really be saved because I still do all that “Jewish” stuff, I know that if I continue to try to live as best as I can in accordance with the way God said to live and worship him (which is only found in the Torah), faithfully trusting that Yeshua is the Messiah and through his sacrifice I am able to find forgiveness of sin (which is, ultimately, what being saved means), then I am absolutely positive that I am on the right path to salvation.

And despite not liking Christianity, I still can love Christians.

This ministry is devoted to teaching the truth, as I believe it to be, about who God is, who the Messiah is, what he taught, and how best to serve God in the way we worship him and treat each other. I try to make sure I have biblical justification for every and anything I teach

I have many who disagree with me, on both the Christian and Jewish side, but I never tell anyone what they should believe, only what I believe and why I believe it.

I will argue (always nicely and with respect) with anyone who disagrees, and if we cannot come to an agreement, then so be it- we can each shake the dust from our sandals and go somewhere else. The fact remains that nothing I say, or you say, or anyone says is going to count at all when we come before the Lord God, Almighty at Judgement Day because all that will count with God is what he says.

And when we come before him, as we all shall do, at least I can say that I tried to do what God said to do and not what some men who created their own religion said to do.

Frankly, I think that will go over a lot better with God than someone who says they did what their religion said to do.

Thank you for being here and please remember to share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for this week so L’hitraot, and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!

For over two millennia both Jews and Christians have been taught that Jesus Christ is the founder of Christianity.

I would say it is true that the man-made messiah called “Jesus Christ” is credited with being the founder of Christianity, but in truth the real Messiah, Yeshua, never did.

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

First of all, it isn’t correct to say Yeshua was Jewish because he IS Jewish- he was risen as the Messiah of God, who is, was, always will be, and had been planned from the beginning of creation to be a Jew.

It is because he obeyed God’s Torah completely throughout his life that he was resurrected, as anyone who could have done that would have been; the problem is, of course, no human born of man and woman can do that.

So why is it Christianity has taught that having obeyed the Torah, which allowed him to be resurrected to eternal life in God’s presence (which, for the record, is what being “saved” means), if you believe Yeshua is the Messiah you don’t really have to obey anything?

What is the purpose of doing something to show us how it is done, just to say now that you know how to, you don’t have to?

That’s right, it don’t make no sense!

The first thing to understand is that God has no religion- he gave the Jewish people his Torah, after having chosen us to be a nation of priests to the world (Exodus 19:6) so that after learning it ourselves, we would be able to teach it to the Goyim (Nations, i.e., everyone else in the world).

God gave us the Torah so that all people God created (that includes you) would know how to worship God and how to treat each other in the way that God wants us to do, so that we can be righteous in his eyes.

Again- the way God wants you to be, not the way a religion teaches you it wants you to be.

Of course, proper obedience to God can’t happen because we are a rebellious, sinful, egocentric, and just plain stupid species. If not for Messiah Yeshua, we would have no chance for eternal life in God’s presence, whatsoever.

Ya know… it’s funny that God put mankind in charge of the animals, but in the end, the animals can teach us about how a society should be better than we can teach ourselves.

It isn’t about being Jewish or being Christian, or anything else: it is about doing what God wants us to. In Ezekiel 18:23, God tells us he doesn’t want anyone to die, but to do t’shuvah (turn from sin) and live.

Remember: when God says live or die, he doesn’t mean from a mortal viewpoint, but from an eternal one.

Yeshua never preached anything against the Torah; in truth, what he taught was a deeper, spiritual understanding of the Torah (called the Remes) so that we could be able to live it better. He did not do away with anything, but added to our ability to do as we should.

The idea that he died a Jew but was raised a Christian is so stupid that the only way anyone with half a brain would believe it is if it had been drilled into their head from early childhood, when they had neither the knowledge of the Bible or ability to question what they were being told, so that by adulthood it was an a priori truth.

God said what he wants everyone to do in the Torah, and because we can’t do it as we should, he sent Yeshua to cover our tuchas when we fail. Without Yeshua’s sacrifice replacing the need to bring an animal to the temple in Jerusalem (as a sin sacrifice), which is the only Torah commanded way we can ask for forgiveness, there is no hope for anyone not accepting Yeshua as their Messiah to be saved, no matter what their religion tells them.

Here is a truth that leads to eternal life: anyone who rejects the Torah rejects God, and that ain’t gonna do you no good, at all!

Yeshua never taught against the Torah, and neither did Shaul (Paul), or any of the Apostles- what they did was try to teach Gentiles how to live according to the Torah a little at a time. After Shaul died (around 60-64 AD), the Gentiles that led his congregations started to stray from the proper path and by the time they decided to change things around (their reasons for doing that are being beyond the scope of this message) what had been a Jewish movement accepting Gentiles became a Gentile religion that rejected Jews.

But Yeshua is still a nice Jewish boy sitting at Daddy’s right hand, probably saying to himself …

“Oy gevalt!
How could they so screw up something so simple?”

Thank you for being here and please comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

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

** It took nearly 5 hours to upload this simple 10-minute message because the cell tower I use was overloaded. **

They say that experience is the best teacher, but in fact experience is not a good teacher, it is nothing more than a database. If you don’t understand what the data means, you’re not going to learn anything.

The same is true with the Bible- we may know what is in there but without understanding we can’t really be edified or learn anything.

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

I believe the most efficient way to understand what the Bible says is to have your understanding come through the Ruach HaKodesh, the Holy Spirit. This divine understanding is what separates those who blindly follow a religion from those who understand what God wants from each of us, and are able to reject whatever a religion tells them that is not in alignment with God’s commandments.

That takes more than understanding- it takes courage. You need courage to be able to reject a teaching that all your family and friends find absolutely to be the “word of God”, and to be willing to be expelled by a church or synagogue because you know that you understand correctly.

The most potent information you can have is not just knowing what is said, but understanding the meaning of it.

In Judaism, we have a biblical exegesis tool called PaRDeS, which is an acronym for P‘shat, Remes, Drash, and Sud. P’shat is the literal, plain-meaning of the word, such as Do not Kill. The Remes is the deeper, spiritual understanding of the P’shat, such as do not so much as hate someone in your heart. A Drash is a story that has a spiritual moral, which is generally the same as a parable. The Sud is a mystical understanding, and I don’t even have an example to give you.

So, in real life, Yeshua taught the Remes, which is why people said he spoke with authority and that no one had ever taught or spoke like him before. That is because the Pharisees only taught the P’shat.

Have you ever been visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses? Meaning no disrespect, but in my experience with them they know the Bible backwards and forwards, but they have no understanding. Their responses to questions are “patented”Party Line” and they have no more understanding of what they are saying than a parrot does when it is trained to respond to a stimulus.

Most Christian religions teach one or more of the following falsehoods: God and Yeshua are the same entity, Yeshua did away with the law, and Born-Again Christians are now God’s chosen people because God has rejected the Jews because the Jews have rejected Jesus.

All of those are man-made lies, justified by taking bits and pieces from the Bible and creating those theologies. None of these ideas come from the true scripture, which is only in the Tanakh, the Old Covenant or “Jewish” Bible.

They justify the Trinity (a man-made idea first created by Tertullian in the middle of the Second Century) almost exclusively from misinterpretations (knowledge without understanding) from the Gospel of John, they justify the doing away with the law by knowledge of Matthew 5:17 without understanding, and they came up with the ridiculous idea of Replacement Theology from the letters written by Shaul (Paul) to congregations of mostly Gentiles who were having issues of faith and interpersonal relationship problems.

The New Covenant writings are NOT scripture, but they do contain a lot of scripture taken from the Tanakh. The Gospels teach nothing new because everything Yeshua taught was the Remes (remember what that is?) of the Torah, and the letters by Shaul were nothing more than managerial directives to help congregations get back on the right track for salvation.

I know this seems wrong to many of you, but this is more than knowledge- it is understanding.

Let’s take something from the Gospel of Matthew and use this to show the difference between knowledge and understanding: Yeshua said that he did not come to change or do away with the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). A typical Christian teaching is to first interpret “fulfill” as “complete”, and then to go further and say that by completing the law he finished it, i.e., made it obsolete (which is often incorrectly validated by what Shaul says in Galatians 3:24-25.) As such, Gentiles who believe in Yeshua (whatever that is supposed to mean) are not obligated to follow the Torah.

But that is just knowledge of what he said; to understand it is to know that the word “fulfill” back then meant to interpret the law correctly- to misinterpret it was a trespass (sin). And that understanding is validated by the fact that when Yeshua gave his Sermon on the Mount, he taught the Remes of the law to those who had no knowledge or understanding.

The lack of understanding made it easy for the people (as is the case even today) to be misled, and the emphasis on knowledge (without understanding) is why people are so easily led astray (as Isaiah said).

Religion, in general, teaches only knowledge because that makes it easier to mislead people, and over the millennia has caused millions to reject God because when you reject what God says to do, you reject God. The only place in the entire Bible, from Genesis through Revelation where God, himself, tells us what he wants us to do, is in the Torah.

Everything after Deuteronomy is either historical narrative or commentary.

God chose the Jews to be a nation of priests (Exodus 19:6), then gave us the Torah. Why? Obviously to learn it so that as priests we could take it to the Goyim, the Nations, which means everyone else. Knowledge tells us Jews are a nation of priests, and knowledge tells us God gave the Torah to the Jews, but understanding is why we can put those two things together to realize that the Torah is for everyone who professes to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that is why the Jews are God’s chosen people- chosen to be God’s priests to the world, something that will never change.

So, nu? are you satisfied just with knowledge or do you want understanding?

The best place to get understanding is to first gain knowledge by reading your Bible over and over…and over, again, and then ask God- not me, not your Pastor, not your Minister, not your Priest, not your Rabbi- but God to give you his divine understanding.

And allow yourself the right to make your own decisions without threat of going to hell or being excommunicated. The truth will always set your free, and if what you understand to be the truth gets you kicked out of your place of worship, well- you have just been set free.

But here is a caveat: always be open to hearing what others believe because when you stop being open to new ideas you stop learning, and you have nothing to fear from really listening because the truth will always remain the truth.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

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