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!

I was reading my Bible the other day, just as I do nearly every morning, and I was in 1 Kings, Chapter 13.

After reading that chapter it occurred to me that there is a really important lesson there, one that could save us from being led away from salvation and straight to damnation.

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

Let me review briefly what 1 Kings 13 is about:

A prophet from Judah is sent by God to curse the altar made by Yarov’am in Israel. The prophet is told not to eat or drink anything while there and to come home on a different road than the one he took to get there.

After he delivers his message, he heads home, but a prophet living in Israel goes after him. When he reaches the prophet from Judah, he asks him to come back and dine with him. The prophet says he is not to eat or drink anything while there, but the other prophet lies, saying he heard from God that the man from Judah is to go back and eat and drink with him.

So, the Judean prophet goes back and eats and drinks with the man who lied to him.

Just then the liar gets a word from God and tells the Judean prophet that because he went against the word he was given he will be killed by a lion on his way home, which is exactly what happens.

And here’s the kicker: the lion kills the man, then just sits down next to him. It doesn’t kill and eat the donkey or the man; it just sits there.

The lying prophet hears about this and retrieves the dead prophet’s body, having it buried in the very tomb he had cut out for himself.

I thought to myself how unfair it was of God to kill the man who was just believing what he was told. It should have been the lying prophet who was punished, but that isn’t what happened.

Then it occurred to me that there is a really important message here, one which this ministry is devoted to making known to everyone: you can’t trust what you are being told by anyone!

Not even me!

(Not to sound like I am bragging, but I would say I am one
of the more trustworthy ones to listen to.)

How many different Christian religions tell their congregants to ignore (which is the same as rejecting) God’s Torah, even though God tells us to obey his Torah?

They say that the Torah is just for Jews, basing that lie not on Yeshua’s teachings but on misinterpretations and misusing the letters that Shaul (Paul) wrote!

Judaism is founded on the Torah, which is (like it or not, no matter what your Christian teachers have told you) God’s User Manual for Righteousness. He gave it to the Jews, who he chose to be priests to the world (Exodus 19:6) to learn it then teach it to everyone else.

Who really thinks that Shaul outranks God?

When James offered his four requirements for the Gentile neophyte believers (Acts 15), he preceded that by saying they would learn the laws of Moses (i.e., the Torah) by attending Shabbat services. He fully expected the Gentiles would eventually adopt a Jewish lifestyle, which is how Yeshua lived and what Yeshua taught.

James also said that those who teach have a double obligation and will be judged more strictly (James 3:1-2), implying that teaching is something you should think about twice before doing.

I think about it more than twice, and so I am confident that when I say this story in the Tanakh is not just interesting, but is a salvation issue, and I am not just saying this to sound dramatic.

I have an “Acid Test” question about everything I hear or read regarding God, Yeshua, and the Bible. That question is this: “How does this affect my salvation?”

If something doesn’t affect salvation, it may be interesting or even edifying, but it is not something to get all worked-up about.

For example, the idea of the Trinity is a hot topic, but it isn’t really a salvation issue because we aren’t saved by faithfully believing Yeshua and God are one- we are saved by faithfully believing that Yeshua is the Messiah God promised to send, and that his death and resurrection really happened, paving the way for us to receive forgiveness of sin which is how we are able to be in God’s presence for eternity, i.e., “saved”.

But this biblical story in 1 Kings 13 IS a salvation issue because if we automatically believe what we hear, just because someone is a prophet or Priest, or Rabbi, or Minister, or whatever (with credentials or not), we are liable to be in the same spot that prophet from Judah was in when he ignored what God told him to do because a man told him something different.

God tells us all how he wants us to worship him and how he wants us to treat each other in the Torah. That is the ONLY place in the entire Bible where we read that God, himself, tells Moses to tell the people what he (God) wants them to do. There is no other place, anywhere, in the entire Bible where God says anything changes or gives any new commandments.

And you can look until your eyes bleed but you will never find anywhere in the Bible where God specifies some laws are for Jews, some for Catholics, others for Protestants, etc..

If you are Jewish or Christian, or whatever, and you reject what God says he wants you to do (in the Torah), then you are in the same boat as that prophet from Judah who was told to go straight home but turned aside from God’s command because he accepted as truth what some human being told him to do.

And even though it isn’t stated anywhere, I have to believe that the lying prophet got his comeuppance, eventually.

There are a number of places in the Bible where the leaders or prophets give the people the choice to follow Ba’al or follow Adonai, and today- right now as you are reading this- you have a similar choice. You can either follow God’s instructions for worship or follow a man-made religion.

Whatever you do, choose carefully because the choice you make definitely IS a salvation issue.

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 today so L’hitraot, and Baruch HaShem!

The world needs scientific proof in order to believe in anything. As such, to consider if God is alive or not, especially for those atheists or agnostics in the crowd, we need to look at what science identifies as being “alive”.

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

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s work with what Google Ai describes as being alive:

“In science, being alive isn’t defined by one single trait but by a collection of characteristics, including being cellular, organized, metabolizing energy, maintaining homeostasis (stable internal state), growing, responding to stimuli, reproducing, and evolving over time, essentially a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. While non-living things might show one or two of these, only living organisms display all of them as an integrated system. “

First off, let’s ignore the non-biblical element that Google states as part of being alive, specifically the reference to “Darwinian evolution”, and just redefine that as being able to evolve.

For the world to believe something is alive, it must meet all the above requirements. So, nu? Does God meet those requirements for life?

God never changes so he certainly meets the requirement for maintaining homeostasis, and he also is very organized (I mean, he created everything to work in harmony: that represents an A-level of organization), and he definitely responds to stimuli, such as prayers and sin.

But he isn’t growing; in fact, he can’t grow because he is omnipresent, and as such is already everywhere at once, so growth is impossible because he is already as large as everything that exists.

He is not cellular because he is spirit, and as such also does not qualify under the idea that he metabolizes energy because he IS energy!

And he is the one and only God; as such, he does not reproduce because… he is the one and only (sound familiar), and since he never changes, he cannot evolve.

So, there you have it- according to science, God is not alive.

Back in the 1960’s, there was actually a Christian movement stating that God is dead (yes, this was radical but still and all, Christian), proposing that traditional belief in a transcendent God was obsolete in a secular world, urging Christians to find meaning through human action and secular life. This was inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “God is dead,” and championed by theologians like Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton. 

But if God is dead, then he must of, at one point, been alive and being God, since we know that God is omnipotent, he can’t die. So to be dead, he had to be alive, and if God was alive, being God, he couldn’t die.

So what is it: is he alive or is he dead, or was he ever really anything?

The answer to all this is simple: God is not alive or dead because he is not flesh, he is an eternal spirit.

One of the conditions for life was metabolizing energy, but God is energy. His existence is beyond the confines of physics or science, which are the only way mortal beings (that’s you and me) can understand their surroundings.

God is not alive or dead, he just IS!

In Exodus 3:14, God tells Moses exactly what I just said when he describes himself:

“God said to Moshe, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” (I am what I am) and added, “Here is what to say to the people of Isra’el: ‘Ehyeh [I Am] has sent me to you…’

God is not alive and he is not dead: as he states, he IS.

In Hebrew we say: הָיָה (hayah), הוֹוֶה (hoveh) ויִהְיֶה (v’yihyeh) (he is, he was, and he always will be).

This is why it is so difficult for human beings to understand him, or to believe in him because he does not fit into anything we can understand. That is also why we continually try to reduce him to something we can understand, reducing his omnipotence, his authority, and even interpreting from the Bible what we want him to be saying, instead of taking what he says for what it is.

That is why there are so many different religions all professing to worship the one, unchanging God- we have continually tried to pigeon-hole him into what we want him to be instead of accepting him for who and what he is- beyond human understanding and above our rules for existence.

Only those who faithfully accept that we cannot understand God will be able to believe in his existence, and thereby find joy in obedience to his Torah.

Now, that doesn’t mean people who are zealous for their own religion can’t ever find joy, but what they think is joy in obedience to God is really a joy in obedience to their religion (which more often than not is in opposition to God). They are misled by their devotion to a religion instead of devotion to God because they don’t really know what God says to do (in the Torah), and as such their ignorantly joyful rejection of God will turn to sorrow when they meet him at Judgement Day.

And that is truly sad, and a disaster for everyone who thinks they are saved, but can’t really be saved because they follow a religion and not God.

But that is for another discussion.

So, if anyone asks if God exists, you can say he does but not on the same plane of existence we humans are on. He can interact with us, and we can interact with him, but only at his discretion.

God is not alive or dead, he just IS. That is hard to wrap our mortal heads around, that is what it is: accept that fact and you will be on the right track.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and “like’ these messages. Also, please share them 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!

There are some 613 commandments in the Torah, and according to the brother of the Messiah, Yacov (James 2:10), to violate even just one of them is the same as having violated the entire Torah.

But in modern times, are all the Torah commandments still relevant?

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

The answer is that every commandment in the Torah is still valid, still relevant, and still required by every single person who professes to worship the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob.

And yes, that means you Born-Again Christians, as well!

However, what we need to consider is also that these commandments were written thousands of years ago, and to a people who were just learning how to live after some 400 years of having no options at all, as to what they can or can’t do.

Consequently, the Torah was written to identify right from wrong to a people who were a new-born nation. But what about now? We are some 3500 years older, so is every commandment still valid, especially considering we live in countries that have a constitution and their own penal code and civil laws?

For example, the Torah says a child who curses his parents should be stoned to death, but if Junior tells Daddy to get lost, and Dad stones him to death in view of the entire neighborhood, I don’t think the judge at his trial will let him go free because the Torah said what he did was acceptable.

So, do we take the punishments in the Torah literally, and potentially spend our lives in jail for obeying God, or do we “adjust” those punishments to fit into the modern world?

We also have to understand the purpose behind those commandments: for example, the “eye for an eye” commandment has been considered by the Rabbis to be a figurative statement and not to be taken literally. The idea is that the punishment should fit the crime, so stealing bread may get be punished with time in jail or making restitution, while murder will have a much more severe punishment, possibly death.

I couldn’t find anything that states absolutely how the Torah is redefined with regards to whatever society the Jewish people are living in at any given time. What I did find is that the Torah text is considered to be unchanging, but what can be flexible is the interpretation of those laws and regulations with regard to how they are applied, and that is found in the Talmud (also known as the “Oral Law”).

The Talmud is a very old and important book, composed of two main sections , the Gemara and the Mishna. The Mishna was the first compilation of rabbinic commentary on how to obey the laws in the Torah, and the Gemara came later to explain how to apply the Mishna.

Another way to define the difference between the two is that the Mishnah is the foundational text of Jewish law, a concise compilation of rabbinic legal discussions, while the Gemara is the extensive commentary, analysis, and debate on the Mishnah.

Together they form the Talmud (there are two versions, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud); the earliest version of the Mishna dates back to around 200 CE, and the combined texts, forming the complete Talmud, was finalized sometime between the 5th and 6th Centuries CE.

Studying the Talmud is something that Jewish children begin almost as soon as they are old enough to understand it, around 7-8 years of age. And it is good that they start that young, because the Talmud has 2,711 double sided pages, and to learn 1 page a day (using the Daf Yomi cycle), it takes over seven years to complete.

The Talmud codifies Halakha (The Way to Walk), which is where we go when we have a question regarding how to apply the Torah. Halakha is an essential part of Orthodox and Chasidic Judaism, and in many ways Halakah is considered as important as scripture by Orthodox Jews.

So, the Torah text never changes, and the Talmud text never changes, but the interpretation of those texts does change, adjusted to whatever society and times the people are living in.

That’s a hard thing to wrap one’s head around: what the Torah says is absolutely the word of God, and the Talmud reconciles Torah laws to man-made laws through how those Torah commands are interpreted.

In other words, what God says is absolutely true and to violate any of his laws is to violate the entire Torah, yet we can obey what some Rabbi’s say in applying those laws and God will be OK with that.

I’m sorry, but that sounds like a cop-out to me.

On the other hand, we can’t really kill someone for sleeping with our spouse and get away with it just because the Torah says that is what we are supposed to do.

I wish I had an absolute answer, but I don’t.

I guess it comes down to this: we need to know the Torah so we can’t be taught false doctrine, and we need to know the Torah so we can understand who God is and how he wants us to worship him and treat each other. And we need to do our best to obey God’s word within the laws of the land we live in.

If adultery is against the law where we live, and the courts require the death penalty, then that is fine and in accordance with the Torah. But, if where we live finds adultery not to be a violation of any civil laws, then we have to live within those laws.

Maybe we could interpret the Torah to mean what must be killed is the marriage, and not the person who ruined it by committing adultery?

I know that sounds a little silly, but we are in unknown territory here, caught between obeying a law first created in a society that had no real system of jurisprudence and modern society, with a very defined system of jurisprudence.

I believe that God recognizes man-made laws, and as long as they are in relation to his laws, even if some of those Torah laws have to be “toned down” a bit (i.e., divorce instead of death), I think God will be okay with that.

From what I know of God, he is more interested in understanding and living with in the spirit (Remes) of his law, which is what Yeshua was teaching us.

I think it comes down to the punishment should fit the crime, and the interpretation of what punishment fits, well… that will be based on what the Torah says, what Halakha says, and what the society in which we live says.

It will be up to us to reconcile those three as best as we can, staying within the spirit of the Torah and the literal laws of the society.

I have to figure that would be OK with God, otherwise someone in total obedience to the Torah might end up spending their life in jail.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and “like” these messages, as well as share them 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!

In his second letter written to believers, Kefa (Peter) warned against something that I believe the early Gentile leaders (of what was becoming Christianity) failed to listen to.   

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

So, nu?  What was this warning? It was given near the very end of the letter, in Chapter 3, verse 16.

Kefa was talking about how what may seem like God not taking any action to bring about the Day of Judgment, really was God being patient and giving those who are sinning the chance to repent, but he reminds them that the day will come swiftly and without any warning. Therefore, they should be ready by always acting faithfully and leading godly lives, as Kefa’s good friend, Shaul (Paul) has written to them.

Now, here we come to the warning, and verse 16 goes like this (CJB):

Indeed, he speaks about these things in all his letters. They contain some things that are hard to understand, things which the uninstructed and unstable distort, to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

Christianity has pretty much done exactly what Kefa said they shouldn’t do, using Shaul’s letters as a foundation for teaching to ignore the Torah, which was never his intention.
What they have done is exactly the wrong thing- they have ignored most of the Torah and justified that by misusing Shaul’s letters (especially Romans) to teach the Torah is not necessary for Gentiles.

More than that, Christianity teaches that Yeshua lived the Torah perfectly as an example to all of us, then did away with it.

I know, I know…when you think about it, how can anyone believe that makes any sense, at all? I mean, if Yeshua was showing us all how to live Torah correctly, why bother if he was going to do away with it?  

That’s like going to school to learn how to repair something that no longer exists or is in use anywhere.

But, I digress… 

If you are fair-minded and open to hearing something different than what you have been taught, I think as you review the tenets and foundations of Christianity you will realize that it isn’t based on anything other than what Shaul wrote, with some occasional reference to the 10 Commandments.

Basically, they say Christians do not have to follow the law of Moses but the Law of Christ (for the record, the Laws of Moses aren’t really his laws but the laws of God, Almighty: Moses only wrote them down).  

Okay, well, then… what is Christ’s law?

The only time Yeshua proclaimed the importance of following a law is when he said the two most important laws are to love the Lord and to love each other (Matthew 22:37-40). 

Well, those aren’t really his laws because God said to love each other in Leviticus 19:18, and the Torah says to love the Lord in Deuteronomy 6:5. So, really, the only “Law of Christ” is not his law, but God’s law.

This is one example of the many ways that Christianity misused Shaul’s letters, ignoring Kefa’s warning, in that the so-called “Law of Christ” is actually the Torah- the very thing they say to ignore!

My experience with most Christians, whether born-again or of the more standard variety (traditional Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, etc.) is that almost to a fault, when we talk about the Trinity, or holidays, or what God wants from us, or names for God, they all quote either from John’s Gospel (which I have often shown to be a false gospel) or the letters Shaul wrote.  

Now, Shaul did use many quotes from the Tanakh, which is the only real scripture in any of his letters, but he never came right out and said, “God told me to tell you… (whatever)”.

The only place in the entire Bible where we read that God dictates, directly, how the people must live or worship is in the Torah.

So, Shaul never did get any direct instructions from God, or Yeshua for that matter, except maybe that Yeshua told him to go to Damascus and find a man named Ananias.

The letters Shaul wrote are not God-breathed scripture.

When you read them, without already knowing what they are supposed to mean, you can see that they are merely managerial directives to congregations of Gentile believers who were having issues of faith and inter-personal relationship problems. And, in almost every letter, he had to address the pressure they were put under by the Jewish believers to make total conversion (specifically B’rit Milah/Circumcision) instead of learning how to live a Torah observant life step-by-step, which is what Saul was doing with them.

He knew that if these hedonistic pagans had to give it all up at once, the paradigm shift in lifestyle would be so great as to cause many to fall away before they had a chance to be saved.

So, what Christianity has done is to misuse Shaul’s letters, even though Kefa warned them, to eventually create a new religion that is anti-Torah.

And if something is anti-Torah, it is anti-God.  

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!

I recently posted about Christmas (this lesson is NOT about Christmas, so don’t even start on that) and a response I received from many people made me realize that there seems to be confusion about something in the Book of Deuteronomy.

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

The verse that I was referred to by many people when I was talking about that holiday whose name shall not be spoken is Deuteronomy 4:2, which states (CJB):

In order to obey the mitzvot of Adonai your God which I am giving you, do not add to what I am saying, and do not subtract from it.
(For those who may not be familiar with Hebrew, “mitzvot“, as used here, means “commandments”)

I also checked no less than 5 other versions of the Bible, and in all cases, what was not to be added to or taken away from were God’s “commandments“.

I interpret that as saying what are not to be changed are the commandments, such as the Kosher laws in Leviticus 11, or the Holy Days in Leviticus 23, or any of the commandments that are throughout the Torah.

In other words, what is in the Torah is what we must do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do more.

For instance, what about the holidays (meaning man-made celebrations) that have become part and parcel of worship over the centuries?

I’m talking about Simchat Torah (Joy of Torah) celebrated after Sukkot on the eighth day , or Purim (this holiday was never commanded by God to be celebrated), or Hanukkah (this one’s not even in the Bible, except for the Apocrypha, and only the Catholics use that), or even that holiday whose name shall not be spoken.

This brought me to the question of today’s message: is the Torah the only form of worship we are allowed, essentially restricting our opportunity to thank God, or is the Torah just the foundation, the starting point, the least we must do when we wish to worship God?

According to those who refuse to worship that holiday, validating their position by quoting Deut. 4:2, what they are saying is that any holiday not specifically mentioned in the Torah is a sin.

Besides that, they are also saying that nearly every Orthodox and Chasidic Jew, not to mention any other sects who follow Halacha, are also sinning because if you want to know what adding to a commandment is like, then research all the rules and restrictions that Halacha has! Oy!

Look, people, I can’t see God restricting our ability to demonstrate our love and appreciation for all he is and all he has done, and IS doing, by saying the only way we can celebrate him is by those 7 specific days, and only in those specific ways.

I mean, really? Does that make any sense to you?

I think that commandment in Deuteronomy was meant specifically to identify the least we should do with regard to worshiping God. It is a foundation for us to build on, not the entire structure within which we cannot go outside of.

How can honoring God ever be wrong? How can wanting to celebrate the wonderful things he has done for us be sinful?

How could anyone think that if we created a new holiday to celebrate God or to honor his Messiah that God would reject that as sinful? And if we think we are doing right by celebrating what God has done (which includes sending us his Messiah), how many millions of faithful believers in God and Messiah Yeshua will be punished at Judgement Day?

I don’t know about you, but to me it is a really frightening thought that creating celebrations to thank God for all he has done will send us to hell!

Sorry, but that just can not be!

I believe from all that I have read about God in the Bible that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will not reject ANY form of worship or ANY celebration that is created by people with the intention to be thankful and/or give worship to him for what he does.

And that includes ANYTHING he does, has done, or even plans to do. If a man-made holiday has been created as a form of worship, thanks, or dedication to God, I can’t see God rejecting that just because it isn’t specified in the Torah.

No, people, I am confident in saying that the Torah is only the foundation for proper worship, and any celebration we create designed to give thanks to God that doesn’t change an existing commandment is not only acceptable to God, but appreciated.

Thank you for being here and please remember to “like” and comment on these messages so that they get more Internet exposure, and share them 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!