Happy 251st birthday to my fellow United States Marines!
The message that Yeshua the Messiah brought to us nearly two millennia ago was that the kingdom of God is near.
We read in the Bible how the power elite in Jerusalem “shot” that messenger; today, I believe the ones we should shoot are those who have garbled the message.
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So, who is responsible for garbling the message and why did they do it? If you ask me, and even if you don’t, I’m gonna tell ya, anyway.
It started way back at the end of the first century when the Jewish leaders of the movement within Judaism which accepted that Yeshua was the Messiah had all died off or been martyred. The Gentile leaders who were being taught the Torah by Shaul and his associates throughout the Middle East and Asia were concerned about being connected with the Jews, who had been in constant rebellion against Roman rule.
As pagans, they were safe, but as their lifestyle began to become more “Jewish”, which was happening under Shaul’s teachings, they were concerned they may become targets of Rome.
During the latter part of the first century, the Jews who were joining the movement within Judaism that they called “The Way” were being persecuted by the power elite in Jerusalem and their cohorts in the other Sanhedrim.
The reason for that was simple: if Yeshua was the Messiah, he would be king and those political hacks who made up much of the Judean judicial system at that time would have been out of a job. They knew to stay in power they had to get rid of him.
After Rome kicked Jewish tuchas in 132-133 AD and dispersed many of them throughout the Roman territory, leaving only a handful still in Judea (which they renamed to Syria Philistia, later translated to Palestine), those Jewish Believers didn’t have to worry about the Jews, anymore. But that didn’t help the Gentiles because now that their issue with the Jews was over, Rome could concentrate on these (now called) Christians because they had been under the radar, so to speak, but now were obvious to Rome as a religion worshipping a God different from the Roman gods.
And that dog didn’t hunt as far as Rome was concerned.
So the idea to reject much of the Torah to avoid being a target of Rome backfired until the third century, when Constantine legalized what had become a totally different, anti-Torah religion.
You need to remember that the only way we can be in the presence of the Lord is to be sinless- God will not abide sin in his presence. That is why he gave us the sacrificial system, so we could cleanse ourselves of our sin and reunite with him.
Yeshua’s message that the kingdom of God is near was founded on the fact that he knew his sacrifice would provide the means for us to reconnect with God by being forgiven of sin when the temple would no longer be available. You see, according to the Torah no sacrifice would be accepted unless it was done at the place where God put his name, which was (DUH!) the temple in Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 12:5-11).
The message from Yeshua included learning the heart of the Torah, what we call the Remes– the deeper, spiritual meaning of the law. This is evident in his Sermon on the Mount, but what happened was that later on religion got in the way.
The early Gentile Christians led (what had been) a Jewish movement away from Judaism, and over the past two thousand years they have continually been splitting hairs and creating new sects, divisions, and movements so that today there are literally thousands of Christian religions throughout the world.
The original message has been mangled, garbled, and completely mutated into something that doesn’t bring us closer to God, but leads people away from him!
Nu? What do we do?
My suggestion is that you reject any religion that rejects whatever God said to do in the Torah. Next, read the entire Bible- Genesis through Revelation- and ask God to show you his truth in it.
Think about this: God anointed the Jewish people to be his nation of priests to the world (Exodus 19:6) and then gave us the Torah, which is God’s “User Manual for Righteousness“. True, no one can be 100% Torah observant, which is why he gave us the sacrificial system because God wants everyone (Jew and Gentile) to live-meaning to have eternal life with him- and he said so in Ezekiel 18:23. So, if God made the Jews his priests to the world and gave us his instructions for worship and how to treat each other in the Torah, how is it that anyone would think the Torah was just for Jews? I mean, really? As priests we are obligated to bring God’s instructions for how to be with him throughout eternity to the world.
God promised Abraham that the world would be blessed by his descendants in Genesis 12:3, which is why he gave us the Torah and made us his priests to take it to the world! The Torah, along with Yeshua, is the blessing that God promised Abraham the world would receive.
And yet, the world has rejected it!
The message that Yeshua brought has been garbled and rejected because people prefer a man-made, easy-peasy, come-as-you-are salvation religion to doing what God said.
And we can’t really shoot the ones who garbled the message, but God can and I believe he will when they come before him.
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!