** 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!