The popular saying among many people is that you only get one life, so live it to its fullest.
That sounds like a wise saying, but in my opinion it is wrong because this life is given to us for only one reason: to decide where we will spend eternity.
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Non-believers and Sadducees (if there are any left) don’t really believe in an afterlife. Some may believe in reincarnation, which- if you ask me- is nothing more than being able to make all the same mistakes you made the first time, but as a different person.
Those who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob also must believe in the second life we are to have, the one that comes after this mortal existence and the one that we should be planning for when this life is over.
Which brings us to today’s message: Which life is more important to you?
If you prefer to get the most out of this mortal life that you can, you will probably find that you have to reject the way God says to live because the world is sinful, and the pleasures of a mortal existence preclude being able to live that life righteously.
What I mean is this: you can’t be a hedonistic, sexually perverse drunkard (which is, after all, the way to get the most out of this mortal life) and expect that God will accept you.
Salvation is not a “Come-As-You-Are” party; Yeshua said that to follow him we must, essentially, give up nearly everything that the world finds valuable.
That is why it was such a hard sell for Shaul (Paul) to get the Gentiles living a worldly lifestyle to give it up in order to find peace and joy after they die. And, given the pressures placed upon these neophyte, Gentile Believers to get circumcised only helped to undermine Shaul’s work.
Even the Edlers in Jerusalem knew, when writing that letter in Acts 15, that the Gentiles would have to learn Torah obedience slowly, a step at a time (as Isaiah said about the Northern Tribes in Isaiah 28:1-13, when he said the people needed to be taken slowly, precept upon precept, line upon line).
And James confirmed this in Acts 15:21 when he said that the Gentiles would eventually learn the Torah by attending Shabbat services.
So, there you have it… we get to choose which life is more important to us, the one we live now during this short, mortal lifespan or the one we will be living throughout eternity.
The Torah is God’s User Manual for Righteousness, which Yeshua proved to be just that because he lived it perfectly his whole life, and was resurrected to the right hand of God.
Of course, you and I are not Yeshua; we are born into sin and can’t avoid it, which is why God first gave us the sacrificial system and then, when that wasn’t possible for us (because the temple was destroyed), he had already sent Yeshua so that through faith in him as the Messiah we could find forgiveness by means of his sacrifice.
For me, I choose to live by God’s Torah. That means I don’t accept anything that Christianity says about Torah being no longer valid for those who accept Yeshua as their Messiah, and I also reject Halacha when it overrides what God said we only need to do in the Torah.
Let me finish with this good news and bad news: the good news is that if you choose to live a worldly life you have until your last breath to repent, confess your sins and ask God to forgive you by means of Yeshua’s shed blood. Remember that Yeshua told us the first will be last, and the last will be first (Matthew 20:16).
The bad news is that once you’re dead, your one last chance to save your soul from eternal damnation is no longer available.
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!