Month: July 2021

Parashah Ekev 2021 (Because) Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25

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Moses continues to advise the Israelites that when they obey the Lord’s instructions they will be blessed. God will go ahead of them into the land and slowly weaken the people there so that they will be more easily defeated.

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Moses reminds the people how God has tested them, afflicting them when they ignored him and yet, keeping them alive and protected for 40 years while they were in the desert.

Moses again warns the people that when they have settled in the land and are happy and safe, that they should not abandon God or think that they have all they do because of anything they did. He tells them that when they do that, the Lord will drive them out of the land, just as he did the ones that were there before them.

This discourse continues, reminding the people of the sin of the Golden Calf, God separating the Levites for service to him, and how he, Moses, suffered for them to have God spare them and give him the 10 Words, again.

Over and over Moses tells the people to remember all that God did for them and what happens, or will happen, when they reject God. He relates the story of the rebellion under Dathan and Abiram and pleads with the people to maintain their faithful obedience to God so that it will go well with them when they are in the land.

When I read this book, I sometimes think the name should be the Book of Redundancy. Over and over, and over, and over Moses tells the people the same darn thing: when they obey God’s commandments they will be blessed; when they reject God, they will be cursed and driven out of the land. He says this so many times, that you’d think the people would reply, “All right already! I get it!”

But history shows that they really didn’t get it.

Despite the many miraculous demonstrations of God’s power and ability to save, the people were no different then than they are now: if it is right here in front of me, I see and know, but once I am on my own, I don’t care and will do what I want to.

Even with strong and righteous leaders, such as Moses, Joshua, and many of the Judges, later on, people need to be strictly controlled in order to remain righteous. We desire to do evil, which is called iniquity, and it is part of our DNA! What we really need is to be strictly controlled by strong and righteous leadership in order to keep us in line.

So what can we do? If you’re asking me, and even if you’re not, I believe the only thing to do is for each individual to determine what they want from eternity. This life is temporary, and quite short, even insignificant compared to forever, but it is all the time we have been given to decide where we want to spend eternity.

And what is worse is that we never know when our time is up!

So do as Moses wanted his people to do, and faithfully accept that God is the one to listen to: not Moses, or your Rabbi, or the Talmud, or the Pope, or your Pastor, Minister, or Saint Paul, or non-Believing family or friends, but G-O-D.

And God tells you exactly what he expects from you here, in this Torah. Nowhere else in the entire Bible does God say what he wants us to do, how we are to worship him (Leviticus 23) or what we are to eat (Leviticus 11) or what kind of intimate relationships are righteous (Leviticus 18), and other ordinances and regulations found throughout the Torah that outline the kind of society and lifestyle we should have.

People think that religion is the way we are to worship God, but it isn’t. God has no religion, but people created religion in order to have power over other people, and the best way to disobey God is to obey a religion.

If you want God’s blessings, all you have to do is live your life the way God said you should. It’s really that simple: the reason there are so many different ways to do that is that religion has confused everything.

And for those who refuse to believe in God, or accept that Yeshua really IS the Messiah God promised to send, well…you’re on your own.

Good luck with that.

If I may, I suggest you check your history books because every civilization that rejected the God of Israel or came against Israel has been so decimated that it has never recovered its full strength, or is no longer in existence. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Spain, and more currently the Nazis- all gone. And no matter how many times Syria or Jordan or Iran or Iraq or anyone else surrounding Israel tries to defeat and destroy them, they fail.

Not because of how great Israel is, but because of how great God is, and as long as Israel tries to do as God has commanded them, they will continue to survive and flourish.

God isn’t just for Israel, though- the good news for everyone else is that this is possible for them, too; all they have to do is reject their religion and worship God as he said to do.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe, share these messages, and check out my books on my website. I have a Facebook page and discussion group called Just God’s Word which everyone is invited to join, so long as you agree to the rules.

That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and Shabbat Shalom!

Does Your Compass Work?

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Are you familiar with the Disney movies about the Pirates of the Caribbean? In these movies, if you haven’t seen them, the main character played by Johnny Depp is Captain Jack Sparrow, who owns a very special compass. Instead of pointing to the north, his compass points the way to whatever his heart desires.

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

We all have our own compass; it’s not the kind that you carry in your pocket, but the kind that you have in your heart. It is your Moral Compass, also called your conscience, and for those who have confessed their sins and accepted Yeshua as their Messiah, it is called the Ruach HaKodesh (the Holy Spirit.)

Everyone has this compass, but not everyone’s compass always points “north”, meaning dependably leading us in a godly and righteous way.

By the way, did you know that the compass points to the magnetic north and not to the North Pole? Depending on where you are in the world, magnetic north and true north may be quite a few degrees apart. That is why maps have a Declination Diagram on them, which gives you the difference, in degrees, between true and magnetic north, so that you can adjust your compass to point you in the right direction.

The Declination Diagram we have for our moral compass is called the Bible. In that book, especially in the first 5 books (called the Torah), God tells us exactly how to adjust our moral compass to bring us to his true north, i.e. righteous living.

Unfortunately, both Judaism and Christianity have demagnetized many moral compasses, pointing them away from the Messiah or the Torah. In Judaism, we have been told that Jesus was a traitor to Judaism and created a new religion that hates and kills Jews and that any Jew who believes in Jesus can no longer be a Jew but is a Christian.

The traditional Christian teachings are that Jesus did away with the law, the Jews are no longer the chosen people (this is called Replacement Theology), the Holy Days God said we should observe aren’t for Christians, and many other lies which are designed to separate Christianity from its Jewish roots.

These teachings have made people’s moral compasses point in the wrong direction, effectively blinding them to the proper path to travel.

And when the blind lead the blind, they both fall into a hole (Matthew 15:14).

When your compass isn’t registering correctly, the further you have to go, the farther away from your goal you will be when the trip is over. And considering today most people live into their late 70s and early 80s, if your moral compass isn’t pointing to God correctly you will find yourself totally out of his presence when you die.

So make sure your compass is pointing correctly; if you have had it demagnetized by Christianity pointing you away from the Torah or Judaism pointing you away from Messiah Yeshua, make sure you adjust according to the Declination Diagram, which is the Bible.

And I mean the entire Bible, Genesis through Revelation.

Read it daily and constantly so that your compass will adjust itself to God’s true north, and you will find yourself in his presence when it is time to turn the equipment in.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe to my YouTube channel and website, check out my books (I am working on a 4th book which is going to debunk many of the traditional lies about the Jewish Messiah), and share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry grow. I never ask for money, just the opportunity to give people the proper “dope” about the Lord and the Messiah so that when they decide what to believe, they can make an informed decision.

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

Being in Control Doesn’t Mean Always Controlling

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We all know that God is in control of everything, but that doesn’t mean God is controlling everything.

There is a word I am thinking of that relates directly to this message, and if anyone has ever been in a position of authority over others, you might be thinking of the same word. And that word is… delegation.

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

We read often throughout the Tanakh, especially in Kings and Chronicles, how God used the Semitic kings of the Middle East to be his means of punishing both the Israelites (Northern Kingdom) and the Judeans (Southern Kingdom) when they rejected God and sinned. He was not always controlling what those pagan kings did to his chosen people, but he allowed them the freedom to do as they wanted.

Yet, even though it may seem somewhat unfair since God gave them a free hand, he also held them accountable for what they did when they exceeded what he had intended. We know this by reading about it in the Tanakh. Two examples are Isaiah 10:5-34 and Nahum 1-3, both about Assyria and how even though God used them to punish the people, they went beyond what God had wanted them to do and boasted about their own strength, not giving glory to God who made their victory possible.

I have held many positions of authority in my life: I was in charge of a department in Marine Midland Bank that processed over $60 Billion dollars of securities daily; I was the Operations Manager of the Fidelity Discount Brokerage Services office on Wall Street; just 3 years out of college I was a First Lieutenant in the US Marine Corps and the Executive Officer of a company of United Stated Marines that numbered over 350 men.

I am not saying this to brag, so please don’t think that, but I am telling you this so you can understand that when I talk about being in charge and delegating, I know what I am talking about.

I was in charge, it was all me, I ran it all, but I did not control everything because in order to develop my people I had to let them make their own mistakes and learn by doing. I trained, I instructed, but I also had to let them go off on their own.

Delegating one’s authority is not being relieved of the responsibility, it is just giving some of what you have to others for them to do the work. No different than when God told Moses he would take some of the spirit on Moses and give it to the ones Moses chose to be judges under him (Numbers 11:16.) Even though there were judges under him, Moses was still the ultimate authority and in control.

If you are wondering what my point is, it is this: don’t automatically blame God for whatever happens in your life, whether good or bad. Even though he is in control, more often than not he might be allowing you to go out on your own. He is watching and allowing, which means he hasn’t ceded control to anyone, such as the Enemy, but he has just delegated authority for the moment to you so you can grow.

Think about this: if God wanted us all to be perfectly sinless, because he is in total control of everything that happens we would all be sinless. Easy! But where’s the fun in that, right?

No, God can control everything in the universe, but he doesn’t because he knows that for us to grow in spiritual maturity and in spiritual power, we must be making the decisions. We must be the ones in control of what we do so that we learn by both suffering the consequences and reaping the blessings for what we decide.

So be comforted in knowing that no matter how much you screw up, God can always make it right, or at least get you back on track, but that doesn’t mean every time something goes wrong, God is behind it. He may be, but to be safe and fair, you should always do a self-check when things are constantly going wrong. Don’t ever automatically assume that God is doing anything, or for that matter, that the Enemy is attacking you.

This may be what is happening, but in my experience, it is just that when you live in a cursed and fallen world, stuff happens. Too often I hear people blame God because they say since he is in charge of everything, he must be doing it. That is wrong; God may punish, and he may reward, and he may just do neither and let you run the show, yourself.

I think the best way to go through life is to be comforted that God is in charge and can do whatever needs to be done; yet, for the most part, he allows us the authority over our life to make our own decisions and just like a good parent, he allows us to screw up so that we learn.

It is as I often say: If I should happen to do something really good, it is only because God is working through me; when I screw up royally, that’s when I can take full credit.

Thank you for being here and please subscribe to both my YouTube channel and my website, like my Facebook page, and join my Facebook discussion group, Just God’s Word.

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

Parashah V’Etchanan 2021 (I pleaded) Deuteronomy 3:23 – 7:11

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Moses continues his first discourse, pleading with God (again) to allow him to cross over the Jordan, to which God refuses but tells Moses to climb Mount Pisgah and look at the land. God tells Moses to charge Joshua to take the people into it.

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Moses reminds the people of all God did to bring them to the land, how his glory was seen at Mount Horeb but not in any physical form so do not make statues or any representation of God. He tells them, in a prophetic way, of what will happen when they abandon God and serve other gods.

Moses tells the Israelites they are representatives of the living God, and how as such when the nations see them live in accordance with God’s commandments they will remark how wonderful our God is because of the wonders and splendor of Israel. On the other hand, when Israel abandons God and they are destroyed and scattered among all the nations, how the people will see Israel as the representation of what happens when they abandon the God of their fathers.

In other words, Israel is to represent to all people how God wants all people to live.

Moses then begins his second discourse of the foundations of the covenant, reviewing the Ten Commandments and other laws that God has decreed. In Chapter 4, verses 4-9 Moses recites the Shema, the very watchword of our faith, the essence of monotheism, the declaration of the oneness and uniqueness of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The Shema is then followed by the V’Ahavtah, the prayer that tells us to love the Lord, which my Chumash noted is the first time in human history when a religion required love of God.

This parashah ends with Moses warning the people to remain separate from the nations around them, who God will remove, or they will fall into sin with them and be expelled from the land.

What I am going to say today may sound very prejudicial, and even like bragging, but it is based on what Moses says.

Moses tells us throughout the Torah that one thing the Israelites are to be is an example to the world: not of how great, or how strong, or how intelligent we are, but how all these blessings demonstrate how wonderful our God is.

Recall that God told Moses way back when they received the commandments that God chose Israel to be his nation of priests (Exodus 19:6) and as such we are to be an example to the entire world how to live in accordance with the way God wants us to live.

The greatness of Israel is not its’ people but its’ God!

In John 14:9, Yeshua said that when we see him, we see his father, meaning that as the image of God he demonstrates God’s wonder, power, and holiness. In this same way, the Israelites are also to be an image of God. When we see the wonders of this nation of priests, how they work together, how they worship, how they are blessed, their strength, and their wealth, it demonstrates the greatness of the God who chose them as his own.

Every person who professes to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and especially those who have accepted Yeshua (Jesus) as their Messiah, are obligated –no, we are commanded!– to demonstrate the goodness and holiness of God in everything we do and say.

This is why the V’Ahavtah prayer not only tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart (representing the mind), all our soul (spirit), and all our might (how we act in the physical world) but to also teach this to our children. We are to have God’s instructions before our eyes and on our hands (which is the tefillin), on our doorposts and gates (which is the mezuzah), and to speak of them when rising and going to bed, which are the daily prayers. 

   * The three daily prayers Jews recite are the Shacharit (morning), Mincha (afternoon), 
      and Maariv (evening). Each prayer is only 10-15 minutes long, as defined and
      instructed by Halacha, which is found in the Talmud.

It is the responsibility of the Jewish people to show the world how God wants everyone to live, and as that example to remain steadfast in their worship and lifestyle. Unfortunately, we have rarely lived up to that standard, but still, we have demonstrated the power of God, as well as his unwavering desire and ability to forgive those who repent.

I have occasionally posted how the Jews have truly been a blessing to the world, just by looking at all the Nobel prizes won by Jews compared to the other religions. Jews represent about 4/10 of one percent of the total population, but since the Nobel Prize has been awarded, they have accounted for nearly 28% of all Nobel prizes given out. Besides that, today Israel is a world leader in cyber technology, agriculture, and medicine, all of which help everyone.

Did you know that Israel developed a facemask that is guaranteed to kill the Covid-19 virus? It can be washed up to 55 times and is still guaranteed to protect you for 1 year.

God has placed on the Jewish people an enormous responsibility to represent him, just the same way that within any religion the religious leader is required to act and live to a higher standard of righteousness. Overall, Jews have done this, but we have been as unstable as the ocean, shifting from righteous to sinful, then back again. In today’s world, where sin is becoming more prominent than ever, as God’s chosen representatives of his power and glory, the Jewish people are being accused of crimes and human rights violations by the ones who are the REAL violators.

And the world hates to hear the truth but loves to accept the lies, promulgated by the media, the United Nations, and even by members of our own government!

But, in the end, God will win and the Jewish people will continue to fulfill their calling to be priests to the world, with the High Priest (Cohen Gadol) being the greatest Jew who ever lived, Yeshua the Messiah!

Thank you for being here and please share these messages, subscribe to my YouTube channel and my website, and check out my Facebook page, as well.

And remember that I always welcome your comments.

That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and Shabbat Shalom!

Are Cheeseburgers Kosher?

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The answer to the question, “Are cheeseburgers kosher?” is a resounding NO!…and a resounding YES!

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If you ask any “mainstream” Jewish person, their answer will be “No” because their rabbi has taught them that any mixture of dairy and meat consumed within a certain number of hours is a sin (the time between eating one and the other is different depending upon whether you are Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jew.)

If you ask a Christian, born again or not, they will tell you it is a sin but only for the Jews because Christians are under Grace and the need to obey the Mosaic Laws is done away with when you accept Jesus as your Messiah.

Lastly, if you ask me, I will tell you that it is not a sin to have a cheeseburger because all God told us in Leviticus 11 (and a few other places within the Torah) is that we are not to boil a calf in its mother’s milk.

There is nothing, at all, anywhere in the Torah that says you cannot have dairy and meat together: that is strictly a Talmudic requirement.

If you aren’t familiar with the Talmud, it is considered by many Jews, especially within the Orthodox sects, to be as important as the Torah. This is because the Talmud is called the “Oral Law”, which is the many other commandments God gave to Moses that were not written down, but instead passed orally from Moses to Joshua, and so forth down through the centuries until it was finally written down in the Mishna, composed circa 300 CE. Later, the Gemara was added around 500 CE. There are two separate Talmud’s, the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian, or Jerusalem Talmud. The Talmud contains Halacha, which means “The Walk” or “The Way to Walk”, which is how Jews are to worship and live their lives. Everything from how far you can walk on Shabbat, to what kinds of dishes to have, to how hot your dishwasher has to be, to what lights to leave on Friday before Shabbat, to what you can wear, to how to groom yourself, to …well, you get the idea.

So if Jews say cheeseburgers aren’t kosher, and Christians say kosher isn’t required for people who believe in Jesus, why do I, a Jew who believes in Jesus, say that cheeseburgers are kosher and the kosher laws are still required?

I’ll tell you why: because God never said don’t mix dairy and meat together in the same meal and Yeshua never said any of the Mosaic laws, which include the kosher laws, are no longer necessary when you follow him.

Let’s get this straight: I do not condone or even suggest that we should change God’s commandments because of the difference between how people lived then and how we live today, but rather that we should know how they lived then and account for how we live today to ensure we follow not just the letter, but the spirit of the law.

God was clear when he spoke through the Prophets that he wants obedience, but obedience from a desire to please him and not as a means of earning salvation.

In other words, just going through the motions (what we call Legalism) is not enough.

I say cheeseburgers are kosher because when we consider what the culture and society were like when God gave that command, we know that back then you most likely owned the cow that gave the milk and birthed the calf, so you knew which calf belonged to which cow and which cow gave what milk. Knowing who belonged to whom, you could easily avoid using the milk that came from that calf’s mother to cook that mother’s calf.

God only knows why he gave this specific commandment, but it seems obvious there is spiritual importance in what God said. To me, this clearly indicates some relationship with child sacrifice, and the hideousness of parents eating their own children, which is often brought up as the epitome of horror resulting from being under siege.

Maybe being “under siege” doesn’t have to relate only to being surrounded by an enemy, but to being surrounded by sin? Such as when we live in a sinful and fallen world?

So, back to cheeseburgers: the meat in the cheeseburger comes from the beef cattle industry and the milk comes from the dairy farm industry: these are two totally different animals (pardon the expression), and in dairy farming the cows aren’t killed until they are no longer able to produce milk. And that isn’t part of the beef industry.

Calves are born in both the beef and dairy industries, but they stay within that industry. To violate the kashrut (kosher) commandment regarding boiling the calf in its mother’s milk, you would have to buy milk from the grocery store that was from the same cow that gave birth to the veal you bought from the grocery store, then boil that veal in that milk.

The milk production from United States dairy farms is about 21 billion gallons a year, and the meat Americans eat is not mainly from America, but the top four producers of meat sold in America are Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Hong Kong. Considering these statistics, it seems pretty safe to say that there is no way in the world that anyone would ever be boiling a calf in its mother’s milk.

Unless you owned the cow and did it all on purpose.

So there you have it: if you want to live “rabbinically” kosher, obeying what men say which overrides what God said, then you will never eat any dairy with any meat product, ever. At least you won’t be sinning.

Or, you can ignore the kosher laws altogether, as Christians have been taught they can do, thereby always sinning: not just by violating the cow/milk/calf thing, but by pigging out on pig and having a shell of a time eating shellfish.

There is a third option: you could do as I do and be “biblically” kosher, eating what God said is OK to eat, and not eating what God said is not OK to eat.

This ministry is not here to tell you what you should do but to teach you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision, and now that you have been informed it is up to you to decide what you will do.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry grow. Please subscribe to both my website and YouTube channel, and don’t forget to also check out my books and Facebook page.

And remember that I always welcome your comments.

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