If you ask me, there are two types of ignorance: passive and active.
Neither type has anything to do with intellect, but both have to do with experience.
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Passive ignorance is the state in which a person has not been exposed to the topic. For instance, I am totally ignorant of Quantum Mathematics. However, I would be willing to learn. Passive ignorance is simply not knowing something but being open to learning about it.
Active ignorance is when someone has been exposed to the topic but refuses to learn anything else about it. For example, someone raised in a bigoted household who, upon reaching the age when they are able to make their own decisions, refuses to want to know anything different than what they were taught as a child. Active ignorance is knowing something about something but refusing to learn more about it.
When it comes to God, Yeshua (Jesus), or the Bible, both Christians and Jews fit into one or the other category of ignorance.
However, in some cases, they change from active to passive, at which time they learn enough to make an informed decision that can save them from their ignorance, save them from eternity outside of God’s presence, and help them become spiritually matured.
Here’s what I mean.
Let’s define Christians as all non-Jewish religions that worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and in one way or another, recognize Jesus as the Messiah. There are many Christians who pray to graven images, or who believe Jews have been rejected by God, or who worship according to man-made (i.e., Constantinian) dogma and celebrate man-made rituals refusing, absolutely, to listen to anything that indicates in any way they should be observant of the Torah. This is active ignorance.
We also see active ignorance within mainstream Judaism (meaning all sects of Judaism except Messianic Judaism), where Jews adamantly refuse to hear anything about Yeshua and insist that any Jew who believes Yeshua is the Messiah is no longer a Jew but a Christian, despite their lifestyle or form of worship.
There are also passively ignorant Jews and Christians who were raised to believe whatever their religion or sect taught them, but are open to hearing other ideas and beliefs about Jesus or different interpretations of the Bible but haven’t changed their initial beliefs or form of worship.
And then there are those like me, someone who went from actively ignorant to passively ignorant to informed, and because of that changed what I believe and how I live.
I am a Jew who was raised in a Reform Jewish home and was actively ignorant about God, the Bible, and Jesus for the first 40 years or so of my life. But God directed me to spiritually mature Christians who understood where I was coming from, as well as introducing me to a Messianic Jewish Bible, and I changed from actively ignorant to being passively ignorant, at which point I began to seek more information about God, Jesus, and the Bible, which ultimately means learning more about where I will spend eternity.
Of course, that change in attitude led me to find and know my Messiah, which has changed my Jewishness (if that’s actually a word) from being an incomplete Jew, incomplete because I was still waiting for my Messiah, to a competed Jew knowing my Messiah.
The ultimate closure for Jews is to have the Messiah come to us and re-establish our relationship with God. Because I refused to remain actively ignorant, I have come full circle from rejecting my Messiah to accepting my Messiah, and through that acceptance becoming spiritually knowledgable, living the way God said I should (to the best of my limited ability), and being written in the Book of Life.
If you are Christian and have been taught that the Torah is only for Jews, think about this: why would the son of God teach those he came to reunite with the father to reject the father’s commandments? Would the Messiah rebel against God and teach people to worship him, instead?
I don’t think so, do you?
And if you are Jewish and have rejected Yeshua (Jesus) as your Messiah, is it because you have biblical evidence he isn’t the Messiah or just because you have been taught he isn’t? If someone is Jewish by blood, lives a Jewish lifestyle by observing the Torah commandments, celebrates the Friday to Saturday Shabbat and observes the Holy Days God declared we should in Leviticus 23, do you really think they aren’t “Jewish” just because they believe Yeshua is the Messiah? Don’t you know Jews who reject God or live without any concern for the Torah, but are still considered Jews? If you don’t, then you must be in a select group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews with no contact outside your sect.
Well, believe me- there are plenty of Jews who aren’t the least bit Jewish, according to how God told us we should live. But no one calls them Christians. Now that I live more like a Jew than I ever did growing up, just because I believe Yeshua is the Messiah I am rejected by Jews and called a Christian.
I am not a Christian; I mean no offense to those who consider themselves a Christian. The reason I say I am not a Christian is that modern Christianity has been perverted and mutated from what Yeshua taught; in truth, any person who professes to worship God and who wants to live as Jesus did, but refuses to obey the Torah or celebrate the Holy Days God gave us actually is NOT worshiping God the way he said we must and NOT living as Yeshua did.
If you are Christian, look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are really living your life the same way Jesus did, which was to obey his father’s commandments. If your answer is you don’t, then ask yourself if you do, what can it hurt? After all, Jesus never said to ignore his father, but Christianity has taught others to do just that-to reject God’s instructions through their misinterpretations of the Epistles! So, do you want to remain actively ignorant, ignoring God in order to follow man-made traditions and rituals?
If you are Jewish but not Messianic, look in the mirror and ask yourself why you reject Yeshua as the Messiah. If the answer is because you were told he isn’t the Messiah and you have never researched it for yourself, ask yourself if you want to remain actively ignorant all your life? If he isn’t the Messiah, researching it will give you the confidence to know you are right; and if he is the Messiah, then you can be written in the Book of Life, which is ultimately what every Jew wants. In the long run, if you check it out, what could it hoit?
We are all raised by those who teach us what they think is right, but they are usually just repeating what they were taught. Your parents, your religious leaders, friends, and teachers all teach what they were taught, and very few of them research to verify whether or not what they were told is actually correct. Most people are passively ignorant from the start, then choose to remain actively ignorant.
My purpose in having this ministry is not to tell you what to believe, but to give you the chance to make an informed decision about where you will spend eternity. We all start out believing something, and those beliefs change as we are exposed to more and more information. Please do not stop listening because the choice to remain actively ignorant is the choice to travel the road to perdition.
Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know. Subscribe to my website and YouTube channel, like my Facebook page and join my Facebook discussion group called Just God’s Word (please make sure you read and accept the rules). And while you are on the website, buy my books. If you like what you get here, you will like my books, as well.
That’s it for now, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem.
