How about a nice, easy lesson today? Let’s talk covenants.

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

Before we talk about covenants, let’s make sure we are all on the same page as to what a covenant is: it is an agreement between two or more parties, and it can be conditional or unconditional.

Conditional covenants are those where each party promises to perform some act in order to make the covenant valid, and if either party violates their side of the agreement, then the covenant is rendered null and void.

Unconditional covenants are those where one side of the agreement promises to perform some act and the other side is not required to do anything.

Simple, right?

Okay, so the main 5 covenants we know from the Bible are these:

1. Noahdic Covenant– God promises unconditionally not to destroy life by a flood anymore, and the rainbow is the sign of that covenant.
2. Abrahamic Covenant– God promises Abraham that he will make him into a nation and give him the land of the Canaanites. He also promises that those who curse Abraham will be cursed, and those who bless him will be blessed. The sign of this covenant is that all the males of Abraham’s family and slaves must be circumcised.
3. The Mosaic Covenant- God promises to make us into a holy nation if we obey the laws he gives us. The sign of this covenant is the Shabbat (Sabbath).
4. The Davidic Covenant– God promises King David that so long as his children obey God’s commandments (in the Torah) then he will always have a descendant sitting on the throne. Most important about this is that he also promises to make David’s house a perpetual house, which is understood to be the promise that the Messiah will be a descendant of David.
5. The New Covenant– Despite what you may think, this is not in the New Covenant writings, but in Jeremiah 31:31. God promises to write his Torah on our hearts and forgive our sins so that no longer will anyone have to say “Know Adonai” because we will all know him.

So, now that we have the covenants down, let’s identify which ones are conditional and which aren’t.

There is really only one that is unconditional, the Noahdic Covenant. God doesn’t require anything from us in that covenant.

The other four are all conditional: for Abraham we need to be a circumcised male (although obviously females won’t have to undergo that), for the Mosaic Covenant we need to obey the Torah, and the Davidic Covenant is conditional upon David’s descendants obeying the Torah.

Although the New Covenant doesn’t specify any requirement, I have to believe that if someone has not turned their heart towards God they probably won’t be allowed into that covenant.

You may be thinking why God, who has always kept his side of the bargain even though we have often (actually, always) broken our side of his covenants, has still done what he said he would do regarding the conditional covenants.

I think the answer is this: God loves us so much that he is willing to allow us to screw up over and over, but he will not take advantage of his legal right to break his side of the covenant.

I believe this is pretty obvious when we see how many times God has allowed his people to violate his covenants yet was willing to forgive us when we did T’shuvah (turning from sin) in order that the covenant would remain in force.

Ezekiel 18:23 says it best: God doesn’t want to see anyone die (meaning an eternal death), which is why he maintains his side of broken covenants, just waiting for us to re-establish our side.

And when we fail to get around to replacing our heads on our shoulders from where we had them (I won’t say where, but the sun doesn’t shine there), God eventually runs out of patience and decides to give us some motivation, such as a plague, sending the sword against us, famine, etc. He still keeps his side, despite our violation, and instead of just leaving us be he tries to get us back on track.

However, for those who constantly and happily violate the covenants, God will allow them to go their own way, which I believe is very painful to him. But because he loves us so much, he is willing to allow us to kill ourselves, even when he doesn’t want that to happen.

One more thing about covenants- they are in force until one side breaks them or whatever time period they may have attached to them runs out. As for God’s Torah, he gives us a term limit- throughout all your generations.

That means as long as we are alive, those laws are valid and required to be in the covenant with God. Christianity has taught that you can violate the Mosaic Covenant without any repercussions, but that is a false teaching, unless you can show that you have no more generations.

Yeshua lived in accordance with all God’s covenants, including the Torah, which is why he was resurrected- like it or not, the Torah IS the path to salvation because it is God’s “User Manual for Righteousness”, and obedience to the Torah will result in salvation; Yeshua proved that by being resurrected.

The problem is that humans cannot do that, which is why God sent the Messiah, to cover our tuchas when we screw up.

Everyone is under the Noahdic Covenant, and can be under every other covenant if they choose to be obedient and meet the requirements for our side of the agreement. To be saved you do not have to be circumcised because being a member of the Abrahamic Covenant is not a requirement for salvation, but if you want to be saved you need to recognize that believing in Yeshua is NOT a part of any of the covenants, and salvation cannot be earned so it is not a covenental issue, either. Believing in Yeshua is required to receive forgiveness by means of the sacrificial blood he shed, replacing the need to bring an animal to the temple.

Salvation is eternal life, and it is a side-effect of the New Covenant, but (as I said earlier) I truly believe that anyone who rejects obedience to God’s Mosaic Covenant will not be allowed to participate in the New Covenant.

It just doesn’t make sense that God will allow those who purposefully reject his Torah to be forgiven, despite what your Christian religion may tell you.

Here is something to consider: at the end of time we will all face God, and some will say, “I tried to be obedient to your covenants” and others will say, “I did what my man-made religion told me was okay to do.”

So nu?… which of those people do you think God will accept into his presence?

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages, even with 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!

I have often stated that I believe the Gospel of John is a false gospel, and by that I mean it is not written by the real apostle John, and even more than that, I do not believe it was even written by a Jewish person.

Warning: this one will be longer than most of my messages.

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

I think we first have to remember that what started out as a movement within the Jewish people, one where Yeshua was being recognized as anything from a prophet to the Messiah, had originally been (except for a very few exceptions) only within the Jewish population . It wasn’t until about 3-4 years after his resurrection that Shaul (Paul) changed his mind about Yeshua and began to open the path to salvation through Yeshua (now recognized as the Messiah) to the Gentile population throughout the Middle East and Asia. This was a paradigm shift in lifestyle for those Gentiles, and Shaul was bringing them into Torah observance at a pace they could handle.

The problem was that the Jews were rebelling against Roman rule and, as such, the Gentile believers started to get worried that their conversion would target them along with the Jews, so that by the end of the First Century, when most of the original Jewish leaders had been martyred or dead and the majority of Jews who would believe in Yeshua had come and gone, the movement that was Jewish mutated into a new religion called Christianity, which by the middle of the Second Century (after the Jewish rebellion had been put down, once and for all around 132 AD), this new religion was targeted by Rome, anyway, because the one thing Rome hated more than rebellion was a religion other than their own in one of their territories.

Okay, so now we have the historical background to support why this Jewish movement was moving away from Judaism by the time John wrote his gospel.

According to scholars, John was exiled to Patmos around 93 AD, spent anywhere from 18 months to 3 years there, then was released and eventually returned to Ephesus, He died there around 100 AD at the approximate age of 92. He wrote about his vision of the Apocalypse while on Patmos, but his gospel wasn’t written until after he returned to Ephesus.

According to scholars, the three narrative gospels were each written sometime within 40 years or so of Yeshua’s death and resurrection around 30 AD: Mark wrote his gospel around 70 AD, Matthew and Luke were written around 80-85 AD.

Now what is funny here is that when you look up when Matthew was supposed to have died, it is sometime between 68-70 AD, some 10-15 years before he was supposed to have written his gospel! And if the other gospels were written within 40 years or so of the resurrection, why did John wait over 60 years?

I contend that no one really knows when the gospels were written, they only have guesses. And we know that many times scribes would write letters from notes made by someone, signing that person’s name. This is suspected to have been done with a number of Shaul’s (Paul) letters.

(You can check that out in the teaching series I have written regarding the Epistles- here is a link to that series of teachings: the Epistles.)

So, with these questionable issues about any and all of the gospels, let me go into some of the reasons I feel that John is not a valid gospel, at all, and written by a Gentile using the name of John.

One reason is that he doesn’t write about the Torah or the Jews correctly. What I mean is that a Jew would never call the people “the Jews”, which John does nearly 60 times throughout this gospel; to a Jew, the other Jews are “the people”. And a Jew would never, ever refer to the Torah as “their Torah”, which John does in his gospel.

Another reason I doubt the validity of John is because it fails the test of Hermeneutics, which is the exegesis tool that says every part of the Bible should not contradict any other part of the Bible, since it was all (allegedly) inspired by God, who never changes.

How John fails this test is, for one, where he refers to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). The other three gospels are clear that Yeshua says he has come only for the children of Israel (Matthew 15:24) and explicitly says to his disciples not to tell anyone he is the Messiah (Matthew 16:20, Mark 8:30, and Luke 9:21), yet here in John he not only tells this Samaritan woman he is the Messiah (failing to match what the other gospels said), but he stays in her town and teaches there for 2 days (again, totally against what Yeshua says in the other gospels)!

And when it comes to the idea of the Trinity (which arguments for or against will not be part of this discussion), almost every justification for saying Yeshua is also God comes only from John’s gospel. Nowhere in any of the other Gospels does Yeshua even hint that he is God. And I also will go as far as to say the miracle of making wine from water (John 2) is designed specifically to show that Mary has some level of authority over Yeshua!

Think about it: the Roman Catholic Church (which was the only church until about 1054) has constantly had people pray to Mary to intervene with Jesus. This miracle indicates that she has that power, since he first said he didn’t want to do anything, but she went ahead and had him do it, anyway. And another thing: every miracle that Yeshua performed in the other three gospels had to do with healing of one sort or another- but in John he makes wine from water for a party! Why? I believe it is only to indicate the authority that Mary has over Yeshua and within the Catholic Church.

Another thing about John is that the writing is stylistically not “Jewish”. Even as confusing as Shaul’s letters are, John is full of double-talk and overly spiritualized metaphor that makes it almost impossible to tell when Yeshua is talking literally or figuratively.

I am Jewish and understand Jewish logic, which is that we Jews will tell you everything something is not before we tell you what it is, but John is written so confusingly that you don’t know what is real and what is not:
If you know me you know him, but you don’t know him so you can’t know me, and that is why you don’t know me because you don’t know him, yadda-yadda-yadda…

One last thing, and I appreciate anyone who has stayed with me this long: by the end of the First Century, the one thing that the Jews and (now called) Christians had in common was this: neither side wanted any more Jews joining this movement. Even Shaul recognized this shift by stating that the Jews will no longer accept Yeshua until the time of the Gentiles is over (Romans 11:25).

By the time John was supposed to have been written, already Christianity was separating itself from its Jewish beginnings by changing the Shabbat to Sunday (Ignatius of Antioch proclaimed that around 98 AD) and by the time of Tertullian’s influential writings (which, for the record, is where the term “trinity” originated) in the middle of the Second Century, Christianity had changed from a Jewish movement inviting Gentiles to a totally new Gentile religion that rejected the Jews and “their” Torah.

John’s gospel is written in a way that would turn-off any self-respecting Jew from even wanting to hear anything more about Yeshua. That is how I was raised, as many Jews have been for millennia, being taught that Jesus was a Jew but turned against Judaism and created Christianity.

Of course, that is untrue- Yeshua was, and still is, Jewish but he did not create Christianity! Men did, and they did so by misusing the letters Shaul wrote and doing everything they could to keep Jews from wanting to know anything about this new godhead of theirs called Jesus Christ.

And that is why I believe, for the reasons stated above, this so-called gospel was written by a Gentile leader of the new religion called Christianity designed specifically to keep Jews away and to further separate this new religion from its Jewish roots.

Thank you for staying through this, and I am sure it is very uncomfortable for many, especially Gentiles, to hear what I am saying. I am not telling anyone to change what they believe, only what I believe and why- you make up your own minds.

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

Being anti-something isn’t always a bad thing, depending on why anyone is against a certain thing. If a person is hateful and bigoted, that is usually based in ignorance and upbringing, whereas if someone is against something for moral or religious reasons, that doesn’t necessitate hatefulness.

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

This message came to me after a discussion with a friend last night, when he told me that I was Anti-Christian. I replied (as my defense) that I was Anti-Christian teaching, but not Anti-Christian.

I am grateful to him for telling me, straight out, that if I am Anti-Christian teaching then I am Anti-Christian. And, in response to that, I had to say he was right.

But I am not Anti-Christian, I am Anti-Christianity. That is the difference between being a bigot and just not agreeing with a religious belief system.

From my lifetime of knowing people who are Anti-Semitic (when you’re Jewish you get to meet a lot of people like that) I have found that the basis for their hatred is not religious, whatsoever. They are not against us worshipping God, or for being devoted to the Torah, although I have been accused of being a Christ-killer, but even that is not enough to generate the level of hatred and violence against us.

The main reason, from my experience, for people being Anti-Semitic is economic. We have been accused of controlling the media and the finances of the world. We even have been accused of being the children of Satan (John 8:44).

The fact that we have been very successful in business and finance has not helped dispel that lie.

But my being Anti-Christianity is not based on economics, social positioning, or anything other than the teachings that Christianity has been proliferating for nearly two millennia. I do not hate any Christians, but I do hate the things they have been taught.

Some examples of those teachings being replacing God the father with Yeshua the Messiah, bowing and praying to statues, telling people that they can ignore the Torah because Yeshua did away with it (which makes the son of God a traitor to his father misleading people away from proper worship), and (this is a biggie!) teaching that Jews are no longer God’s chosen people because God has rejected the Jews as a result of us rejecting his son.

Having a love and respect for God and Yeshua, those teachings are, to me, as annoying as someone insulting my wife in front of me.

So, yes, I am an Anti-Christianity person but I am not against Christians. You might call this one of those times where we hate the sin but love the sinner.

And despite being told, more times than I care to count, that I do not know the Bible or understand the Epistles or that I can’t really be saved because I still do all that “Jewish” stuff, I know that if I continue to try to live as best as I can in accordance with the way God said to live and worship him (which is only found in the Torah), faithfully trusting that Yeshua is the Messiah and through his sacrifice I am able to find forgiveness of sin (which is, ultimately, what being saved means), then I am absolutely positive that I am on the right path to salvation.

And despite not liking Christianity, I still can love Christians.

This ministry is devoted to teaching the truth, as I believe it to be, about who God is, who the Messiah is, what he taught, and how best to serve God in the way we worship him and treat each other. I try to make sure I have biblical justification for every and anything I teach

I have many who disagree with me, on both the Christian and Jewish side, but I never tell anyone what they should believe, only what I believe and why I believe it.

I will argue (always nicely and with respect) with anyone who disagrees, and if we cannot come to an agreement, then so be it- we can each shake the dust from our sandals and go somewhere else. The fact remains that nothing I say, or you say, or anyone says is going to count at all when we come before the Lord God, Almighty at Judgement Day because all that will count with God is what he says.

And when we come before him, as we all shall do, at least I can say that I tried to do what God said to do and not what some men who created their own religion said to do.

Frankly, I think that will go over a lot better with God than someone who says they did what their religion said to do.

Thank you for being here and please remember to 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 this week so L’hitraot, and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!

For over two millennia both Jews and Christians have been taught that Jesus Christ is the founder of Christianity.

I would say it is true that the man-made messiah called “Jesus Christ” is credited with being the founder of Christianity, but in truth the real Messiah, Yeshua, never did.

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

First of all, it isn’t correct to say Yeshua was Jewish because he IS Jewish- he was risen as the Messiah of God, who is, was, always will be, and had been planned from the beginning of creation to be a Jew.

It is because he obeyed God’s Torah completely throughout his life that he was resurrected, as anyone who could have done that would have been; the problem is, of course, no human born of man and woman can do that.

So why is it Christianity has taught that having obeyed the Torah, which allowed him to be resurrected to eternal life in God’s presence (which, for the record, is what being “saved” means), if you believe Yeshua is the Messiah you don’t really have to obey anything?

What is the purpose of doing something to show us how it is done, just to say now that you know how to, you don’t have to?

That’s right, it don’t make no sense!

The first thing to understand is that God has no religion- he gave the Jewish people his Torah, after having chosen us to be a nation of priests to the world (Exodus 19:6) so that after learning it ourselves, we would be able to teach it to the Goyim (Nations, i.e., everyone else in the world).

God gave us the Torah so that all people God created (that includes you) would know how to worship God and how to treat each other in the way that God wants us to do, so that we can be righteous in his eyes.

Again- the way God wants you to be, not the way a religion teaches you it wants you to be.

Of course, proper obedience to God can’t happen because we are a rebellious, sinful, egocentric, and just plain stupid species. If not for Messiah Yeshua, we would have no chance for eternal life in God’s presence, whatsoever.

Ya know… it’s funny that God put mankind in charge of the animals, but in the end, the animals can teach us about how a society should be better than we can teach ourselves.

It isn’t about being Jewish or being Christian, or anything else: it is about doing what God wants us to. In Ezekiel 18:23, God tells us he doesn’t want anyone to die, but to do t’shuvah (turn from sin) and live.

Remember: when God says live or die, he doesn’t mean from a mortal viewpoint, but from an eternal one.

Yeshua never preached anything against the Torah; in truth, what he taught was a deeper, spiritual understanding of the Torah (called the Remes) so that we could be able to live it better. He did not do away with anything, but added to our ability to do as we should.

The idea that he died a Jew but was raised a Christian is so stupid that the only way anyone with half a brain would believe it is if it had been drilled into their head from early childhood, when they had neither the knowledge of the Bible or ability to question what they were being told, so that by adulthood it was an a priori truth.

God said what he wants everyone to do in the Torah, and because we can’t do it as we should, he sent Yeshua to cover our tuchas when we fail. Without Yeshua’s sacrifice replacing the need to bring an animal to the temple in Jerusalem (as a sin sacrifice), which is the only Torah commanded way we can ask for forgiveness, there is no hope for anyone not accepting Yeshua as their Messiah to be saved, no matter what their religion tells them.

Here is a truth that leads to eternal life: anyone who rejects the Torah rejects God, and that ain’t gonna do you no good, at all!

Yeshua never taught against the Torah, and neither did Shaul (Paul), or any of the Apostles- what they did was try to teach Gentiles how to live according to the Torah a little at a time. After Shaul died (around 60-64 AD), the Gentiles that led his congregations started to stray from the proper path and by the time they decided to change things around (their reasons for doing that are being beyond the scope of this message) what had been a Jewish movement accepting Gentiles became a Gentile religion that rejected Jews.

But Yeshua is still a nice Jewish boy sitting at Daddy’s right hand, probably saying to himself …

“Oy gevalt!
How could they so screw up something so simple?”

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!