Author: Steven R. Bruck
What Anger and Joy Have in Common
You might be thinking I got my title a little mixed up. After all, aren’t anger and joy opposites? What could they possibly have in common?
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Before I explain, I need to talk about fire.
When there is a fire, doesn’t it feed on and effect everything around it? And when a fire runs out of fuel, it will begin to feed on itself, right? And when it does that, it dies out.
Anger is an emotional fire, but this type of fire is unique: when it feeds on itself, it grows stronger!
The longer someone stays angry, the harder it is to release the anger, and the more one dwells on what made them angry in the first place, the angrier they become.
So how can this be like joy?
It can because joy has the same characteristic: when we are happy, the more we think about why we are happy, the happier we become. And the longer we stay happy, the easier it is to stay that way.
One other thing anger and joy have in common is that they are both highly contagious.
When someone is angry, they usually take it out on those around them, making them feel (at the very least) uncomfortable, and more often than not angry with the angry person who is now making them angry.
And when we are joyful, we spread joy to others who can’t help but feeling happy seeing how happy we are.
So, nu? What happens when a joyful person runs into an angry person? Do they neutralize each other? Does the angry person become less angry, and the joyful person more sedate?
It all depends on the person.
You see, another thing anger and joy have in common is that, while they are both easily influenced by external factors, we decide how we will feel.
You choose to be angry, and you choose to be joyful- even though (as I have already pointed out) they are both highly contagious, when in the presence of someone who is happy or mad, we can create an immunity to their feelings, if we choose to.
That’s why some people aren’t influenced by other people’s emotional state and some are- it is entirely up to us to decide how we feel.
Of course, it isn’t as easy as I make it sound, and I can tell you from my own experience it takes a lot to overcome anger, and sometimes it takes a lot to be joyful. But when you come down to it, it is our choice, and though external factors can influence us, the uncomfortable truth is there is no one to blame for how we feel except ourselves.
This is where God comes into play- trusting that God is in charge of our life, and by accepting Yeshua (Jesus) as our messiah and being able to receive forgiveness by means of his sacrifice, we can comfort ourselves knowing that this life is short but eternity is, well…it’s eternal, and nothing that happens in this life will matter all that much.
I once wrote a message called SWISH, which stands for So What, I‘m Saved, Hallelujah!
The next time you hear that hoof-footed guy with horns wearing the red jumper suit sitting on your shoulder and telling you to get back at, be mad, or hate someone, SWISH him away!
Believe me, you will feel much better when you do.
Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know. Subscribe to my website and YouTube channel, buy my books, and join my Facebook group called “Just God’s Word” (but please make sure you agree to the rules or I can’t let you in).
And remember that I always welcome your comments.
That’s it for today, so L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
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God the Referee
We know that God is the Creator, the King, the Judge, the Shield, the Father, the Savior, and there are still a few other titles we could give him.
But have you ever thought of him as a referee?
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I looked up what a referee does, and according to Wikipedia, a referee:
Enforces applicable activities rules and assess penalties when necessary
Therefore, God as a referee means he knows the rule book, inside and out, which makes sense: after all, he wrote the darn thing! We call it the Torah. And when someone violates those rules, God will make the “call”, throw the red flag, and assess what penalty is to be given.
We see this in action throughout the Bible: 5 yards for offside (Do Not Commit Adultery); 10 yards for illegal receiver (Do Not Have Any Other Gods Before Me); 15 yards for clipping (Do Not Steal); and ejection from the game for unsportsmanlike conduct (Thou Shalt Not Kill).
What is interesting is that when we read of God telling the prophets to review the rules with the people, he always states the punishment as something that the people bring on themselves. Even though God, himself, is causing the punishment, it isn’t really his doing, it is their doing- in other words, these rules which are immutable and eternal, and when you break a rule- whether or not you agree with it- whatever results from that infraction is solely your fault.
Just like when the referee throws the flag and imposes the penalty- he is just following the rules. He doesn’t have the option to decide if he will enforce the rules or not, and he also doesn’t have the option to decide the penalty for that infraction because the rules tell him what he can, and cannot, impose.
And the one who violated the rules is the only one to blame for the penalty.
You are the only one responsible for what happens when you do (or say) something that is in violation of the rules: there is no one else to blame.
Too many people blame society, or their parents, and some even blame God when they suffer for something they did. The old excuse “I couldn’t help it- they made me do it!” doesn’t hold water with anyone.
When the comedian Flip Wilson dressed up as Geraldine and cried, “The Devil made me do it!”, that was funny; but, the truth is that the Devil doesn’t make us do anything. Oh, yes, he certainly creates an environment where we are enticed to sin, but what you do and say is because you do it., and because you say it!
Do you recall what God told Cain? Wasn’t it something about sin crouching at the door, but it was up to Cain, alone, to conquer it?
So, when you screw something up (and we all do, sooner or later), stop looking for someone or something to blame, and bite the bullet. Confess your mistake and (hopefully) you are also sorry you did it (they call that “repentance”, or in Hebrew, T’shuvah).
After confession, repentance, and asking God for forgiveness by means of the shed blood of the Messiah Yeshua, you can start again, clean.
Here’s the hard part: after you square it away with God, go to the one who you sinned against and ask their forgiveness, too.
It doesn’t really matter, on an eternal level, whether or not they forgive you because this is how that works: you have already made yourself right with God so you don’t really need their forgiveness, but they need to forgive you in order for them to be right with God.
Asking forgiveness from someone is hard because we are baring our heart to them, but it is so important for them to have that opportunity to forgive you which makes them right with God.
You might ask, “Why do I need to do that? Shouldn’t they do that themselves?” and you are right- they should forgive you whether or not you ask for it, but when you do ask, it gives them that chance.
Isn’t giving someone the chance to get right with God a way to show love for another as yourself?
Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know. Subscribe to my website and YouTube channel, buy my books, and join my Facebook group called “Just God’s Word” (please agree to the rules so I can let you in).
And remember that I always welcome your comments.
That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!
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Christian Legalism
Gee, I just realized I haven’t posted anything since 2022! Maybe that’s because today is January 3, 2023?
The letter Shaul (Paul) wrote to the Galatian Believers has brought forth the idea of “Legalism”, which is generally understood by almost every Christian I have met as being “under the law”, meaning that people try to earn salvation through strict adherence to the commandments in the Torah.
However, they never consider that not following the commandments is called lawlessness.
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The right mix between strict adherence to the Torah and not trying to earn salvation is when we do the best we can to obey God’s instructions in order to please God and as a direct result of our faithful belief that everything God tells us to do is for our benefit.
Recently, there are many Christians who are beginning to recognize and accept their Jewish roots, and rejecting the anti-Torah teachings that Christianity has been proliferating for millennia. This is a good thing, no doubt, but it is also generating a new type of legalism- not like in Galatians, where the believing Jews were forcing the converting Gentiles to become Jewish overnight, but by Christians who are trying so hard to be obedient to the Torah that they are becoming overly zealous to the point of obsessive with minutia.
They are over-reacting to issues that have nothing to do with salvation, such as the new moon phases, Christian holidays, and the “proper” pronunciation of God’s name; so much so that they have created their own form of legalism.
The pendulum has swung to the opposite side of the spiritual lifestyle, so to speak, and instead of accepting Christian traditional teachings against the Torah, they have become obsessive about obeying the Torah.
Okay, that’s not bad- I mean, wanting to do as God said to do is fine, but so many have become so zealous that they are now doing things just so that they can say they are doing them. They need to remember what Shaul said in Galatians 4:18, which is that zealousness is good, so long as you are zealous for the right thing.
Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but the fact is doing so that you can say you are doing, is “legalism” in its purest form.
I am not saying that Christians who want to be Torah observant shouldn’t be that way: what I am saying, or trying to say, is that the Torah is our guide, our “How To Be Righteous” manual, but to get so obsessives as to argue about pronunciation, when the new moon really occurs, or which holidays should be celebrated and which are pagan is not edifying- it only causes disruption and dissention within the body of the Messiah.
I also have seen Christians who are “Buffet Believers”- they pick and choose which commandments and observances they like, then make up excuses why it is right to reject the others. This, too, is a form of legalism, and is just not right.
Look- living in complete accordance with the Torah is the epitome of righteousness, and (so far) the only human who was capable of doing that was Yeshua. Truth be told, despite what anyone has told you, if you live in exact and complete accordance with the Torah, it WILL save your soul. That is why God gave it to us, so we would know everything we have to do, and also why Yeshua was accepted as a sacrifice and “saved”- he was righteous in God’s eyes because he was 100% Torah observant.
The problem is, as I said, Yeshua was the only human to ever have done that, and is the only human who ever will. It’s because no human can be 100% Torah observant that God had to send us the Messiah- DUH!
So, if you are a person who was raised Christian, with all the traditional Christian drek about the Torah is only for Jews and all you need to do is believe in Jesus, be a good person, and love others and you will be saved, but have come to realize that it is wrong- good for you! Welcome to Club Torah. But PLEASE! Do not go crazy about calendars or holidays or pronunciation etc., because that will only lead you away from the path to righteousness.
If you do your best to obey what God said to do in the Torah, and make sure that whatever you do- whether it be rooted in Judaism or Christianity, that in your heart and soul and mind you are doing it for the glory of God and his Messiah, then I believe you are going to be fine.
You are doing what should be done, and when you screw it up, as you will (as we all do), be grateful that we have Yeshua.
Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry continue to grow. Also, please subscribe to both my website and YouTube channel, buy my books, and join my Facebook group called “Just Gods’ Word” (please make sure you agree to the rules or I can’t let you in).
And remember that I always welcome your comments.
That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
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Did Yeshua Ever Give a Command?
How many times have you heard that a Believer should follow the commands of Yeshua (Jesus)?
My question is this: when did he ever command anyone to do anything?
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The fact is that Yeshua NEVER commanded anyone to do anything that wasn’t already a commandment from his father, God.
If you search Google for commandments Yeshua made, it will tell you that he made two- to love the Lord and to love each other. Or, you will get a “hit” for when he told his disciples to love one another.
But those were already given by God in the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, respect.).
This is just one example of how Christianity has replaced God with Jesus, making him into an idol who is interfering in our relationship with God instead of interceding for us.
They don’t even refer to him as a messiah but as a savior- just one more way they implicitly identify him as God, which is done in order to separate Jesus from anything Jewish, which only serves to keep Jews from wanting to hear anything about him.
What am I talking about? Don’t Jews view the messiah as a savior?
Not really. We refer to the messiah (as you can see in the Gospel of Matthew more than any other gospel) as king more than as a savior. When you ask a Jew about who his savior is, he (or she) will most likely say God.
Throughout the Tanakh, God is referred to as our savior. Even when Mary prayed (Luke 1:46-49), she referred to God as her savior.
This will help you to understand why we view the messiah as our king and not as our savior: the traditional Jewish expectation of the messiah is that he will rebuild the temple and reinstitute the Levitical service, being both king and Cohen HaGadol (High Priest), and with the temple and Levitical service back in force we will thereby be able to receive forgiveness through the sacrificial system. I have written an entire teaching series about this, and if you want to study it, click here.
Christianity has done everything it can over the millennia to totally separate itself from its Jewish roots, and by referring to Jesus (never using his real name, Yeshua) as their savior instead of God, praying to saints, making graven images all over their churches, saying human beings can forgive sin, and the worst of all is the idea of the Trinity, which makes Jesus equal with God, the very idea of which is an anathema to Jews.
So, nu? No wonder Jews don’t want to hear anything about Jesus: to Jews, he is more of a Gentile idol than as the messiah God promised to send to us.
I am Jewish by blood on both sides for generations- I never converted to Christianity when I accepted Yeshua as my messiah- and to tell you the truth, I am more “Jewish” now than before. Because of this, I can easily see the anti-Jewish messages that Christianity has created in their tenets, dogma, ceremonies, and history (ever hear of the Inquisition? the Crusades?) which most Christians cannot.
And saying to follow the commands of Jesus is just one more example of Christianity trying to keep Jews away from their own messiah.
I usually keep my plugs for my books to the end of these messages, but I really want to tell you that the book I am most proud of is my recent one, and if you want to know more about how Christianity has proliferated lies about the Jewish messiah, click here to get this book.
So, let’s end today’s message with this: next time someone mentions the commands of Jesus, set them straight (nicely, of course) by saying that he never gave a command, he only repeated the ones that God gave in the Torah.
Therefore, if you really, really want to obey Jesus and follow in his footsteps, take a walk through the Torah.
Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry continue to grow. Subscribe, click for notifications, buy my books (I know I already said that, but it never hurts to say it again) and join my Facebook group called “Just God’s Word” (please agree to the rules or I can’t let you join).
And I always welcome your comments.
That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!
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Is the Old Covenant God Different From the New Covenant God?
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard Christians tell me that the God of the Jewish Bible is cruel, punitive, and unforgiving, whereas Jesus is all about love and forgiveness.
Of course, you won’t hear that from Jews because, well, Jews don’t read or even recognize the New Covenant as scripture.
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If you ask me, saying that God was different before Messiah came is not only wrong on every count, but insulting to God. It can only come from someone who doesn’t know God, or messiah Yeshua (Jesus) at all, and is probably just repeating what they have heard from someone just as ignorant as they are.
Do you think the God we read about in the Old Covenant is cruel? Well, he did allow Job to suffer greatly for a long time, he enslaved his people for 400 years, and he completely destroyed both the Northern and Southern kingdoms, even allowing his house in Jerusalem to be wrecked- twice!
But isn’t this the same God who killed Hananiah and his wife, Shapira, simply for lying about how much they received from the sale of their property (Acts 5)? I mean, really?- loving and compassionate, forgiving and caring but still, if you lie to me you die! That sounds like the same God of the Old Covenant to me.
And what about Yeshua in the temple, when he turned over the money changing tables and wrecked the booths of the people selling animals? If he was truly forgiving, wouldn’t he have nicely asked them to leave the temple? Something like, “C’mon, Guys, you know this is not what God wants from you. Please take your business out of the temple area, OK? Thanks a lot, hey- love ya!”
But who was it that said, in Ezekiel 18:23, that he doesn’t get pleasure from anyone dying, and prefers that they turn from their sin, and live? It was the God of the Old Covenant.
And who regathered his people from exile and protected them as they rebuilt the temple? It was the God of the Old Covenant.
And who gave them a miraculous victory over the Seleucid king who tried to destroy them completely? It was the God of the Old Covenant.
Wow! Ya know sumthun? He ain’t so nasty, after all.
There was a big difference between what God had to do in the Old Covenant and what he was able to do in the New Covenant. Actually, in the New Covenant, God didn’t do much himself, but did things through Yeshua.
You need to understand that God doesn’t work on a finite level, which is the only level we humans can understand. God sees everything on an eternal basis, so when he speaks of life and death, he doesn’t mean breathing or not breathing, he means where you spend eternity.
When God first chose Abraham to be the father of his chosen people, a people chosen to bring God’s salvation to the world, he had to first build up this man into a nation. That is why he told Abraham that his descendants would be enslaved for 400 years (Genesis 15:13). Now, to those who don’t know how God works, it seems silly that he will make them a nation while they are enslaved. But it isn’t because he was cruel, it’s because he was smart.
The world back then was cruel and dangerous- a king of a town would destroy other towns, left and right, in order to become larger. If a small group of people, such as the 72 or 73 members of Abraham’s family, were to ever grow into a large number of people, they would have to be protected. So, God positioned them inside the strongest nation that existed at that time so they would be protected and given that chance to grow into a nation.
Yeah, OK, so they were enslaved and tortured and lived a horrible life, but that was also part of the plan, which was so God would be able to show them how powerful he was once the people were ready to fulfill God’s plan for them.
And once they were freed, God then had to be very strict with them to get them to leave their comfort zone of paganistic rituals and lifestyle, and take on the mantle of righteousness that they would receive from obedience to the Torah. If you read carefully, and think about it, every punishment that God exacted on the people when they were disobedient may seem cruel, but he was training the Jews to be his nation of priests (Exodus 19:6). When we read of a punishment, we also see that right after the punishment God followed it up with a way to avoid the punishment.
In Numbers 15, when the man was stoned for collecting sticks on the Shabbat, God ordered us to wear tzit-tzit as a reminder not to disobey.
In Numbers 21, when God sent snakes to punish the people, he also had Moses make a bronze serpent so the people could avoid dying.
When Abihu and Nadab were killed for offering strange fire while drunk (Leviticus 10), God ordered that no priest should drink liquor before approaching the sanctuary.
I was in management most of my career, and one of the things I noticed about good managers was that when they first took over, they were very strict. They wouldn’t “loosen the belt” until the people responsible to do the job proved trustworthy to do the work correctly.
This is what we are told in Proverbs 22:6, which says
“Train a child in the way he should go; and, even when old, he will not swerve from it.”
That has to be coupled with Proverbs 23:13-14, which says:
Don’t withhold discipline from a child — if you beat him with a stick, he won’t die! If you beat him with a stick, you will save him from Sheol.
We had a lot of hard lessons to learn when God was teaching us how to be his priests to the world, and God had to be hard on us, since we are (as God has often told us) a stiff-necked and rebellious people.
By the time he sent the Messiah, these lessons were all well-known (but still ignored), and at that point God knew punishment was not going to change anything. At that time, as it is today, the punishment of those who are sinful is not so much now while they are living on the earth, but reserved for them in the afterlife.
God never changes, he is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, so the God of the Old Covenant is the same, exact God of the New Covenant.
What is different is which part of his plan for humanity he is exercising. He did the training, he did the punishment for disobedience, and the ways to remember not to be disobedient. He’s been true to his word with blessings when we obey, and he’s been true to his word with terrible punishment when we disobey.
We are now at the stage in God’s plan where all that we need to know- his Torah, who his Messiah is, and how we can save ourselves from eternal separation from God’s presence- has been given to us. What is left is God’s loving, compassionate, and patient nature causing him to wait until everyone he wants to have this chance to be saved has been given more than enough time to decide to obey or reject him.
If your religion has told you all that “Jewish” stuff in the Old Covenant isn’t for followers of Jesus, you might want to think about this: Jesus followed all that “Jewish” stuff, which is why he was an acceptable sacrifice.
God never changes, but his method for getting his message across does- from using harsh punishment to initially teach his people what he wants them to do, to sending prophets to get them back on track, to exile, to forgiveness and regathering his people from exile, to sending the Messiah, now our only way to receive forgiveness.
What comes next will be worldwide destruction and the creation of a new world for those who listened and obeyed. I don’t know when this will happen. Hey, even the son of God said he wasn’t privy to the date, so my suggestion is that you ignore your religion and start to pay attention to God, because it is what he said in the Torah that will be the plumb line you will be compared to.
Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know to help this ministry continue to grow. Subscribe to both my website and YouTube channel, buy my books, and join my Facebook group called “Just God’s Word” (but please check that you agree to the rules or I cannot allow you to join).
And remember that I always welcome your comments.
That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!