Recently a friend of mine, who is a long-time Believer, had a crime committed against him. He had something valuable stolen, something that the crook might resell or just keep for him/herself. When I asked if the crime was reported, my friend said that he didn’t report it, but has prayed for this person and hopes that if they keep the item that they get joy from having it, and that the item is a reminder, so to speak, of the crime and will lead that person to repentance.

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My position is that the crime should be reported, if for no other reason, that the crook might be caught, preventing anyone else from having to be a victim. In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I will go as far as to say if someone is a victim of a crime- any crime, from petty theft to sexual attack- and they fail to report it, then they are an accomplice before the fact to any crimes committed by that person from that point forward!

Now, there is nothing wrong, whatsoever, with praying for the criminal, as my friend has done. We are not asked to forgive: the fact is that we are required to forgive.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that we are forgiven as we forgive others, so if you think, for even a second, that your lack of forgiveness on earth will not come back on your own head at Judgement Day, then you have a really bad surprise coming to you.

But is praying enough? Doesn’t God say to be holy as he is holy? So, if we are to emulate God, we should do as he does, so does God allow those who sin to go unpunished?

Forgiveness is not a Get Out of Jail Free card- forgiveness is not something that will affect us on earth, at least, not from God’s perspective. God’s forgiveness doesn’t save us from suffering the consequences of our sins while we are alive-NO! It saves us from eternal damnation.

Look to the Torah- God has set up a penal system where he gives us appropriate punishment for a crime, indicating absolutely that criminals should not go unpunished. We are told not to take vengeance, or to return evil for evil, yes, but that doesn’t mean to not report a crime. To try to stop someone from doing evil is not vengeance, it is being a responsible citizen.

One of the Big Ten is not to bear false witness, well…have you considered that failing to report a true witness is no different than reporting a false witness? Either way, a sin that has been committed goes unpunished.

Of course, no sin goes unnoticed by God, and the ones who sin against others without repenting will have to face the consequences of that sin on an eternal plane, but in the meantime, while praying that the sinner repents is a righteous thing to do, not taking action to prevent that sin from reoccurring is wrong.

What do you think?

If someone stole something from you, would you pray for that person and leave it at that, hoping that God will intercede some way or that the person will come to repentance one day? Or will you pray for the person (which is always right to do), but at the same time report the crime and do what you can to prevent that person from getting away with their sin, hopefully preventing them from doing the same to someone else?

As for me and my house, we will report the crime and do everything we can to put that sucker behind bars.

Thank you for being here and please don’t hesitate to comment, and share this message with everyone you know.

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

I know, I know, Shaul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-20 that we are to pray unceasingly, but sometimes I feel so angry about something, or my heart isn’t really into it, that I believe it is more respectful to God not to pray than to act it out, without the heartfelt desire to do so.

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There are times when I am angry, or just grouchy (ask anyone who tries to IM me in the morning while I am having my coffee- they will verify I am a bear in the morning) and as such, if I did my regular morning prayers to God, I just feel they would be more of going through the motions than genuine.

In other words, if I don’t really feel like praying, I think that prayer would not be acceptable to God because he would know my heart isn’t really into it.

Remember how Yeshua talked of the Pharisee praying that he is so grateful he isn’t like the poor and educated, while the tax collector (the epitome of sinner at that time) humbly confessed his sinfulness and prayed how he was unacceptable to God (Luke 18:9-14)?

To me, this is a lesson beyond just how God rejects the haughty and accepts the humble, it is an object lesson in one of the important things about praying: it must be real.

If I am praying to God because I am supposed to do that and not because I want to, to me that is a form of Legalism because I am not really “feeling it”, I am just doing just for the sake of doing it.

I can’t see that being acceptable to God.

Now I know what you are going to say- if I feel bad or down or angry, the best thing to do IS to pray to God and ask him to help me get past that feeling. And I have prayed when feeling down, or when angry at someone (I pray for them, and it is amazing how much easier it is to forgive them when you do that!), but if I know that I am not in the right spirit (pardon the pun) to pray with genuine respect and care and with an attitude of fear, then I believe it is better not to pray at all.

Later, when I am feeling differently and ready to open my heart to God, then I will pray, and probably ask for forgiveness for my poor attitude that I had earlier.

My message today is this: if you are not ready to come before God humbly, with no bad thoughts in your head, and a heartfelt desire and need to talk to God, then wait. Wait until you are over the bad feelings, and then come before the Lord in prayer.

It is my genuine belief that God will accept any heartfelt prayer from anyone, but he doesn’t want to hear prayers that are repetitious or strained or generated not by desire to commune with him but done only because you think you have to.

It’s better to wait until you want to pray to him than to pray to him because you have to.

Thank you for being here and please share these messages with everyone you know. That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!

This might be one of the shortest messages I have ever written. I know, yes- I say that, then it goes on forever, but this time it won’t be like that.

If you prefer to watch a video, sorry- no video today.

OK, so here it is: Shaul lost his anointing as king because he was more influenced by the desires of the people than by his willingness to obey God.

David was anointed king to replace him because he was 1000% willing to obey God without concern about what anyone else thought.

From the very moment Israel became a state in 1948, they have done almost everything they could, other than the Jim Jones Guyana thing, to appease their Arab neighbors. They were attacked, and all they did was defend themselves. They accepted a fraction of the land promised under the Balfour Declaration, and with that little bit, built a state that is a world leader in technology, agriculture, with a world-class military.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world was totally buying Arafat’s propaganda lies about a Palestinian people who are being deposed by Israel.

Israel, after conquering so much land in 1967, gave so much of it back.

Now, as of October 7, when Hamas attacked innocent civilians, raping, murdering, and taking hostages, all Israel has done is to talk. It has been months, and they are still talking about hostage exchange, where Israel is giving up many more hostages than they are receiving. The Israeli hostages being released are non-combatants, who only want to return to their homes, while the Arab hostages being released are terrorists sworn to destroy Israel.

Now, if David was king, he would have marched into Gaza immediately and freed whatever hostages he could. Then he would have wiped out Hamas, period. If there were innocent Gazan’s that were collateral damage, then it was the fault of Hamas, not Israel, who were (after all) the ones attacked.

King David would have consulted Adonai, who (although I can’t speak for him) I am sure would have said to treat the cowardly and defiant Hamas the same way God said to treat the Amalekites (Deuteronomy 25:17).

But what has Israel’s leadership done?

לא כלום

(Not a thing!)

Oh, yeah, they warned Gazans to leave, and yeah, they have attacked Gaza in limited warfare, but have they retrieved the hostages? No! They have traded hostages, which is a sign of weakness.

So, nu? Why hasn’t Israel done what King David would have done: shown their strength instead of their willingness to be attacked?

It’s because they are more like Shaul than they are like David, weakly acceding to the influences of the UN and the media instead of doing what they should to protect their people, and the land that God gave us.

I think that Israel has become weak and subservient to world opinion instead of doing what God put them there to do- take possession of the land God said we should have.

I say Israel should attack Gaza and completely wipe out Hamas wherever Hamas is hiding, which we know will be behind the skirts of women and under schools and hospitals.

If Israel continues to be more like Shaul than David, then they will suffer the loss of their kingdom, just as Shaul did, until Mashiach comes to show them how to be a Chosen people- unafraid of what the world thinks, concerned only with serving God and honoring his name.

There is no honor in working with those who want to destroy you.

Thank you for being here and I hope you will share this message with everyone you know, make it go viral and maybe, just maybe, someone in power in Israel will pull up their big-boy skivvies and do something to show Hamas, the surrounding Arabs, and the rest of the world why no one should mess with God’s people!

Is the Bible the word of God? Yes, it is, but mostly not from God, directly: it is a human endeavor to interpret the proper meaning of the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin words that the Bible was originally written in over the millennia.

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For a couple of years, I was attending a Hebraic Roots congregation and was honored to be able to give the Shabbat message on a regular basis. One time, I said that the Bible was a book about God, but it wasn’t God, and someone (a man I respect and know to be faithful) stood up and walked out on me!

So many people believe that the Bible is the direct, absolute, and holy word from God, himself, to the point where they almost worship the physical book they are holding as if it was God!
And then they write all over it!

God is never changing, right? He is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow, but the Bible is not unchanging, and certainly every single Bible out there is not the same.

Did you know that under copyright laws that if I published a Bible and copyrighted it, that if someone else wanted to publish a Bible, their Bible must have hundreds- yes, hundreds!- of words different from mine, otherwise it is a violation of the copyright law.

Did you also know that the Bible is available in no less than 704 languages? Now, we all know that old adage about how something is lost in the translation, right? Well, since the Torah (the first 5 books) is the ONLY place in the entire Bible where God speaks to us, directly (with Moses taking dictation), that is the only place where we can trustfully say is the word of God. And that being true only if written in the Hebrew.

FYI: when the Sofer (scribe) writes a new Torah scroll, he copies every single letter directly from an older scroll, and at the end of each page counts every letter to ensure that there isn’t anything missing. That is why the Torah scroll, in Hebrew, is the only dependable source document where we can say it is the Word of God because it has been copied exactly for millennia.

The Bible is not God- it is a book about God (everyone still here?). As such, when we read it, depending on the version we are using, we have to remember that we cannot take every single word as what God really said.

So, nu? If I can’t believe what I am reading in the Bible, how can I believe in what the Bible says?

By using discernment, asking the Ruach haKodesh (Holy Spirit) to guide your understanding, and more than anything else, to read the Bible many times, using a couple of different versions, so that you can get a rounded education and better understand what seems to be more in line with how God works.

I know, I know- God says do not add to or take away from anything he says, but if we go along with that then we really have to reject the entire New Covenant as having any influence in our worship or lifestyle, separate from the Torah commandments, because it isn’t from God.

The New Covenant is written by men: it has the eyewitness accounts of the life and ministry of Yeshua (that’s the Gospels), the narrative of experiences that the Apostles (that’s Acts), the letters that Shaul and others wrote to congregations needing guidance because of the problems they were having (we call them the Epistles), and finally we have the vision John had, which is so difficult to understand in any language.

I am not saying to throw away the Bible, or not to trust it, or to ignore what you don’t like in it because you can just excuse it as being an improper interpretation by some human.

No!

What I am saying is that whichever version of the Bible you use, remember that it is a book about God written by someone who has tried to understand what the original language meant, and that the interpretation will be affected by whichever “original” language that interpreter is working from, not to mention the person’s individual understanding, knowledge, and bias (which is always going to be present).

The way to feel comfy cozy with your Bible is to read a couple of different versions, read them often from front to back (Genesis to Revelation), and use discernment and hermeneutics to determine which version sounds the most like the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as he describes himself in the Torah.

I can’t speak for God, and would not even think of trying, but I believe that when he told us who he is and what he wants of us in the Torah that he is saying we don’t need to know anything else about how to worship him and how to treat each other. In the rest of the Old Covenant, we learn what to expect from the Messiah, and the Gospels tell us of the life of the Messiah.

It is then up to each and every one of us to accept or reject that Yeshua is the Messiah God promised to send.

Thank you for being here and please shares these messages with everyone you know. That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!

We all know there are 12 tribes of Israel, and that 2-1/2 tribes settled east of the Jordan, while the remaining 9-1/2 tribes settled in what was then Canaan. Later, under Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, the kingdom was split into two: Judah and Benjamin in the South (Judea) and the remaining tribes in the North (Shomron, also called Israel).

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Assyria, under Tiglath Pilesar III, destroyed the tribes of Gad, Reuben, and half of Manasseh who were living in the lands of Og and Sichon (east of the Jordan) sometime around 733 BCE. Later, in or around 722 BCE, Assyria also conquered the Northern kingdom of Shomron, dispersing the remaining 7-1/2 tribes throughout the world.

The remaining tribes of Judah and Benjamin, by now almost totally absorbed by Judah, remained in the Southern Kingdom until they were also conquered and displaced by Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BCE.

After Babylon destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, which is where the records of the tribal lineages were kept, from that time on no knows which tribe they belong to. This is devastating because, for one thing, God commanded that only the descendants of the tribe of Levi may serve him in the office of Cohen (Numbers 3:5-10), and only the direct descendants of Aaron may be Cohen HaGadol (High Priest).

Another issue is when Messiah returns and the people are regathered, who is to live where? If we don’t know which tribe we are from, then we can’t live in our ancestral location, based on where Joshua assigned land to each tribe (Joshua 18:10).

Fortunately, God has done something to at least allow us to identify the descendants of Levi.

In 1997, a professor named Karl Skorecki (working with others in Haifa) found that within Jewish Cohanim, there appeared to be a different distribution of two specific “Y” chromosomes (which are passed down only through the father) from the rest of the Jewish male population, which are named YAP and DYS19. Later, in a 1998 study, they tested a total of six genetic markers and found a clear difference between the Cohanim population and the general Jewish population. They named this pattern the Kohen Modal Haplotype.

Of course, since this is science, there are those who refute the validity of their findings, but I believe when God, who created DNA, decided to separate the tribe of Levi for himself, he made sure that there would be more than just lineage records to identify his chosen priests. Now, science has finally caught up to God and discovered his genetic marker for Levites.

Many think that when Messiah returns and is king over the earth, that he will serve as king and high priest, but even if that is true, there will still need to be those to serve as subordinate priests, just as Moses had subordinates under him.

“Yo, wait a minute, Steve- that’s fine for the priests, but what about the ancestral home thing? How will that be resolved in the afterlife?“

That’s a good question, and my answer is that I don’t know. Based on the Bible telling us that there will be only a remnant who will be saved, and we know that this remnant will be composed of both Jews and Gentiles who have received salvation through their faith in Messiah Yeshua, perhaps the distribution of the land in the new earth will be done all over again? Maybe at that time, needing to know which tribe we are from, other than the Levites, won’t be necessary? To me, it doesn’t really matter that much: all I am concerned with is being on the winning side. Wherever I live in the afterlife, as long as I am in the presence of the Almighty, I am OK with it.

I have heard different theories about the lost tribes, that some Native American tribes are from Israel (due to the similarity in the religious beliefs), that the Danes are actually the tribe of Dan, and other such theories. Since the Diaspora is so large an area, who can really know? Jews are pretty much either Ashkenazi or Sephardic (European or Hispanic), so that might help to break-down the distribution of which tribes went where, but- again- really, who knows?

I don’t think it matters because there is only one tribe, Levi, which was specified by God to perform a specific service for him, and now we know how he has made sure we can know who they are.

I do know one thing for certain, and that is that I will be in the service of the Almighty because I have the genetic marker of a Levite.

Thank you for being here, and until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

Collateral damage is what happens to the innocent bystanders when there is a conflict, and when God does things, such as the plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Shomron and Jerusalem (more than once), there were many righteous and innocent people who were killed.

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When I am talking with those who are agnostic or atheist, they very often justify their belief by saying a God who is supposed to be loving and forgiving and compassionate couldn’t allow so much suffering in the world. But, since there is suffering, and so often under God’s commands innocent men, women, and children (even animals!) have been slaughtered, well… something must be wrong, and they conclude it is that God doesn’t really exist.

As I see it, it isn’t that God doesn’t exist, but that their understanding about God not allowing suffering is what is wrong.

In Acts 10, when Kefa (Peter) realized that God allowed the Gentiles to receive the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit), he said that he now understood God is no respecter of men. What he meant was that God doesn’t treat anyone differently: he sees those who are faithful to him, and those who are not.

I have often stated that whereas people are wishy-washy, always trying to find the “gray” between black and white, God is strictly binomial; with God, it is, or it isn’t: you are, or you aren’t: is you, or isn’t you, my Baby?

This is what I have come to understand about God and explains why he allows suffering and the collateral damage that has been prevalent throughout our history, as it even is to this day (reference the October 7 attacks): God doesn’t really care that much about what happens to us while we are alive, as much as he cares where we will be after we are dead.

God is not like us (DUH!) because he is an eternal being of spirit, while we are mortal beings of flesh. We cannot see or understand the eternal, and everything we know must be relatable to an experience we have had. In other words, we are stuck in the physical.

But God is eternal, and as such he sees things on an eternal level. He cares about everyone, and he hates to see anyone die (Ezekiel 18), but not die in the sense we think: to us, to die means to stop living, but to God, to die means to be condemned in the afterlife. That is why he doesn’t really care what happens to us in this life, but what will happen after this life is over.

God allows suffering, and he allows collateral damages to the innocent not because he doesn’t care, and not because he doesn’t really exist, but simply because he is more concerned with our eternal existence than this mortal one.

Now, that may be hard for most people to understand, let alone accept, but I truly believe that is why there is so much suffering and collateral damage to the innocent in the world. We want God to be what we think he should be, but he doesn’t really care what we want him to be or to do. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but God does what God wants to do, and he doesn’t really care what you think he should be doing.

He does care about you, though, and wants you to do as he has instructed you to do (in the Torah, which is the way Yeshua lived) so that when you are on the same page as he is, you will be in his presence for all time.

I’ll finish with this: the answer to the age-old question, “Why am I here?” is this: you are here to choose where you will spend eternity. I recommend you choose wisely.

Thank you for being here and that’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and Happy Hanukkah!