I attended college only briefly finding that I wasn’t really suited for the rigidity and formality of it all. That does not mean that I was against education; I love to learn. I adopted Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams as two of my professors and really enjoyed their columns and books. I have been thinking a lot lately about something that I remember from Walter Williams: The seen and unseen. It is a good read and probably useful for context before continuing this piece.

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I am not sure that I really want to write this but again feel impressed to do it, so I will. This may be seen as my continuing series: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Dale Carnegie would cringe). That is not my intent, but the Gospel is offensive to those who are perishing. Sha’ul (Paul) writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:3-4:

For the time will come when men will not tolerate sound doctrine, but with itching ears they will gather around themselves teachers to suit their own desires. So they will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

If you “will not tolerate sound doctrine,” but wish to surround yourself with people preaching what you already believe, there will be no learning, and you will be uncomfortable here. If you are willing to be challenged, please continue all the way to the end; it will get bumpy along the way.

As I write this, America, Israel, and Iran are a few days into a two week “cease fire.” (There sure seems to be a lot of shooting in this “cease fire.”) We need to begin with this fact, Iran will continue on and it will always be an enemy of America (the Great Satan) and the modern nation state called Israel (the Little Satan). How do I know? Until 1935, Iran was known as Persia. Persia/Iran is included in the list of countries aligned against YHVH in the final battle as told in Ezekiel 38:5. (Please consider this excellent article about Ezekiel 38-39). Persia/Iran is not going to become some sort of western democracy. We do not yet know the outcome of this war, we could declare victory, we probably will, but in the end, America loses. This issue will not be fully dealt with until Yeshua Messiah returns and finishes it. And He will finish it! That is what the Bible says.

I will tell you that you will not truly understand the rest of this piece until you understand that The United States of America is end times Israel. When you read end times prophecy and Israel is referenced, it does not mean the modern nation state of Israel, that is actually Judah. It means the United States of America. This is not replacement theology; this is a proper understanding of what the Bible actually says. You can dig into that in my previous post Have You Considered This: America in Biblical Prophecy?, and my book.

Once you understand that America is Israel, you should realize that it is America’s history. Why are we here in North America? Because we were kicked out of the promised land for disobedience! The northern kingdom of Israel has never returned to the promised land. This is a manifestation of the curses that YHVH promised in Leviticus 26 and reiterated in Deuteronomy 28. You might respond that was given to “the Jews.” You would be wrong. It was given to Israel; those two terms are absolutely not synonymous. You might say, “that doesn’t apply to us, we are Christians and under the ‘New Covenant.’” If you believe that, you should consider my prior post The New Covenant to put that myth to rest.

There are blessings that go along with the curses in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. Blessings come from obedience. If we are experiencing curses, and not blessings, what do you think we should infer from that? Just to make sure we are on the same page as to the answer to that question, I will answer it: We are disobedient! We also find another blessing given to Abraham, passed to Isaac, then passed to Jacob/Israel in Genesis 22:17:

Your descendants will possess the gates of their enemies.

In ancient times, cities were walled with access controlled through the city gates so the city could be sealed off to prevent enemy invasion. There are maritime gates as well. Gibraltar is a gate that can control access to the Mediterranean Sea. Bab el-Mandeb is a strait (a gate) that the Houthis are using to control access to the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Iran is using the Strait of Hormuz (another gate) to control access to the Persian Gulf. At this moment, who is in control of Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz? Iran, directly over Hormuz and through their proxy, the Houthis, they control Bab el-Mandeb. Are we being blessed? Do we control/possess the gates of our enemies? I’m sure you know the answer is “No.” Do you properly infer from that that we are being cursed for our disobedience? I hope so.

Does America have the power to take both back? America has the strongest military ever assembled on planet Earth. Of course we could do it. In Leviticus 26:19, in the curses section, you will find:

And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:

The “I” here is YHVH, Almighty God Himself. He is saying that all of our power will be worthless when we are disobedient, and we are. He is also breaking our will to use our power. Understand, one submarine off of the coast of Iran could eliminate this problem of the closed maritime gates in mere minutes. It could open both the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. That is how much power we have in just one submarine that we are unwilling to use because He has broken the “pride of our power.” This is where most people will say that this is unthinkable. We can’t do that! How many are going to stop reading here?!?! We are here to think and consider things we may not have considered, even uncomfortable things. Please continue.

There are about 90 million people in Iran, most (about 90% are Shia Muslims) are enemies of the Living God, and most will fight against Him when He returns; they will die, physically first, and then be tossed into the Lake of Fire, the second death. Many in Iran and elsewhere are having visions of Yeshua causing them to turn away from the false moon-god of Islam and to the True God, YHVH. Joel said this would happen (Joel 2:28-29) and Peter repeated it at Shavuot (Acts 2:17-18). He is saving some, those He has chosen. He is saving these people from the second death as Yeshua said in Matthew 10:28:

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

We get so caught up in this life. We dismiss that Yeshua’s Gospel was never about his death, burial and resurrection. His Gospel is “The Gospel of the Kingdom.” Modern Christianity has made “the Gospel” a story about Him but ignore what He said and taught, you know, the red letters in the Bible. (I unpack this very thing in my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…) He said in John 16:33:

I have told you these things so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take courage; I have overcome the world!

Yeshua said, “You will have tribulation.” There is no escaping that via some fictitious Pre-Tribulation Rapture. There is no such thing; it is a Christian fantasy. He spoke “I have overcome the world!” as if it is a done deal. To Him, the Eternal God, it is already accomplished, only not yet. We live in a temporal world where it is “not yet.” No matter how much tribulation is to come we are to place our hope in the fact that He is coming back to set up His Kingdom on the Earth to rule and reign for a thousand years. That is our hope, not this life. We are not going to Heaven; He is coming here! We believe Him that He has already overcome the world, that He will resurrect us. He proved it by resurrecting the First Fruits after He came out of the tomb (Matthew 27:50-53):

When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He yielded up His spirit. At that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, and the rocks were split. The tombs broke open, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After Jesus’ resurrection, when they had come out of the tombs, they entered the holy city and appeared to many people.

He presented these to His Father in Heaven the next morning fulfilling the Feast of First Fruits in His position as the High Priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. Please see my earlier piece, Easter or Passover, for a more detailed chronology and explanation.

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Back to offending people by even suggesting that we use nuclear weapons to solve the Iran problem. You say, “But millions will die.” Yes, they will. Sounds heartless. Let’s step back and consider the bigger picture. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed by Iran. What most people hear is that oil and natural gas cannot get out of the Persian Gulf. That is the headline but is it so much bigger than that. You must consider that massive amounts of fertilizer come out of the Persian Gulf. It is planting season in the northern hemisphere, the time when the fertilizer must be applied to be effective. Fertilizer is stuck behind a closure imposed by Iran. If you miss the window to apply it, it is ineffective. Growing seasons cannot be moved. Yields from this season will fall precipitously without it. We aren’t feeling it yet, but it will be felt later this year and into next year. Not only that, but diesel availability is becoming an issue in many countries. This is not only high prices, it is availability. Farm equipment and transportation run on diesel. Without diesel, what we do manage to grow without sufficient fertilizer may not be able to be harvested or transported to market. It is this simple, there are already millions of dead people that just don’t know it yet. There will be mass starvation when food is not produced and delivered to markets. Iran has already murdered millions of innocent people, people not connected to this war in any way, with the closure of the strait and the wanton destruction of their neighboring country’s production facilities for oil, refined fuels, liquified natural gas, nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, and helium—Facilities that will take years to repair. Those millions are the invisible victims of Iran’s actions. It has already happened, just not yet. The visible beneficiaries are those Iranians not killed in the nuclear blasts that would end this war and open the strait.

Let’s say we don’t go nuclear and instead go back to Trump’s “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day.” The Iranians already put women and children around the power plants and on the bridges to prevent us from attacking those. First, that is deplorable to use women and children as human shields. Without question. But, how many people would there actually be? As I said above, Iran has already killed millions. If the closure persists, we will soon find ourselves in the planting season for the southern hemisphere where there will be insufficient fertilizer to plant those crops as well. This means millions more will die from starvation following the lack of available food after that growing season. Lather, rinse, repeat. It could even be argued that if we were to go ahead and hit the power plants and bridges in spite of the human shields and many of them die that it might be better for those than the survivors. Tehran was already in a severe drought before any of this started. If we take out all of the power plants, desalination plants would become inoperable causing millions to die of dehydration and disease. Again, the visible human shields that Iran put around their infrastructure are the visible beneficiaries of not attacking. The invisible victims remain, invisible. They are there though.

This is the human attempt to solve this problem. We have the firepower to do it. We don’t have the will because we refuse to see the invisible victims and because of the curses. The real solution to this problem is back in the question of why we no longer control the gates of our enemies, why we are cursed. Disobedience. You might say, “Disobedience to what?” To YHVH’s ways, His Torah. “But we’re not Jewish!” If you are still saying that here, you need to go back to the beginning and follow the links in this article to the background information that I have already provided for you. The real solution is to fall on our faces, repent, turn from our lawlessness [Torahlessness], our wicked ways, and then cry out for forgiveness for our disobedience.

2 Chronicles 7:14 is where I get the subtitle for my book Blessings & Curses: if my people… We should consider that here, but we will not start in the middle of the sentence, we shall back up to the beginning in verse 13:

If I close the sky so there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send a plague among My people, and if My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.

The part people tend to skip over, dare I say, “Ignore,” are the curses in verse 13. Why the curses? They are pointing back to the full list in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. This passage provides the solution to the curses. Humble yourself. Pray. Seek His, YHVH’s, face. Turn from your wicked ways (repent). Only then will He hear from heaven, forgive our sins and heal our land. We can keep trying to do it our own way, in our own power. We will fail.

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I have read the Bible. I already know that collectively we will not do this (Read Revelation, Daniel, Zechariah, etc. and then see Isaiah 55:11). That is collectively. You and I will each stand before YHVH individually. Whether we find our names written in the Book of Life or not will be determined by how we choose to live. Whether we choose obedience or not. Whether we choose to live as Yeshua lived and taught. Yeshua is to be our example. The Torah is not dead nor done away with; it is the unchanging standard that will finally be written on the hearts of those that choose it and choose Him, when the New Covenant that YHVH communicated to Jeremiah finally arrives. Jeremiah 31:31-24:

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.

It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant they broke, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.

“But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD.

I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts.

And I will be their God, and they will be My people.

No longer will each man teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD.

For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more.”

The four horsemen of Revelation 6 are riding. Revelation is playing out before your eyes. You will see the wars, famine, and death increase as time marches on. Birth Pains are here. The contractions are accelerating and intensifying. Billions will be dead in the next few years (Read Revelation 6:8 and then do the math). I showed you earlier how this is playing out. Are you ready? I do highly suggest my book to understand all of this and have access to the resources to prove it for yourself; after that, live as if you believe it.

Please consider my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

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This piece is definitely going against the grain. I am not going to make any friends by doing this, but I feel impressed to write it, so I will be obedient. People not seeking the truth will be out quickly because it will challenge their beliefs. For those searching for the truth, I hope you will read it all and allow me to lay out my case. I invite you to show where I am missing the mark in the comment section below. Be cordial. I ask that you bring scriptural references to back up your points. I also ask that if you choose to cite Sha’ul (Paul) for your argument that you also do as the Bereans did and bring along with that citations from the Old Testament writings that back up your understanding of what Sha’ul wrote. If the Bereans could do it, you can too (Acts 17:11). If you can’t find it in the Old Testament, then as Peter said, you probably misunderstand Sha’ul (Paul) (2 Peter 15-16).

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I have asked several Christians over the years to tell me where “The New Covenant” is in their Bibles only to find that they cannot tell me where it is even though they profess to live under it. Think about that; how do you live under something that you can’t even find or define? That deserves an answer. If we begin in the New Testament, we can find a New Covenant mentioned in Hebrews 8:8-12 but that is actually quoting Jeremiah 31:31-34, in the Old Testament, the Tanakh. We should look at the original in Jeremiah:

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant they broke, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.

“But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people. No longer will each man teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more.

The word translated “new” here is חָדָשׁ (chadash) which is related to חָדַשׁ (also chadash), only one Hebrew vowel is different, but there were no vowel markings in the original Hebrew text. The first is defined as “new,” the second as, “renew.” These can sometimes be used interchangeably and since there were no vowels in the original, context must be used to determine which is appropriate in any given sentence. Consider the English word “read.” It is pronounced differently and has a different meaning when used like “to read,” vs. “have read.” They are related but only context tells you which is correct. We also use the word “new” in English as not always “brand new” but “new to us.” Consider getting a new car, a 2010 car. Is that “brand new” or only “new to us?” Obviously, the 16-year-old car is not brand new.

I do believe that it is correctly translated as “new,” not “renew,” in the Jeremiah passage. The best reasoning that I see is that it says, “It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers.” He is flat out telling us that it will be different, so it is something “new” or “novel.”

This is “The New Covenant” that was promised through Jeremiah the prophet. The question is, “Was this the covenant referred to by Yeshua/Jesus at the Last Supper, that was not the Passover meal, in Luke 22:20:

In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you”

When Yeshua said, “new covenant,” the Greek word that this is translated from is καινὴ (kainē) which means “Fresh, new, unused, novel.” This is “brand new.” But we must remember that a bunch of Jewish men sitting at the dinner table having a conversation were not doing that in Greek, they were speaking Hebrew. We are reading a Greek translation of a Hebrew conversation and there is always opinion and interpretation injected into translation. The choice to use καινὴ over a possibly more appropriate word ἀνανεόω (to renew) was someone’s opinion. This choice may have been innocent, but it may also have been chosen to inject a predetermined conclusion. I lean toward the latter.

Let’s look at what Jeremiah says this “New Covenant” will look like. We have already discussed that “it will not be like the covenant that was made with their fathers.” That means it is “new.” Who is YHVH making this covenant with? The text says, “with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.” Why is it said like this? Jeremiah lived after the kingdom split in two after the death of Solomon. At the time of Jeremiah’s writing, the northern kingdom of Israel had already been banished from the promised land for over 100 years. YHVH is promising that that banishment will not last forever, that He will restore both Israel and Judah which undoes the split. They will, at some point in the future, become one stick in His hand, Ezekiel 37:15-17:

Again the word of the LORD came to me, saying, “And you, son of man, take a single stick and write on it: ‘Belonging to Judah and to the Israelites associated with him.’ Then take another stick and write on it: ‘Belonging to Joseph—the stick of Ephraim—and to all the house of Israel associated with him.’ Then join them together into one stick, so that they become one in your hand.

Does it say that this covenant is made with a church? It absolutely does not!

YHVH says, “I was a husband to them.” It was a wedding ceremony at Mt. Sinai. YHVH married Israel. They said, “I do” three times; their exact words were, “that which YHVH has spoken, that we will do.” (Exodus 19:8, Exodus 24:3, Exodus 24:7). The Torah, the instructions, are the Ketubah (the wedding contract). As we know, the Israelites broke this wedding contract and whored with foreign gods while Moses was still on the mountain. We will be returning to this shortly.

It is also written that YHVH will write His law, really the Hebrew word translated “Law” is Torah, in their minds and on their hearts. How is it that the Christian church wants to claim this covenant but insists that the Law, again, Torah, has been done away with? You can’t have it both ways!

YHVH continues, “I will be their God, and they will be My people.” He has chosen one people to Himself, Israel, all of Jacob’s sons. He hasn’t chosen a church. My book, Blessings & Curses: if my people… goes deep into this.

After that He says, “No longer will each man teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD.” This is enough to prove that this is not currently in effect when you consider the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

This is the command that we have been given by Yeshua Himself to carry out for the last 2,000 years, to teach. But Jeremiah wrote that there would be no reason to teach because all would know YHVH. That word Jeremiah used that we see as “all” is כוּלָּם֩ (kullam) which means: 1) all, the whole 1a) all, the whole of 1b) any, each, every, anything 1c) totality, everything.” This doesn’t exclude anyone on the planet. If that is the case, how is it that there are over two billion Muslims on planet Earth (one quarter of the population) worshipping the false god Allah? That should be the mic drop moment right there, but we will continue.

We have another witness to this in Acts 15. In this story, some have come and are stirring up strife telling new believers that they must “become Jews to be saved.” It says “be circumcised” but it means take on the Pharisees’ Oral Torah that are additions to YHVH’s Torah, which are not allowed (Deuteronomy 4:2). (This “Oral Torah” was later written down and is now called the Mishnah and Talmud.) There is a meeting where it is decided to only give the new believers four commandments to begin their journey. These four commandments are all Torah, and they are meant for a people coming out of idolatrous paganism. Then we get to verse 21:

“For Moses has been proclaimed in every city from ancient times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

I’m going to restate this as follows, “It is expected that these new believers will be in the synagogues every Sabbath (Saturday) where the Torah that Moses wrote will be taught.” Again, people are teaching and others are being taught. This is part of making disciples, fulfilling the Great Commission. The word for “disciple” in Hebrew is תַּלְמִיד (talmid) which means: a pupil, a student, and it is sometimes translated as “taught one.” There we see that the entire Great Commission is commanding something that will not be necessary under the covenant in Jeremiah 31.

Go look at any news site. If the Torah is written on everyone’s heart (it says “all” with no exclusions) and everyone knows YHVH, would you see all of the stories about rape, murder, human trafficking, fraud, and war? They are not hard to find; they are everywhere! Again, I go deep into this in my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

I would suggest that it has to be willful ignorance after reading all of that to say that we are living the New Covenant that YHVH told Jeremiah to write to us about. So, I will move forward saying that this is not the “New” Covenant that Yeshua spoke of at the Last Supper.

That begs the question that if it was a “new” or “novel” covenant, then where is that in the Tanakh/Old Testament. It has to be there when you consider Amos 3:7:

Surely the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets.

Can you find another “New Covenant” that YHVH revealed to His servants the prophets? I can’t (If you can, please post it below). That means that Yeshua could not have freestyled right there at the dinner table. He could not create something out of whole cloth. After all, He consistently said that He never spoke on His own accord but only what the Father told him (John 12:49) and the Father would not do something without first revealing it to His prophets.

I believe that we have exhausted the cases that Yeshua spoke “New Covenant” and what we are left with is that He said, “Renewed Covenant.” What covenant is He renewing? We discussed earlier that Israel married YHVH at Mt. Sinai. We also know that in Exodus 32, only 40 days after saying, “I do,” that they were caught in the act of adultery by making the golden calf. But, before that, back in Exodus 24:1-8 we read:

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Come up to the LORD—you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of Israel’s elders—and you are to worship at a distance. Moses alone shall approach the LORD, but the others must not come near. And the people may not go up with him.”

When Moses came and told the people all the words and ordinances of the LORD, they all responded with one voice: “All the words that the LORD has spoken, we will do.”

And Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD.

Early the next morning he got up and built an altar at the base of the mountain, along with twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent out some young men of Israel, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as peace offerings to the LORD.

Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he splattered on the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people, who replied, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”

So Moses took the blood, splattered it on the people, and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.”

In our time, after the wedding ceremony, the marriage license is signed and the marriage is legal. They did not sign a marriage license; Israel entered into a blood covenant. What does that mean? It means that whoever breaks the covenant is agreeing to die, just like the animal whose blood was splattered on the people. They were agreeing to die if they broke the covenant!! This is the context of Exodus 32:9-10:

The LORD also said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and they are indeed a stiff-necked people. Now leave Me alone, so that My anger may burn against them and consume them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

After they commit adultery, breaking the covenant, YHVH was going to execute the very thing that they had agreed to (pun intended). He had every right to kill them all and start again with Moses. Moses interceded and then we see in verse 14:

So the LORD relented from the calamity He had threatened to bring on His people.

He didn’t kill them, though they deserved it. That doesn’t mean that He could just forget it. He is just. What He says stands. The death was owed; it would have to be paid at some point in the future. If that doesn’t happen, YHVH’s word means nothing and He is not trustworthy.

Oh how He tried with this harlot wife but eventually His patience wore out and He divorced Israel (not Judah, though she deserved it too) as we learn in Jeremiah 3:8:

I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries. Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear; she also went out and committed adultery.

The marriage is over; Israel is a divorcee. But, YHVH has decreed that He would take her back at some time in the future. How is that to happen when you consider what the Torah says about this in Deuteronomy 24:1-4?

If a man marries a woman, but she becomes displeasing to him because he finds some indecency in her, he may write her a certificate of divorce, hand it to her, and send her away from his house.

If, after leaving his house, she goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the second man hates her, writes her a certificate of divorce, hands it to her, and sends her away from his house, or if he dies, then the husband who divorced her first may not remarry her after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination to the LORD. You must not bring sin upon the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.

YHVH found her displeasing and gave her a certificate of divorce. She whored around and became defiled. YHVH may not remarry her. Quite the conundrum. The solution is found in Romans 7:1-3:

Do you not know, brothers (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? For instance, a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she is joined to another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.

Yes, YHVH married Israel at Sinai. But, Yeshua married Israel at Sinai! YHVH and Yeshua are one. Consider Deuteronomy 6:4:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.

Yeshua restates that in John 10:30:

I and the Father are one.

The law of marriage ends when He dies. He had to die to be able to marry Israel again; it was the only way for YHVH to be faithful to the very laws that He requires His people to be faithful to.

Back to the dinner table, He said in Luke 22:20:

In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the [re]new[ed] covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you”

At Mt. Sinai, Israel broke the blood covenant. The shedding of blood was required as the penalty for breaking it. Yeshua, because He never sinned could pay that penalty on behalf of the guilty party, Israel, which He did. There is no blood in Jeremiah’s covenant, but there is here. Now, the wrath that needed to be poured out upon Israel at Mt. Sinai because of their disobedience is satisfied with the blood of Yeshua. The Groom has died meaning the law of the first marriage no longer applies. Because of Yeshua’s resurrection, He is now able to marry the bride, that is Israel, again. The conundrum is solved with the death and resurrection of the Groom.

He has renewed that covenant but don’t think the wedding has happened yet. He has proposed. The bride has to say “yes.” That is the Great Commission, to go and make disciples, not believers. Disciples have the testimony of Yeshua and keep the commandments of God (Revelation 12:17). The bride will include the ones that teach what Yeshua taught, not a story about Him, and keep the commandments, the Torah. They will be native Israelites that have come out of their captivity by returning to their God and His ways, regrafted into Israel (native branches), and they will be gentiles that have been grafted in (the wild branches) (Romans 11). We are in the betrothal period. He is calling for His bride. The wedding supper is yet to come. It is coming soon, will you be there?

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So, when will the Jeremiah 31 covenant be fulfilled? My understanding would be about a thousand years in our future. Yeshua’s second coming is soon. He will gather His true disciples, both the dead and the living. He will marry His bride and then reign on Earth for a thousand years. Those that are His, His bride, will be reigning with Him in their glorified, eternal bodies. The people that decide to fight when Yeshua returns will die. Those that didn’t fight and survived the anti-Christ’s reign of terror will live in the millennial kingdom without the influence of Satan since he will be locked in a pit for this period of time. They are still mortal human beings. They will die. There will be new people born. They will be living Torah since that is the Law of Yeshua’s kingdom. But, at the end, Satan will be loosed for a short time. Those humans will have to decide if they want to continue to follow Yeshua and His Torah or if they will rebel. If they rebel, they will die. After this, everyone that has ever lived that wasn’t raised at Yeshua’s second coming will be raised and judged. Those found written in the Book of Life will have eternal life, those not written therein will be thrown into the Lake of Fire along with Satan, the Beast, the False Prophet, death, and the grave. At this point we can say, “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” (1 Corinthians 15:54) All of Israel, both the native branches and the wild branches, will then be living under the covenant of Jeremiah 31. Those that just wanted to play church will find themselves in the Lake of Fire.

I do believe that there will be a partial fulfillment of Jeremiah 31 for those that are raised and transformed at Messiah’s second coming. Those are the people that have already chosen to live up to their wedding vows, keep YHVH’s Torah. They have already chosen this path. YHVH will then “write the Torah on their heart,” making it innate to who they are. This is the opposite of what YHVH did to pharaoh when He hardened his heart. We see only the word “hardened” in English but the Hebrew in this story uses three different verbs. Sergio DeSoto does an excellent job in his piece Three Hebrew Verbs and a Pharaoh to tell of this progression in which Pharaoh initially chooses to be hard and ultimately YHVH confirms that since that is his choice, He is going to strengthen him in it. This goes hand-in-hand with Sha’ul in 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12:

The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder, and with every wicked deception directed against those who are perishing, because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them. For this reason God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness.

Notice that they first “refused the love of the truth.” They made a decision, they acted. Because of their decision, YHVH strengthened the choice that they are already made, He sent them a delusion that they readily accepted. It is the same with the “Torah being written on our heart in the Jeremiah 31 covenant; because of the choice already made to obey Torah, He will also strengthen that decision making it easy for us to continue to obey. He will strengthen whichever decision that you make. What will you decide?

Many who think that because they are part of some Christian church and assume, or have been told, that they are “the bride,” will be very surprised when they wake up a thousand years in our future to find that they missed it all, they missed the Millennial Reign of Messiah. Consider Yeshua’s words in Matthew 7:21-23:

Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’

Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness!’

He’s talking to believers, not disciples. He’s talking to people that would not have the truth. When He says, “workers of lawlessness,” He means those without Torah, those that would not follow the instructions, those that would not live up to the marriage vows.

It is imperative to understand which covenant you are actually living under at this current time. Realize what the requirements of that covenant are if you want to be included in “His People,” if you want to be part of “His Bride.”

When you realize that what you were told about the New Covenant is not true, you should ask yourself if there are other things that you believe that should be questioned. I wrote a book that discusses many other things that are common Christian knowledge that must be questioned.

Please consider my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

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Where do you find Easter in the Bible? If you read the KJV you can find it only in Acts 12:4. If you click the link, you will find that verse is translated as “Easter” only in the KJV; no other translation does that. That is the only place that “Easter” appears in the Bible. There are some people that hold that the KJV is the only true translation of the Bible, and that you shouldn’t trust any other as if the Bible was written in Elizabethan English. I posit that it was originally written almost exclusively in Hebrew, a little Aramaic, and I might give you that a few of the letters in the New Testament may have been written in Greek. That said, we get our English translations of the New Testament primarily from Greek manuscripts—No matter what language we are reading it in, it is always describing a Hebrew/Israelite/Jewish context, never a Greco-Roman one. The Greek word that the KJV translates as “Easter” is πάσχα (pascha) which is defined as: The feast of Passover, the Passover lamb. Of Chaldee origin; the Passover. So, why do Christians celebrate Easter every year when it is not in the Bible?

Easter is frequently also called Resurrection Sunday. The Passover lamb was killed on the 14th day of the first month; Passover is not a resurrection, it is a death. How then can Easter be the replacement for Passover when they are two different things? Consider the first Passover as told in Exodus 12:1-20:

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs. That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast. Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire—with the head, legs and internal organs. Do not leave any of it till morning; if some is left till morning, you must burn it. This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is the Lord’s Passover.

“On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.

“This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord—a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel. On the first day hold a sacred assembly, and another one on the seventh day. Do no work at all on these days, except to prepare food for everyone to eat; that is all you may do.

“Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And anyone, whether foreigner or native-born, who eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel. Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.”

Where is Easter in that text? Where is resurrection in that story? The story does talk about how the blood of the Lamb protects from God’s vengeance, a very good thing but no resurrection. Let’s get a little more detail about the Feasts that make up the Passover season in Leviticus 23:4-14:

These are the LORD’s appointed feasts, the sacred assemblies you are to proclaim at their appointed times. The Passover to the LORD begins at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month. On the fifteenth day of the same month begins the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the LORD. For seven days you must eat unleavened bread. On the first day you are to hold a sacred assembly; you are not to do any regular work. For seven days you are to present a food offering to the LORD. On the seventh day there shall be a sacred assembly; you must not do any regular work.’”

And the LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say, ‘When you enter the land that I am giving you and you reap its harvest, you are to bring to the priest a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest. And he shall wave the sheaf before the LORD so that it may be accepted on your behalf; the priest is to wave it on the day after the Sabbath.

On the day you wave the sheaf, you shall offer a year-old lamb without blemish as a burnt offering to the LORD, along with its grain offering of two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil—a food offering to the LORD, a pleasing aroma—and its drink offering of a quarter hin of wine.

You must not eat any bread or roasted or new grain until the very day you have brought this offering to your God. This is to be a permanent statute for the generations to come, wherever you live.

First thing to consider here is that these are not Jewish Feasts. They are the LORD’s Feasts, big difference! The Passover Lamb is sacrificed on the fourteenth day of the first month. It is eaten after the sun sets on the fourteenth, meaning that it has now become the fifteenth day of the month. Passover is eaten on the fifteenth day of the month. The fifteenth begins the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread. This fifteenth day is a High Sabbath. During those seven days, there will be a regular Sabbath (what we normally call Saturday). The day after that Sabbath, the regular one, will be the first day of the week (what we call Sunday). It is on this day that the First Fruits offering is made. Just like your birthday is on different day of the week every year, so the day that the Passover is sacrificed and the day that it is eaten will change from year to year, but the First Fruits of the barley harvest offering is always on the first day of the week. This is important as we shall see later.

Let us now consider what Yeshua/Jesus Himself said about his time in the grave, we can find that in Matthew 12:38-40 (emphasis added):

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.”

Jesus replied, “A wicked and adulterous generation demands a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Common Christian reckoning of this time period has Yeshua/Jesus being crucified, dying, and being buried on Friday, being in the grave on Saturday and rising early Sunday morning before sunrise. If you count partial days, you could find three days in that sequence: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The problem arises in that there is no possible way to find three nights between Friday evening and Sunday morning. Impossible! There is a solution to that problem, for that I will quote a paragraph out of my book Blessings & Curses: if my people… (emphasis and hyperlinks added):

What about the Feasts of Yehovah, His Holidays? Yeshua kept the spring Feasts of Passover Pesach, Unleavened Bread Matzah, and First Fruits Yom Habikkurim; He never once celebrated Easter. He kept Shavuot, not Pentecost. In fact, His first coming was to fulfill these very Feasts and He did so to the very day and hour. How did He do that? He was chosen as the Passover Lamb on the tenth day of the first month (Exodus 12:3) when He came riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, on Shabbat, as told in Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19, and John 12. Four days later, on the fourteenth day of the first month, Wednesday in 28CE (Leviticus 23:5, Exodus 12:6), He was executed on the cross at the very time the Passover lambs were being slaughtered on the Temple Mount. He rested in the grave on the fifteenth day of the first month, the High Sabbath that begins the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Matzah) as Exodus 12:7 commands. He rose from the dead three days and three nights later, just as He said He would in Matthew 12:40, as the regular weekly Sabbath ended, at sunset, and the first day of the week was beginning. At that moment, He became “the firstborn from among the dead” (Colossians 1:18 NIV). The next morning, on Yom Habikkurim, as the High Priest was presenting the First Fruits offering in the Temple (Leviticus 23:11), Yeshua, as the High “Priest forever in the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 5:6 BSB), was presenting His First Fruits offering in Heaven. This happened between the events of John 20:17 and Matthew 28:9 which is why in John’s Gospel, Mary was told to not touch him, but in Matthew the women grabbed his feet; they were not rebuked because between these two events He had gone to Heaven, “Ascended to the Father” (NIV), and presented the First Fruits offering. What was the First Fruits offering that He presented? It was the people that came out of the tombs in Matthew 27:52-53; they are the First Fruits, not Yeshua. Fifty days later, on Shavuot, He poured out the Holy Spirit as Acts 2 confirms.

This chronology has Yeshua/Jesus in the grave for three days and three nights, exactly 72 hours! I wrote earlier about the day of the week that Passover falls on varies from year to year, but the Day of First Fruits is always on the first day of the week. That means that there are only certain years that it is even possible to have that sequence of events play out. 28CE is one of those years.

This sequence of events also confirms that the Last Supper was not the Passover meal. Yeshua/Jesus was the Passover Lamb. He died as the Passover lambs were being sacrificed on the Temple Mount which is how He became the Passover Lamb. The Pharisees prove this when they take Yeshua/Jesus to Pilot’s Praetorium to have Him executed which we can see in John 18:28:

Then they led Jesus away from Caiaphas into the Praetorium. By now it was early morning, and the Jews did not enter the Praetorium, to avoid being defiled and unable to eat the Passover.

Right there they told you that the Passover was to be eaten in the future, that evening, but the Last Supper occurred the night before. And this will blow your mind, at that meal they ate leavened bread, ἄρτον in greek which means: Bread, a loaf, food; From airo; bread or a loaf. It was not unleavened bread, it was a “loaf of bread.” It is correct that the Passover meal must include unleavened bread, but they were eating leavened bread at this meal because the Feast of Unleavened Bread had not yet begun. The Passover meal is eaten just as the Feast of Unleavened Bread begins just after sunset.

Some may counter Yeshua’s/Jesus’ own words in Luke 22:15-16:

I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before My suffering. For I tell you that I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

Of course He would eagerly wish to eat this [coming] Passover with them because that would mean that He would still be alive 24-hours later to actually eat it. It would mean that He wouldn’t have to endure what He was about to go through. That would not be the case, He would be sealed in the tomb before the Feast of Unleavened Bread would begin. He confirmed that He didn’t want to actually do this in Matthew 26:39:

Going a little farther, He fell facedown and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will.”

At the Last Supper, that was not the Passover meal, we are told that He instituted “The Lord’s Supper,” that He created something new. That is not true. The bread and the wine had been part of many meals of the Israelites ever since Abraham and Melchizedek shared that very combination. Abraham taught that and the blessing to Isaac. Isaac taught it to Jacob, and it was passed down through the generations. They had been doing it for 2,000 years at that point in time! Yeshua told His disciples the meaning of what they had been rehearsing for millennia. By all means, keep this within the Passover context; it must stay there as that is what it has pointed to for the last 4,000 years. The story of Abraham and Melchizedek is told in Genesis 14:18-20:

Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine—since he was priest of God Most High — and he blessed Abram and said: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand.”

It is only tradition that has a Friday crucifixion and a Sunday resurrection; the Word of God, your Bible tells a completely different story. Also, nowhere in that story are Easter eggs, Easter bunnies, nor Easter Hams (see Leviticus 11). What do those have to do with the death, burial, and resurrection of Yeshua/Jesus? Why do we continue with those traditions? Consider what God Himself says about that in Deuteronomy 12:29-30:

When the LORD your God cuts off before you the nations you are entering to dispossess, and you drive them out and live in their land, be careful not to be ensnared by their ways after they have been destroyed before you. Do not inquire about their gods, asking, “How do these nations serve their gods? I will do likewise.”

He says to not do things that He did not command. Do not change His calendar, do not invent your own holidays, do not add Easter eggs, bunnies and hams. He said, “Don’t do it!”

Yeshua/Jesus also has something to say about these traditions in Matthew 15:3:

And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?

He’s asking you that question. What is your answer?

Consider another quote from my book:

Let us jump forward in Jeremiah to a story recorded in chapters 42-44. I highly recommend you read it, but I am going to summarize it here. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and carried many of the survivors off to Babylon leaving only a remnant behind. This remnant approaches Jeremiah and asks him to make an inquiry to Yehovah about what they should do. They say to Jeremiah that whatever he tells them that Yehovah says, that they will do, echoing their ancestors back at Mt. Sinai. Jeremiah agrees. Ten days later, Jeremiah speaks to the people the words that Yehovah gave him. The very short version of the reply was, “Go to Egypt and die, stay here, in the promised land, obey, and prosper.” They accused Jeremiah of lying and said they would not obey; they’re going to Egypt! Jeremiah reminded them about why all this trouble had fallen upon them, about their idol worship, pouring out drink offerings to the Queen of Heaven, etc. They were supposed to repent for those things and stay in the land in order to prosper. They refused, arguing that when they were pouring out drink offerings to the Queen of Heaven that things were good, their bellies were full, so why would they ever stop. Keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results? Insanity!

They wanted to keep their traditions, “pouring out drink offerings to the Queen of Heaven.” They refused to hear from God. Is that us? You have now read the true story. Are you still going to celebrate “your own way,” or the way that God commanded? Most will say, “We’re going to Egypt! Pass the Easter ham!” That doesn’t have to be you. Maybe it is this year that you realize that we have gotten it all wrong, that we have been deceived (another chapter in my book). Look at the world around you, it is crumbling. We are at war. Famine is coming because of the lack of fertilizer getting through the Strait of Hormuz. Disease will increase because of no food, no water, and medications that can’t be produced or shipped. The four horsemen are riding (Revelation 6). The book of Revelation is playing out before your eyes. But, go ahead and hunt Easter eggs, eat chocolate Easter bunnies, and devour Easter hams when God commanded us to keep His (not Jewish) Feasts, His appointed times.

Please consider my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

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I have read the Bible through more than ten times. Several times I found a reading plan online that specified which chapters to read daily to complete the reading in a year. I have used several different plans, reading in different orders: straight through beginning to end, chronologically, by theme, etc. The problem this can introduce is that the plan usually has just three to four chapters per day to space out reading to complete it in a year. Sometimes stories go on for more chapters than that and sometimes the chapter breaks are at odd places having you stop in the middle of a narrative causing context to be lost when coming back to continue.

The above is a quote directly out of my book Blessings & Curses: if my people… Now that I have some experience with this, I would like to offer my recommendation as to how to approach reading the Bible.

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As with any book, the best place to begin is at the beginning, Genesis 1:1. I strongly recommend starting there. To me, it makes little sense to start a story other than “In the beginning.” There is another book of the Bible that begins with those very words, “In the beginning,” that is the book of John. Too often new Christians are told to start reading the Bible in either John, or Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. In order to help understand why this is not the best idea, let me again quote from my book:

“And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, ‘I am not the Christ Messiah.’ And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the Prophet?’ And he answered, ‘No.’ So they said to him, ‘Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ He said, ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord Yehovah,” as the prophet Isaiah said.’ (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) They asked him, ‘Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?’” John 1:19‑25 (ESV).

The questions that the priests and Levites ask John are interesting. They ask, “Are you Elijah?” Elijah is a prophet. Next, they ask, “Are you the Prophet?” To which he says, “No.” They are asking if he is a specific Prophet that they did not name. They did not name the Prophet but apparently John knew he was not that Prophet. Are we left out of the story? What are we missing? The ones asking the question knew who they meant. John understood what they were asking. Everyone else that heard this exchange understood it. What is unspoken here?

If you begin reading in John, in the first chapter you are already at a loss as to what John the Baptist and the priests and Levites were talking about. I do explain this much deeper in my book. There is an answer and you will only find it in the Bible if you start at the beginning.

Now we know where to start. I highly recommend reading Genesis to Deuteronomy, the five books of Moses, also known as the Torah, five times through. Do this somewhat quickly so that the context stays with you; dragging it out too long and you can lose track of what you read earlier. Unless you are reading in the original Hebrew, I would also suggest reading a different translation each time through this since translation is interpretation and you might see things differently if you have several interpretations to compare and contrast. So, you might ask, “If I am not Jewish, why would I want to read the Torah that many times?” Interesting question. Without a good understanding of Torah, you will not really understand the dialog between Yeshua/Jesus and the Pharisees when you finally read the New Testament. We’ll get to that in a little bit.

Once you have finished reading the five books of Moses five times, it is now time to read Genesis to Malachi, twice! Don’t go to the New Testament yet, you are not yet ready for that. Pay particular attention as you read 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, and 2 Chronicles. You will find that there is a split after Solomon’s reign. There are now two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah (where “the Jews” come from). This is the critical piece, you cannot conflate Jew, Judah, and Israel. Israel is a separate kingdom from Judah. In our time, we have Jews (Judah) living in a land called “Israel,” which leads to a lot of confusion. Israel is still scattered to the nations and has not yet returned to the promised land, but Judah is in the process of returning; a lot of Jews are already back in the land. I devote a significant number of pages in my book Blessings & Curses: if my people… to understanding all of this and where these people are today. You will not understand the prophets if you do not have a really good grasp of this.

When you complete this, you will have read the Torah seven times; hopefully it is sticking by that point. You will now have a good handle on who The LORD Yehovah is. Pay particular attention as you complete Malachi where in chapter 3 verse 6 we find:

“I the LORD Yehovah do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.

The God of the Bible is gracious to tell you that He does not and will not change just before you are about to turn the page to the book of Matthew to begin the New Testament. Let that sink in! He. Does. NOT. Change.

Now, only now, are you finally ready to read the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These books (and Revelation) are where you will find the actual words of Yeshua/Jesus, what He said; these words are critical. You must go into reading this remembering that Yeshua/Jesus is God and that Malachi 3:6 says that He does not change!! That means that He will never contradict what was spoken in the Old Testament. Consider Matthew 5:17-20:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law Torah until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Yeshua/Jesus is confirming right here in the first book of the New Testament that He is not changing Torah! Why does it seem that Christianity says that all of this changed when in the course of just a few pages in your Bible both the Father and the Son say that isn’t going to happen? Don’t just blow by that question, it is not rhetorical.

One reason that we want to have a good handle on the Torah before getting to the Gospels is that as we read, we will find the “powers that be” accusing Yeshua/Jesus of breaking the Torah. If you don’t know Torah, you won’t know that they are making false accusations. Consider Matthew 15:1-3:

Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”

Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?”

In these verses, it is easy for a Christian that is not fluent in Torah to easily believe what these “teachers of the law” are saying is true; after all, they are the “experts.” Here we can see them questioning Yeshua about washing hands before eating. Now, if you know Torah, you know there is no such commandment. But these are Pharisees, and they teach from an “Oral Torah” which will be written down around the second century CE that we know today as the Talmud and the Mishnah. These traditions that He is being accused of breaking are part of this “Oral Torah,” not the Torah given to Moses at Mt. Sinai. That helps to clarify Yeshua’s response where he contrasts “their traditions” with the “command of God (Torah).” This is but one example of where Yeshua is accused of breaking “the Law” but He never breaks the Torah. If He ever broke Torah, He could not be our unblemished Passover Lamb; His sacrifice, if He had sinned, would be insufficient to restore the covenant, to pay the penalty owed for the breaking of the covenant.

Now that you know that there is an “Oral Torah” which are just traditions, consider Luke 11:46:

Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”

Now you should know that these “burdens” that they are heaping on the people are their traditions, not Torah. This goes hand-in-hand with Yeshua’s words in Matthew 11:28-30:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Yeshua doesn’t say there is no burden, no responsibilities for the disciple. He says that His burden (Torah) is light and that is contrasted with “the burden that they can hardly carry” from Luke 11:46 (which are the traditions). This is not a new teaching, He is summarizing Torah, His Father’s words in Deuteronomy 30:11:

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.

As you read the Gospels, understanding Torah, you will realize that Yeshua is frequently accused of breaking “the Law” when He is only breaking their manmade laws and traditions, never breaking His Father’s commandments, that is Torah. Why does He always flagrantly break their laws and traditions? Because Torah says to! Consider Deuteronomy 4:2:

Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the LORD Yehovah your God that I give you.

There you have it, manmade laws are not allowed!

Now that you have read the entire Old Testament and the Gospels, I would recommend reading Revelation. This is a book dictated by Yeshua Himself to John. These are things that Yeshua wants us to know about what is coming. You really should read the Gospels and Revelation several times and in several different translations before moving on.

Next up, Acts. The book of Acts is the story of how the Apostles began to take the Gospel of the Kingdom (Yeshua’s Gospel) to the world. When you start the book of Acts you must remember everything read up until this point. Remember that both the Father and the Son said that Torah would not change. Nothing in Acts (or any other book) can contradict Them!!

As one example to consider when reading Acts, we need to look at Acts 15. This is one of many chapters that Christianity uses to say that the Torah has been done away with; that Christians do not need to concern themselves with it. This is terribly misunderstood. If we believe that, we say that both the Father and the Son are liars. That should be enough to stop us in our tracks, but unfortunately it is not. Read the whole story for yourself but I will point out the important stuff here. There is a dispute about “having to be circumcised to be saved.” We get into trouble by ignoring the “to be saved” part. Circumcision is still part of Torah and we will find in Acts 16, the next chapter, that Paul will circumcise Timothy. Acts 15 isn’t about circumcision, it is about keeping Torah (the Law) to be saved. We will find in this story that new believers are given four commandments in verses 19-20:

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.”

Christianity like to stop there saying, “see there are only four commandments.” These commandments are all straight out of Torah! These are all things for people coming out of pagan religions; they are a starting point. You must continue reading because the next verse says:

“For the law of Moses [Torah] has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

This verse communicates two things. First, it is expected that these new believers/disciples will be “in the synagogues on every Sabbath” Second, they will learn Torah when they are there every Sabbath! Sabbath is the seventh day; we call it Saturday. This is after the resurrection, and we find the Apostles expecting people to be in synagogue every Saturday! Am I saying to “become a Jew” and go to synagogue every Sabbath? No. I am saying to keep Sabbath as they were. 2,000 years ago, everyone did not have access to the Scriptures so the only place that they could hear it read and learn it was the synagogue. You have access in the palm of your hand to many translations. You can read every day; you don’t have to wait for the Sabbath.

One more thing to consider in Acts is Acts 17:11:

Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true.

Paul considered the Bereans “nobel-minded” because they didn’t just believe what he told them, they “examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true.” They tested Paul. How did they do that? They “examined the Scriptures.” What were the Scriptures when this was being written? The New Testament did not yet exist. The only Scriptures that they could examine were what Christians call the Old Testament, the Tanakh. Think about this: they were able to validate everything Paul said with the Old Testament. He never contracted the Old Testament which would include the Torah.

Only after reading and understanding all of this are we ready to read the letters, most of which were written by Paul. I would recommend saving Paul’s letters for last. Study John’s and Peter’s letters before Paul. 1 John is hard hitting defining sin in 1 John 3:4:

Everyone who practices sin practices lawlessness [Torahlessness] as well. Indeed, sin is lawlessness [Torahlessness].

I fixed it. The “law” here is Torah.

Before moving onto Paul, you must take Peter’s warning in 2 Peter 3:15-16 to heart:

Consider also that our Lord’s patience brings salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom God gave him. He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his [Paul’s] letters are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.

Do not dismiss this warning! Christianity uses Paul’s letters to say that Torah is not relevant to Christians. Most Christian churches preach more sermons out of Paul’s letters than either the Old Testament, which is twice the size of the New Testament, or the Gospels which contain the actual words of Yeshua/Jesus. They do that because they “distort” his writings. Consider what Peter says the result of this distortion is: destruction. Tread lightly.

Peter says that Paul wrote “with the wisdom God gave him.” Paul was smart. Paul was educated. Paul studied at the feet of Gamaliel. Paul wrote over most of our heads; mine included. Peter warned us. If we ever think that Paul is contradicting Yeshua or Yehovah, we misunderstand Paul. That is your first clue that you are distorting Paul which can have disastrous consequences. This is why I say that Paul must be read last. You must know what Paul knew in order to understand what Paul wrote.

Once you finish this, it isn’t the end. Studying the Bible is a lifelong endeavor. Every time that I read it I would swear there are new things in it that were not there the last time. I know that is not true, but it does seem like it. Keep going. Grab a Concordance and begin digging into the original language since our English translations can leave meaning behind.

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I hope and pray that this helps people to really understand their Bible.

Please consider my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

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Disclaimer: I am not a doctor; I don’t play one on TV. I am giving my researched opinion in this piece. Be an adult and do your own homework before following any of this advice! You are made in the Image of God (Genesis 1:27), given a brain and the ability to reason (Isaiah 1:18). Don’t wait to be spoon fed information that you need, you live in a time that more information is available at your fingertips than at any time in human history. Use discernment because both truth and lies are out there.

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In my book, Blessings & Curses: if my people…, in the introduction you will find the following:

In the book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, is this line, “Stories consist of words, words that can mean anything; they have no solid, rational relationship to facts.” I found it ironic that the author, Mattias Desmet, was making the case in his book that words can be a very imprecise way of conveying information and ideas. Ironic because he was doing so in a book of hundreds of pages of words—just as I am doing by writing this book! He is not wrong. It is the best we have so we must strive to understand the meaning of the words as the author or speaker understood them if we are to comprehend the information or ideas trying to be conveyed. Words can have multiple meanings; those meanings can evolve over time, essentially taking focused effort to truly understand.

At the end of 2025 we had a government shutdown over Obamacare subsidies where the Democrats were saying that without these subsidies that we were taking away people’s healthcare. Is that true or were we really arguing about who was going to be paying for people’s medical interventions, managing their chronic diseases, paying for their prescription drugs? We must begin by understanding that people are responsible for their own healthcare, whatever that entails. Since some of this can be very expensive, we have insurance available to help mitigate the cost. So, the shutdown was not about healthcare, it was about funding. We need to quit calling that “healthcare” because it is not.

It is all about money, not about making people healthy. Healthy people are terrible customers for the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Businesses like recurring revenue. Sick people facilitate that; healthy people do not. We do not want to believe this, we want to believe that the system only wants the best for us, wants us to be healthy. We do not want to contemplate living in a world where big business puts profit over people’s health and wellbeing. We don’t want to believe that the people that run these enterprises are that callous, but they are. That is the system.

I believe that most people that decide to become a doctor, a nurse, or become a scientist developing pharmaceutical drugs got into it to help people, and that is laudable. Unfortunately, the medical and pharmaceutical industries were taken over by the likes of John D. Rockefeller. A system was created to sell chemicals, drugs, pharmakeia. Doctors are trained to identify symptoms and then follow a protocol of prescribing drugs to relieve those symptoms. Since this system is designed to never really look for the root causes of problems but only stops at identifying symptoms, the prescribed drugs will likely be required for the foreseeable future, a customer for life! Any side effects of these drugs will result in new symptoms requiring another drug. Wash, rinse, repeat. This system is a money machine and that explains why the medical industry, “healthcare spending,” accounts for about 18% of the United States GDP! Since the United States GDP in 2025 was about $30.6 trillion, the “healthcare spending” represents about, $5.5 trillion! Who is paying this $5.5 trillion? The Federal and State governments (your taxes!), employers though employer paid health insurance premiums, and individuals through insurance premiums and co-pays along with their out-of-pocket maximums. Consider that someone is receiving every one of those $5.5 trillion and they will do anything and everything to keep that money coming (and increase it!).

Acute care and chronic care are two different things. The medical industry is good at acute care. I want a doctor to fix a broken arm or suture a laceration. But a medical doctor is not the best person to give you advice about preventing or healing chronic disease. There are some that have made that leap, but most have very little real education in nutrition and natural approaches that worked before Rockefeller mucked it all up.

Businesses are measured by growth. How do you grow this industry? You need more sick people. You need sicker people. That is what we call healthcare!

Unfortunately, we are victims of a system that has been created over the last century to century and a half. We have been told lies. We are told that grocery stores are full of food; they do have some good food in the produce section, the meat and dairy coolers but even some of this can be suspect. Most of the middle of the store is full of boxed, bottled, and canned substances that are full of chemicals in the form of preservatives, pesticides, herbicides, artificial food colorings, high fructose corn syrup, and seed oils. All of those things wreak havoc on your gut microbiome and your metabolism. In the produce section, most is not organic meaning that it has been sprayed with glyphosate, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides which are still present when you eat it. None of that was meant to be consumed by human beings. The meat is probably from a CAFO facility. This produces unhealthy animals that were fed an unnatural diet and injected with hormones and antibiotics which are still in the meat (and dairy) that you eat. In the dairy case, we destroy milk with pasteurization and homogenization and then remove all or most of the healthy saturated fat. We also find yogurt with added sugar or high fructose corn syrup. This is the fuel for chronic disease!

We can usually identify poisons because when we are exposed to them, we get ill or die pretty quickly. The food system above poisons us but very slowly so we don’t recognize the cause and effect. We don’t associate our daily choices with what these very small doses of daily poison are doing to our bodies. If we don’t recognize the cause and effect, we will not be able to address the cause and mitigate the effect. Now you know that the standard American diet is poisoning us a little every day; it is one of the major causes as to why over 60% of American’s have at least one chronic disease.

It is amazing how the rise of the medical industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, the science industrial complex, and the industrial food complex parallels the rise of chronic disease. Medicine was corrupted when Rockefeller took over the medical schools, redefined the system and pushed out natural, homeopathic medicine to favor patentable high profit manmade drugs. Food was corrupted when we began industrial farming. We began monocropping, requiring massive amounts of fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides instead of working with nature integrating both animals and crops on the same land, rotating crops and allowing the land to rest (Leviticus 25:1-7), which actually strengthens the soil and creates healthier animals. Science is at the heart of all of this. Scientists create the drugs, and the chemicals required in “modern” agricultural practices. Scientists also created plastics which it has been said that many people are consuming about a credit card of plastic per week in the form of microplastics. Microplastics are the result of the degradation of plastic items into tiny particles that are breathed in or swallowed. These plastics are not inert; they can cause circulatory issues, and they can act like estrogen in the body causing hormonal issues. Some ways this happens is that we use plastic cutting boards, purchase products in plastic containers instead of glass, store food in plastic instead of glass, reheat food in plastic instead of glass. All of this leaches plastic into our food and beverages. This plastic builds up over time and eventually contributes to chronic disease. Because this happens so slowly, we don’t realize that this is the cause of so many issues.

You can fix this (this is how you begin to care for your health). Eat only whole foods. Choose organic to eliminate/minimize all of the chemicals listed in the last paragraph. Eat only ruminant animal meats that are grass fed/grass finished. Eat wild caught fish that have fins and scales. Pork is not meant for human consumption, and neither are shellfish. See Leviticus 11 for details about why God made some animals for food and others for other purposes; they are the “cleanup crew.” The cleanup crew eats anything and everything. Remember, you are what you eat, and you are what you eat eats. It takes effort to prioritize health over convenience. Shopping will take more effort; meal preparation can take more time as you must actually cook using raw ingredients, nothing out of a box! Eating out should be minimized due to the fact they are serving all of the things that you shouldn’t eat, things that fuel chronic disease. You can win this battle when you prioritize health and longevity over convenience and simplicity.

Vaccines are another thing fueling chronic disease. I know, vaccines are supposed to prevent disease, and some may. Unfortunately, this is another place where we have been seriously lied to. Many vaccines are made with aluminum, mercury, and now mRNA, which are detrimental to human health. In many cases no real studies have been done to confirm efficacy or safety of the vaccines. Doctors are taught to vaccinate. Pharmaceutical companies pay doctors to push vaccines and then doctors get to treat the side effects and chronic conditions that these vaccines frequently produce. You can begin your research into this at Children’s Health Defense. Consider not being a pin cushion funding this entire system. Consider never getting another vaccine once you have done your own homework and realize what is really happening. Instead, do everything within your power to strengthen your immune system. Your body was created to protect itself and heal itself if we give it what it requires to do that and avoid putting things in that destroy it.

Exercise is another key piece of the puzzle in caring for your health. A sedentary lifestyle leads to all sorts of health problems. Exercise strengthens the body and keeps us mobile. Without exercise we become weak and frail. Exercise can be a simple as going for a walk, try to get 10,000 steps or more per day. Add a little resistance training which could just be body weight exercises to build muscle. You do not need a gym membership. Exercise should push you a little, you should feel it. You will be uncomfortable. You can choose to be slightly uncomfortable as you exercise, or you will be uncomfortable due to the chronic disease that takes hold of your body. Choose wisely. Not choosing is to choose.

I opened this piece with a quote, “Stories consist of words, words that can mean anything; they have no solid, rational relationship to facts.” To take this to the extreme, we call the murder of unborn children, abortion, “healthcare.” This “healthcare” is guaranteed to result in at least one death. Can you see the absurdity? Call it what it is, “Murder;” this is not healthcare. Don’t fall for the lie.

We have been sold a lie that when you hit forty it is all downhill, that we can expect our health to get steadily worse as we get older. Yes, in our lifetimes that does seem to be the normal state of affairs. Consider Moses. He died at 120 years old. He was called by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt when he was already 80 years old. He led them out of Egypt and to Mt. Sinai at 80. That journey itself was a very long march, out of Goshen, across the Sinai Peninsula, through the parted Red Sea and then onward to the mountain. Read that story in Exodus. Take note of how many times that 80-year-old man, Moses, was called up the mountain and then sent back down to speak to the children of Israel. It was many times; he was 80 years old. My wife and I traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2023, went to Mt. Sinai, and climbed the mountain. I was 58 and my wife 56; significantly under 80. We successfully climbed the mountain starting at 5,000 feet (that is the elevation where the Israelites camped) and climbed to well over 7,000 feet. We were successful, first because God allowed it (Psalm 24:3-4), but also because we trained. We walked many very long walks over many months at a brisk pace to build endurance. We lifted weights to build our strength. It was still a difficult climb. Moses was in better shape, healthier, at 80 than I was at 58. As a second example, consider Caleb. We can see it Joshua 14:10-11, “Now then, just as the Lord promised, he has kept me alive for forty-five years since the time he said this to Moses, while Israel moved about in the wilderness. So here I am today, eighty-five years old! I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out (He was 40 at that time, Joshua 14:7); I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then. These examples give me hope, decline is not inevitable; we can age gracefully.

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I do not have all of the answers. I continue to read and research so that I can be healthy as I age. I continue to make adjustments as I learn more. Here are some links to resources where you can continue doing your own research and take charge of your health.

The Forgotten Side of Medicine | A Midwestern Doctor | Substack — Subscribe to this and stay informed. Check out his articles on DMSO (several are in the menu at the top).

Mercola.com - #1 Natural Health Website — Subscribe and learn something new each day.

NaturalNews.com. — Not all are health articles but there is a lot of good information here.

The Biblio Diet: Live Long, Master Metabolism, Reduce Pain, Fight Depression, and Conquer Cancer with Healing Secrets from the Bible — Healing and good health are possible, I highly recommend reading this.

Check out this podcast. There is a lot of good information here. You will learn that there are cures for things that the medical industrial complex tells you are incurable.

Obamacare Was Not A Failure | ZeroHedge

Step out of the lie. Healthcare is not provided by the government or your employer, insurance is. Take charge of your health. It takes effort but you can do it. Being dependent upon this system is something that you should not want. Do everything that you can to not depend upon pharmaceuticals to live. Answers are out there for almost everything. You won’t find those answers going to your primary care physician. When you are dependent on drugs to survive and dependent upon someone else to pay for them, you are exactly where the system wants you; they control you.

By the way, healthcare and food are not the only things that they have lied to us about. Please consider my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

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Hello Glenn,

I would like to begin by thanking you for all that I have been able to learn through your books, and radio and television programs since I found you when you began your show on Fox. I have been a mostly daily listener since that point and was an original subscriber to GBTV. I attended Restoring Honor in Washington D.C. I bought a ticket to Restoring Courage in Israel but due to thunderstorms in the eastern United States I was unable to make the connection to actually get to Tel Aviv; I ended up watching from my living room in California. My wife and I attended Restoring Love in Dallas and then we both attended Restoring Unity in Birmingham. Back in the day, when you used to do live shows, we attended several tapings of your television programs, and I even offered the closing prayer on more than one occasion. We have also volunteered at popup museums, AJE and even a gala. We have been around a while.

I have been listening to you for a long time. There are a few things that I believe that you should now hear from me and since you are by no means an easy man to be able to talk to, I have chosen this open letter hoping it might get in front of you, and that what I have to say may educate others as well. I will primarily be focusing on things you have discussed in the closing months of 2025.

Since you so frequently have quoted Jefferson saying, “Question with boldness…” I am taking you at your word that you are willing to entertain the notion that you might not yet have all of the facts and that may have led you to some erroneous or incomplete conclusions. I will be quoting Scripture in justifying my positions and I take you at your word that you believe the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation. Let’s begin.

We will start with Muslims. You want to slice and dice Muslims into “good Muslims” and “radical Islam/political Islam/Islamists.” I would like to equate this to what Solomon was proposing when he said to split the baby in 1 Kings 3:16-28. You know this story. Solomon knows that you can’t actually split the baby and still have a baby. You want there to be two pieces to this Muslim/Islamist thing. This is a distinction without a difference. What does the Word of God have to say about Islam? Let’s just begin with what you sometimes like to call something like, “Bob’s top 10 list.” Most people call them “The Ten Commandments.” I call these “The First Ten Commandments.”

Since the beginning is a good place to start, we’ll start there in Exodus 20:2-3:

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.”

Since Muslims worship a false moon-god Allah, not the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, that is YHVH, by allowing Muslims, I’ll even say “good Muslims,” to worship their god in our land, we are putting these false/foreign gods in YHVH’s face. We’ve broke the first commandment.

Should people that worship Allah even be in the United States of America? I answer that in my article Islam in America but will summarize here. The first amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

(Incidentally, this is the very first conversation that you and I ever had in person. I was in the audience of one of your Thursday studio audience shows and you asked what five rights are protected by the first amendment. I was sure that someone in your audience would know that answer so I was reluctant to respond, but since no one else would speak up I had to respond, and I did give you the five rights. Later in the show you came back to me with another question saying, “John will know.” I did.)

We interpret that to mean that any religion should be allowed in this land. Is that what YHVH thinks? We call ourselves a Judeo/Christian nation. What does that mean? I posit that we would say that our culture and system of laws is based upon the Bible, the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Allah is not the god of the Bible though he is in the Bible; he is known as Ba’al. The Jewish and Christian Bibles both contain what Christians refer to as “The Old Testament.” Let’s consult that. Exodus 12:49 says:

“The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you.”

Who said that? YHVH, the God of the Bible, did! Are Muslims allowed to bring their false foreign god and their Shariah Law into a Judeo/Christian nation? YHVH says, “NO!” The law spoken of in that verse is the Torah, where we get the ten commandments from. That law, the Torah, is to govern all Judeo/Christian nations. Remember that when Israel was finally able to enter the Promised Land after their little forty-year excursion wandering through the wilderness because of their disobedience and distrust of God, that God told them to drive out or destroy all of the current inhabitants. This was 100% to prevent these pagan false god worshipping people from infecting the Israelites with their false religion. They were not to take the heathen’s daughters in marriage nor offer their daughters to the heathen. YHVH drew a very distinct, dark line.

Back to the first amendment and thinking that it was meant to protect any religion; it was not. I can’t articulate the religion of each and every founder, framer of the Declaration or Constitution but I can say with 100% certainty that there wasn’t a Muslim among them. The religious ones, which was the vast majority, worshipped the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob as one of the many Christian denominations, or as Jews. They worshipped the “One True God.” When they were protecting “religions,” they were protecting Jews and the many Christian denominations. Being a student of history, I know you know all about the Barbary Pirates, so I won’t elaborate here other than to remind you that this is our first encounter with Muslims. The framers of the first amendment were not protecting the Barbary Pirates wicked, false god religion. You also know that the United States produced a Koran in order to educate Americans as to what these false god worshippers believed and why we had to go to war with them!

When we allow the “good Muslims” in, the ones that don’t intend to murder us, at least right now, we must understand that along with allowing them comes their Koran and Mosques. They don’t assimilate; they congregate. They will recruit/convert people and marry our sons and daughters (I think we were told to never allow that!). Allowing the “good” ones in, the ones that reproduce at an almost exponentially higher rate than native Americans do, means that in only a few generations they will be taking over the culture. In fact, that is already beginning to happen. Can you say, “Dearborn, MI?” Can you say, “Minneapolis, MN?” Our own “little Mogadishu.” Now we have Mamdani as the first Muslim mayor of New York. I am, at least somewhat, less concerned about him being a Democratic Socialist than him being a Muslim. And you personally know that this is a big deal in Irving, TX right now! We can also point to EPIC, recently renamed the innocuous sounding, “The Meadow.” Because we allowed the “good Muslims” in, they now have the numbers to make these things happen. All of this is happening because we always seem to know better than God and we just love to do things our own way! This has a name: Sin.

Let’s move onto another subject: the Sabbath. You recently interviewed Erika Kirk on your radio show and discussed Charlie’s book, Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life. It was a nice interview, and I appreciated it greatly. I must say though that I was dumbfounded when you asked Erika something like, “Why did you and Charlie decide to keep the Saturday/Jewish Sabbath?” Sabbath has but one definition and it is defined by God clear back in Genesis 2: 1-3:

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. And by the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on that day He rested from all His work. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on that day He rested from all the work of creation that He had accomplished.”

You make the claim that there is a “Christian Sabbath.” There is not. The Constantinian Catholic Church outlawed the Saturday Sabbath and created a Sunday “day of worship.” Sabbath is to literally cease and rest. A “day of worship” requires no such thing. Just consider how most Christians go to church on Sunday and then go out to eat (which requires others to work), and then go home to mow the lawn, wash the car, do the laundry, etc. Just another day, not a holy (meaning “set apart”) day.

Back to “Bob’s Top Ten,” Exodus 20:8-11:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Who shouted that commandment down from Mt. Sinai? YHVH did! He said that the sabbath is the seventh day! Will this seventh day definition ever change? Exodus 31:16 has that answer:

The people of Israel must keep the Sabbath day by observing it from generation to generation. This is a covenant obligation for all time.

Some will say that it changed in the New Testament. Consider that carefully. Just before you turn the page into what Christians refer to as the New Testament you will be in the book of Malachi. Malachi 3:6 says:

I the LORD do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.

God is very deliberate to make sure that we are reminded just before turning to the New Testament and saying that everything is going to change, that He is NOT going to change!

It is very explicit. The Sabbath is the seventh day, from sundown Friday to sundown on Saturday. This is right in the Bible. It is beyond arrogant to think that it could/would change, it is like calling God a liar. I, for most of half a century, was that arrogant!

You might counter with, “But it says, ‘The people of Israel must keep the Sabbath day,’ or ‘So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.’” You, as most do, I once did, equate Israel/Jacob to “the Jews,” and then say that since you are not a Jew that this doesn’t apply to you. This is where most people get all bollixed up. The Jews, the tribe of Judah, are only one of the twelve tribes of Israel. All Jews are Israelites, but all Israelites are not Jews. Judaism is not a religion created at Mt. Sinai; it is a man-made religion created by the Pharisees in about the second century BCE. When we stop conflating Jew with Israel and Judaism with the Law of Moses, the Bible becomes a lot clearer and we can understand what is happening in our world, at this time, a lot more clearly (More on this below).

Moving on. You have given some very heart stirring monologues where I can hear in your voice your sincere desire to understand and do what is right. I have been right there with you with tears in my eyes as you pour out your heart. As you say, you are good at putting things together but are terrible on timing. I do think that is something that I can help you with. The problem is that I can’t lay all of that out in this letter or a small post. I did write a book that dives deep into this. I am finding that if your name isn’t Glenn Beck or James Patterson that marketing a book is much more difficult than actually writing the book! My book is Blessings & Curses: if my people… Since I now live in the DFW area, I drove to Irving, to your studios, and hand delivered three copies of the book. I couldn’t get in the door—you have some tight security— but met with one of your security guards outside and gave the books to him and asked that they be delivered to a producer of your show. I don’t know if you ever saw them. This book does have answers that you are searching for. You may not agree with what I have written yet but in the not-too-distant future you will want to know what is in those pages. The book also contains chapters explaining the whole Jew/Israel/Jacob confusion as well as where America is in the Bible; America is in the Bible! This might even be interesting for The Torch.

Sincerely,

John Solgat

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This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

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Let’s begin with a new Christmas carol for your viewing and listening pleasure:

“You neatly set aside the command of God to maintain your own tradition. For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever you would have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God), he is no longer permitted to do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by the tradition you have handed down. And you do so in many such matters.” —Jesus Christ (Mark 7:9-13)

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Christmas is one of those “many such matters” where we “nullify the word of God.” Consider Deuteronomy 12:2-4:

Destroy completely all the places where the nations you are dispossessing have served their gods—atop the high mountains, on the hills, and under every green tree. Tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, burn up their Asherah poles, cut down the idols of their gods, and wipe out their names from every place. You shall not worship the LORD your God in this way.

This tradition of Christmas has people setting up a green tree in their living room claiming that this is all about Jesus. This tree is a modern day “sacred pillar,” or “Asherah pole.” The LORD says that you shall not worship Him in this way. Jeremiah 10:2-5 sounds an awful lot like a Christmas tree:

This is what the LORD says: “Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by the signs in the heavens, though the nations themselves are terrified by them. For the customs of the peoples are worthless; they cut down a tree from the forest; it is shaped with a chisel by the hands of a craftsman. They adorn it with silver and gold and fasten it with hammer and nails, so that it will not totter.

Like scarecrows in a cucumber patch, their idols cannot speak. They must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them, for they can do no harm, and neither can they do any good.”

This applies to man-made idols. Even though the Christmas tree does not have to be “shaped with a chisel,” that does not mean that it hasn’t become a modern-day idol, our version of an Asherah pole. In these verses we are commanded against doing this.

Further down in Deuteronomy 12, in verses 29-30, He expounds on this:

When the LORD your God cuts off before you the nations you are entering to dispossess, and you drive them out and live in their land, be careful not to be ensnared by their ways after they have been destroyed before you. Do not inquire about their gods, asking, “How do these nations serve their gods? I will do likewise.”

Most of the modern-day celebration of Christmas is not in the Bible. Below is a documentary that details the origin of many of the traditions that we have inherited. You will be blessed if you budget some time and view the entire video.

I wrote a post last year detailing the true story of the birth of the Messiah and contrasted that with our modern traditions: Have you considered this: Christmas? Please click the link and go explore a true Biblical perspective of the story in its true Israelite/Jewish context.

In Jeremiah 16:19-21, Jeremiah is having a conversation with the LORD Yehovah:

O LORD Yehovah, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in the day of distress, the nations will come to You from the ends of the earth, and they will say, “Our fathers inherited nothing but lies, worthless idols of no benefit at all. Can man make gods for himself? Such are not gods!”

“Therefore behold, I will inform them, and this time I will make them know My power and My might; then they will know that My name is the LORD Yehovah.

It was foretold that we would inherit lies. That has happened. The good part is that Yehovah said that He would “inform” us of the truth. You have been informed. What will you do with that?

Once you realize that Christmas is not what it is purported to be, you should begin to question and test everything else that you believe. I address more of those in my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

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We should begin by defining Democracy:

government by the people : rule of the majority

A republic is defined as:

a form of government in which the power belongs to a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by the leaders and representatives elected by those citizens to govern according to law

We should next ask, “Is the United States of America a democracy?” The founders created a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy. Benjamin Franklin was asked by Elizabeth Willing Powel: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” He was signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution and said, “A republic.” He ought to know! We were not meant to be a democracy. We do democratically elect representatives to the legislature as well as the president, but we are supposed to be a republic as defined in our Constitution.

The Constitution in Article IV also guarantees to every state a Republican form of government:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

We are supposed to be a republic where we democratically elect representatives to govern according to the law. Every law that the legislature enacts is supposed to be within the confines of the Constitution.

Article 1 of the Constitution gives all law-making power to Congress. Section 8 of Article 1, which we all but ignore, limits the subjects that Congress is allowed to make laws concerning. Congress making laws about subjects not enumerated in Section 8 is not allowed by the Constitution; those subjects are reserved to the States and the people, which is explicitly articulated in the ninth and tenth amendments (two more things totally ignored!).

In a republic, our representatives are to “govern according to the law [ultimately the Constitution].” We the People have allowed the U.S. government to write and enforce laws that are outside of their jurisdiction meaning that we have in actuality devolved into a de facto democracy; something never intended. By this I mean that we are now basically majority rule/mob rule unconstrained by the rule of law. Since this has happened, consider this quote from Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee who was a Scottish advocate, judge, writer, and historian who was a Professor of Universal History and of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the University of Edinburgh:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.

With our staggering $38 trillion in debt, I think we have passed that part where the majority votes to elect the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury. The collapse is coming.

The Democrats basically speak into existence that we are a democracy. A lie told often enough and loudly enough is eventually accepted as true. Consider Senator Chuck Schumer’s campaign web site:

Our democracy is under attack. From Donald Trump’s big lie about a rigged election that incited the Capitol insurrection to Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws passed by state legislatures, there is a concerted, organized attempt to sow distrust in our elections and stop people from voting.

Despite Republicans trying to stand in the way, Chuck Schumer has never backed down in the fight to save our democracy. He continues to lead the fight to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, get dark money out of politics, secure our elections from Republican attacks and ensure every eligible American is able to cast their ballot.

How about a few quotes from Congresswoman, and now former (Praise God!) House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi’s official congressional web site:

Earlier this month, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi discussed the urgent need to protect American democracy… Every day seems to bring a fresh blow to our democracy… it’s going to take all of us to save our democracy… That is essential to saving our democracy… They may be okay with that and the fact that he’s harming our democracy…

That is only a very small sample from just one page on her web site. It seems to me that these two that swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America ought to know that very Constitution guarantees a republican form of government, not a democracy. They know, then lie to us anyway.

In this Constitutional Republic, we do democratically elect the members of the House and Senate. That means that the winner of the majority of the votes cast wins the election. When casting votes for bills in both houses of Congress a majority of votes cast is required to pass a bill. But that is not quite true, is it? Consider the Senate filibuster.

The current rules for the filibuster allow the minority (41 of 100 Senators) to actually decide what can come up for a vote to be passed by the majority. This is not democracy (see the definition above); this is a tyranny of the minority. How is it that the Democrats that just caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history using the filibuster where a minority of Senators prevented the passage of a bill to open the government that a majority of the Senators supported? And when they did that, they said that they were “saving our democracy.” Again, democracy is “rule of the majority,” yet the minority seemed to rule. Do words mean anything?

Our Constitution was ratified it 1788 and the following year it went into effect with the election of Congress and President George Washington. Congress has now been operating for 236 years and it is only a rather recent thing for this minority to prevent a vote as they did to cause the longest government shutdown ever. The rules for the filibuster have changed many times over those 236 years. The filibuster is not in the Constitution; it is merely a rule that the Senate has adopted and changes from time to time. The first time that this 60-vote threshold became part of the equation was back in 1970, 181 years after the Senate came into existence. It wasn’t always this way.

Within the Constitutional boundaries, the majority should rule except for the few cases that the Constitution itself requires a supermajority. The Senate is to debate bills; Senators supporting or opposing a bill get to make their case to the other Senators before a vote is scheduled. The point is that the minority is to be heard but the majority is to ultimately prevail. The majority may change their mind once the minority has had a chance to make their case; but they may not. In any case, the minority should never be able to obstruct the will of the majority.

For an example of how the filibuster has worked in the past consider Mr. Smith Goes to Washington:

The minority should be heard. Mr. Smith was that minority and he was heard. It should cost something to delay the vote, to extend debate, and Mr. Smith paid a price when he spoke so long that he passed out. In today’s world, they just say they want to filibuster which can impede progress and cause a government shutdown that hurt millions of people and cost the economy billions of dollars. We need to go back to how Mr. Smith had to do it! The rules of the Senate change over time. Remember, the sixty vote impediment to actually voting on a bill only came into existence in 1970; the senate operated for 181 years without it, yet we consider it normal today that 41 Senators, a minority, can gum up the works. And then, we call it democracy meaning majority rule.

Why bring this up now that the government shutdown is over? The shutdown ended but we will be in the same predicament again at the end of January only to face the possibility of doing this all over again. A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. We are insane; at least the Senate is!

Some Republicans argue against ending this 60-vote rule because they are afraid of what will happen when Republicans are out of power. That is called a “prevent defense” which doesn’t always work out as planned. Go on offense. Do the right things for We the People and earn the right to stay in power. Senators and Members of Congress should convince the voters that they are worthy of their votes by serving them properly and within the confines of the Constitution.

John Wesley said, “What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace.” When we let things go on for too long, they become the new normal. Unfortunately, humans, with a life expectancy of only around eighty years, have a short memory. We quickly adopt new normals and then will fight for them as if that is how it has always been. How many other things are we guilty of adopting and then, even though they are wrong, continue to do just because that is how it has always been?

I’ve got one! Consider Christmas. Christmas was once illegal in America. What!? It’s true. We consider it normal but that wasn’t always the case. Consider my post last year: Have you considered this: Christmas? That post delves into the true story of the birth of the Messiah and contrasts that with our modern traditions.

“A Republic, if you can keep it.” That was Benjamin Franklin’s answer. If he were to come back today and examine the current state of America, he would probably ask, “How long did the Republic last?” What he would really be saying is, “I see that you couldn’t keep it.”

There are many more things that we consider normal that are not. I address those in my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

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Am I now seeking the approval of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Messiah.

Galatians 1:10

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This piece is definitely not seeking the approval of men!

The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

One of the five rights that this amendment is meant to prevent the government infringing upon is the establishment or exercise of a religion. Did the framers of this amendment mean any religion? The vast majority of the founders of this nation were one of several Christian denominations or Jews. The commonality here is that these founders professed to worship the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. That God is Yehovah (you see LORD in your Bible but that obscures the actual name in the Hebrew text). Not one of the founders was Muslim. In fact, America’s early relationship with Muslims/Islam was one of war. They have been our enemy from the beginning. If you are unfamiliar with this history, please read about First Barbary War.

Islam/Muslims worship a false moon-god named Allah. Allah is not Yehovah. Muslims profess to be “people of the book” but their book is the Koran, not the Bible. They do lay claim to Abraham, and rightly so. Abraham sired Ishmael through Hagar, an Egyptian. Ishmael’s descendants are the Arabs which is where Islam started and continues to this day. That said, Ishmael was not the receiver of the covenants and promises of Yehovah; those went to Isaac and then to Jacob. Jihadists/Islamists shout, “Allah Akbar,” meaning, “Allah is greater.” Greater than who? They are saying, “Allah is greater than Yehovah.” Blasphemy!

A major problem we have understanding things is that American’s do not know who they are. America is Israel, specifically the tribe of Manasseh. Don’t believe that? Please see my prior post, Have You Considered This: America in Biblical Prophecy? For a much deeper dive, if you can handle the truth, get my book, Blessings & Curses: if my people… Why don’t we know who we are? Consider Romans 11:25 (KJV):

For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

Romans 11:25 does not say “to the Jews,” it says, “to Israel.” Those two are not the same thing! This is a major subject of my book Blessings & Curses: if my people… The American’s that I am speaking about here are of the tribe of Manasseh, they are not Gentiles, they are the blind ones. In these end times, this blindness is beginning to be lifted.

Once we finally have our eyes opened to the fact that America is Israel, we must realize that it was our ancestors that entered into the covenant with Yehovah at Mt. Sinai. We are party to that covenant. We are expected to keep the promises that our ancestors made; they said in Exodus 19:8:

“All that Yehovah hath spoken we will do.”

The covenant is everlasting, from generation to generation. That continues to us. Yeshua came and paid the price for Israel, our ancestors, breaking that covenant, but He did not abolish the covenant; He renewed the covenant. In fact, He said in Matthew 5:17-18,

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law [Torah] or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law [Torah] until everything is accomplished.”

That covenant is in the Law of Moses, the Torah. The Torah is Yehovah’s instructions to govern a nation. Yehovah was establishing the nation of Israel; He was not instituting a religion. The Torah is the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. Being an Israelite nation, The Torah is above the Constitution of the United States of America. That cannot be argued if we claim to be a Judeo-Christian nation, if we claim that America was founded upon Judeo-Christian values. Those values are enshrined in the Torah.

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Now that we know that Torah is to be the supreme law of the land, what does it say about foreigners that want to reside among us? The Bible has that answer in Exodus 12:49:

“The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you.”

That means that if someone decides to live amongst us, they are expected to keep the same law, the Torah. Shariah law is NOT ALLOWED! Israelites should never have Muslims ruling over them. That is a commandment from God! In fact, inviting, or allowing, Muslims to live among us is inviting false gods into the land. The first commandment says that is not allowed. That verse also says that the native-born are expected to keep His Torah.

We might be waking up. Governor Abbott of the great state of Texas just declared the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR are foreign terrorists. Both are Islamic organizations. Unfortunately, I have heard people declare Islamists bad, but regular Muslims to be okay. This is a distinction without a difference. They are all worshipping the false moon-god Allah which the Torah, the law of God, does not allow. People that are currently Muslim are welcome in America when they renounce that false god and the Koran and embrace the Creator of the Universe, Yehovah, and His ways, His Torah.

I don’t hate Muslims. They have inherited lies. Jeremiah 16 has the story of a conversation between God and Jeremiah. In that story, Jeremiah says that in the end times, our time, we would finally acknowledge that we have inherited worthless lies and traditions. It’s not just the Muslims that have inherited lies though; Christians and Jews (and every other religion) have as well. Again, my book Blessings & Curses: if my people… details this extensively. Can you handle the truth? Get the book and test my assertions.

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

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Yesterday, New Yorkers elected a Muslim Communist, Zohran Mamdani, to be their mayor. Watching his supporter’s euphoric celebration after the win reminded me of the rooftop party in the movie Independence Day. Picture the people in the scene below with Mamdani signs.

Take a look at this clip from the movie.

She says, “It’s so pretty.” Then, they blow up the city!

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How did we get to this point? My last post, The Root Cause, discussed the true underlying cause, but we should explore this more specifically. I am going to assert things here that won’t be expanded in this forum because there isn’t room to do that. That said, I wrote an entire book that does delve into this and brings the receipts. That book is Blessings & Curses: if my people… Get your copy and dig deeper into what is posited below.

The United States of America is the Israelite tribe of Manasseh. That is quite a claim; the book proves it. Being Manasseh means that the United States is an Israelite nation. Our ancestors were the very people that entered into a covenant with God at Mt. Sinai. We, through our ancestors, promised to keep His law, His Torah. Our ancestors failed to keep it, so they were removed from the promised land. Our obedience to it is still expected. The Torah is not a set of religious doctrines; it is a set of instructions that are to govern a nation. Since we are an Israelite nation, it is expected that the Torah govern our nation; that the Torah be the supreme law of the land.

God expects Israelites, including the tribe of Manasseh, that is, the United States of America, to keep His Torah, observe His commandments. What about those that are in America that are not Israelites? Great question! The Bible has that answer in Exodus 12:49, “The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you.” That means that if someone decides to live amongst us, they are expected to keep the same law, the Torah. Shariah law is NOT ALLOWED! Israelites should never have Muslims ruling over them. That is a commandment from God!

Mamdani is not the first. Consider Dearborn’s Muslim Mayor:

This should not happen in America. We have allowed Islam to virtually take over Dearborn Michigan. Shame on us.

Minneapolis Minnesota is becoming a no-go zone for native born Americans, and they have elected Ilhan Omar, a Muslim, to the United States Congress, impacting all of us! Check out the recent video of her talking about her allegiance to Somalia, not the United States!

God considers us disobedient to his Torah, so He allows this as our punishment, hopefully leading to repentance. We should keep His commandments, all that can be kept, and require those that live among us to do the same thing. If they won’t, they should, actually, they must, leave.

To go deeper into this, I would ask you to consider my new book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking, and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

A problem cannot be fixed until the cause is found. Until we find the root cause, attempts to resolve the problem will be futile. We can see the world around us falling into chaos. The left wants to blame the right, and the right blames the left. That is exactly where the enemy wants us! We place blame, demonize the other side, and then, fight like hell. We have been doing that since the founding of the nation, since the creation of the world really, but it does seem to have accelerated recently. Is there truly a reason for that, or is the other side just getting worse? We can continue to keep demonizing the other side, or we can find the root cause.

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Add to the warring of the right and left the increasing number of unnatural disasters. We have severe droughts, flooding, hurricanes reaching far inland in North Carolina, and Jamaica was decimated just this week. What about wildfires such as Paradise, California; Maui, Hawaii; and Los Angeles, California? These fires destroyed entire communities. There have also been tremendous tornado outbreaks all throughout the middle of the country. Volcanic activity has been increasing worldwide, and earthquakes are shaking the entire planet. We have also experienced COVID, monkeypox, bird flu and measles outbreaks, just to name a few.

On top of all of this, add actual war. Russia invading Ukraine. Israel fighting Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Actually, Israel is fighting most of the world. We, the United States, also have possible wars with Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, and even with China over Taiwan. We could even be drug into war with Russia over Ukraine. Things could even get to the point of actual civil war, a real shooting war, within the United States of America. Blacks are murdering whites in South Africa and Islamic terrorists are murdering Christians in Nigeria and other places. North Korea tortures and murders Christians, South Korea has begun cracking down on Christianity just as China has been doing.

Do we want the real answer, or do we just want to think the next election will solve the problems, that the United Nations can resolve the wars to bring world peace, and that the WHO along with the rest of the public health organizations will solve the disease issues? Assuming all of those things would be the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Unfortunately, the insanity will continue; most people will put their trust in “the System.” You don’t have to do that.

I will now give you the root cause: sin. That’s it. Many people will have just left the discussion; if you are still here, good for you. Please allow me to make the case and then you can decide for yourself. First, sin must be defined. I have heard Christians define it as “missing the mark.” But when pressed to define “the mark,” they have no real definitive answer. We will let the Bible define sin. 1 John 3:4 says, “Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.” The law here is the law of Moses: Torah. I can hear it now, “But that is for the Jews!” Is it? Open your Bible and turn to Malachi 3:6 which says, “I the Lord do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.” God made sure that this verse is in your Bible on the page just before you turn the page to the one that says, “New Testament.” Think about that. Why does Christianity say that the Torah, the Law, is done away with in the New Testament when God Himself says just before turning there that He does not change? That question really needs, in fact, demands, an answer.

Jesus Himself says that the Torah, the Law, is not done away with in Matthew 5:17-18, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” He seems pretty clear that “until heaven and earth disappear” it can’t be abolished. Heaven and earth will never disappear, but they will be renewed as promised in Revelation 21.

So, now that we know what sin is, how do we know that the things that are happening are related to it? The answers to this are in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 27-28. We find there that there are blessings for obeying the law, the Torah, and curses for disobeying. I provided links, go read those chapters and then decide for yourself if we are experiencing the blessings or the curses. If you profess to be a Bible believing Christian, do you believe this part of the Bible? This is in your Bible.

We often hear 2 Chronicles 7:14 quoted, but since that verse begins in the middle of a sentence, we will backup and quote the entire sentence, beginning in verse 13, “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” It begins with God Himself causing drought! Why is He causing drought? Because the people are disobedient. If we are experiencing drought, what should we surmise? We are disobedient. What is the cure for drought? Humble ourselves, seek His face, and turn from our wicked ways. Wicked ways are our disobedience to His Torah, His Law. For this drought example, let me cap it off with a quote from the blessings promised in Leviticus 26:3-4: if we obey, “If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their fruit.” We should never experience drought, but we do.

The curses are to goad us back to being obedient; the curses are meant to be correction. Jesus says to Saul in Acts 26:14, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” It is hard on us when we continue to kick against the goads. We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way, it is up to us. We usually choose the hard way!

To go deeper into this, I would ask you to consider my new book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

If you found this interesting or thought provoking, please consider subscribing, liking, and sharing it. You may also join the conversation in the comment section below.

I just Googled “Define Christian grace” and received the following response:

the spontaneous, unmerited gift of the divine favor in the salvation of sinners, and the divine influence operating in individuals for their regeneration and sanctification.

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I usually hear it preached as this “divine favor,” or “undeserved favor.” It is sometimes said that mercy is not getting what we deserve, and grace is getting what we do not deserve. Our faith becomes very easy with this simple definition. Consider what Merriam-Webster has to say about the definition of grace:

unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration or sanctification

What is this “divine assistance” for? Consider the words of Messiah in John 14 where He is telling his disciples that He must leave but He will send a “Helper.” This Helper is the Holy Spirit. In John 14:16-17, Messiah says:

I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, so that He may be with you forever; the Helper is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him; but you know Him because He remains with you and will be in you.

Just a few verses later, He says in 21:

The one who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will reveal Myself to him.

This is the context in which He spoke of the Helper. The Helper will assist the disciple in knowing and keeping His commandments. He says that the evidence that someone loves Him is that he or she keeps the commandments. A problem we frequently run into is that we want to redefine “His commandments,” as if that definition changed in the New Testament. Consider His words in Matthew 5:17-19:

Do not presume that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter shall pass from the Law, until all is accomplished! Therefore, whoever nullifies one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

“The Law” that He is talking about is the Law of Moses, the Torah. He continues expounding on this subject of “the Helper” in John 16:7-11:

But I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I am leaving; for if I do not leave, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. And He, when He comes, will convict the world regarding sin, and righteousness, and judgment: regarding sin, because they do not believe in Me; and regarding righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you no longer are going to see Me; and regarding judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.

He discusses sin and righteousness as what the Helper will be helping with. What is sin? 1 John 3:4 has that answer:

Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness.

Sin is lawlessness. The law here is Torah. Sin is violating the Torah. Righteousness is “observing all of the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly,” as it says about Zechariah and Elizabeth in Luke 1:6:

Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly.

This is the Grace of Messiah, that He would send us a Helper, the Holy Spirt, to enable us to not sin. To enable us to keep his commands, His Torah. The Holy Spirt is the “divine assistance,” the very definition of grace.

Paul discusses this in Romans 6:1-2:

What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?

Paul is saying that grace is not a license to sin. He is saying that grace should enable us to stop sinning! Jesus sent us a Helper so that we could be successful in that.

To go deeper into this, I would ask you to consider my new book Blessings & Curses: if my people…

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

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I have been away, not posting on Substack for a while. The reason for being away is that I have been writing a book that became available on Amazon today, September 15, 2025.

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Here is the description on the back cover:

Blessings and Curses. Oh, how we prefer the former over the latter. If only we could be continually blessed and never cursed. Is it possible to be both blessed and cursed at the same time? I believe that it is and will make that case in this tome. There are two witnesses in the Bible where God says that if we obey His instructions we will be blessed and when we do not, we will be cursed. Those can be found in Leviticus 26 and again in Deuteronomy 27-28. There does not seem to be a middle ground; obey and be blessed, disobey and be cursed. If that is true, how can blessings and curses be happening at the same time? It all comes down to God’s covenants. We will dig into all of that and there will be some surprising reveals along the way. We will explore prophecies about events in our near future in a way that you may not have considered.

This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!

Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com

New here? Consider reading the introduction here.

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Do you believe the Bible to be true? Even more specifically, do you believe the red letters, the words that Jesus spoke, to be true? If your answer is yes, let’s test that.

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In Matthew 12 we find Jesus saying, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” He gives this response to “the Pharisees and teachers of the law” when they say to Him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.” He answers them in verse 39, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” He is referring them to Jonah 1:17, “Now the LORD had appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the fish.” Click the links or, better yet, open your Bible and verify this.

Christians all over the world will go to church on Easter Sunday to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. They will hear a message about how Jesus was crucified on Good Friday, died about 3PM, was placed in the tomb just before sunset, 6PM, and then resurrected on Easter Sunday morning. Matthew 28:1 says, “After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.” At dawn, about 6AM, on Sunday morning, the two Marys found the tomb already empty. With this reckoning of the timing of the events we find that Jesus was supposedly in the tomb for less than 36 hours. If we are to believe Jesus’ own words, it should be twice that number for “three days and three nights.”

The traditional Christian explanation for this can be unpacked in this article. Basically, the short version is that “Jews consider any part of a day a full day.” If that is true, why was Jesus so specific saying, “three days and three nights?” Why didn’t he just say three days? He did say it was the sign of Jonah so it should match what the book of Jonah says. The book of Jonah does say that “Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the fish.” Do we believe that? The Bible says that. Was Jonah swallowed by the fish about sunset and vomited out on the beach 36 hours later? That’s not what that story says. It says, “three days and three nights.” (View The Jonah Code for more details).

If I just say, “three days,” I may be implying that I mean both the light part of the day as well as the dark part, night, are included: the full 24 hours. If I am specific and use the both words, “day” and “night,” I am distinguishing between the light part and the dark part of the full day. If “day” in this scenario includes the dark portion then night is redundant, unneeded. The verbiage used in both Matthew 12:40 and Jonah 1:17 both distinguish between the light part of the day and the dark part of the day and say that both are included in counting the days. With that understanding, we must have three dark periods, nights, between the burial and the resurrection. In the traditional reckoning discussed above, we have Friday night, Saturday night. Where is the third night?

In the scene below from 1984, O’Brien asks Winston how many fingers he is holding up. O’Brien is holding up four fingers, but Winston is supposed to see, and say, five. This is a version of what the Easter Sunday message is going to be like. Friday night, one. Saturday night, two three. See, three nights! You don’t see three; let’s do it again. Friday night, one. Saturday night, two three. See, three nights! I’m sure you see it now!!

Let us consider another possibility for the reckoning of the timing of these events. The year is 28 of the common era (28AD). According to Leviticus 23, the Passover Lamb is to be killed before sunset on the fourteenth day of the first month, the month of the aviv barley (more details here). Jesus is our Passover Lamb, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He was killed a few hours before sunset on the 14th day of the first month and was laid in the tomb before the sun set that day. In the year 28, that was April 28th, a Wednesday. He was crucified on Wednesday!! He was in the grave all day Thursday, one; all day Friday, two; all day Saturday, three; three days. He was in the grave Wednesday night, one; Thursday night, two; Friday night, three; three nights. He was in the tomb three full days (light periods) and three full nights (dark periods), just as He said He would be. He rose just before sunset on Shabbat, Saturday, exactly 72 hours after He was put into the tomb, as He said He would! The tomb was found to be empty early the next morning. Your Bible never says that He rose Sunday morning, it only says the tomb was found to be empty at that time.

My prior piece, Have you considered this: where are they now? goes deeper into some of this and will help your understanding.

Does this matter? Friday to Sunday or Wednesday to Saturday? Does the truth matter? Have you considered this: Truth? dives deep into this question. In John 8, Yeshua said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

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Traditional Christianity would say that we are living in the church age ever since the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That means the old covenant has ended and we are living under “The New Covenant.” What exactly is that New Covenant? In Luke 22:20, Jesus says, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you.” But the terms of that Covenant are not defined there, so what did He mean? I can’t really find the definition of this New Covenant in the Gospels so where is it? It is mentioned in the New Testament in Hebrews 8:8-12 and those verses are quoting Jeremiah 31:31-34, so it is really an Old Testament prophecy.

Let’s examine this New Covenant in Jeremiah 31. Verse 31, “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.” Did He do this when He spoke the words in Luke 22:20? Since the eighth century B.C.E., continuing to this very day, Israel has been scattered to the nations. He was only speaking with Jews (the house of Judah) when He spoke those words. How exactly did He make this covenant with Israel at that time?

In verses 32-33, we read, “It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant they broke, though I was a husband to them, But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law [Torah] in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people.” He does say the covenant will be different and Christians would tend to agree. These verses say that He “will make with the house of Israel.” As said above, Israel is not even there in Luke 22:20, only Judah, when He spoke of this New Covenant. Yehovah God says that He will put His law, His Torah which is the Law of Moses, in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. Again, Hebrews in the New Testament is quoting this; that the Mosaic Law will be written on our hearts. If we are currently living under this New Covenant, is that true? Christians claim that the law was done away with. Which is it? Is it written on our hearts or is it abolished? Can’t be both. I would take this to mean that Yehovah God’s law written on our hearts would make it instinct, we would follow it without question as it would just be who we are, part of us, innate. Is that the world that you see today? I don’t. Murder continues. Human trafficking continues. Rape continues. October 7th happened. Do you know the penalty in the Torah for all of those things I just listed? Death.

Moving to verse 34, “No longer will each man teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more.” Please read that again and ask yourself if that verse looks like the world you are living in today. Don’t we in fact “teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD?’” Don’t Christians evangelize? Don’t they attend church and hear a message preached to teach them about God? This New Covenant that Jeremiah writes and Hebrews quotes says, “they will all know Me (Me being God Himself).” Again, why evangelize and teach if everyone knows Him? It would be unnecessary.

With an honest reading of these verses defining the New Covenant, you can’t arrive at the conclusion that this covenant is currently in effect. What a wonderful world it will be when it is, but it isn’t, yet. So that brings us back to Luke 22:20, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you.” It is a translation problem. A better translation would be, “This cup is the renewed covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you.” I wrote about this in my prior piece on The Ten Commandments:

This means that they had broken the blood covenant that they had already agreed three times to keep; that didn’t take long! Yehovah God was going to make them pay the price that they had agreed to for breaking the covenant, death. But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand (Exodus 32:11)?” Moses was successful and (verse 14) “then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.” Just because Yehovah God relented at that time does not mean the death was not owed, after all, God is just. The morning and evening sacrifices were not part of the Torah prior to this; those sacrifices were instituted because of this event to remind the people twice daily that death was still owed. That death would eventually be paid by Yeshua when He came and died to pay this price after which the morning and evening sacrifices were eventually taken away. This is the renewed covenant in His blood! He renewed the Covenant made at Sinai, taking away the penalty, not the requirements.

Please comment below if you have another explanation. Thank you for considering!

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In my last piece on The Ten Commandments, at the end I stated that Deuteronomy 10:5 tells us that the tablets are in the Ark. Where is the Ark now? The book of 2 Maccabees tells us that Jeremiah hid the Ark and the Tabernacle of David. The Ark has remained hidden since that time, but it is just hidden, not lost.

According to the Temple Institute [emphasis mine]:

Tradition records that even as King Solomon built the First Temple, he already knew, through Divine inspiration, that eventually it would be destroyed. Thus Solomon, the wisest of all men, oversaw the construction of a vast system of labyrinths, mazes, chambers and corridors underneath the Temple Mount complex. He commanded that a special place be built in the bowels of the earth, where the sacred vessels of the Temple could be hidden in case of approaching danger. Midrashic tradition teaches that King Josiah of Israel, who lived about forty years before the destruction of the First Temple, commanded the Levites to hide the Ark, together with the original menorah and several other items, in this secret hiding place which Solomon had prepared.

This location is recorded in our sources, and today, there are those who know exactly where this chamber is. And we know that the ark is still there, undisturbed, and waiting for the day when it will be revealed. An attempt was made some few years ago to excavate towards the direction of this chamber. This resulted in widespread Moslem unrest and rioting. They stand a great deal to lose if the Ark is revealed - for it will prove to the whole world that there really was a Holy Temple, and thus, that the Jews really do have a claim to the Temple Mount.

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Rabbi Shlomo Goren claims to have actually seen the Ark:

In the summer of 1983, Goren and several other rabbis joined Rabbi Yehuda Getz, who worked for the Religious Affairs Ministry at the Western Wall, in touring a chamber underneath the mount that Getz had illegally excavated, where the two claimed to have seen the Ark of the Covenant. The excavation was shortly discovered and resulted in a massive brawl between young Jews and Arabs in the area. The access tunnel to the chamber was quickly sealed with concrete by Israeli police. The sealed entrance can be seen from the Western Wall Tunnel, which opened to the public in 1996.

Ron Wyatt has quite a story to tell about actually finding the Ark of the Covenant. He is somewhat controversial, and you will find many saying he is a fraud, but given the last five years that we have lived through I am willing to entertain ideas that I might have readily dismissed in the past. I suggest that you research this out and arrive at your own conclusion, don’t just let the naysayers “shoot the messenger.” I am providing two videos below for your consideration to get you started.

Michael Rood has done teachings on this subject as well and I provide two of his presentations below for your consideration.

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After considering the videos above, it is easy to conclude that Yehovah God is not done with the Ark. He did not allow it to be lost to antiquity, He provided for it’s safe keeping until the time of the end when He plans to reveal it and use it for His purposes.

The lid of the Ark is referred to as the “Mercy Seat.” Traditional images of the Ark do not generally allow anyone to sit on the lid, the seat, as the two cherub’s wings cover the entire lid as shown below.

The image at the top of this piece shows an Ark that looks more like a chair, it has a seat with a back. I believe it is actually the earthly thrown of Yehovah God. I also believe that it will be revealed in the last days prior to the “man of lawlessness” (the antichrist) being revealed. Sha’ul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-4 about him, “Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God. As 2 Maccabees tells us, Jeremiah hid both the Ark of the Covenant as well as the Tabernacle of David, along with other things. When the Ark is finally revealed, so will the Tabernacle of David be revealed. No third Temple needs to be built, the Tabernacle can fulfill that role until the third Temple is finally built after the return of Yeshua Messiah. Once these things are brought out, the Tabernacle set up and the Ark put into the Holy of Holies, the “man of lawlessness” will sit on the Ark and proclaim himself to be God as Sha’ul says.

Many Christians may dismiss some of this since it’s really “Jewish stuff” from the Old Testament. Read what Sha’ul says in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-4 again. He says that Jesus Christ, that is Yeshua Messiah, will not return before the “man of lawlessness,” the antichrist, is revealed. Many Christians think they will be raptured out of here prior to any of the bad stuff, antichrist stuff, happening. Sha’ul, Paul, begs to differ. I strongly suggest watching the included videos above as they will discuss why any of this matters to Christians.

I share all of this now so that when these things begin to happen that you will understand what is happening, most people will not. In some ways I dread these things as this means that the Great Tribulation, the worst time that there will ever be on planet Earth, is underway. In other ways I can’t wait for it to happen since it means the return of Messiah is very, very near!!!

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If I were to ask someone familiar with the Bible where would I find the Ten Commandments they would probably point me to Exodus 20:2-17. Someone may also point me to the retelling in Deuteronomy 5:7-21. In either place, you will find the following list:

1. You shall have no other gods before me.

2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

5. Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

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Although the first time we see this list is in Exodus 20, the phrase Ten Commandments does not appear until Exodus 34, fourteen chapters later, and that chapter does not contain this list. Why is it that we associate the term the Ten Commandments with this list? That is the topic we will consider.

Let’s set the stage, in Exodus 19 Yehovah God calls the children of Israel to a meeting at Mt. Sinai after He had asked them to follow Him where they responded in verse 8, “We will do everything the Lord has said.” He told them to take a bath, wash their clothes, abstain from sexual relations and in three days He would come down and meet with them. They obeyed and assembled at the foot of the mountain on the morning of the third day. In Exodus 20, Yehovah God began speaking so that all of the two to three million Israelites assembled could hear what He spoke. After hearing God speak the ten commandments above, the people trembled with fear for they thought that they might die if they hear any more the voice of God. So, they went to Moses and asked him to hear the rest of what God had to say and relay that to them. Moses and Yehovah God heard their request and had a private conversation where Yehovah gave the rest of the commandments that He intended to give. This private conversation continues all the way through Exodus 23. Moses went back and spoke all of the rest of the commandments to the people and they responded in Exodus 24:3, “Everything the Lord has said we will do.” They verbally agreed to the covenant and then Moses wrote all of this down. The next morning, Moses got up, built an altar and set up twelve pillars of stone for the twelve tribes of Israel. On this altar, they offered burnt offerings to Yehovah and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings. Moses took half of the blood of the bulls and splashed it on the altar and the other half he put in bowls. He then took the Book of the Covenant that he had written the night before and read it to the people. They responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.” (Exodus 24)

This now makes three times that they confirmed that they would do everything Yehovah has said! Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words” (Exodus 24:8). They had entered into a blood covenant which means that whoever breaks the covenant is to become as dead as the animal whose blood was sprinkled on them. After this, Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel and they had a meal with Him.

After the meal, Moses is called to go back up the mountain where Yehovah would give him, “tablets of stone with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction” (Exodus 24:12 NIV). There is a problem with the NIV translation here where it says, “with the law.” The Hebrew says, וְהַתּוֹרָה֙ (Exodus 24:12 Hebrew Text Analysis) which properly translates, “and the law Torah.” Reading this as with, could imply that the law is written on the tablets, using and would suggest that He is giving Moses tablets of stone, the law and the commandments; a list of three things. You can compare different translations here. This becomes very important later.

Then Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18). During this time, Moses is given instructions on building the Tabernacle, the Ark, the Menorah, and many other things, in fact these instructions go from Exodus 25 all the way to Exodus 31.

We are now about six weeks after the Israelites had confirmed three times that they would follow Yehovah God’s instructions and entered into the blood covenant. You can read the whole story in Exodus 32 but the short version is that the Israelites got impatient waiting for Moses to return, decided to make an idol, a golden calf, which was forbidden by the second commandment that they had personally heard Yehovah God speak.

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This means that they had broken the blood covenant that they had already agreed three times to keep; that didn’t take long! Yehovah God was going to make them pay the price that they had agreed to for breaking the covenant, death. But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand (Exodus 32:11)?” Moses was successful and (verse 14) “then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.” Just because Yehovah God relented at that time does not mean the death was not owed, after all, God is just. The morning and evening sacrifices were not part of the Torah prior to this; those sacrifices were instituted because of this event to remind the people twice daily that death was still owed. That death would eventually be paid by Yeshua when He came and died to pay this price after which the morning and evening sacrifices were eventually taken away. This is the renewed covenant in His blood! He renewed the Covenant made at Sinai, taking away the penalty, not the requirements.

After Moses convinced Yehovah God to relent from destroying the children of Israel, “Moses turned and went down the mountain. He held in his hands the two stone tablets inscribed with the terms of the covenant. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. These tablets were God’s work; the words on them were written by God himself.” I quoted the NLT here because it says “terms of the covenant” instead of the NIV because that translation incorrectly adds “law” when that is nowhere to be found in the Hebrew text. I will posit here that up to this point, we have not read what this covenant says. We do learn here that a covenant, a contract, is written on the stone tablets, not a list of commandments, a list of dos and don’ts!

When Moses approached the camp, his anger burned and he threw the tablets down, shattering them, showing the breaking of the covenant. Moses ground the idol to powder and scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it. The Levites stood with Moses and at his command, went through the camp with their swords and killed about three thousand people that had participated in the debauchery. There is a graveyard not far from the mountain where those people were buried.

After this, Yehovah says that He will no longer go with them to the land He promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. At these words, the people began to mourn. After their mourning and Moses’ petitioning, Yehovah relents and says that He will go with them into the Promised Land. The full story is in Exodus 33.

Now we get to Exodus 34 where Yehovah God replaces the stone tablets that Moses broke. You should read the whole chapter, but I am going to go over the important details. Moses is commanded to come alone up the mountain. This time Moses is to make two stone tablets like the first ones and bring them with Him where Yehovah “will write on them the words that were on the first tablets” (Exodus 34:1). The same words will be written on this set as were on the first set of tablets. This is important! Moses is obedient and chisels out the tablets and climbs the mountain to meet with Yehovah. Moses bowed down to the ground and worshipped. Yehovah responded that he is making a covenant, a contract, with ten clauses:

1. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the Lord, will do for you. Obey what I command you today. I will drive out before you the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles. Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. (Exodus 34:10-14)

2. Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same. Do not make any idols. (Exodus 34:15-17)

3. Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. For seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Aviv, for in that month you came out of Egypt. (Exodus 34:18)

4. The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons. No one is to appear before me empty-handed. (Exodus 34:19-20)

5. Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest. (Exodus 34:21)

6. Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year. (Exodus 34:22)

7. Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign Lord, the God of Israel. I will drive out nations before you and enlarge your territory, and no one will covet your land when you go up three times each year to appear before the Lord your God. (Exodus 34:23-24)

8. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast, and do not let any of the sacrifice from the Passover Festival remain until morning. (Exodus 34:25)

9. Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the Lord your God. (Exodus 34:26)

10. Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. (Exodus 34:26)

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 34:27-28) Ah, there is the first time the phrase Ten Commandments appears in your English Bible.

Moses was told to write “these words.” Yehovah says that He made a covenant with Moses and Israel according to “these words.” The context is this trip up the mountain. These words are the words of Exodus 34:10-26. Yehovah says that He wrote this covenant on the tablets!

What about the phrase “Ten Commandments?” In the Hebrew text it is הַדְּבָרִֽים עֲשֶׂ֖רֶת. The first word עֲשֶׂ֖רֶת is aseret, meaning ten. The second word הַדְּבָרִֽים is hadebarim. Ha is the direct object the and debarim is the plural of debar which can mean thing, matter, word (this is the same root word above in “these words”), or commandment, as well as some other things. This isn’t a list of commandments, it is a list of clauses in a contract, a covenant. These clauses are matters. This would better be translated “Ten Matters.”

In Exodus 20, there is just a list of commandments. In Exodus 34, there is a list of clauses with rights and responsibilities of each party. Yehovah says that if they obey, He will drive out their enemies. He has responsibilities. He says that if they go up three times per year to the Feasts, that He will protect their land from their enemies. This is important because the men, the army, are commanded to go to the Feast leaving the land unguarded. Yehovah commits to guard their land if they obey. Another responsibility that He has.

Deuteronomy 4:12-13 also has the phrase Ten Commandments. “Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared to you his covenant, the Ten Commandments, which he commanded you to follow and then wrote them on two stone tablets.” This could be interpreted to think that the Exodus 20 list is what is written on the tablets. Two issues with that. First, it contradicts Yehovah’s own words in Exodus 34:27-28 which would make God a liar. That can’t be it. Second, Deuteronomy is written about 40 years after Exodus 34, just before the Israelites are going to enter the Promised Land. The reason that they had been wandering for 40 years was because of the bad report of those sent to spy out the land in Numbers 13. In Numbers 14, Yehovah commanded that all of the fighting age men at that time, except Joshua and Caleb, would not enter the promised land, that they would all die before the forty years they were sentenced to wander expired. Deuteronomy was written when most of the people that heard the voice of God at Mt. Siani had perished. The ones that had heard it were just children at the time. Many, possibly most, that were about to enter the Promised Land were born after the events of Exodus 20. He was reminding them of that time forty years prior that scared them so bad they thought they would die; they would remember that! Above it says, “He declared to you his covenant.” After the first ten commandments were shouted down, everything was declared to them through Moses, as was the covenant in Exodus 34 written on two stone tablets.

Deuteronomy 10:4 is the third place we find the phrase Ten Commandments. Deuteronomy 10:1-5 reads, “At that time the Lord said to me, ‘Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones and come up to me on the mountain. Also make a wooden ark. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. Then you are to put them in the ark.’ So I made the ark out of acacia wood and chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I went up on the mountain with the two tablets in my hands. The Lord wrote on these tablets what he had written before, the Ten Commandments he had proclaimed to you on the mountain, out of the fire, on the day of the assembly. And the Lord gave them to me. Then I came back down the mountain and put the tablets in the ark I had made, as the Lord commanded me, and they are there now.” A lot of this is a retelling of Exodus 34. What seems contradictory is that it says, “he proclaimed to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the assembly.” Scripture cannot contradict itself. Again, Yehovah Himself said what is written on the tablets in Exodus 34 so I think what has to be inferred here is that everything spoken by Yehovah to the Children of Israel before they stopped Him was not written down. Exodus 20 begins, “And God spoke all these words.” What it does not say is, “God spoke ONLY these words.” I believe that it is very possible that they heard the Exodus 34 covenant prior to the first Ten Commandments of Exodus 20 being shouted down, only that part was not recorded by Moses. And, if this is true, the same argument can be used for Deuteronomy 4:12-13.

That is the only way that I can reconcile these verses. If you have a different solution to the seeming contradictions in these Deuteronomy verses, that doesn’t make Yehovah a liar in Exodus 34, please comment below. I would love to learn!

From all of this, there are no Ten Commandments as we currently understand that phrase. The only times that phrase is used is in reference to what is written on the stone tablets which would be better translated as “Ten Matters” or, maybe, “Ten Clauses.” In Exodus 20, there is an artificial break in verses 18-21. Yehovah is communicating His commandments when the people interrupt Him because they think they will die if they hear His voice any longer, so they ask Moses to be their intermediary. This break is coincidently after the first ten commandments are shouted down. If He had gotten through fifteen commandments before He was interrupted, there would be no question about the Ten Commandments. Yehovah continues in verse 22 privately with Moses. If you remove verses 18-21 in Chapter 20, the interruption, the commandments go on uninterrupted from chapter 20 through chapter 23, four full chapters. If we wish to ascribe a name to the Exodus 20 list, that name should be The First Ten Commandments, though that is nowhere in the Bible.

Deuteronomy 10:5 tells us that the tablets are in the Ark. Where is the Ark now? The book of 2 Maccabees tells us that Jeremiah hid the Ark and the Tabernacle of David. They are still in Jerusalem and will be revealed in the last days. We will soon see the Ark and be able to read the very text that Yehovah Himself wrote on the tablets that Moses carved out. I can’t wait to see all of these things!!

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When Yeshua, Jesus was crucified, he was crucified between two criminals, one on His right and the other on His left (Luke 23:32-33). In Luke’s account we see the interaction of the three on their crosses in Luke 23:39-43 as follows, “One of the criminals who hung there heaped abuse on Him. ‘Are You not the Christ?’ he said. ‘Save Yourself and us!’ But the other one rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same judgment? We are punished justly, for we are receiving what our actions deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.’”

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We know all three died; so where are they now? The obvious one is Yeshua, Jesus. Continuing on in Luke’s story, we know that Joseph of Arimathea received His body and laid it in a tomb cut in the rock, where no one had yet been laid. Very early on the first day of the week, women came to the tomb to find the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. Later that evening, He appeared in His glorified body to eleven of his disciples who were gathered together. Forty days later, many witnessed his Ascension as described in Luke 24:50-53, “When Jesus had led them out as far as Bethany, He lifted up His hands and blessed them. While He was blessing them, He left them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped Him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, praising God continually in the temple.” He is currently “seated at the right hand of God” as Sha’ul, Paul, tells us in Colossians 3:1. That was the easy one as it is directly said in Scripture. What about the others?

I heard a message from a pastor a few months ago that was the impetus for me writing this piece. In that message that pastor claimed that Jesus and the criminal on the cross that said, “Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!” were, in fact, together in Heaven that very afternoon (today). It sure sounds that way when Jesus’ response was, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.” Couldn’t be any plainer, “today you will be with Me in Paradise.” End of story on that one. Or is it? Let’s turn to John 20:11-17. There we will find, “Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ ‘They have taken my Lord away,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’ At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means ‘Teacher’). Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” This is three days after the crucifixion. Yeshua, Jesus says that He has not yet ascended to the Father. He says he is going to but hasn’t yet. Wait a minute, I thought He told that criminal that “today you will be with me in Paradise.” That was three days ago. He just said He hasn’t been there yet. Did He lie? If He did, He can’t be the Messiah. Since He didn’t lie, we must have misunderstood what he told the criminal.

We are reading an English translation of a Greek translation of a Hebrew document. I recommend that you consider my earlier piece on the Bible for details on this. Neither the Greek nor the Hebrew have punctuation and neither have uppercase characters. That means every capital letter that you see denoting the beginning of a sentence or indicating a proper noun, a name, in English is the interpretation of the translator. It also means that every period, every comma, every quotation mark, etc. is an interpretation of the translator. The punctuation can change the meaning. With that information, please reconsider Yeshua’s words, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.” Do you see it, that pesky comma? As it is shown here it contradicts His later words in John 20. But what if we read it like this, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with Me in Paradise.” Do you see the change? I moved the comma. Now, there is no contradiction between the two. He did tell him, on the day of the crucifixion, that he would, eventually, be with Him in Paradise. Now we can’t use that statement to say where he is today.

The two criminals are currently in the same place, in the grave awaiting the resurrection that each has attained. At the point where Yeshua said, “I have not yet ascended to the Father,” there were only a few people that had ever been resurrected, the rest are in the grave awaiting the resurrection that each has attained. Let’s consider some other things happening between the crucifixion and when He spoke those words. Turn to Matthew 27:51-53 where, as Yeshua was dying, we read, “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.” I have read over this passage for years and never really considered what happened to these people that came out of the tombs. They are never mentioned again. There must be a reason that they are in the story but what is it? Any ideas?

These people came out “after Jesus’ resurrection.” They are seen by “many people.” And then, never heard from again, or are they? We’ll get to that. Yeshua told Mary that He had not yet ascended to the Father but that He was going to soon. Why? His ascension isn’t for another forty days. You have to consider on what day all of this is happening. Look at Leviticus 23:9-11, “The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When you enter the land I am going to give you and you reap its harvest, bring to the priest a sheaf of the first grain you harvest. He is to wave the sheaf before the Lord so it will be accepted on your behalf; the priest is to wave it on the day after the Sabbath.’” This is happening the day after the regular weekly Sabbath during the week of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, that is the first day of the week. That day is a commanded Feast, First Fruits. This is the day that this Feast is being fulfilled by our priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 7). These “holy people who have died” are the literal First Fruits of the resurrection. Yeshua, the Hight Priest, took these people to His Father and presented the First Fruits of the Resurrection and then returned to Earth. How many were there? We can’t be sure, but we can be sure that there were at least twenty-four. How? Let’s read Revelation 4:4, “Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads.” Yeshua, at his first coming, is fulfilling the Spring Feasts to the day and hour. The Spring Feasts had been rehearsals for what He is accomplishing at that time. They are now, today, remembrances for what He did. Sad part is that most people that believe in Jesus don’t keep the Feasts, don’t know the details about what He fulfilled and don’t truly remember because this is the Greatest Story Never Told.

There are four resurrections found in 1 Corinthians 15:22-24, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ, the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.”

1. Christ

2. The firstfruits (the previous paragraph)

3. They that are Christ’s at his coming (His Second Coming)

4. The end resurrection, where the white throne judgement happens.

There is another translation/interpretation problem here. Notice that I struck out cometh. It is in italics in the KJV which means that it was added by the translators, an interpretation. This insertion corrupted the plain meaning of the text, the fourth resurrection. A better insertion to clarify meaning would have been to add resurrection after “the end.” And the translators missed the comma after Christ in the list so I placed it where it should have been. That period after “at his coming” shouldn’t be there either as it breaks the list of the four resurrections.

The first two are complete as we documented above. We anxiously await the fast approaching of His Second Coming for the third resurrection. The fourth isn’t until after Satan has been loosed for a short time and then is thrown into the lake of fire, still at least a thousand years in our future (Revelation 20).

So, which resurrection(s) will the two criminals be made alive in? Obviously not the first two. The criminals were not yet dead when Yeshua died and the graves were opened. That leaves the third or fourth. The third is for those that are “Christ’s at his coming.” This third resurrection is for the Bride, that is Israel. I didn’t say Church, I said Israel. Please follow the link to get those details. Neither criminal will make this resurrection for, as Revelation 14:12 says, this is for “the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.” Neither criminal “kept his commands.” Salvation is of grace (Ephesians 2:8), reward, reigning with Yeshua, is of merit. Neither criminal earned this reward. At the fourth and final resurrection, when these two are raised, the books will be opened. The one that put his faith in Yeshua will be saved by grace, the other will probably find himself in the lake of fire. Obviously, that decision is way above my pay grade, but I believe that is probably how it plays out.

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Shall we consider another punctuation issue that changes the meaning? Consider Matthew 24:4-5, Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many.” Since there is no punctuation in the Greek this is translated from, the quotes around “I am the Messiah” are an interpretation. Should they be there or not? If they are there, Yeshua is saying that someone will claim to be the Messiah that isn’t. Without the quotes it would be interpreted that someone claiming to be a Christian, preaching Jesus, actually saying that Jesus is Jesus, is deceiving people. It would make sense that the interpreters prefer the quotes since they may also “preach Jesus” and wouldn’t want to implicate themselves as deceivers. Personally, I think the ambiguity is intended; I think it should be interpreted both ways. The first case, someone claiming to be the Messiah that isn’t is obviously deceitful. What about the case of someone claiming to be a Christian preaching Jesus?

We will consider Yeshua’s words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:17-20. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” He immediately confirms that He did not come to abolish the Law, that is the Torah. He came to fulfill, that is make full, make complete, not end. He said that not the tiniest bit will disappear before everything is accomplished. Everything isn’t accomplished; there is so much prophecy to be fulfilled in our future. So, since He says that the Torah has not been, and will not be, done away with, anyone interpreting Sha’ul, Paul, as saying that it has, is lying. Sha’ul cannot contradict Yeshua. Let me say that again, Sha’ul cannot contradict Yeshua! Remember, Peter warned us in 2 Peter 3:15-16, “Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.” And, just so we are clear, in Malachi 3:6, God Himself says, “I the LORD do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.”

So, anyone that claims to be a Christian and “preaches Jesus” that says the law has been nailed to the cross, sets aside one of the least of these commandments and teaches others accordingly, is a deceiver and will be called “least in the kingdom of heaven.” It’s amazing that we can read Yeshua’s own words in Matthew 5 and then allow Sha’ul to say those words are null and void when God Himself says He does not change. The author of Hebrews, possibly Sha’ul, says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Want to be called “great in the kingdom of heaven?” Practice and teach the Law, that is the Torah, the writings of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy!! All. Of. It. Those are the words of the Messiah who says in John 14:15, “If you love me, keep my commands.” He is the God that does not change that gave the commandments to Moses at Mt. Sinai, those commands.

The book of Acts confirms this in chapter 15. In this account, some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” This caused quite an argument, so the apostles and elders met to consider the matter. Coming out of that meeting it was agreed that they would tell the new gentile believers four things to do, or, should I say, not do: abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood. Why these four? These are gentiles coming out of pagan religions. These are all pagan practices, so they needed to get that dealt with quickly. Is that all that is ever expected of them? They were not told to not commit adultery, to not steal, to not murder. Are those okay for them? Of course not. The very next verse, verse 21, says, “For Moses has been proclaimed in every city from ancient times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” From this it can be surmised that the apostles and elders expected these new believers to be in the synagogue every Sabbath, not Sunday, where they would hear the rest, they would hear Moses read (You can find the Weekly Torah Portion here). What did Moses write? The Torah. This is all before printed Bibles so unless you were very rich, you did not have your own copy of the scriptures. They would need to hear it read each week in the synagogue where they would learn the Torah incrementally. In hearing it every week, they would eventually come to realize the circumcision is part of the Torah and could then voluntarily choose to be obedient and be circumcised. In the next chapter, Acts 16:3, we read, “Paul wanted to take him [Timothy] along on the journey, so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.”

Obviously, since Paul circumcised Timothy, circumcision was not the issue here, the “why” was. The issue was getting circumcised to be saved. This is confirming what Sha’ul, Paul, wrote in Ephesians 2:8-10, “For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life.” Salvation is by grace. What are these “good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life?” Our good works are our manifestation of the two greatest commandments as stated by Yeshua, Jesus in Matthew 22:37-40, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law [Torah] and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Yeshua wasn’t creating anything new here, He was quoting the Shema (שְׁמַ֣ע) from Deuteronomy 6, “Hear [and obey!], O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” How do you love God? Yeshua Answered that in John 14:15, “If you love me, keep my commands [my Torah].”

Let us strive to be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

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Here we shall continue to explore keeping time. To truly understand this, it would be best to have read Have you considered this: Time? In the first part, we discussed days, months and years but the Bible has other divisions of time that must be explored. First up, the seven-day week. In the creation story of Genesis 1 & 2, God created for six days and then rested on the seventh, Shabbat. In Genesis 2:2, “God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” This seven-day cycle has continued unabated into our time. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been attempts to change it such as the decadi during the French Revolution when they tried, unsuccessfully, to create a 10-day week. Notice how God divided the week, six workdays and one rest day. How do we divide the week? Five workdays and two weekend days. We frequently use one, or both, of these two weekend days to mow the lawn, clean the house, etc. so we do work six, or even seven days. God’s pattern of six and one will repeat so we should really understand it better.

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Next, the Shemitah (שְׁמִטָּה) or the Sabbatical year. Years are divided into seven-year cycles, six normal years and then a Sabbath or Sabbatical year; after seven years, the cycle starts over the same as the weekly pattern above. In Exodus 23:10-11 we find, “For six years you are to sow your land and gather its produce, but in the seventh year you must let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor among your people may eat from the field and the wild animals may consume what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and olive grove.” We also find this detailed in Leviticus 25:1-7. There is also a second aspect to this as Deuteronomy 15:1-18 details. In verse 1 we read, “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.” The rest of the verses go into more detail on what this means but the point here is that there is a seven-year cycle that repeats. Think about if America honored the Shemitah cycle and had to cancel debts at the end of the cycle. We surely couldn’t have accumulated $36,000,000,000,000, and rising, in debt!!

Seven of these seven-year Shemitah cycles total 49 years. The year after that is the 50^th year, which is the Jubilee, or Yobel in Hebrew (יוֹבֵל). Sometimes people get confused as to how many years are in a Jubilee cycle. Since it is the 50^th year, people frequently misunderstand and think there are 50 years between Jubilee years. This is incorrect, the cycles are 49 years long, the 50^th year is also the first year of the next seven-year Shemitah cycle, as well as the first year of the next 49-year Jubilee cycle. We find the Jubilee in Leviticus 25:8-55, verse 8-10 say, “And you shall count off seven Sabbaths of years—seven times seven years—so that the seven Sabbaths of years amount to forty-nine years. Then you are to sound the horn far and wide on the tenth day of the seventh month, the Day of Atonement. You shall sound it throughout your land. So you are to consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be your Jubilee, when each of you is to return to his property and to his clan.” Leviticus 25 is where you can get the details.

In Genesis 6 we read about how the earth is corrupt and Yehovah God has decided to destroy all living creatures save Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives, eight people. In verse 3 we read, “So the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days shall be 120 years.’” The context of this verse is over 100 years prior to the flood. After the flood we find that Abraham died at 175, Isaac died at 180, and Jacob died 147. So, apparently Yehovah God didn’t mean that everyone after the flood would only live 120 years, at most. In our modern time, 120 years is an exceptionally long life with the vast majority not surviving beyond 100, in fact Psalm 90:10 says, “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures.” In Genesis 6:3, the Hebrew word translated as years is shanah (שָׁנֶה). It has a definition of “a year” but the usage section of the concordance says, “The Hebrew word ‘shanah’ primarily denotes a ‘year’ in the context of time. It is used to measure the passage of time, often in terms of age, duration, or cycles. In the Hebrew calendar, a year is a significant unit for marking religious festivals, agricultural cycles, and historical events.” What if, in this case, “cycles” or “religious festivals” is more appropriate? What cycles might that be? I would suggest Jubilee cycles, 49-year cycles. Twenty 49-year cycles total 980 years, or almost, about, similar to, or like 1,000 years, a millennium. Six (6 x 20 = 120) of these 980-year periods total 5,880 years. In 2 Peter 3:8 we see, “Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” The word “like” can be defined as “similar to” though not exactly the same. 980 years is similar to or like 1,000 years, not exactly, but close. It is easier to understand in nice round one-thousand-year increments but remember Proverbs 25:2, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” So, what if He is saying He is not going to contend with mankind in our current fallen state for more than 5,880 years, or six prophetic days each consisting of twenty Jubilee cycles? Revelation 20 speaks of a thousand-year [I suggest that is rounded up from the actual 980 years] reign of Messiah on the earth. This is a continuation of the pattern of six normal prophetic days and one set-apart prophetic day of Messiah reigning on Earth.

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(There is an apocryphal book called the Book of Jubilees. It is a very interesting read and helps wrap your head around the above because it counts time in Jubilee cycles.)

Let’s explore that a bit. I’ll pull from my earlier piece, Have You Considered This: Trump? Updating the 1,000 years for the 980 years derived above.

Consider that approaching six thousand years ago God said, “Let there be light,” in Genesis 1:3. Five days later, on the sixth day God created humans, Adam and Chava (Eve). They were placed into the garden and told that they could eat from any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life was right there with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and there was no command against eating from that tree. Once they had chosen to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were banished from the Garden of Eden and cherubim and a flaming sword were put in place to prevent them from getting to the tree of life. I believe that had they chosen wisely, chosen to eat of the tree of life, that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would have been removed and the last almost six thousand years would have been totally different.

Yehovah God, knowing all, was not surprised when they partook of the wrong tree, had already put in place his plan for the next seven thousand 6,860 years revealed in the seven-day creation story in Genesis 1 & 2. Yehovah reveals in Isaiah 46:10, “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’” In the opening two chapters of the Bible, He lays out the template of his seven-thousand-year 6,860-year plan, declaring the end from the beginning.

In the creation story, God created for six days and then rested on the seventh. He made the seventh day Holy, set it apart (Genesis 2:2). The easiest day to understand in the template is the seventh day, the Sabbath rest when Messiah (Christ) reigns upon the Earth for those one thousand 980 years (Revelation 20:6). During those one thousand 980 years, we will rest from the influence of Satan as he will be bound and cast into the Abyss.

What about the other six days? Since we chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we will be allowed to exercise that power, knowing and determining for ourselves good and evil, for those six days. How’s that working out for us? Look at history. Where has that led? There has been very little time here on Earth where there has been peace. Kingdoms rise against kingdoms. Wars have been the norm, not the exception. Yeshua says in Matthew 15:19, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” This is what we, collectively, have manifest with this power. Sha’ul (Paul) writes about us in Romans 3:10-18, “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’ ‘Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.’ ‘The poison of vipers is on their lips.’ ‘Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.’ ‘Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.’ ‘There is no fear of God before their eyes.’” Romans 3:10-18 are not original thoughts of Sha’ul, this starts with “As it is written.” Written where? In the Tanakh (Old Testament) of course, the New Testament did not exist! The footnotes in your Bible will lead you to the source of Sha’ul’s quotations. Have we progressed in the almost two thousand years since Sha’ul wrote this letter? Look around at the division. Read any news site. I dare say not only have we not improved but we have gotten increasingly worse. Isaiah 5:20 tells us we would get it all backwards, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness to light and light to darkness, who replace bitter with sweet and sweet with bitter.”

We have been given six thousand 5,880 years (six prophetic days) to show how we would handle that power. Yeshua in Matthew 24:22 said, “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.” He’s confirming that we, collectively, are so wicked, so evil, that if He doesn’t come back prior to the end of those six days (six thousand 5,880 years), we will destroy ourselves! Who would know better than Him? The world progressed very slowly prior to the birth of America; very little technological innovation (read The 5000 Year Leap). We also went through the dark ages. America’s birth was in the last half of the sixth prophetic day (millennia); meaning we are fast approaching the end. Yehovah gave America a multitude of blessings, saw us through the War for Independence and led us in the creation of our Constitution. Yehovah did that because we feared God and because he made a promise to Abraham. The Constitution that Yehovah lead the founders to create was the best hope for mankind. It separated powers and provided checks and balances because of the natural proclivities of humans to seek more and more power. It may have started out okay, but we have proven that given all these advantages we are not up to the task of governing ourselves, properly discerning good from evil. Hard to hear, isn’t it? I believe that we are dividing ourselves into sheep and goats (Matthew 25). We get to choose if we, each of us individually, will be a sheep or a goat; it doesn’t go so well for the goats, choose wisely!

We are so close to the 5,880-year mark (and the 6,000-year mark if you don’t like the Jubilee numbers from above) and Yeshua said he would come back early. I currently believe that we probably will not complete this decade prior to the need for Him to return before we destroy ourselves. Nuclear World War III anyone? Seems to be mentioned in so many news articles that I read lately. All the signs from Matthew 24 that Yeshua spoke of that would happen prior to His return and the end of the age are manifesting right now.

It’s about to get bumpy as His return is very near!

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Reckoning time should be a simple subject, shouldn’t it? Well, it’s much more complicated than we might think. In our modern western world, we use the Gregorian calendar to count off twelve months of a varying number of twenty-four hour days, many named after pagan deities. In this time system, days begin and end at midnight, 12:00AM. We use this system daily and it is easy to assume that this is all there is and that anything else is unnecessary. In fact, this calendar system isn’t even that old, coming into use in America only shortly before our independence in 1752, though it was in use in other parts of the world as early as 1582. This calendar replaced the Julian calendar that had a flaw in that it calculated a year as exactly 365.25 days when a year is closer to 365.2425 days (actually 365.2422 days). This difference allows the seasons to drift through the year and given enough time Summer would eventually be in December in the northern hemisphere. We use this system daily without a second thought; it’s just how things work. There are other calendars in use around the world such as the Chinese calendar, the Islamic calendar and the Hebrew/Jewish calendar, just to name a few.

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In the Bible, we see references to dates such as “The Passover to the LORD begins at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month.” This is from Leviticus 23:5. First, what is this “first month” spoken of? Is it January? It can’t be that because the first calendar to use such a system was the Julian and it was instituted in 46 BCE by Julius Ceasar and Leviticus was written somewhere around 1,400 BCE. There must have been another reckoning of time. Since I am referencing the Bible it probably makes more sense to look at the Hebrew/Jewish calendar. The issue here is that this is the Hillel II calendar created in 359 CE, way after Leviticus was written so there must be something prior to that.

In Genesis 1:14-19 we read, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to distinguish between the day and the night, and let them be signs to mark the seasons and days and years.’ And it was so. God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. And He made the stars as well. God set these lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth, to preside over the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.” Here is the creation of the clock and calendar used in the Bible. This calendar isn’t written on paper or calculated with mathematical formulas, it is in the heavens (and we will see later, on the Earth). With the sun, we reckon days from sunset to sunset (evening comes before morning, days do not start at midnight). In Hebrew, there is no separate word for month and moon, they are the same thing. A month is from [re]new[ed] moon to [re]new[ed] moon. How do we know when to begin a year? In Exodus 12:2 we find, “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.” Exodus 12 is the story of the first Passover, which is in the spring. How do we know this? In Exodus 9, describing the plague of hail, in verses 31-32, we see, “The flax and barley were destroyed, since the barley had headed and the flax was in bloom. The wheat and spelt, however, were not destroyed, because they ripen later.” The Hebrew word here translated as “headed” is aviv, or you might see abib, (אָבִ֔יב) indicating a level of ripeness of barley. The barley was aviv so it was destroyed by the hail. These events are at the time of year (season) when barley is ripening. Deuteronomy 16:1 tell us to “Observe the month of Aviv the aviv and celebrate the Passover of the LORD your God, because in the month of Aviv the aviv he brought you out of Egypt by night.” Notice that I struck out “Aviv” and replaced it with “the aviv” since the Hebrew in both cases is הָאָבִ֔יב. This is usually translated incorrectly in your Bible as it is usually translated as if Aviv is the actual name of this first month. At this point in time, the months did not have names. Also, the definite article ה, meaning “the,” prefixes aviv indicating this is not a proper noun. From all of this we can understand that at the new moon, if the barley is aviv (the “on the Earth” part from above), it is now the first month of the year.

The moon takes 29.53 days to orbit the Earth. That 0.53 days (12.72 hours) makes a mess of calculating the beginning of a month. Sometimes you can see the new moon after 29 days and other times you won’t be able to see it until the 30^th day. If the new moon is not sighted on the 29^th day, the month will be a full month of 30 days; it will never exceed 30 days. How do we know this? 1 Samuel 20:5 says, “Look, tomorrow is the New Moon feast.” How does David know that? Because it is the 30^th day since the last new moon was sighted, after sunset that evening, when the day changes, will be the new moon. A month has to start at the beginning of a day, which is at sunset, so the moon needs to be sighted sometime after sunset. Hence the Hebrew idiom, “No man knows the day or hour.” Sounds familiar. Since the Earth takes 365.2425 days to orbit the sun, dividing by 29.53 days for the average month, we find a complete orbit of the Earth around the sun takes 12.36852353 average months. That math isn’t pretty. What do we do with that 0.36852353 part of a month? This is where that aviv barley comes in. If we count twelve months and the new moon arrives but the barley is not aviv, we need a thirteenth month to allow the barley to ripen. If the barley is aviv, the new year begins, it is the first month. The twelfth month is named Adar after the Babylonian captivity (they didn’t have names prior to that) so the thirteenth month is called Adar II or Adar Bet. This addition of a leap month is what keeps the first month in the spring; it is always self-correcting, as if it was planned that way!

We should now consider Noah in Genesis 7 & 8. In 7:11 we read, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” This is the day the flood began. Genesis 7:24 says, “And the waters prevailed upon the earth for 150 days.” In Genesis 8:3-4 we find, “The waters receded steadily from the earth, and after 150 days the waters had gone down. On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.” We see that this all began on the seventeenth day of the second months and lasted until the seventeenth day of the seventh month, exactly 5 months. We are also told, twice, that this was 150 days. 150 days divided by 5 months equals exactly 30 days per month. How do we reconcile that with the 29.53 days from above? Shouldn’t there have been some 29-day months in there? I will provide two possible answers and leave it to you to decide. First, at that time, months could have actually been exactly 30 days in length. For what I consider to be a plausible theory on this, study The Mars-Earth Wars by Donald W. Patten. Second, clouds covered the Earth so Noah could not see the sky nor the moon. Every month, after 29 days had elapsed, he would look to the heavens and not spot the moon because of the cloud cover thus making it a full 30-day month. This happened for five months in a row. But, the moon and Earth kept in their orbits and when he could finally look into the sky and see the moon, all of the missing 29-day months would be absorbed in a short month prior to the first new moon he could see after the clouds dissipated. Again, self-correcting, as if it were planned.

What’s the big deal with the barley? The spring feasts are to be in the first month of the year. At the Feast of First Fruits, there is to be a wave offering of the first fruits of the barley harvest. Hard to harvest barley if it isn’t ripe. If the barley is aviv at the beginning of the month, at the new moon, it will be harvestable by the day of First Fruits in the middle of the first month (on the day after the regular weekly Sabbath that falls during the weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread).

This is the calendar that the Creator created. All you need is to look into the sky, look at the barley fields and be able to count to thirty. Granted, this calendar does not work well in our modern society. Try booking an airline flight two months out. What day would you actually be flying? Hard to really plan too far in advance. Our Gregorian calendar does a great job at this, which is one reason why the world uses it. But, if you fail to understand and honor the Creator’s calendar, you won’t know when to keep the Feasts of Yehovah as he has commanded.

I said that this calendar is in the heavens and on the earth, no calculations necessary. That said, it is possible to make a best guess at what the calendar will be in the future since we have very accurate calculations of the orbits of the moon and the Earth. We can calculate when the moon should be visible. But no one knows when it will be visible. You can download a pdf of the current month here and purchase an entire year of possible calendars at the same site. Since it cannot be known in advance exactly when the new moon will be seen, several versions of months are provided for cases where the moon could be seen on the 29^th or if the month is a full 30 days. Even though we have this printed calendar available, the real calendar is not on paper, it is in the heavens and on the Earth so we must wait for the new moon report to know if the moon was sighted in Jerusalem on the 29^th or not and we must wait on the barley report to know if the barley is aviv or not to begin the new year.

The Jews, using the Hillel II calendar, have a second New Year, Rosh Hashanah, that they celebrate each year. They celebrate this on the Biblical Feast day of Yom Teruah. This new year is not in your Bible. Follow the link to the Hebrew/Jewish calendar, which is the Hillel calendar, and read about all of the man-made adjustments they make that are not Biblical.

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Just as Yeshua fulfilled the spring Feasts to the day and hour at his first coming, He will fulfill the fall Feasts at his second coming. Sha’ul, Paul, writes about this in his first letter to the Thessalonians. In chapter 5, versus 1-5 we read, “Now, brothers and sisters, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.” All too often, people say that since He is coming “like a thief in the night” that we can’t know when He is coming. But, read on. He tells the Thessalonians, the believers, that this day should NOT surprise them. How can that be? It is because Sha’ul had already told them, while he was with them, that Yeshua would return to fulfill the Fall Feasts. Sha’ul spent at least a few weeks with them, teaching. His letter was meant to correct some of the things he heard about them. He had no reason to reiterate everything that he had recently taught them, he just needed to remind them. He is reminding them that by keeping the Feasts, that they would be “awake and sober” as it says in verse 6, so they will not be surprised. Ask yourself this question, “Will I be surprised by His return?” If you are a believer, Sha’ul says you should not be. Did he lie? If he did, why do we listen to anything he has to say? Will you be surprised? Something to consider.

Happy New Year?

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