Video Series

Hey all,

So now for something completely different. In addition to my blog posts, I will be doing two different types of videos. On Tuesdays I will be doing a video series teaching people how to learn to study for themselves, how to be able to tell if their teacher is studying, how and when and where to ask questions, and how to tell a good source from a bad source – I will be teaching by example as I go through a specific book that is a popular source for some Hebrew Roots and Messianic teachers, and we will see if it is a good or bad source, only time will tell! I will also be using three great teachers – Rico Cortes of Wisdom in Torah, Lee Miller of House of David Fellowship and Joseph Good of Hatikva ministries – in order to show you how to find and investigate good sources. Fridays I will be talking about developing fruit as believers. I started it up last week on my youtube channel and I will be making topical playlists.

My teachings will be geared towards newcomers, just like my books. I am laying foundation here – not doctrinal foundations, but equipping people to function in the perilous world of online teachings and webpages dedicated to proving everything under the sun. How can you tell true from false when people are “proving” entirely opposite positions? Well, I am going to try to show you how to do just that.

A Nation of Priests and Kings Pt 2 – The Individual Mandate to do Justice and Righteousness

(I am leaving this blog up not because it is entirely accurate – I have since learned that the “kings and priests” is actually rendered better a “kingdom of priests” but otherwise, our call to justice and righteousness is the same – we study and keep learning, eh?)

This is a follow up to my ancient Near Eastern explanation of the Biblical phrase “a nation of Kings and Priests” – which is so easily misunderstood and twisted. I have decided to add to it because not only were the Israelites, as a nation, given the relationship with YHVH that in the ancient world was reserved only for kings and priests, but they were also uniquely given a mandate to perform the types of righteous and just acts that in the rest of the world were only demanded of incoming kings.

In the ancient Near East, kings were expected to do certain things when coming to the throne – acts that were required by the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) of all citizens of God’s Kingdom. Earthly kings were expected to forgive debt, free slaves, punish oppressors, and take care of the “least of these” – the poor, widowed, and orphan – upon ascension to the throne in order to establish themselves as righteous and just rulers. Once established, they often had no desire to ever repeat that sort of kingly generosity again! Forgiving debt and freeing slaves and punishing wealthy merchants who were cheating their customers and robbing widows houses was not the sort of thing that made ANE kings popular with the wealthy and powerful men in their kingdom – but it did go a long way towards establishing their honor and reputation among ” the rabble.”

Now these were the unwritten laws of the Ancient Near East, an absolute expectation of an incoming monarch (which should make King Rehoboam’s refusal in I Kings 12 to provide tax relief seem all the more shocking and the subsequent splitting of the Kingdom make much more sense – even heathen kings would have provided that tax relief!) – but certainly not the expectation upon the actions of everyday citizens, who had no desire to free their slaves unless a new king forced them to, or to stop foreclosure on the land of a widow, or to forgive the debts owed to them – and it certainly wasn’t the sort of act that was on any sort of schedule – but YHVH changed that in Torah Law, the constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven operates on a seven year cycle when it comes to the release of debts (Deut 15:1-3) and the release of slaves (Ex 21:2). Ancestral land sold in order to pay debts was to be restored to the family in the Jubilee year (a 50 year cycle – Lev 25: 13-16, 27:24). The Israelites were always commanded to take care of the widowed, poor and orphaned (Ex 22:22-24, Deut 14:29) and every three years there was a special tithe given just for their upkeep so that there would never be an Israelite truly impoverished and starving (Deut 26:12). Equal weights and measures in business dealings were a continual commandment (Lev 19:36, etc.). The guilty, and not the innocent, were to be punished for their crimes (Deut 22:25-27). Neither the rich nor the poor were to be favored in court cases (Ex 23:6, Lev 19:15). Female prisoners of war could not be mistreated and during times of war (Deut 21:10-13), a city must be given the opportunity for surrender before being attacked (Deut 20:10-12). Foreigners had to be treated with equity and could not be persecuted (Ex 22:21, 23:9).

These were not the ways of the Ancient Near East – this was a radical and continual mandate of each citizen to be both fair, generous and merciful. The Laws of God placed upon each citizen the obligation to do forever what earthly kings only did in order to curry favor with the people. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, had varying degrees of punishment based on who the victim of the crime was! The penalty for harming a rich man, or a priest, was exponentially higher than for doing harm to a peasant. But Israel’s law set all Israelites as equal in the eyes of the justice system – on par with ANE kings and priests when it came to personal worth, as well as in the personal responsibility to do justly and righteously.

And so, when we come into Covenant with this great God and King, we truly do become a nation of kings and priests – having the access to pray and make petitions, the obligation of exclusive worship in our obedience, the mandate to do justice and righteousness, and the personal worth ascribed by the rest of the world (and their gods) to the elite classes. And although it does not give us the physical priesthood and kingship as believers, it does in fact set us on par with the kings and priests of the world in terms of relationship.

As any physical kingship in the Kingdom of Heaven must come from the line of David through Solomon by Royal Grant, so the physical priesthood must come through Aaron – both are perpetual ordinances. But what we have been given, as believers, is an incredible testament to a merciful, just and righteous God – unlike any other the world has ever claimed to know. We have the spiritual access to our God that only the elite of the polytheistic world had with their gods, and we each have the obligations to behave as good kings in the midst of a crooked and corrupt world. Truly we serve a God and King like no other ever imagined.

Do we have the right to determine what qualifies as Admat Kedusha aka Holy Ground?

We were raised with the concept of our congregations being Holy Ground if they are dedicated to the Lord. The Hebrew for this is admat kedusha and we first see it mentioned when Moses is at Sinai before the burning bush in Ex 3:5. We see this word translated holy, kedusha, in reference to surprisingly few things in scripture – the people of Israel (as a whole, not individually), Sabbaths and Feasts (times), the Temple and the Land of Israel (places) and the tithe (a grant set aside for the actual genetic Levites) and the Temple furnishings (things). No people outside of those in Covenant are called holy, no times apart from His Sabbath and Feasts are declared holy and no place outside of the Land of Israel is declared holy. The commandment to “be holy as I am holy” in Lev 11:44 is a corporate commandment to a holy people to act according to their conferred status, as a reflection of the character and kedusha of their God.

There is a reason I am bringing this up, and it is because of a really excellent question I was asked last night about clean vs unclean in light of modern non-Temple times. The question was:

“How does cleanliness and uncleanliness relate to us today as the redeemed in Yeshua (Jesus). I will state I believe we should be abstaining from things that will make us unclean, such as the things we eat, etc, but obviously there are things that aren’t sin that bring uncleanliness.

My question is, according to your knowledge of the subject, how does uncleanliness affect us today when there is no earthly temple standing, and does it affect our relationship with Abba……. For instance, if I touch a corpse, with your current understanding do I lose some level of relationship with Abba, such as my prayers going unheard that day etc? Does Yeshua bring us a permanent state of cleanliness on a macro perspective?”

In order to even go in to the subject of kedusha and holy ground, I need to lay a foundation of the importance of clean vs unclean. Clean vs unclean is not usually about sin – in fact it almost never is, unless one is eating unclean foods or having sexual relations during a woman’s menstrual cycle. The most common reasons for being unclean in Temple times was marital sexual relations and a woman’s menstrual cycle, which are both tied to the blessing of bringing forth life and are functions we were created for. Ritual cleanness was tied to how closely a man or woman could approach the physical throne of God on earth. While describing the not yet existing third Temple, God tells the prophet Ezekiel this:

Ez 43:4-7a And the glory of the Lord came into the house by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward the east. So the spirit took me up, and brought me into the inner court; and, behold, the glory of the Lord filled the house. And I heard him speaking unto me out of the house; and the man stood by me. And he said unto me, Son of man, the place of my throne, and the place of the soles of my feet, where I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel for ever

Whenever there is a Temple, it will be the physical place of the throne of God and if you continue to read on in Ezekiel, you will see dimensions for a man-made Temple that has never been built.

One cannot physically approach the throne of God in an unclean state or:

Lev 15:31 “Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.”

Note that this applied to all the types of uncleanness from Lev 12 through 15, those applying to both male and female. Leprosy, seminal emission, normal sexual relations, childbirth, menstrual cycle, and any abnormal bodily discharge. And we know from the Talmud that men and women were held to the same exact standards during Temple times. A priest who had a seminal emission during the night had to immediately leave, mikveh and go home until sundown the next day. Men who had sexual relations were held to the same standards as menstruating women and were confined to the same courtyard on the Temple Mount. There were no double standards as we see in Messianic congregations today. In fact, let’s talk about the application of clean vs unclean in our local congregations.

We see very clearly in scripture that the highest level of uncleanness that still allowed you on the Temple Mount, but outside the Temple complex was corpse impurity. It was so severe that it took the ashes of the red heifer to cleanse a man or a woman from the impurity they naturally gained from lovingly preparing the corpses of their loved ones for entombment. Joseph of Arimathea would not have been able to eat of the Passover after touching the body of Yeshua because that meat had been sacrificed and was therefore holy, kedusha – and certainly no one would accuse him of sin. He would have gone to the priests at some time afterwards to be cleansed with the ash water in order to partake of the second Passover the next month.

So now we have a problem, if we are going to implement cleanliness standards in our congregations – (1) we are encroaching on the exclusive rights of YHVH to say what is and what is not admat kedusha, by taking it upon ourselves to decide and doing things according to our own understanding – but only God can set apart space (land) and and times as kedusha, not us; (2) we are misappropriating the reasons for separation as dictated in Lev 15 – the separation of the unclean, by degrees, from physically approaching the Temple, the physical throne of YHVH; (3) if we are going to exclude menstruating women and those who have birthed a child, we must also exclude anyone who has had a seminal emission the night before as well as any couple who engaged in sexual relations – not to mention anyone who has corpse impurity, which means no police, no firefighters, no doctors, nurses, EMT’s, hospice workers, soldiers who have seen action, or those who have suffered through the death of a loved one OR have even been in a house with a dead person (thanks Ryan White for that, see note at bottom).

Let’s face it – we are all pretty much unclean. We live in an unclean world, we have no access to the ashes of the red heifer, so pretending we are clean is a sham. Holding men and women to differing standards of kedusha, in addition to being unscriptural in most cases (because we have no right to go beyond what is written nor to deviate from the intent of respecting the kedushah of the Holy place), is inaccurate weights, as we see in the Proverbs:

Lev 11:1 A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight.

So the next time you see a Pastor quiz women on their menstrual status, know that they have no standing to declare their congregations holy ground, and know that unless they are asking men about seminal emissions and couples about sexual relations, they have no leg to stand on. And if that Pastor has ever touched a dead body, they are really playing with fire because their uncleaness is far more serious than any menstruating woman – because there is no way currently to get rid of it.

Should we endeavor to lead clean lives? Yes, as much as possible, but we should also live informed lives and lives free from hypocrisy. We also have to face the fact that living in exile has its penalties, one of which is being unclean.

So now, back to the original question – no, our cleanness/uncleanness level has nothing to do with our relationship with God, only with how closely we can approach His physical throne on earth. Now that we have a Heavenly High Priest with 24/7 access to the Heavenly throne of the Father, our mediator/patron Yeshua (Jesus), we have access to the throne of grace without even having to approach the physical Temple. We don’t have actual physical access like a High Priest would, but we have access through Yeshua, who has direct access. Uncleanness, as Daniel Botkin once explained to me, is nothing more than a temporary disqualification from going to the Temple.

I hope that helps! I wrote about Niddah and the temporary Temple attendance disqualification in my book, The Bridge, if you need more clarification.

(Note: Thanks to Ryan White, who just added this – Num 19:14 clearly states that even being in a room with a dead body renders one ritually impure from corpse impurity, and needing the red heifer ashes after 7 days)

Martin Luther and Me: What Opposition Reveals About the Heart

How could the man who made the earth-shattering statement that Jesus (Yeshua) and all his disciples were Jews come to have such a vitriolic hatred of them? How does it happen?

In 1523, Martin Luther wrote That Christ Was Born a Jew and it was revolutionary in the day – preaching love towards the Jews and encouraging their conversion. But the Jews were not interested in a Messiah who was a lawbreaker and who looked nothing like a Jew but instead like a Gentile. Luther’s professed love turned to a vitrolic hate and in 1543, 20 years later, he published On the Jews and Their Lies – considered by many to be Adolf Hitler’s 60,000 word blueprint for their extermination.

So what happened, and how can we learn from it? And how can we avoid doing it?

Doing it? Yes indeed – I see it on a daily basis. I saw it just this morning on a facebook thread, where a self-proclaimed Messianic Rabbi was preaching hatred and slander against other Messianics who disagree with his brand of theology, they were weirdos who just weren’t getting it and he painted his opposition with as wide and insulting a brush as he could manufacture (and misrepresenting just about everyone I know in the process). And I have seen it against Christians from Messianics as well, and from Christians against Catholics, Catholics against Christians, etc.

So what happens? We come into what we believe is the truth and we get super excited – we want to share that truth and relieve others of their blindness – and when those people don’t want to hear it, our “love” for them quickly turns to contempt, anger, and bitterness, and then slander and wrath if we don’t learn to control ourselves. And step by step, we feel justified in that contempt, anger, bitterness, slander and wrath – it starts to feel like righteousness when it is in fact the exact opposite.

You see, opposition reveals our heart, and our fruit – if our fruit is bad then opposition will reveal it. If we cannot have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control when people aren’t “getting with the program” – then it’s just a sham the rest of the time. Even tax collectors are good to their friends, as Yeshua (Jesus) said. Martin Luther had a great revelation, but his fruit was bad. That revelation should have changed his heart, not just the company he kept. When Luther turned his hatred on the Jews, it wasn’t because the Jews weren’t believing God – it was because the Jews were not believing Martin Luther. And I see that everyday with new believers – they go out in pride, wanting to convert the world, but people don’t want to follow them. A lot of people get over that and remember that their blindness had to be removed by God Himself, but others just keep becoming more and more hateful and more and more insulting. They become worse because their minds are depraved with discord, they are divisive and love controversies, they have no patience or compassion for those who are blind (if they truly are – sometimes it is actually the preacher “of truth” who is blinded), and they have no tolerance for opposition.

Can we disagree without insults, without manipulation, without passive aggressive attacks? Can we wait upon others with the patience that God expended upon us? Can we acknowledge the things that those who disagree with us are right about, the things that they do excellently, the ways they perhaps reflect God’s character better than we do? Or are we, like Luther, going to stay focused on their real or imagined faults and descend into the pit of blind hatred and depraved cruelty?

No, we are called to good fruit, to die to ourselves – to be opposed and yet still hope, still love, and still have faith. We can’t afford to hate those who aren’t walking in the fullness of truth because none of us are. If we judge others for how short of our expectations they fall, how are we to justify ourselves before God? As the man who was forgiven a great debt went after the man who only had a small debt, and was thrown into prison for it, how can we tempt the gracious mercy of our King in not extending compassion and patience to others?

Becoming Martin Luther is easy, it’s the easiest thing in the world. We just need to get prideful about what we have been given, and then persecute everyone else who hasn’t received that gift yet. Martin Luther didn’t receive revelation because he was better than everyone else, it doesn’t work that way – he got that revelation because God was generous with him. God was also generous with me, but the moment that I start to forget His generosity and imagine that I am here by my virtue – I’m just 60,000 words away from becoming just as hateful and vengeful as the man who could have chosen to love the Jews and end the rift between Protestant Christianity and Judaism – and in so doing, save us from almost 500 years of antisemitic futility.

The Fruit of the Spirit Pt 5: Kindness

I’ve been begging God to show me the true meaning of this one for years, and this last week He has been doing it in a big way – both by showing me the real thing and the counterfeit. He has shown me people that talk kindness versus people who do kindness.

Just as God’s laws at the time of Moses were counter-cultural – rights for female prisoners of war, unprecedented protections for women in general, mandatory support for the needy and oppressed and foreigners, etc. – so also is the Fruit of the Spirit counter-cultural. We (and they) live in a society where peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control are seen as weakness, as naive – and even as dishonest – as though it is somehow a virtue to run our mouths off without restraint, as though hurting people simply because we are angry and offended is somehow to be equated with honesty. It isn’t so much honest as simply immature, even when we try to couch our anger and offense in passive-aggressive terms – as though anger can be masked as love and offense as concern.

Kindness does not seek to humiliate, that is one I am really learning in a big way. Kindness seeks to curb behavior for the good of the person displaying that behavior, but is careful about how it goes about it. Kindness doesn’t generally take shortcuts, because kindness is nurturing and nurturing takes time. Kindness builds before it tears down – kindness makes sure that restoration is clearly seen within reach before the correction is given. Kindness grieves over the rebuke, and kindness never manipulates.

Kindness knows the difference between sin and annoyances – and believe me there is a big difference. Not everything that annoys me is sin and in fact probably most things that annoy me aren’t sin, nor is everything that offends me sin. If I was kinder, I know that would temper my responses – and my thoughts.

Kindness is the aspect of love that covers sin until the person is mature enough to confront and conquer it – kindness is that aspect of love that truly looks at a person as a work in progress, a good work to be supported and not simply lamented over as being a hopeless case – at least not as long as we have the ability to deal with it without bringing damage to ourselves. Kindness is also that aspect of love that causes us to see others as real human beings and not just as our personal resources. Kindness isn’t a tattletale but a comrade. I am finding that kindness is the prerequisite of patience. One must possess kindness, an awareness and compassion of the current limitations of others, before one can have enduring patience for those limitations.

I struggle with both of these greatly.

Kindness isn’t always about people who are always speaking softly and carrying no stick, but about people who truly have to blow a lot of dust off that stick whenever they take it out. When I see the stick of a truly kind person come out, I pay attention – their kindness has earned my respect. Kindness is too kind to point itself out, just as humility is also. As soon as I hear people tell me they are kind, I step back and wait for the slap, because it’s generally on it’s way – they just want me to perceive that slap as kindness. They are priming me to accept their version of the story before they ever tell it. People who are quick to point out a virtue are generally getting ready to violate it at your expense.

But as Mark Twain said – kindness doesn’t need to be announced. Even the blind can see it and the deaf can hear it. Indeed, kindness is a language worth learning and speaking.