Hey all! The Dire Straits is upon us—that three-week period before the 9th of Av when like all heck breaks lose spiritually. We’re starting out the next few weeks with a break before diving into Mark 13 and 14, and I am going to cover three (at least) topics that people have been requesting I discuss. This week I want to talk about those pesky people who used to be believers before denying Yeshua/Jesus and then become stealth missionaries for the other side, actively manipulating people by presenting the Bible out of context for the sole purpose of slowly converting people away from our Messiah. I will use that as a segue into the problem of male and female identified religions—which is where people who go this path will often end up. Men and couples into more male-identified modes of religious life and women into neo-paganism. After watching this happen for the last eight years, there is a definite trend and I want to talk about how and why it happens.

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Changes in religious beliefs tend to happen over time, but when they do not—when they instead happen suddenly, we will find a catalyst of some sort. Obviously, a personal encounter with Yeshua/Jesus on the way to persecute believers in Damascus in the case of Paul. When I got saved it was because Yahweh was just invading my every waking moment with His presence for like four long, grueling days and forcing me to deal with Him and, when I wanted to become a Jew, He directed me to Jesus instead. Abraham was directly called by Yahweh out of the paganism of his family. Genesis 6 says that Noah found favor with Yahweh and only some time later was he called a righteous man. And that is how it is with us, right? We have no righteousness of our own and we are often a hot mess when Yahweh determines to have our allegiance. Take it from me personally, He doesn’t much care to take no for an answer. We often desire to make the case that Yahweh calls otherwise righteous people but that doesn’t seem to be the general pattern of Scripture. He calls us in spite of ourselves. And that understanding is very important.

There are also religious changes that occur as we grow. Often, we will start out legalistic and zealous—not really knowing much of anything but making up for it by being really passionate about things that we regret in time. As we develop in relationship with Yahweh, our zeal for doctrines transforms into a passionate love for Yahweh and others, which sometimes puts us into opposition with our previously held views. This is how wisdom works—we begin as fools and get wiser, and then we get foolish about a new understanding, and hopefully gain some wisdom, and then keep doing it and hopefully our foolishness gets milder and briefer as we grow. Some folks do seem to only get worse.

Another cause of radical change comes about within the Hebrew Roots Movement and Messianic Judaism when someone gets taken in by anti missionary propaganda. And what do I mean by an anti-missionary? I mean former believers who used to be quite sold out for Yeshua, and I even know of one college professor who teaches textual criticism who makes a lot more money now turning people away from Jesus. But these were people who were, by all outward appearance, true believers with compelling testimonies and the works to go along with it who, for whatever reason, listened to someone who gave them reasons not to believe and they forgot everything they knew experientially and tossed our Lord to the curb in order to become traditional Jews. And the interesting thing is what happens in the aftermath of this and how it is related to gender, of all things.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

This happens during two times of the year—when the anti-missionaries go hunting. And I am not talking about the Jewish anti-missionaries. I have yet to see them care about converting Gentiles away from Jesus—it isn’t on their agenda. I am talking about the former believers in Yeshua—those from the Hebrew Roots Movement and Messianic Judaism who have fallen away and become, really, useful pawns in all of this toward the larger goal of preserving Torah for the Jews only and to eliminate the witness of Yeshua-followers keeping the feast and kosher and all of that. But the wrecking of our faith isn’t the goal, it’s the return of Jews to traditional Judaism that is their goal. Former HRMs and MJs are just useful to them, but they never really seem to be accepted in any real way, into the flock, unless they become full blown conservative Jews.

So, in my personal experience, it happens like this. And if you want to listen to my testimony on this from a couple of years ago, I will link that to the transcript in my blog. Regardless of gender, it goes like this—someone gets to them and they deny. But they won’t come out and announce it like they did when they got saved in the first place—that’s the first red flag for anyone thinking that this is a genuine God-driven correction in belief. Instead, they begin with the talking points—quoting certain scriptures out of their Scriptural and historical context knowing that the body in its current state is influenced too strongly by memory verses and will not bother to do the hard work of learning what the verses meant to the original audience. Taken as secluded islands, they indeed make it sound like Yeshua couldn’t possibly be the Messiah, and the people reading them each day as they go by on the newsfeed or in casual conversation—well, a seed is planted. And a bunch of seeds get planted and all of a sudden people are paying so much attention to their manipulated doubts that they can’t even begin to think straight anymore. Frustration and fear set in. Because the person doing it hasn’t been honest about their intentions, the listener’s/reader’s guard was never up and they went in unprepared. It’s very much like the seduction of a virgin who, before she knows it, is being violated. People deserve to know what we are striving to teach and impart. If it is of God, we can be honest about it.

I am reminded that Yahweh, through the prophets and Yeshua, only taught in parables in order to obscure and prevent conversion, not in order to trick anyone into it. Allegiance, which is what our covenant relationship is primarily based on—whether Sinai or the Cross or both—requires informed consent. When Yahweh was overpowering me with His presence before my conversion, He came at me impressing upon me exactly what He wanted from me. He didn’t want a casual acceptance of His existence—I had known He was real for over a decade at that point. That was never in question. The question was—was I willing to be loyal to Him and accept Him as God on His terms? And He made it very clear to me that His terms included Jesus as my Master and I needed to believe Him. This wasn’t anything I had sought out—quite the contrary. This was unwelcome and unwanted but there wasn’t an ounce of deception involved. He knew what He was demanding from me and so did I—which is why I fought so hard. It’s really very funny now, in retrospect. Like, I thought I could do better on my own.

And by the time these people are in full-fledged crisis, they often are too emotionally wounded with embarrassment at having missed all of this “scriptural evidence” that they had been deceived to be reasoned with. I see this a lot. On a lot of issues. The whole fictional Two Babylons and Fossilized Customs propaganda sounded so outrageous and convincing that no one thinks anyone would have the audacity to make it up so no one does the research to fact check it. Except I did, by accident, and I was horrified at how much my life had been manipulated by absolute nonsense claims that had no archaeological or mythological backing whatsoever. I had been duped by deception and manipulated into false outrage that left me absolutely vulnerable to believe a whole lot more nonsense—just as long as it was telling me that a certain crowd was absolutely deceived about everything. Thankfully, I started studying. But most people can’t, or don’t know how to, or don’t have the time or money or even the desire to do it themselves.

And I am talking about this now because we are in the Dire straits, from the 17th of Tammuz to the 9th of Av when things heat up spiritually and people get nutty and the anti-missionaries get feisty and people start falling away.

But what happens to people after they fall away and how is it very gender-driven? Well, at first the same thing happens to both groups—embarrassment drives them to seek out relief in being right and being part of the religion that they believe rescued them from being “idolaters.” So, they tend to convert, either whole hog or half-heartedly, to Judaism. Men are more likely to convert to conservative forms of Judaism and women to liberal forms (sometimes after being more conservative for a while and not finding it at all to their liking). It often has to do with whether the women are married and if their husbands have also denied. But their personalities change, often radically. I have seen incredibly patient and loving women become monsters. And they don’t see it. They believe they are the same. They don’t see the contempt and the anger. They just feel that they have been freed from deception and are on a crusade—at least those who are open and honest about their new beliefs. Some go a long time before admitting falling away. I wonder if they are told that they need to be secretive so that they won’t be persecuted but then are trained to indoctrinate others quietly and casually. Because they like all do the same thing and once you’ve seen it happen, it becomes obvious—what, is there like some sort of training manual? Inquiring minds want to know.

What happens to them after they deny, as I said, often has a lot more to do with gender than anything else. You’ve got to fill that space where the Holy Spirit once was and so what that looks like, what will satisfy that, is going to be different from person to person. Men generally respond by retreating into tradition, which makes more conservative and orthodox expressions of Judaism attractive for them. As men, the system favors them more than it does women coming into it from the outside. They have new identities that are very male-affirming, prayers where they thank God that they were not born women, cultural markers like tzitzit, and like thousands of years’ worth of new traditions to feel part of—which is also going to come into play with how women handle this ongoing transition but we will talk about that later. Men making this change get a lot more support and respect than women do and when they dive into the Torah and the Talmud, they find very little there that demeans them as males and a whole lot propping up their egos.

Now out from under the really hard, take no prisoners on your inner life, teachings of Yeshua, they are not required to forgive pre-emptively—which is a real sticking point of contention between many Jews and Christians. Turning the other cheek—gone. Blessing those who curse and persecute you—poof! And they can be replaced with rituals and tradition, which are a lot easier than the hard work of heart reform. And they allow for a lot more pride to foster. Because, frankly, when people haven’t been raised within the culture of Judaism, what they do with it is often really off base and off-track. How do I put this…well, when you aren’t raised within the mindset of Judaism (or anything, really) you see all the forms but not the function and you miss the spirit of it. And so, people who deny Yeshua and “become Jews” are often Jews in name only—because that was what they were left with when they denied Yeshua. They weren’t pagans on the outskirts who were drawn to Judaism because they saw something in it that was excellent—no, it became their default decision after rejecting the back of the book. And this works out for men a lot more successfully than it does for women. And if you think this is just me, no my Jewish friends notice it too—that Judaism as a default position to being Hebrew Roots or Messianic (unless you start out Jewish) is a recipe for disaster and especially for women.

Judaism isn’t just a religion, it’s a culture. It isn’t anything like following Yeshua, in some ways. Judaism looks pretty much the same regardless of what culture to find it in. But following Yeshua can look very different here in the States than it does in Africa or Asia. And I think that’s a positive thing, personally. All nations, peoples and tongues worshipping before the throne—that’s what it looks like. Different cultures, different music—but, one Master and one Lord. But, when people who have known salvation, when they deny Yeshua and become Jews only because they see that the Bible is truth and see it as their only alternative—that’s not the same thing as choosing to become Jewish. That’s treating Judaism like some sort of consolation prize. And for couples to are attracted to that way of life, they can find enjoyment in it, okay? But for single men, there can be real problems and for single women it can be even worse. Single men, unless they want to go full blown conversion, which a lot do not want to do, they just want to play at Judaism, find themselves second-class citizens. You know, something that does not exist in the followers of Yeshua—or at least it shouldn’t. We are told—no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Gentile. And hopefully we believe that. Hopefully we also act like it is true. Not everyone does, obviously.

But those who lodge themselves halfway between what it looks like to follow Yeshua and full-blown Judaism, they end up as people without any kind of home. Except with one another and that is why I feel they make such an attempt to recruit others. People who already felt lonely in the HRM or as Messianics and who are needing identity—having given up identity in Messiah—tend to become more so. They now believe that Yeshua-followers are idolaters so they can’t go back and worship with them, the online personalities associated with their newfound beliefs generally are angry and spend a lot of their time insulting Yeshua-followers—and of course, they stop calling Him Yeshua, they use Jesus now. Which is a second red flag. People who spent so much time online harping on the name Jesus now only want to use Jesus—why can’t they bear to say the name Yeshua? That should really concern anyone wanting to consider what it is they are talking about. If they can’t be honest anymore, okay? If they can’t use the name they know is correct? Why is that? Good question. Are they actively lying, or being insulting, or can they just not bear to say His Name anymore now that they have denied and betrayed Him?

And so, you get people on the fringes—wanting to be Jews but not really wanting to be Jews. They want to call themselves Jews but really they just want what is left over from the Bible after they take Yeshua out of it, it’s something to cling to. And some actively avoid the Bible after that and immerse themselves in Talmudic, and Midrashic teachings. So much so that they get into trouble there too—not understanding how Jews use these. I have seen people not understand the first thing about how to use the legendary materials and go off the deep end, not understanding when they have massively diverted from Scripture and thinking that somehow this is commentary that draws only from the text instead of “what if” stories—which is how Jews understand them. They start getting treated as divinely inspired. I had this guy come on my wall back in February, after the whole Stewart-Allen Clark fiasco back last winter, when we were talking about the double standards for men and women and were talking about Bathsheba and how the text describes her as innocent and only David as guilty, and he comes on with both guns blazing talking about how she was perfumed and wearing jewelry and all prepared to seduce him. Is that in the text? No, not even close. But the problem was that he had so immersed himself in Midrashic literature that he had lost touch with the text. Instead of reading it as a “what if” story, he was presuming that anything written by the rabbis is divinely inspired or at least not departing from the text.

But, someone correct me if I am wrong, that is not how anyone raised within Judaism views all of this. They inject these “what-if” stories in order to teach concepts, not to replace the Biblical text. And it’s misunderstandings like this that make non-Jews, in general, a poor fit for conversion. Same with a lot of the traditions and rituals of Orthodox Jewish life. They aren’t things to be tacked on to a pre-existing life, they are cultural and to try and understand them otherwise just courts disaster.

And, like I said, men do better with this than women do because when you are not raised in this, as a man there is less objectionable material than there is for a woman. Much of the Rabbinic commentary comes out of the Middle Ages, in which women (in both Judaism and Christianity) were blamed for much of the evils of humanity and for being just flat out objectionable in general. Now, the Scriptures do not support this—but it was the times and they were what they were. That’s why it is important to never read any sort of commentary or any sort of literature in a vacuum. You need to know when it was written, who wrote it, where they lived, how they lived, what genre it represents, what the historical situation at the time was, how they looked at such literature, opposing viewpoints because Judaism has never been monolithic, etc. But there is this crazy idea out there that the only thing that ancient Jews were capable of writing was Scripture. No sir, they wrote some brilliant fiction and lots of it. They also wrote a lot of commentary on their times, tying Scripture to prophetic fulfillment in their own lives. They wrote wisdom sayings, apologetics, histories, polemic, apocalypses, personal letters, etc. All of these have to be read differently—same with all the different genres in the Bible. We should not read an epistle like a Gospel, or like a wisdom saying, or like love poetry, or like an apocalypse. In the same vein, we should not read a parable like a history! People do it though, and they get themselves and others into some trouble when they do.

So, where am I going with this? This affects how men and women react when confronted with this sort of literature. And it affects whether or not they are going to actually convert to Judaism or turn away into something else entirely. For men, Judaism provides camaraderie and a lot of structure that can be very appealing amidst the insanity and chaos of modern society. It can be very comforting to belong to something that is thousands of years old—although modern Judaism is really as much or more shaped by medieval thinking that Mosaic. And by this, I am talking about a very heavy reliance on Maimonides, or the RAMBAM, who lived and wrote almost exclusively during the late 12th century and really he is the most respected commentator on Scripture, period. No one else holds a candle to him—with the exception of Chabad leaders within that sect.

Judaism is not all that challenging to men as long as they like structure. As the Bible was written within a patriarchal culture where women were considered to be inferiors, and Moses’s allowances (which Yeshua makes reference to not really approving of) very much prop up that sort of culture. He doesn’t outlaw polygyny even though he owns that co-wives are rivals and not “sister-wives”. He doesn’t allow women to divorce men, only men to divorce women.  Adultery is written of as a crime against another man, either husband, father or betrothed and not a crime against one’s own wife. Whereas an adulterous woman was sinning against her husband. Daughters could be sold as wives/slaves. Women taken in the aftermath of battle, if virgins, were to be forced into slavery and marriage, depending on the whim of her captors. Otherwise, they were killed. A foreign woman who was not a virgin was without value. So, men are presented with a historical situation that was recorded and sometimes this gets treated as if it was God’s will for this to be normative, or universal forever, instead of the reality of the ancient Near Eastern culture that Yahweh was invading and intervening in—to begin to show His people another way. Truly, the Sinitic Covenant was much better for women than anything else in the region. The laws of the surrounding areas were terrifying. Sinai was the starting line, not the finish line.

And so, when men come in to Torah from the outside and when they have thrown off the interpretations of Yeshua, who tells men accustomed to patriarchy that He instead expects them to be meek, loving, forgiving, non-retaliatory, non-violent, to forgo abusive language and trickery and even hidden hatred and lust that doesn’t get acted on; when He tells men that divorcing their wives for anything other than her unfaithfulness makes them adulterers and that polygyny does as well (I will show where He makes this claim next week)—well, devoid of Yeshua and apart from having been raised as a Jew, I have seen this become a recipe for disaster for the wife and kids, who were not really shown to have much respect or even a place at the table when it comes to the kids, in the ancient world that the Bible tells its stories in the midst of. Remember that the Bible tells us what was going on and not always what should have been going on. Patriarchs lied, cheated and swindled without any value judgments assigned to their actions. They are just recorded along with whatever consequences happened, if any. The untrained observer, unfamiliar with the ancient Near Eastern context, is left to imagine a God who has none or little love for women.

Traditional Jewish men pray this prayer in the morning, ““Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a woman.” And although modern apologists insist that it merely means a gratitude that men are obligated to keep more commandments, anyone who has spent any time in the medieval traditions knows darned well that is not what they meant. In fact, authors going back to ben Sira in the second century BCE have insanely vile things to say about women, in keeping with the surrounding culture. Of course, as I often teach, when we look at the trajectory of Scriptures, we see God’s people moving from things like misogyny and slavery being normal and accepted (again, we will talk about that next week) to the same things being incredibly distasteful. No believers today, I don’t think, would argue for chattel slavery of the kind we see in Exodus 23, where you can beat your slave to death as long as they live longer than a day because, after all, they are your property (obviously an allowance of Moses because we know that slaves are fully human and no human is to be reduced to property status)—no one would argue that slavery is okay simply because Moses never forbade it. Moses himself likely was very much at home with the idea of women being inferior, slavery being okay, and men only being accountable to other men but women and children being accountable to men and certainly not the other way around.

Yahweh deals with us where we are. Not just people groups but with us as individuals. And although most men these days and especially men who became believers later in life, are disgusted by misogyny and prejudice—it is more palatable to men who were brought up in churches that promoted it. And it takes a long time for Yahweh to work that out of people, okay? I mean, even after 22 years He has cultural stuff and paradigms that He is dealing with in me too—so I don’t take it personally when a man won’t listen to me teach or thinks I should be quiet. I am not forcing myself on him or arguing with him—what good would it do? I am not his God and he doesn’t answer to me. I don’t hate him or think he is an idiot. I recognize that what we have been taught to accept goes really deep. I trust God to work it out, if He so desires. I actually don’t think it is the most important issue out there anyway.

So, I think letting go of Yeshua and Paul and Peter and James and all that, it just makes it easier and can be somewhat of a relief because the demands of the Sermon on the Mount just never let up. We will never reach perfection. Our righteousness must exceed that of the people who know and outwardly observe the law the best. That isn’t a game we can ever win through our own efforts or feel justifiably prideful about. Or is that just me? And maybe that’s why so many of these guys just get so abusive and destructive and can’t even talk about Yeshua or those who follow Him without all the mocking and insults. Because, the Scriptures are clear—the more we truly walk with Him, the less of that we will end up doing and the more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, trusting, gentle, and self-controlled we will become. I mean, when I look at these anti-missionaries who are plaguing the Hebrew Roots crowd, I don’t see real Jews. Real Jews don’t spend much time thinking about Yeshua at all, much less having a vendetta of going after Him, real Jews have a life. So, Messianic Jews of course are the exception because they think about Yeshua as much as we do, obviously!

So, I mean, that’s the male identified religion that men who have denied Yeshua glom onto. They go for the more patriarchal modes of thought and doctrines and disciplines. But what about women? Well, that generally doesn’t work for women as well and especially women who are used to being a lot more liberated. Women tend to read the Bible a whole, whole lot more than men do. Women are more religious than men in general. We just are—maybe it’s because we have more time on our hands! Maybe it’s because traditionally we have had to cleave to God more than men have felt they need to. I am sure there are lots of reasons. Some traditions of Judaism just flat out acknowledge that women are more spiritual than men. That doesn’t mean better or superior, just that we are different. I believe in the beginning we were created as flip sides of the same coin in order to perfectly balance one another out as equals. My husband and I see one another as equals and we yield to one another according to our strengths. My husband doesn’t need the upper hand. He doesn’t need or want to rule over anyone or to have that kind of authority. He needs an equal, not an underling. He thinks that life would be quite lonely without an equal.

But women, because we are more inclined to read the Bible and supplementary materials for ourselves—women tend to get pretty unhappy pretty quickly with Judaism without Yeshua as the final interpreter of the Torah. A lot of what He did to include women in His ministry, and Paul’s words about there being no male or female or slave or free in Christ (meaning no hierarchy) and the detailed lists of female apostles, deacons and such—well, for most modern women, they find they have lost too much to be happy in Judaism. Added to that, another big problem. It doesn’t take them very long to start applying the same criticisms to the Hebrew Scriptures that the anti-missionaries applied to the first century writings. And because they aren’t looking at the Bible as wisdom literature written within a historical reality, they begin to pick it apart. They notice the rulings that are now untempered by the wisdom of Yeshua. The allowances of Moses are no more to be considered allowances from Moses due to hardness of heart but the very eternal dictates and will of Yahweh as normative forever. They encounter not a God who was intervening in a patriarchal nightmare for their benefit, but one who is not much unlike all of the pagan gods of the past—determined to love men and keep women subservient and even abused and used. That culture only looked good to women who were comparing it to the reality of the rest of the pre-Cross world. And it was better, but Torah never made anything perfect. Torah contained and limited sin until the coming of the Messiah. That’s why Paul calls it our tutor and it is good for that purpose but we needed the death and resurrection of Yeshua to set us free from bondage and so that our hearts could be circumcised and God’s intentions written on our hearts—His intentions of no oppression, hierarchies, hatred, all the nasty works of the flesh in Galatians 5.

So, what are women to do? I believe that they begin to long for that love they had from the Bridegroom—but they now believe the entire Bible is a farce. And yet, they generally have enough memory of things they can’t explain without God and so they go one of two ways or one way and then another. From what I see, most women go looking for what I call a more female-identified religion. Where traditional Judaism provides that male-identification, it doesn’t do well for women who were not raised in that culture to accept it as normative. They see it instead as restrictive and even devaluing—and this is what I see from the outside and watching conversations of those who have gone this route. They want to feel good and valued and they don’t see what traditional Judaism offers as being satisfying and they are rejecting the Bible anyway. So, our culture has a lot of women pulling into neo-paganism, wicca, crystals, laws of attraction (not the kind in physics textbooks but something where people who don’t understand Quantum physics, which I got a really high grade in, made some really bad connections based on not having a baseline understanding of how it works), shamanism, magic-driven naturopathy (no, I am not calling all naturopathic medicine pagan, but you’ve possibly seen it when it crosses the line into being more like magic), etc.. and it is all very female identified, goddess centered. Whereas Yahweh is spirit but metaphorically identified as male in Scripture, they can instead trade all that in for a fully-realized female nature goddess whom they can trust to not be traditionally male which, as I myself can attest to, can be very scary. I know men hate the phrase toxic masculinity, but traditional forms of masculinity can be extremely toxic. Just check out the honor/shame dynamics of Yeshua’s day, boy howdy. To be a healthy man is one thing, and a good thing, but historically, very few women would want to go back in time even a hundred years to where there was no such legal thing as marital rape or spousal abuse or even child abuse—it was just the patriarch’s right and during ancient times, he had the right to kill anyone under his roof with impunity. Thank God for Yeshua and the cross and how He changed society and what it means to be a man.

But, back to the women who are seeking to get what they had back—some of them really buy into to the whole neo-pagan lifestyle and the reason it is palatable is because it has nothing in common with ancient paganism. No one from ancient Babylon or Egypt or Greece or any of those places would look at what is being done and would recognize anything. That’s because neo-paganism is entirely a creation of the last two hundred years based on romantic literature, which was originally written to appeal to a more female audience anyway. And romance literature isn’t based on historical truths because they weren’t big on archaeology, but instead on author’s ideas about what a world with magic and magical creatures might have been like. I know a lot of people, personally, from before I was a believer, who live very happily within that system. It affirms them as valuable, gives them a bit of a feeling like they can have some control over the chaos of their world, connects them to the spiritual side of life, and makes absolutely no ethical demands of them. But it also doesn’t really offer any sort of true substance.

Because of this, women who were formerly followers of Yeshua often only find it entertaining until they run out of new and exciting things to learn and do. Then the buzz wears off—and this happens a lot. People follow the knowledge train and take it as far as they can, never being able to be satisfied by it because no knowledge is never enough. And when it crashes at the end of the line, they find themselves empty and oftentimes atheists. And angry. Angry at religion. Angry at people who are still believers. Unable to see what they have lost because they are so determined that all it ever was, was one big deception. And the anti-missionaries who messed them up in the first place? They’ve moved on to their next target. They aren’t there to be spiritual advisors. They were there to recruit and to destroy faith. Mission accomplished.

And this identification religion, it can be a huge problem in more ways than just with these extreme cases. Wanting something to give you an identity other than the one we have been granted in Messiah as disciples, which is a huge honor based on who we were before, right? I know it is for me. But when we seek anything for ourselves apart from that core identity—when we feel we need to change our names, and pretend to be Jews, or to speak Heblish just because who we are doesn’t feel special or relevant enough—that’s a trap. Two of my favorite Bible characters really have no lines. Apollos and Junia. Both named after pagan gods. And both apostles, male and female. And these were incredibly common names in the Greco-Roman world. You would think that if anyone would change their names, these two would, as they travelled around and no one can even say their names without invoking a false god. But them going around with those names and preaching Yahweh and Yeshua, it was like the biggest disrespect to Apollo and Juno imaginable. Every time they spoke, it was like the false gods themselves were rolling over and prostrating themselves before the King of kings and Lord of lords.

Same with us. When Tyler Rosenquist, in light of who I used to be and do and say and believe, goes around proclaiming Yeshua and the word of God? Well, it means something because of my former identity, not in spite of it. God wins. Satan loses.

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