God is love. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Love your neighbor as yourself. We hear these statements all the time. We smile, nod our heads, and enjoy the warm fuzzies. But do we know what they mean? We think we do. We assume we do…. But remember what happens when we …
God hates his people. Or at least that’s what many churches teach. They quote Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill in which he said, “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commands all men every where to repent.” (Acts 17:30) Then they quote Yeshua’s statements along the lines of “You have heard …
Let’s play a game. You’ve probably played this one before. It’s called word association. I’ll give you a series of words. After each word, you respond with a word of your own, the first word that comes to mind. Ready? Circumcision Law Commandment Precept Statute Obedience Fun, right? Well… that depends. If you’re like most …
There’s an interesting little chiasm in Leviticus 8:1-5. (See here for more information on chiasms.) Lev 8:1-2 – God instructed Moses on how to carry out the ordination of Aaron and his sons. Lev 8:3 – God told Moses to assemble the congregation at the entrance of the tent of meeting. Lev 8:4a – Moses …
Continue reading ‘Humility Before a Great, Incomprehensible God’ »
I teach that there is one Law for all citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, that those who have been grafted into Israel are subject to the same statutes and moral standards as those who were born into Israel. One common–and reasonable–objection is that if the law didn’t apply to gentiles prior to Yeshua’s incarnation, …
Someone on Twitter recently told me that he is still not sure why the Messiah needed to die. My reply (brief due to the limitations of Twitter) was something like this: Something has to cover (atone) our sins before we can approach God. A precise understanding of how atonement works is probably beyond our comprehension, …
The enemy within your gates must be defeated before you can effectively engage the enemy without, but sometimes the enemy outside is sent to expose and defeat the enemy hiding within. In Psalm 86, David began with a parallelism that lays out a cause and effect relationship between the state of his heart and God …
Circumcision in itself is nothing, just another bit of body modification. It’s irrelevant to your salvation. Neither ritual conversion to Judaism nor ritual rejection of Judaism has any impact whatsoever on who you are in God’s Kingdom. These are merely works, whether good or bad, and, by themselves, works can never save you. What you …
Traditions are wonderful and powerful forces for creating and reinforcing the bonds of family, community, and nation. Shared experiences even bind together generations separated by centuries. For example, people have been singing hymns at church and synagogue for thousands of years. If you were to travel back in time to a first century congregation, the …
This is from a conversation I had on Google+ today, but I thought it deserved to be preserved here at American Torah. ———- Paul wrote “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I …
Continue reading ‘What Is the Difference between Grace and Following the Law?’ »