Torah Observance

Welcome

Introduction

Last week I introduced myself to you, and I think my opening sermon hit you like a bomb.

Topical Sermons are temporary

I want to first say that the topical sermons - pretty much the norm in Messianic circles - are all going to be temporary. Once I’ve hit a few of the doctrinal errors that are prevalent in Messianic circles - there’s a couple left to hit - we’ll move on to expository preaching. If you don’t know what Expository preaching is, it is taking a text of scripture and expositing - or explaining - it. Expository preaching usually starts with choosing a book of the Bible and teaching through that book, then choosing another and teaching through that. I won’t live long enough to preach through the New Testament, so no worries on that.

The good news is I write these in Logos Bible software, and it gives me a running total of time it takes to preach. So I’ll be trying to keep every sermon under 35 minutes.

Torah Observance

After I got married - quite a bit later, I should add - we got drawn into Hebrew Roots Messianic. Now, there were two Messianic shul in town - one that didn’t return phone calls or emails, the other one did. That was the one I got involved in. The Rabbi was David Hargis, and after attending for a while, he approached me about being the cantor and assistant rabbi. I attended Messianic Bureau International Yeshiva. Just in case nobody knew, the odd name came about because we’d seen Men in Black, and David the next day flipped around the MIB logo to MBI. It was a joke at first, but David continued it and it stuck.

MBI has been criticized as being a diploma mill. Was it? I’d say, yes. All you had to do was read some books and write book reviews. It wasn’t the way I planned it - I literally gave David a complete curriculum, and he downgraded it to the Lael University diploma mill system, because that’s what he went through and that was all he knew.

This is the same model done by some of the Messianic Yeshiva. You can conceivably graduate from a Messianic Yeshiva and still know nothing about doctrine.

I’m trying to fix that, by the way.

Sadly, that wasn’t the end of it - a thousand Messianics have recycled his - and my - teachings. I’m going to tell you I was wrong, and a lot of it I blame on lack of good Seminary education.

Certainly, If I’d known then what I know now about the Bible, a lot of the grief I went through could have been avoided.

I’m going to say that as a Messianic, I went from Messianic Reformed - where most of you are now - to very quickly - Messianic Conservative. I rejected that after about a year as an inconsistent position. To me, the only way was Messianic Orthodox - in Yiddish that’s Mashiechist Misnagidei. By the time I left it, I’d actually crept closer and closer to Messianic Chassidei.

I left MBI and Mishkan HaMelech - his synagogue - during a period of rebellion on my part, around 1998 or 1999. I confess it freely now, and if David had lived any longer, I would have sought him out and tried to get his forgiveness. I am still ashamed of it, and repent of it. The disagreement between us was almost entirely my fault - I’d say I deserve 80% to 85% of the blame.

During that time, I became a Chassid, a Lubavitcher. In the one year I was a Lubavitcher, I literally found myself regretting ever leaving the Messianic movement. Like, from week one. But I was, as another person I know who followed me into it said, “trapped.” During that one year that I was with Chabad, oh yes, I was a true chabadnik. Tefillin, tallis, shachris, mincha, maairev, Tehillas Hashem prayerbook, Daf yomi, and even Der Tannya. I spend hours at my Rabbi’s house reading the letters of the Rebbe. They were Mashiechist, meaning they believed the Rebbe was the Messiah.

Table of Contents

Consider this part almost a table of contents what we’ll be speaking about for the next few weeks. The very first thing I have to do is correct errors, and remove heresies. To be blunt, if you’re a heretic, I’m going to preach on these issues non stop until you either repent and are converted to a believer in Christ, or drive you away as a reprobate unable to bear the light of Scripture, or else get fired.

I left the Chassidei, and went into the world for a few years, and found myself coming back to God. I struggled with what I’d been taught for the entire time as a Messianic versus what the Bible said, and very quickly I began to realize the only way to harmonize what the Bible teaches was to start over and let the Bible speak for itself. I tried being an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist for nine years, but I finally had to admit that Arminianism - the system of belief that says God predestines some to salvation based upon their acceptance of Him -was unBiblical. The vast majority of Christians and Messianics have a faulty view of salvation that is known as Pelagianism, and the early Christians - many of whom were still Jewish - rejected Pelagianism as a heresy.

The only Biblical worldview is called Calvinism. We’ll get into that soon enough.

Here are some teachings of the Messianic movement that are erroneous.

Two stick theology, also called Judah/Ephraim.

inverted Replacement theology - the teaching that only Messianic Jews are real Jews.

British Israelitism - this is where Judah/Ephraim’ism comes from. The key teaching of this is that Messianic Gentiles convert automatically to Judaism by joining a Messianic synagogue. Here’s how to tell if you believe this - you’ve said “I’m Jewish now.”

Mandatory Torah Observance, also called Hebrew Roots. This is the teachings of James Trimm and Michael Rood, and both of them very quickly adopted most of my arguments for Torah observance. This is a conditional salvation heresy that says you are saved by grace through faith - but if you don’t observe the 613 commandments, you forfeit your salvation.

Patripassionism - the belief is that Jesus was actually God the Father - it’s also called Sabellianism or Modalism - and says that God is One, but appeared as God the Father until 5 BC, then became Jesus Christ, and after the ascension, appears as the Holy Spirit.

Denial of the deity of Jesus Christ

Anyone who knows any New Testament whatsoever knows this is a strong symptom of being a reprobate. If you’d like a blunt description of reprobate status, it means “Damned.” Unless those who believe this repent, they have one sure end, a certain fiery judgment awaits them.

Is there a Hell? Yes, there is. If you reject Christ or His deity, you will find out.

Anti-trinitarianism. We get so in love with the Shema that we end up rejecting clear teachings of the Bible. The Bible makes it clear Christ pre-existed, and is eternally co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. We call that God. The Bible clearly teaches one God revealed in three distinct persons. If you’re reading a Messianic Bible that teaches anything besides this, I recommend the nearest trash can. And get a copy of James White’s “The Forgotten Trinity.”

Original Hebrew Manuscript tradition - the only book of the Bible said to have been written in Hebrew was Matthew. We have possibly a fragment of a gospel in Hebrew, but that's it - and we don’t know if that’s Matthew, or what’s known as a Targum - a translation. If there were original Hebrew manuscripts, we’ll never know. There’s no apostolic witness of them, no patristic mention of them, and no quotations of them in early Christian literature.

And several others we’ll get to as we go along. Some of these are erroneous. A couple of them are just silly. Most are heresies, some of them damnable heresies.

Let me briefly correct them, and we’ll move on. We’ll revisit these as we go along, because like a cult rescuer, I may have to do a lot of deprogramming.

Your parents are welcome here. Your brothers and sisters are welcome here. Gentiles are welcome here.

Gentiles are Gentiles, Jews are Jews. Neither are better than others. That’s why it’s better to say “Messianic synagogue” instead of “Messianic Jewish synagogue”. If you’re a gentile who was chosen by God for salvation, that’s awesome! What matters is not being Jewish or gentile, but that you are part of the Elect. That’s it.

To that end, I’ve got this to say - be careful not to offend. Women like tallisim, but if a woman wears a tallis, she is going to offend any Jew who is being drawn by God. Jewish Men wear Tallis and yarmulke. Women do not. Jewish Men wear tefillin, women do not.

If you’ve EVER gone through the trouble of putting on tefillin and tallis for Shachris prayers, you’ll begin to wish you didn’t have to. If you’re going to do it, fine. Do it right with the prayers, and there you go.

Nobody is required to wear yarmulke, tallis, tefillin. Bottom line.

If you want to wear tallis and lay teffilin, fine. Do it. If you don’t, don’t!

Nobody here is required to eat kosher or keep the feasts. WE’ll do the feasts, but you better believe we’ll do Christmas, Easter, and the rest.

One common complaint is that Jews aren’t comfortable in a setting that practices Christmas and Easter. I’ll debunk that pretty quickly. I’ve got no problem with it. Was I Frum from Birth? No, I’m not FFB. To my knowledge, there are very few FFB Jews who come to Messiah - but those that do have no problem with it.

Turn with me in your Bible to 2 Tim. 3:16-17

2 Timothy 3:16–17 NASB 95

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16–17 NA28

πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος καὶ ὠφέλιμος πρὸς διδασκαλίαν, πρὸς ἐλεγμόν, πρὸς ἐπανόρθωσιν, πρὸς παιδείαν τὴν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ, ἵνα ἄρτιος ᾖ ὁ τοῦ θεοῦ ἄνθρωπος, πρὸς πᾶν ἔργον ἀγαθὸν ἐξηρτισμένος.

I used to get into online debates with cult members, and I’m going to include Torah Observant Messianics in that category. One of the requirements I made was that you had to have at least one year of Greek in a classroom setting if you were going to cite any Greek. Only one tried, and I quickly shot him down because he was making elementary mistakes that anyone who’d had a year of even the most elementary Greek could not have made. Let me say this - looking up words occasionally in Strong’s for three years does not constitute three years of Greek. A lot of Greek study is systematized already, and there’s certain crutches we use that reveal that. Want to hear a Greek crutch? We get so used to lumping together the words “all every each” in Greek that we unconsciously will continue to do it in Greek, because they’re conjugations of the same lemma. Pas Passa Pan.

In this case, it’s pasa graphe, all Scripture. Theopneustos, God breathed. All Scripture is inspired. The verbal meaning here is God breathed it out How close do you have to be to feel someone’s breath? When you study Scripture, it is as if God is whispering in your ear.

If you are reprobate, God is silent except for one thing - repent. Jewish sources as well as Christian all agree on this. You’ve probably read the Talmudic quote before that says every day a Bat Qol goes forth from heaven, crying “repent, repent”.

The first objection several will raise is this - define all scripture. Some immediately call some books of the New Testament into question, like Galatians, and possibly Hebrews. Others raise the issue of the Hebrew originals and “it’s not possible to put Jewish concepts into Greek”, and then there’s the villainous “they” who took Jewish concepts out of the Bible. I see the smiles, the nods. Some of you have heard this. Some of you believe it and preach it. Don’t get mad at my next few sentences, because I’m about to debunk this.

Galatians has never been questioned by the church. Ever. All accepted it as authentic Scripture. In all the earliest lists of Scripture, Galatians historically has always been on those lists.

Now, I know that Avi Ben Mordecai claims the book of Galatians was sealed until he miraculously unlocked it. I’ve heard others say the same thing, and no two interpretations agree with each other.

Galatians was never questioned by any until the torah Observant movement. And here’s why. All the pet theories why we should keep the torah are demolished by a plain, straightforward rendering of Galatians.

Bottom line - Galatians is part of inerrant, inspired, preserved Scripture. So now you have to decide - are you sola scriptura or not?

Christians - and by definition Messianic Jews are Christians - follow sola Scriptura. That’s latin for “Scripture alone”. We define our doctrines by Scripture and only Scripture.

Some denominations use a mixture of faith, tradition, reason - that’s not a Christian doctrine. The Christian doctrine of Scripture - known as Bibliology - is Scripture alone.

So - what’s Scripture? The books of the Bible are accepted by all with a few exceptions. There are some books that were in question, but very early on the churches all agreed and used the 66 books we have now. The only ones in dispute were James, 1 and 2 Peter, 2nd & 3rd John (and only because they seem so short), Hebrews and Revelation.

Dispute about those books is over emphasized. The early Christians were VERY careful about calling something Scripture. The only hesitation about these books were because there were a minority of dissenting voices about them, and so the churches were VERY careful to examine them, even though 99.96 or so - I can’t be dogmatic about the number because early churches and councils all met in secret simply because the price of being caught was agonizing death - 99.96% of the churches and church members all accepted by the beginning of the second century all of these books. It was mainly a few guys here and there who said, “I don’t know” - and the fact the councils met to examine and debate books the churches had all accepted as Scripture showed how careful the early church was about defining anything as Scripture.

So let me go debunk another pet theory, and know before I speak that many Messianic congregations will get furious and fire a Rabbi who dares say this fact.

By the way, everything I’m telling you can be historically verified. It’s not even difficult to find this information. It’s so readily available that I have to conclude it’s like the guy who closes his eyes, plugs his ears and says “la la la la” so he can’t hear you.

Ready?

There were no books that the church as a whole accepted that later were removed. Sorry, Dan Brown. Sorry, James Trimm.

There were no Hebrew originals. The New Testament, with a possible exception of Matthew, were all written in Greek. Not a single fragment of any book other than Matthew dating to the first century in Hebrew or Aramaic has ever been found.

We have one fragment - one - of Matthew in Hebrew. it’s age is disputed, and even its authenticity. I personally believe it’s authentic, I personally believe it is a fragment of the Hebrew Matthean autograph. And this is the intro to my second point - the preservation of the Greek autographs.

By taking every extant copy of the New Testament and separating them by century, we can determine what the text of the new testament most likely was. Every new manuscript is analyzed and collated, comparing all of them to one another. They sell books on these that list what manuscripts like P66 contain. the Nestle-Aland 28th edition and the UBS have the exact same text, but differing apparatus. What that means is, I can look at the NA28th apparatus and see what textual variations exist in every verse. The UBS has an apparatus that gives the same information, but more to show what was included and why. If you have both, then you can see every textual variant and which ones were considered in assembling both manuscripts.

By diligently comparing the manuscripts and giving weight to which are the oldest and closest to the source, we can determine what the most likely original wordings written down by the apostles probably was. Want to know how it reads? Get the NA28. Don’t read Greek? Okay. Get a literal word for word translation, like the New American Standard Bible. or a more dynamic equivalent like the ESV. And compare the translations.

There you go.

Anyone who talks about the books of the new testament being removed and hidden by the church because they were too Jewish will be laughed out of a reputable Seminary’s classroom. The theory is tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theory. It not only never happened, but couldn’t have happened. How do I prove it? Look in the back of your Bible. If Revelation is there, that’s your proof. If the Gospel of Thomas is NOT in your Bible, there’s more proof. All the spurious books are still around. We’ve lost very few books to history. This is the doctrine of preservation. The entire catalog of Scripture is preserved in the mass readings of the New Testament. We have SO many copies of the New Testament in Greek and the various targums in scrolls, parchments, manuscripts, codexes and lexicons that it’s a wealth of information. No other book in the world is so well attested.

What many Messianics believe is not historically attestable. We recycle historically debunked arguments often presented by enemies of the Gospel, in favor of theories for which there is no historical evidence whatsoever. It’s akin to quoting the tooth fairy in debates. We argue for and believe in the existence of mythological boogie men to support fallacious theories and arguments.

It HAS to stop. It has to stop now. And I’m going to freely admit that I’m partially to blame for this, because I never was educated in a reputable seminary or Yeshiva. Oh, I’ve learned a lot since then. In the first week of my seminary training - which I took years after my ordination - I found some of my Christological beliefs were heresies.

So, here is my affirmation: Jesus Christ is God in human flesh, truly man and truly God, one third of the Trinity, the Son of Man and the Son of God from before Time began, possessing two distinct natures as the God Man.

to believe otherwise is damnable heresy.

Here is my other affirmation - the Bible is inspired, inerrant, preserved, without need of correction. To quote the 1689 Second London Baptist confession:

The Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient, certain, and infallible standard of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.

Confessing the Faith: The 1689 Baptist Confession for the 21st Century I. The Holy Scriptures

1:1 The Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient, certain, and infallible standard of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. The light of nature and the works of creation and providence so clearly demonstrate the goodness, wisdom, and power of God that people are left without excuse; however, these demonstrations are not sufficient to give the knowledge of God and His will that is necessary for salvation. Therefore, the Lord was pleased at different times and in various ways to reveal Himself and to declare His will to His church. To preserve and propagate the truth better and to establish and comfort the church with greater certainty against the corruption of the flesh and the malice of Satan and the world, the Lord put this revelation completely in writing. Therefore, the Holy Scriptures are absolutely necessary, because God’s former ways of revealing His will to His people have now ceased.

1:2 The Holy Scriptures, or the Word of God written, consist of all the books of the Old and New Testaments. These are:

THE OLD TESTAMENT: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.

THE NEW TESTAMENT: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Revelation.

All of these are given by the inspiration of God to be the standard of faith and life.

1:3 The books commonly called the Apocrypha were not given by divine inspiration and so are not part of the canon or standard of the Scriptures. Therefore, they have no authority for the church of God and are not to be recognized or used in any way different from other human writings.

1:4 The authority of the Holy Scriptures obligates belief in them. This authority does not depend on the testimony of any person or church but on God the author alone, who is truth itself. Therefore, the Scriptures are to be received because they are the Word of God.

Everything I just quoted forms the beginning of the 2nd Baptist London Confession, and is almost word for word found in the Westminster confession. Similar wording can be found in other Reformed confessions. These words represent the attitudes, beliefs and understandings of the Christian church since its beginnings. I do not differentiate between the Christian church and early Messianics. It is to the condemnation of Israel that Jews rejected the Messiah based upon the acceptance of Gentiles. Truly in this way we provoke the jealousy of Israel, that Gentiles rushed to accept the very Messiah that Israel rejected.

To say these words I have spoken for the last 30 minutes in a Messianic synagogue is grounds for being fired. I can think of no greater condemnation for the movement than this. We can either continue the foolishness that condemns people to eternal torment, or we can grasp the Gospel that Jesus Christ died to save sinners.

If I still work here by Next Erev Shabbos, I’ll start dealing with Christological heresies, because that’s where we start. If you don’t have these right, you’re not going to Heaven - your eternity is going to be agonizing and horrible.