At this time of year, here in Israel, we have the feasts of Unleavened Bread which celebrate the end of the Hebrew enslavement to the Egyptians.

In the supermarkets it is impossible to buy many products that the Rabbis consider not suitable for purchase by the Israeli people during Pesache, but what right have they to dictate such things?

Scripture prohibits chametz (yeast) during the week long feast, this is ostensibly because the ‘bread’ for the escape was flat (unleavened) bread because there was no time to wait for the yeast to cause the dough to rise.

Instead of allowing the people to make their own decisions according to their own relationship with Yah, the Rabbis dictate and enforce the rules as they see fit, and the supermarkets comply, so rice is included for, although it contains no yeast, it ‘swells’ and must be considered pseudo-chametz.   Same with products made with self-raising flour, the bicarb raising agent is also banned during the week.

They also have a special ‘kosher for pesache’ food tax so that they profit financially from the whole affair, it pays for their ‘first class’ lifestyle.

Yuhushua warns us to beware of the leaven of the pharisees – this is very appropriate as religious leaders of all persuasions make arbitrary (and profitable) decisions on behalf of their congregations.

Yeast is symbolic of man’s tendency to inflate the word of Yah; to create ‘traditions’ and then make them compulsory as defining the ‘authority’ of popes, vicars, archbishops and rabbis (elevated ones)  all these positions are unscriptural and have no authority from Yah, and yet they enslave most of us by their ability to dictate the terms of our ‘relationship’ with Yah.

All scripture points to an individual relationship with Yah as the only way to enter the narrow gate and walk the Way of righteousness.   The prodigal’s pigsty was filled with those slavers who dictated how we should live our lives; modern day Egyptian slavemasters.

So we each need a personal Exodus to escape the tangle of religious bondage, if it is not in the Tanach (old testament) it is not from Yah; there is nothing ‘new’ in the new testament see the words of Solomon (Eccles.).  For there is no difference in Hebrew between ‘new’ and ‘renewed’ and we should regard it as a ‘renewed testament’, an amplification of the covenants of the old testament.

The new testament is valuable, but it should always be used in conjunction with Old Testament scripture as Paul tells us, and at the time of Paul’s writing, scripture was only Tanach.

In this modern day, most of us are enslaved by those set over us, does your Pastor (shepherd?) guide you or does he/she dictate to you?  Does he say, there is Yah over there, go, make friends with him, or does he say do it my way, make friends with me, pay me, and I will lead you to ‘salvation’.

If we have not, of our own volition, left the pigsty, and walked the Way to the Father’s house as a servant, we cannot sucessfully come to the Father’s gates and sonship.

When we stand before Yah, there will be no pastor, vicar, priest or rabbi there to hold our hands and speak for us.   Have we left our enslavement and become good and faithful servants, or did we allow others to define our relationship with Yah via rituals, traditions and the hot air of chametz.

There is a certain amount of tension between the two major religions of the bible, but, we are told, that in Yehushua, there is neither Greek nor Jew, Bond of Free, Male or Female, and to this we may add, Black or White.

The differences between groups are the obsession of religions in defiance of Yah and every time we exclude fellow believers we are throwing our religion(s) in Yah’s face.

We are right to seek to procreate within the norms of the family as it is the optimum way of obeying Yah’s directive to “go forth and multiply” children and mothers need a family for support and protection, fathers and unmarried grown children need a family in order to have a place to come home to.

A relationship with Yah is not about singing hymns or wearing funny hats, Yah has defined a ‘Way’ and it we like sheep have gone astray and turned every one to his own way then we are going to be caught napping.   Throughout the scriptures we find a major light and a minor (reflected), our job is to reflect the light of Yah not to create our own light.   We are easily lead astray by those in authority who bask in their own luminescence, people who set themselves up as ‘elevated ones’ demanding that we obey their interpretations, directives and whims.

These are the same people as those who rejected Yah at Mount Horeb.   Moses had to write the scrolls of law to try and give the people guidance, all the while understanding that it was Torah written upon the heart that truly reflected the light of Yah.

Keeping the Law can be a mechanical thing, and here the danger is that we add or take away from it, Jews tend to add to it through tradition and interpretation, Christians tend to cherry pick and thus discard important bits (especially seventh day sabbath but never the tithe).

The Mosaic Law is designed to give us a picture of how to escape from bondage and take the Way to the father’s gates.   It is there to prepare us to leave Egypt and follow the way to the promised land, but this time the journey is a solo journey, we must follow the pillars of light and cloud written upon our hearts.

When Adam fell, he chose to follow his own way, but the Way of Yah was still there in his heart, suppressed by His desire for his own godship (knowledge of good and evil).

When we cast off Adam’s godship and leave Adam’s world we can then humble ourselves and consider ourselves as servants of Yah rather than as rulers in authority over men, It may be that Yah chooses us as with Barnabus and Paul in Antioch – a process that took many years.

When we follow a Rabbi, priest or pastor we do exactly that, we are not following the Way of Yah, but following the way of Adam.   When we come to our judgement before Yah, we will need to understand the truths of Yah, His Way, His Truth, His Life, our Rabbi/priest/pastor will not be with us, he/she will be trying to explain away how and why she has lead you the perdition of religion, instead of teaching you where to find Truth…..

The first words in the Gospel of John provide a striking revelation of what a relationship with Yah is all about:

In the beginning – harping back to Genesis 1, if you believe that in the beginning Darwin created then the Gospel of John is not for you.

Was the Word – the Greek word Logos translates into the Hebrew debar which describes a spoken commandment (see LXX);   Torah is a signpost which points to the debar that is Creation, the spoken words of Yah made concrete and physical.   This is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

All Things – Creation itself is a product of these words as spoken by Yah in the beginning.

Without – Nothing exists except that Yah spoke these words, the spoken word (debar) of Yah is reality, if there is no debar, there is no Creation of Yah.   If there is no debar in your life then as far as Yah is concerned you don’t exist.

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us – It is here that Christians tend to depart from Yah’s intention, by elevating ‘Jesus’ to equal ‘godship’ as part of a trinity, a pantheon, they miss the implication of this.   The ‘debar’ preceded the ‘Jesus’, the debar, the spoken word of Yah, the Creation as such, became ‘Jesus’.

Yahushua (Jesus) is ‘Torah made flesh’ he did not create a new religion (Constantine did that), he was a renewal of an old covenant; Abraham kept debar, as emphasized by Paul in the epistle of Hebrews.   The elders of the children of Israel broke covenant at Horeb, which resulted in a Mosaic rewrite we call ‘Torah’.     Abraham had ‘Torah’ written upon his heart, but the elders rejected this close relationship with Yah and the personal responsibility implied in it and insisted that Moses take full responsibility, the result was the Mosaic Torah which encapsulated this relationship in a shell of ritual.   Torah was not ‘evil’ but it was not the optimal relationship achieved by the few, the prophets, who dared take on the personal responsibility of the Abrahamic relationship.

Yahushua, as debar made flesh, was a game changer, His task was to renew the Abrahamic covenant making the Mosaic covenant fall away (“when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part will fall away”)

So at Pentecost (Shavuot) we see the ‘flames’ of ‘power’ pass from the temple to the individuals; Horeb has finally triumphed and the Way of God (the debar) has become open and available to all mankind.

There is only one God, Yahushua is the Word of God made flesh, the Holy Spirit is the Word of God written upon our hearts.   But is very easy to hide and obfuscate this in the miasma of the religions of men.

The Greek word ‘pisteo’ is said to mean belief, but does the English word ‘belief’ really translate the intent of pisteo?

Young’s rather translates it as “to trust and rely on”

To trust and rely on is a much stronger form, and it is perhaps the most difficult of all the doctrines put forth in our relationship with Yah.

To many Christians, all that they have to do is ‘believe’ and all things are added unto them, this is incomplete, for to have all things added we must seek first the Kingdom of Yah; that place where Yah rules….

To trust and rely on Yah, we must stop doing the things of Adam and wait for Yah to provide the resources we need to proceed along His way.

When we leave the pigsty to follow the Way back to the Father’s house, we are still covered in the slime of Adam’s pigs.  We tend to think Adam rather than Yah, we still trust and rely on Adam’s ways not Yah’s ways, we still believe that god helps those who help themselves.

As the slime dries out, it falls off, assisted by Yah’s servants who meet us from afar.   If we can be humble and listen and learn from these servants we will progress, but if we stick close to Adam we will make little progress.   Adam says we are sons of Yah if we ‘believe’ but the servants tell us that we too must be servants, like themselves, and trust and rely on the Master.

If we cannot convert Adamic ‘belief’ into trust and reliance on Yah, we will not reach the end of the Way and enter the Father’s gates.   In the garden of the Father’s palace, all conforms to the will and righteousness of the Father, it is his domain.   We cannot bring Adam in with us.

In the last 2 years fear has been used as a weapon against us.

Yah tells us that we should “fear not” because He is in control not the politicians or the technocrats.   But because we tend to live according to Adam’s world and not according to Yah’s Creation, we easily get bogged down in tradition and ritual.

This planet is a spiritual place which ‘thinks’ it is physical, people, including believers, think that “god helps those who help themselves”, I keep hearing the saga of the man stranded on a rooftop waiting for God to rescue him from a flood.    People who tell this story understand very little, either about Yah or about Those called by His ‘name’ (description).

There is a point to everything Yah says and does, and the guy on the roof being ‘super spiritual’ is not a practical picture.   Yah does things which are impossible, the guy on the roof wants Yah to do the mundane and at his behest, but the story itself is a mockery of a real working spiritual relationship with Yah, the man of God would part the waters a’ la Moses and walk to safety with dry feet.

We have to learn not to judge Yah by the standards of Adam’s creation, but to be humble before Yah and be prepared to do things his way, Yah does not need our ‘help’ but is very happy to have us serve.   His ways our not our ways, and we must be prepared to step aside and be the servant and not the master.    Then when we can be trusted to do things His way, then he can call us to sonship, to be his representative with His spiritual authority.

It took me many years to even begin to understand the old testament Tanach idea of salvation, an idea obscured in translation from the Hebrew and Greek.

Salvation, the state of being saved, is a fundamental idea from the times of the patriarchs, and to even approach it we must understand what happened in the Garden of Eden.

Put simply, Adam lost his salvation, his eternal life with Yah.  Adam’s denial of wrong doing; accusing Yah and the woman of his own sin and culpability thereof (the woman confessed her culpability and thus retained salvation even though still subject to physical death).

Adam was no longer acceptable to reside with Yah, he no longer considered himself a ‘servant’ but considered himself a ‘god’ knowing good and bad from his own opinion and godship and no longer subject to Yah’s Good and Yah’s Bad.   He, Adam, was in rebellion, Yah’s Way was no longer his way, and he was thrown out of Eden; he no longer had ‘salvation’, the right to spend rternal life with Yah.

We are born into Adam’s world; the world outside of Eden and its tree of (eternal) life with Yah, so we need to seek our salvation anew.

Salvation crops up throughout the scriptures, it is a constant theme and is by no means restricted to the new Testament and is by no means dependant on or exclusive to being ‘born again’ in the Christian sense.

Psalm 119 v 41 relates Salvation to keeping Torah – doing what Yah says as opposed to what men say.

‘Salvation’ is Yah’s repair mechanism of Adam’s condemnation of all his descendants, without exceptions, for death came into the world through Adam and his arrogance.

Mankind was made of dust and the breath (spirit) of Yah, but the spirit of Yah ceased to function in Adam because he chose his own godship over service to Yah.   This act disqualifies all of us born of Adam from domicile with Yah, Yah and our own ‘godship’ cannot co-exist in the same space.   However if we choose to do things Yah’s Way, the Way of Torah, instead of Adam’s way, the way of sin and death, then the gates of Eden are once more open to us and we can dwell in the house of Yah forever…..

Yahushua (Jesus) was the Way (Torah) made flesh and dwelling amongst us…

Paul was a ‘follower of the Way’ the Way of Yah rather than the way of Adam.

Eden is a place where Yah and man dwelt together before man became a ‘physical’ being having his own knowledge of good and bad.

Adam was thrown out of Eden, but that does not mean he cannot re-enter.   But to re-enter he must be humble enough to confess the deceit (the same as the woman did).

We are born into Adam’s world and are totally immersed in Adam’s physical, and Adam’s SPIRITUAL worlds as defined by Adams knowledge of good and bad.

As we walk the Way back to Yah, we deal with Adam’s physical deficit; the mud and slime from the pigsty falls away as we come to understand the need to conform to Yah’s rules and behaviours, not man’s.

But what about the things of the Spiritual, that part of our relationship with Yah that is intangible to our senses.   Our spiritual too is dominated by Adam’s creation,  our spiritual ‘think’ is dominated by Adam’s knowledge.   In the same way we become physical ‘followers of the Way’ so too must we become spiritual followers of the way, whilst we might be physical ‘sergeants’ we can at the same time be spiritual ‘privates’ because we fail to submit our spiritual side to Yah.

We may not even understand that our spiritual  side even exists, or that it too is badly tainted by the mud and slime from the pigsty and must be cleansed.

Our role is to be containers for the spiritual outflow from Yah, our ‘cups’ must run over, spreading Yah’s elixir to all those in our reach, but that elixir must be uncontaminated by our spiritual malaise, we must be humble in spirit, knowing that we can taint the flow from Eden by adding our own ‘Adam’ to it.

The Creator’s Spirit Created All Things, we can participate in that by being a conduit of Yah’s Spirit, but only if we understand that if it is tainted by our own spiritual knowledge of good and bad, it will cease to be effective.

We should be able to stand in Adam’s creation as a chalice of light, glowing with the Creator’s Spirit within us.   It is not easy…..

Is what man thinks is good the same as what Yah thinks is good?

This is a very important question, perhaps, for each of us, the difference between eternal life and eternal death.

To get to ‘heaven’ we must be compatible with the heavenly environment, but if we cannot understand the difference between what mankind defines as ‘good’ and what Yah defines as GOOD then we have a big Big Big problem of compatibility with Yah’s CREATION and thus ‘heaven’.

To get to ‘heaven’ we must be Yah compatible, if we love Yahovah we do things His way not Adam’s way – we keep Torah the Moses way not the Rabbinical way or the Roman way.   We seek first the Kingdom of Yah and His Righteous.

It is our own responsibility to seek, to question and to live according to what Yah tells us, not according to the opinions of religious leaders; when we come before Yah, we will not have Rabbi Menahem or Pastor Bob to hold our hand, so if you elevate Rabbi Menahem or Pastor Bob to dominance in your life you had better make sure they are right because Yah will not accept any ifs or buts….

We have to understand that, at Mount Horeb (Sinai). the Elders of the Children of Israel rejected a personal relationship with Yah, preferring to place Moses as a moderator.   This was highly problematic, it meant that none of those Elders would or could see the promised land.   And they did not.

If we are to ‘see’ our promised land, we must take responsibility for our own relationship with Yah, we must seek to see what He defines as GOOD, and what He defines as EVIL   We are born into Adam’s creation and see things through Adam’s knowledge of good and evil, in a land where murdering babies is acceptable, “my body, my choice” sounds acceptable to Adam, but what does Yah think about it?

Our guide is His Torah and His Tanach, and those passages of the ‘New’ Testament that can be fitted into the Tanachic context.   No the Torah was not “nailed to the cross”, the Greek word ‘dogma’ in this context refers to (man’s) opinions (as opposed to Yah’s).

If you want to get to ‘heaven’ YOU must learn to do things Yah’s Way, not Adam’s, Menachem’s or Bob’s.

We are made of two components, the ‘earth’ (dust) and Yah’s breath – the Spirit and the place where these two overlap is called the soul.

Our soul can be dominated by the earth, that is the Adam, or the spirit, the Yah in us, and depending upon which one is dominant, then so we are what Yah sees we are.

When we are born, Adam (the dust) is totally dominant.   As we grow up and mature, so we have the opportunity to seek the Way of Yah, if we decide to seek Yah, and His truth, so the balance of our soul shifts towards the spiritual, it shifts towards the Yah in us.

If however, we choose to believe that in the beginning, Yah did not Create, then it is the dust (death) that is in control.    The dust has no Torah, no ten commandments, it only has the desires of the flesh, if you watch a baby or a toddler, it only knows its own needs, it is totally selfish and unrelenting.   Project that behaviour into adulthood and you have the obsessive behaviour which is now all too familiar to us.

It is not that the dust is corrupt, it is just the ‘selfish gene’ which is the starting point of new birth.   If we are born into a Yah inspired household, so our ‘soulical’ balance slowly shifts towards Yah as we learn and absorb from those with whom we are intimate.

At some stage in our lives we become able to make our own decisions; do we believe that we evolved and are just a super intelligent animal, or do we believe we are the Tov Mehod of Yah’s Creation.

If the former, then we live a selfish life in the Adamic world, if the latter, then we live a life close to the Creator and His Creation, still within the Adamic world, but with a supernatural swirl around us protecting us from the intrusions of the serpent.

The serpent is intimately bound to the dust, the Adam in us has no protection from it.

Take the current Covid 19 crisis, I have a choice, take the vaccine and rely on mankind’s best endeavours, surrounded as it is by misinformation and confusion, or submit to Yah’s spirit and know that Tov Mehod means perfect.

The above are the extreme cases, and most of us fall somewhere in the middle, the case for atheism, evolution and hedonism is very strong, this is called temptation.   The spiritual call is less well defined, using Torah as a guide, we have to follow a pathway which leads to the TRUTH that is Yah’s Creation, but first we have to leave the pigsty, the mud (liquid dust) and the filth (the selfishness).

We stagger onto the pathway, still covered in the mud and slime, but as we walk towards Yah, we are met from afar by his servants.   His secants who help us remove the filth from our bodies and garments so by the time we get to the father’s gates we are cleansed; Yah’s spirit is active in us….

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Many regard ‘sin’ as being ‘naughty’ and contravening the ‘rules’ of their society, Yah is much more straightforward, sin is falling short of His standards, in effect disobeying the Abrahamic Torah.

When mankind (Adam) uses his ‘knowledge of good and bad’ to replace Yah’s Knowledge of good and Bad, he sets a standard of behaviour which he can flex his own torah (knowledge of good and bad) to justify.   But in the end he will bump up against Yah’s Creation founded upon Yah’s Knowledge. His sin – using his own knowledge of good and bad – will be exposed

If he is ‘unlucky’ (willful), that will be before the Great White Throne where Yah will require him to receive judgement against His Knowledge and Torah with Satan as his accuser.   If he acknowledges the Law of the Spirit of Life, the woman’s legacy, then there will be no condemnation, Yahushua will be there to put down the Satanic accusations.

Man’s acquired knowledge is the opposite of Yah’s, man looks in awe at his own godship and considers it to be superior, and uses it to oppress cajoul and coerce others.   Man likes to create ‘us and them’ situations; he can pick a trait such as skin colour, and use it to put down other groups of different skin colour, this then satisfies his lust for power and dominance by virtue of his own perceived godship.

This is the same in religions where there are ‘elevated’ ones, expressing their own doctrines as more important than Yah’s truths as revealed in the scripture and accepting the worship of their congregations.

He also taxes others via pleading for donations or making up dietary laws by which he levies ‘food taxes’ on all and sundry.

Yah requires that we humble ourselves, and pray, and seek His face, and turn from our wicked ways.

If we are leaders of congregations and not suppressing our own puny knowledge, then we are as clashing cymbals – preaching our own fictions as facts from a position of arrogance and vanity.

Yah requires that each of us builds our own relationship with Himself, we cannot approach Yah through the auspices of Reverend this or Rabbi that, or even of Saint somebody of somewhere.

We get nothing from bible colleges or Yeshivas – we get everything of value direct from the Torah enscribed heart.

I have to commit myself as a servant of Yah, His Torah must be written upon MY heart, I cannot tag along and sneak through on somebody else’s coat tails….