Fracturing the Faith …. Vol. 1

Fracturing the Faith …. Vol. 1

Believing God …. And insomnia.

These questions entered my teenage brain for the hundredth, maybe even the thousandth time.

Do you believe everything you say you believe?

What do you believe, exactly?

Are you just following the crowd or your own belief?

Why are these things done this way?

Is this the right way?

My questioning of faith and religion finally came to a climax and I fell off the religious path, as do many teens.  While I held onto belief in God the Creator, Jesus the Messiah and the Holy Spirit, I did not attend church for more than a decade. In my mid-twenties I reentered the church and remained there for the next two decades. I stopped reading scripture and began to earnestly study it.  I even attended seminary although I did not complete it. Ultimately, I found myself revisiting the questions of my youth, consumed by the need to answer them.

Some time later, about 3:00 a.m. each night, I would awaken with no hope of going back to sleep. Sometimes I would dress and go outside to stare at the deep, dark sky, talk to God, pray and think.

After two weeks of frustration, lack of sleep, and the constant whirlwind inside my head, my early mornings became more like hostage negotiation: desiring something from God that I believed he would not give up. I shouted at the sky, “What do you want from me!” Then, I heard it: “Shut up and listen you stubborn man!” What I heard next was so simple and yet so profound, I felt foolish and yet so blessed. “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God.” In the frigid morning air I kept saying that over and over again.

Then it came into focus: the Word is Jesus, Jesus is the Word, Jesus was with God, Jesus is God. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. And, Jesus own words, “if you have seen me you have seen the Father”. The Word is the Scriptures, the set apart writings. The Scriptures were with God, and the Scriptures became flesh. I do not worship a book. I worship the author (and perfecter) of my faith.  God made it clear that the answers I sought were already provided in the Bible. To know who He is and what He wants, I had only to search His Word.

I was being awaken by God himself to set the ground rules for my future by settling my perceived quandaries so I could move forward as He led.

What is to follow is my discovery of His-Story:  the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob-Israel. The information I will share under the following headings may be already known to you but I hope you will find new revelations of our God and His plan, as I have.

 

1. The House of Israel and the salvation of Jesus the Messiah.
2. The realization of the Creator of the universe is YHWH Elohim and his name was changed by the translators to the generic, God or Lord.
3. The Messiah, Yeshua, was translated as Jesus by the Greeks.
4. The claim to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is to become a sojourner (and adopted) with the House of Israel.
5. The Bible is a book written by Hebrew writers, about their God who protected a Hebrew nation, through whom the world would be shown grace and mercy through a Hebrew savior. The term Hebrew means “to cross over”. We cross over from death to life in Messiah.
6. The Adversary (Satan) has used history to pervert and delude people from the truth.
7. Ephesians 6 is a direct result of Genesis 6
8. Religions are the result of the Genesis 6
9. Religions are the tools of the Adversary and [deceiving?] spirits in Ephesians 6
10. “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Is not just a cliché. That Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 and Hebrews 1:3 show without a doubt that dispensational thinking is a lie from Satan designed to confuse and confound belief in YHWH.

 

Some of these points may be unsettling to you, even angering, but bear with me as I unravel the thread of deception with which we have all been blinded and the joy of YHWH’s truth, preserved for us all these centuries.