"Coming Out"

I am sure the title of my post has some of you holding your breath. Wondering what in the world I am going to say. I thought this title best described my decision to tell friends and family about the change in some of my beliefs. I have always loved the Messiah and believe He died on the cross for my sins, rose on the third day and ascended into Heaven and will one day return again! These core beliefs have not changed and never will. I will be sharing these changes with you over several posts.

In my search for authentic living, the way the Messiah intended His followers to live, I discovered a wealth of information that I had never known before. I want to share what I have learned with you and share my heart. I know it may not be popular, but the Messiah was not popular. My desire is just to share my heart, share my adopted Jewish heritage and then pray that you would seek God (YHWH) with all your heart and keep an open heart to what He might be trying to tell you.

A dear friend gave me a wonderful book called, "Restoration: Returning the Torah of God to the Disciples of Jesus". I am so grateful for her kindness and generosity in giving me that book. I gleaned so much from that book that I will be sharing with you in this post. I also have studied the Scriptures with a new founded fervor and a deep hunger to know who my Messiah really is. YHWH has opened my eyes in so many ways, in ways only He can do and I have been so blessed. I hope what I share with you is as much of a blessing to you as it was to me.

We Gentile Christians have in some ways misunderstood and misapplied the Gospel because we have been ignorant of the Jewish origin and Torah context of the Gospel. The Jewish people have lived in exile since the age of the Apostles. So has the Gospel. But the time is nigh for the exile to come to an end. Moses foresaw a time of restoration. He foresaw a time when the people of Israel would return from exile and turn back to the commandments of God. "And you shall again obey the Lord, and observe all His commandments which I commanded you today" Deut 30:8.

New Testament scholars are returning the Gospel to its Torah context and reconnecting it with its Jewish origins. In the days of the Apostles, Christianity was not yet a separate religion from Judaism. An honest reading of the NT from a biblical-Jewish perspective makes it clear that the first century church never thought of herself as separate and excluded from Judaism. Rather, she considered herself as part of the whole of Israel. She never imagined herself as replacing Judaism. She might have conceived of herself as a reform within Judaism, but not as a separate entity. Jesus was actually a Jewish teacher of Torah (first 5 books of the OT). His Hebrew name - that is, His real name - was Yeshua. He kept the Torah, taught the Torah, and lived by the Torah. He taught His disciples to keep the Torah in imitation of Him. He argued with teachers of other sects of Judaism. He denounced the Sadducees, rebuked the Pharisees and brought correction to errant teachings, but He did not institute a new religion, nor did He cancel the Torah. Instead, He sought to bring restoration to the ancient faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. His followers, the Apostles and the believers, also remained within the parameters of normative, first-century Jewish expression. They met daily in the Temple. They congregated in synagogues. They proclaimed the Scriptures of Israel. They kept the Biblical festivals, the Sabbaths, the dietary laws and the whole of Torah as best as they were able. When non-Jews began to enter the faith through the ministry of Paul of Tarsus, they too congregated in synagogues and embraced the standards of biblical Judaism. They understood themselves as "grafted in" to Israel and made citizens of the larger "commonwealth of Israel".

History then began to change things. The Jewish war gave rise to the politics of anti-Semitism. Emperor Vespasian followed up the Jewish War by imposing a heavy, punitive annual tax upon all Jewish households in the empire. He determined Jewish households as those who worshipped after the Jewish manner. With the addition of the Fiscus Judaicus tax, Gentile believers had financial, political and cultural incentives to distance themselves from Judaism. By the time second century began, anti-Jewish sentiment was SO high in the church that most non-Jews no longer wanted to be identified with Jews at all. Theologically, the church leaders decided that the Christian church had replaced the Jews as the true Israel of God. They decided that they were now the true people of God, and that Jews were consigned to damnation and everlasting cursedness from God. By the time Constantine converted to Christianity and declared it the official state religion, most of the Jewish elements were gone. Constantine made the divorce from Judaism final with the Council of Nicea (325 CE). His official policy regarding Torah observance is expressed in his words: "Let us have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish rabble." The Council of Antioch (341 CE) prohibited Christians from celebrating Passover with the Jews, while the Council of Laodicea (363 CE) forbade Christians from observing the biblical Sabbath.

As time went on, and the Dark Ages began, the Christian church turned violent toward the Jewish people. Synagogues and holy books were burned, whole communities were slaughtered. Jewish men and women were tortured - all in the name of Christ. The pages of church history are stained red with the spilled blood of the Jewish people. Then along came the Reformation. What the various Protestant reformers have failed to recognize about the first-century church is that she was Jewish. Yeshua, the disciples, the first believers, the worship system, the Scriptures, the interpretation of the Scriptures, the teaching, the vernacular and even the very concepts of faith and grace, Messiah and god were all patently Jewish. Any attempt at church reformation, ant attempt to return to the original NT church falls short as long as it refuses to acknowledge the essential Jewishness of our faith.

The modern-day Jewish roots movement is born out of an intersection of things. The Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls all combined to spark a complete renaissance in the way that early Christianity is studied and understood.


After reading about my Messiah and His religion.. I realized that I needed to go back to my Jewish roots. I was adopted into His family and I was ignoring His commands to me, His Torah. I now consider myself a TOFY - A Torah Observant Follower of Yeshua. In my next post I would like to share with you what the Torah is and how it applies to us today. I had never really studied the Old Testament, simply because it was "old" - old news, old laws.. nothing in there applied to me I was taught.. oh well except for the Ten Commandments. But anyway, the more I studied the more I realized that not only was the OT for me, but it was relevant for everyone. When Yeshua was on the earth and He taught from the Scriptures and He taught us to obey His laws and His commands, He was teaching us from the OT. The NT did not begin to get compiled until 90AD and some of the letters from the Apostles did not get added until two hundred years after their death. This made me look at things in a new way, a new light.