Do You Really Read The Bible?

12 November 2006

Good Morning and the blessings of our Messiah and God be with you all evermore.

Today in our readings of scriptures we saw several references to reading of Scripture.  But the most poignant reading is from our Gospel lesson today.  In Matthew 22:29 we heard how the Lord himself accuses us of our reading habits, “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.”  Sure his comment was directly spoken to the Pharisees and Sadducees as well as others who were pretending to be Judahites and were spreading a false religion within the very temple of God.  But it was also meant to reach across time and be heard for us now in the end times.

Now many of you will tell me that you read the Bible.  Some of you may even look at the words everyday.  But are you like the Pharisees and Sadducees who our Messiah was speaking of?  Looking at the words only as many do or even more common and dangerous only looking at the paraphrased version of the Scriptures spouted by seemly true prophets.  Come on now don’t fool yourself, because you cannot fool the Lord.  I admit it is so easy to pickup a modern Christian book about prayer, Yeshua, the bible and believe what we see, simply because the word Christian is on the cover.  But that is not knowing the scripture.  Knowing God through his scripture takes work.  Work that many of us are not willing to do to, just to get to know him.  We are to busy with our lives, our jobs, and our money to take the time to learn about what God has been speaking to us over the millennia.

Let me tell you, reading a book of prefabricated prayers, or daily guidance, or spending hours reciting prayers written by others, is not going to make you a true believer.  It does not make you born from above and it does not make you a follower of our Messiah.  Just as the innocently naive Israelites sprinkled amongst the many false Judahites of Judea in Yeshua time you are being lead astray by the disciples of Satan.  You see even Satan believes in the Messiah!  Because he truly knows Yeshua’s power and he knows how to deceive through sending so many false messages at us that we cannot sift through all the chaff.

Lets have a little quiz.  Anyone who has studied the Bible should be able answer this.  “What nationality, or ethnic group or religion was the Apostle Paul?

Many of you may have remembered seeing something in Acts about Paul’s heritage and believe he was a Jew like the Messiah.  But if you believe this you are wrong?  Paul tells us he is an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, so he can not be a “Jew” as is so often wrongly sited in the many false teachings in print today.  Paul tells us in Romans 11:1  “I ask, then: Did God reject his own people? Certainly not! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.” and Philippians 3:5  I was circumcised when I was a week old. I am an Israelite by birth, of the tribe of Benjamin, a pure-blooded Hebrew. As far as keeping the Jewish Law is concerned, I was a Pharisee,”  So Paul was not a Judahite (descendent of Judah) he was a Benjamite.  “So what?” you may ask, “Weren’t they all Jews?”  Paul goes into detail about his heritage for one reason, to separate himself from the false teachings of the Pharisees and their religion of Pharisaism, which they brought to Jerusalem from Babylon.  Paul was an Israelite by birth a Hebrew like Moses.  Paul had turned aside from true faith in God of his ancestors and had adopted a form of Babylonian Idol worship known as Pharisaism, which eventually was guised under the term Jewry.  Now don’t confuse Pharisaism guised under the term Jewry (Jewish) with the Hebrew religion practiced by the decedents of Judah the son of Israel.  These are two different religions both misnomered by the English word Jewish.

Now some of you remembered reading what Paul says in Act 21:39  Paul answered, "I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of an important city.  Please let me speak to the people." (GNB)  And  in Rom 16:11  Paul says, “Greetings to Herodion, a fellow Jew, and to the Christians in the family of Narcissus.” (GNB)  Why the apparent conflict?  It is a paradox of the English translation of the Greek word “Ioudaios”, which means Judean or a resident of Judea in the case of Acts 21:39.  In Romans 16:11 it is a mistranslation all together as the Greek word translated, as Jew is “suggenēs” which means relative or countryman, as so stated in the King James Version.  The English word “Jew” first came into existence in the Year 1775 when the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan used it in "The Rivals”, where it is found in Chapter 2.  The origin for Sheridan word “jew” is the Anglo-French word “iuw”, which comes from the old French word “giu”. “Giu” is first seen in literature around the year 1175 AD, or some 800 to 900 years after the New Testament was first written.  

Paul himself say he was a Benjamite and a pureblooded Israelite (descendent of Israel/Jacob) and he also says he was born in Tarsus.  Tarsus was and still is a city in what is modern day Turkey.  It is within the Assyrian Empire to where the Israelites were driven too by the Assyrians centuries before.  

So what was Paul doing in Jerusalem?  He had been studying the Pharisaism religion that had embedded itself within the Temple of God in Jerusalem.  He had become one of the followers of the snakes and children of snakes that Yeshua tells of us in Matthew 23:33 (GNB).  Paul or Saul as he was known as when he arrived in Jerusalem was one of the chief prosecutors of the followers of the Messiah.  How could an Israelite follow a group of imposters parading around like sons of Judah?  It was easy they had the money, they had the best and most expensive clothing, they had the political/police power, and they had the smooth lies about their righteousness.  They had circumvented God’s law and had replaced it with Satan’s laws, life styles, and contemporary morality that they called holy and still do today.  Everything about these fake Israelites was designed by Satan to be alluring and to appear to be the real law of God.  Even calling on God, but not by his name Yahweh, as the Israelites were instructed to do, was part of the illusion.  Yahweh, the name of God had been replaced by the imposters with various pronouns and it was forbidden utter the name Yahweh aloud.  The vast majority of the people of the region were no longer descendents of Israel/Jacob and had no idea about the true Hebrew religion.  The people of the region only knew what the Pharisees and Sadducees told them.  Judeans who followed Pharisaism of the temple were prohibited from communicating with the Samaritans because as we learned in John 4:12 many of the people living in Samaria where true descendents of Jacob.  It was easy for Paul to be seduced by Pharisaism and join its ranks.

Lets look at another Bible reference, because I want to show you the power of reading and understanding your Scriptures over just looking at them.  In Psalm 22:16 we read “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.”  Yet in the Masoretic text (Pharisaism Old Testament) Psalm 22:16 reads like this, “For dogs have encompassed me; a company of evil-doers have inclosed me; like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet.”  Thus the Pharisees they eliminate a reference to their crucifixion of the Messiah.  But that is not all my brothers and sisters, I want you to see for yourself that the Pharisees tried to prevent us from preserving our vary salvation. In the Masoretic Text by which most English Bibles including the King James are translated from Isaiah 53:11 reads, “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.”  Yet in the Lxx/Septuagint we find the orginal Isaiah 53:11 reads, “the Lord also is pleased to take away from the travail of his soul, to shew him light, and to form him with understanding; to justify the just one who serves many well; and he shall bear their sins.”  Notice the phase “shew him light”, this is a clear and precise reference to Yeshua’s resurrection, without which there is no salvation for any of us.  Yeshua had to fulfill the prophesy about him and if that prophesy is missing in the Scriptures one cannot not compare his life to the prophesy of his life.

We have covered a lot of ground today on the importance to your salvation of understanding Scripture not just looking at it.  Reading the Bible in any version is not easy, it requires a lot of effort and patients to gleam from the verses the truth of our Lord and Savior that has been written their for us today.  Ask any mother and she will tell you that birth is a very laborious ordeal, requiring much effort and work!  How could anyone believe then that “being born from above”[1] or as often misquoted ‘being born again” would not require labor.  It takes work to understand the words of scripture; they don’t just fly into your head.  We need to work at understanding the message God has left for us in all the writings of his true believers and we must learn by trial and error to distinguish the truth as given by God from the falsehood as thrown in our paths by the many false prophets of our time.  1Peter 1:7 sums up the essence of the effort we must put forth just to understand the worldly message God left for us in scripture, “That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:”

The Peace of our Lord be with you evermore. AMEN