Are
You Living God’s Word?
April 1, 2007
Good Morning and Happy Palm Sunday:
In today’s lessons we learned from the Book of Jeremias chapters 7 and 8 about a very stern warning that God (Yahweh) gave Jeremias to tell us, his people then and now. Between the time of Moses, which was around 1500 BC and the time of Jeremias, which was around 550 BC, a thousand years had passed. Whole Kingdoms and empires had come and gone the world was a different place. Over that thousand years people had begun to corrupt the words that Yahweh had spoken to the people and had replaced his word with their traditions and customs. You may ask how can that be. Well in the back of today’s calendar is a copy of the Lord’s Prayer from an English Gospel book from the beginning of the 11th century AD. That is about 1000 years ago. It is next to impossible to read and pronounce never mind understand. If someone was to translate that old English version of the Lord’s Prayer for you, they could say almost anything and how would you know if it was right or wrong? What if they made an honest mistake? Just as one of today’s readings was wrongly identified when it was read. A thousand years later who would know that it was a mistake? This is how easy it is to get off the path of God’s light and go down the path of darkness.
But Yahweh wasn’t going to let the errors, which in this case were purposely introduced to go unidentified. So he sent a prophet Jeremias to the people of the kingdom of Judah to warn them. An example of the nature of this problem can be found if you look in today’s leaflet and you will see that the word Judea is used in the English translation of the book of Jeremias, but the real word should be Judah. The kingdom of Judah and the much later kingdom of Judea are not the same place or people. The country of Judea was formed by the Maccabee Kings long after the time of Jeremias and was made up of peoples of all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. Just as in the time of Jeremias when God (Yahweh) declared that the scribes had used a false pen to copy the books of scriptures, so even today we must be careful to ensure the scriptures we read are accurate to the true word of God (Yahweh).
But didn’t the messiah set all that straight when he was here? Isn’t everything we are told by the religious leaders of today true? In the lesion from 1 Titus chapter 1 we learn that after the resurrection and the departure of the Messiah. There was already misinformation being spread. Not only about the law and the prophets but also about the sayings of the Messiah himself. Paul was warning us today to be careful that the message of the Messiah we were holding on to today was not over time corrupted and changed. Paul knew that those who performed the good deeds of a true believer would teach the true message. Paul wanted us to be wary of the words of the Pharisees, who are referred to here in Paul’s letter as the Jews or Judeans as it was base on pure myths and for their financial and political gain over others.
Yeshua (Jesus) also warned us of the deception that would be put in front of us as true scripture and identified the deceivers as the Pharisees of Jerusalem, the Judeans. They had been living and profiting off the lies they perpetuated to the people as the word of Yahweh. Yeshua reminds us to honor our parents. Yet how many know that this commandment is referring to God (Yahweh)? This is the law we are to follow not the laws of meat offerings etc. The Pharisees, the Judeans of Yeshua day had a vested interested in deceiving future generations because they were of the seed of Satan. They are his offspring his children. They don’t want you to know the truth because then you win and their father looses. Yeshua wants us to know the truth; he wants his followers, who are the children of Adam to be saved. That is why he came here. That is why he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey that Sunday two thousand years ago. He knew he was going to run up against the Pharisees, but he didn’t care. He went there to confront them to vex them so that they would have to make their move and we could see them for who they really are.
You know that most of the English Bibles
in print today are translated from a set of books that was authored by the
Pharisees. That’s right, it
wasn’t written by the Hebrews, or the Israelites the children of Jacob
(Israel), no it was written by the decedents of the same people who had Yeshua
nailed to the cross the Pharisees. There
version of God’s word wasn’t even written until about 1500 AD, yet many of
us follow it without question and without knowing that it was written by the
sons of Satan. The same sons of
Satan that Yeshua warns us about in John 8:44.
In today’s lesson from Jeremias we used the English translation of the
LXX or Septuagint, which is the oldest know version of the Old Testament that we
have available to us today. It
dates from the 3rd century BC and was transcribed into Greek from
original Hebrew texts; it was the Scripture that was read by Yeshua and his
apostles. It is the scripture that
is quoted by the apostles throughout the New Testament.
Now in verse 18 it reads “…that to make cakes to the host (c of
heaven;” which in Greek is στρατιᾷ
τοῦ οὐρανοῦ
(strat-ee'-ah oo-ran-os)' the
word
στρατία
(strat-ee'-ah) being host. Yet
in the English Translations of the Pharisees bible the same phrase is “…to
make cakes to the queen of heaven”. There
sure is a big difference between the “Queen of heaven” and the term “host
of heaven”, especially sense the Greek word for host, στρατία
(strat-ee'-ah), means “celestial
luminaries” or celestial bodies such as the stars, planets, and
constellations.
So
what does all this mean to you as a believer today? It means that you must be on guard, that you must take the
initiative to fully understand what you read and hear.
You must do the research and seek out the truth because if you don’t
you will end up like the people of Jeremias day in Judah following the wrong
laws. You will be following the
laws of the Pharisees and Satan instead of the laws of Yahweh (God).
Now you can’t get away with saying you are to busy and don’t have
time to study God’s word, you can’t say you don’t know how to read Greek
and Hebrew. God doesn’t want to hear those lame excuses.
He has sent us teachers, and prophets, and technology, and communications
media, and every tool you need to hear, study, and know the true word of God
(Yahweh). If you choose to read
those fancy religious books with page after page of useless words, if you choose
to listen to the false preachers who are all dressed up in their expensive suits
in their expensive buildings, if you are just to lazy to hear God for yourself
instead of having someone spoon feed you the easy lies.
Well, then you are turning your back on Yahweh (God) just as the people
of Judah did and your fate will be sealed, just as theirs was.
Yeshua is calling you back to the true
word of God. He gave his life so
that you would be able to hear his plea to you to turn from the way of the
foolish unbeliever and open you heart to his knocking to let him in.
None of us needs to be doomed for eternity but for salvation to be real
for you, you must know what it is God says to you.
You need to know the truth in order to be set free as the savior promised
you. In to know that truth is to know Yeshua with all your heart
and all your mind, in way that is wonderful and beautiful, and more satisfying
then anything else you will ever experience.
Amen