Here’s an excerpt from one teacher in our area who is in to the Hebraic Roots movement…lot’s of people in this area are subscribing to this teaching…This is one of the issues I’m dealing with… Alan

“—I will ask people again, as I believe I did the other day, what has been missing from the church of the Lord Yahshua Mashiach for two thousand years? It has basically been the Messianic Jews. The church as I understand it, was started by them and for over ten years, the church was all Jewish so to speak. It was kosher I guess. Then around the year 325 AD, a move by Constantine and others from Rome and later Constantinople was initiated to metamorphose Messianic Judaism (and that is what the Bible teaches the early church was) into a paganized religious system called Christianity…”

The excerpt went on for another 2 paragraphs, but the first establishes enough of the point.

Hello my friend, it’s so good to hear from you.

You know, I can understand why people subscribe to this kind of stuff, and I suspect it’s simply because of the sense of failure in the organized church of today. I mean, lots and lots of people want to be given a simplistic word-of-the-Lord type solution to the obvious lack of a real connection to the real God. This Hebraic Roots thing provides a heavy sense of validation simply because it suggests a missing Biblically-oriented piece of the puzzle. But the truth of the matter is that it only makes sense within the realm of organized religion!

You know what I’m saying here? I mean that if people didn’t have a long history of a failed organization called Christianity it would only sound like the most obvious attempt at bringing people back under the very law that could not deliver the Jews in the first place. There is no doubt that the church from the time of Constantine became a paganized version of what it was before that — and even then the organization was in various degrees of corruption — but its failure only proves that man’s attempts to formulate the work of God on the earth can only be bound for failure.

Just remember that it took a maxed-out Jew to really declare the deficiency in a Jewish church in the first place. That would be Paul, for he came to miraculously understand that there was NO Jew and NO Gentile, but ONLY THE NEW CREATION IN CHRIST. Now, we get these enlightened teachers to demand that our problems came about because we abandoned the Jewishness of the church. What a load of BS! What, do these men think the Jews had better success at the morality they now hope to bring about by returning to the former failures?

The ONLY church that was started by the Jews was the religious formulation that only gravitated back toward a total rejection of Christ’s sacrifice and into a renewed activity of animal sacrifices. The thing that has been missing from “the church of the Lord Yahshua Mashiach” has been Christ himself. The very concept of the Messianic Jew is built upon the same division that has plagued man at his every turn! There is NO Jew, there is NO non-Jew, there is only Christ, the new creation. It was contention in the beginning that caused one to cast out another, it was contention in days of the church that has had one group try to set itself up as being the more superior over another. In the same way that non-Jews try to insist THEIR form of worship is superior, so do Jews — and the contempt it breeds can only cause more division — not union. It’s definitely not the missing piece!!

It was the Messianic Movement that forced Paul’s pen to issue a scathing rebuke in the form of a letter to the Galatians, as well as in probably all his other letters. He fought the Hebraic Roots stuff at every turn — and he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews! The Hebraic Roots movement was the downfall of the HEBREWS, as it only hardened their resolve to cling to the letter and not to the Spirit. Paul warned the Hebrews AND Gentiles to stand firm in their freedom in Christ AGAINST the bondage of what was being preached by the Messianic Jews.

Besides, you know what Paul thought of his own roots, right? Camel flops. The same goes for all of us, for WHATEVER we thought was our real life has become nothing because only in Christ is our real life.

The bottom line, as I see it stated in this article, is that INFORMATION becomes the power of God to salvation. Wow, how fortunate we are to have the Holy Spirit so we can be reminded that we need to delete certain information! Give me a break. Is this what God sent His Spirit into our hearts for? Sounds like a perversion of the Word-of-God they profess to hold so dear.

Okay, you got me going now!! Haha!

Love, Jim

Jim, Thanks for getting reved up! Below is another excerpt for your reading enjoyment. I’m under the faucet!!! Help!!!! Alan

“Galatians is probably one of the most misunderstood letters of Paul that there is. It gives one that doesn’t understand the Torah the impression that Paul was saying that under grace, there is no law to answer to. Where the church has missed it is that under the works of the law God can not legally justify anyone to receive the born again experience of life (zoe). If I look across North America I see a lawless church as a whole. A lawless church is one that does not practice the law or Torah. She has been duped into believing exactly what Paul was so afraid of. She has come to believe that her conduct did not matter anymore because grace came in and as a result grace replaced the law. So the “Thou Shalt Not’s of the Torah became the “Thou Should Not’s” of grace. With that teaching came also the companion teaching to that lie which is; because grace has replaced the law, then the gentiles church has replaced the Jews. Folks, I believe without a shadow of a doubt that that teaching is not from God but Satan. I really and truly sit here today and hope and pray that I am wrong. But the proof is in the pudding so to speak.”

So, are you letting these boys get to you? Haha! Hey, I remember seeing you get revved up to the point that you could easily dismiss this baloney! And it is exactly that. While this guy tries to suggest that the church has gone the way of lawlessness because of grace, the truth is that the church has gone the way of lawlessness because it has taken grace and turned it into something else — LAW — which fits exactly what Paul had declared.

She has been duped into believing exactly what Paul was so afraid of.

Very ironic, don’t you think? The guy can make a correct statement and yet it is for exactly the opposite reason!! After all, who were the lawless ones Jesus, Paul, James, Jude and Peter wrote about? Yeah, it was those who desired to preach law. They came declaring freedom, and yet their freedom was merely another form of the inability of following a law (any law) that those who preached could not fulfill themselves.

There is no doubt the church (the denominational, structured organization — that is) has mixed law and grace so that to the hard-core Torah-based lawman it would appear that grace is the problem. Heck, the church has forsaken grace a long, long time ago, and that should be incredibly evident in just about everything it says.

Just consider why it is this guy says Galatians is so misunderstood. He believes the church should be practicing the Torah. But what did Paul say about those supposed sons of Abraham? They think the Law can justify them in any way. This habit of dividing up the salvation experience so that it can be said that — in this way — law cannot save you is a cloak by which those who justify themselves by the law deceive both themselves and those who listen to them. The justification Paul wrote about in Galatians had to do with everyday living, and he used Peter’s silent intimidation of the Gentiles as an example.

So the “Thou Shalt Not’s of the Torah became the “Thou Should Not’s” of grace.

Once again, the irony is amazing. The Thou-Shalt-Nots of the Law had been immediately turned into Thou-Should-Nots — even by the Jews. Isn’t that what Jesus hit them on time and time again? They just did it by making legal loopholes. Jesus told the Pharisees that by their traditions they had invalidated the Law of God. It hadn’t been explained away by grace but by LAW.

Paul says it many different ways, but where there is law there is also wrath. And this guy still thinks we should be answering to something that can only bring wrath — and not life? Living by the law is described as BONDAGE, and NOT of faith:

However, the Law is not of faith; on the contrary, “HE WHO PRACTICES THEM SHALL LIVE BY THEM.” Galatians 3:12

So, he thinks we should practice the law, the Torah? He who practices them shall live by them. This is the condemnation Christ came to save them from!! Yeah, yeah, I know he has this covered by that typical approach (the very same one held by most of these lawless churches) of dividing salvation up so that it can be demanded that one cannot get IN (get born again, get saved, etc) by practicing the works of the law, but that AFTER one gets sav-ed then they are supposed to practice it. Too bad, because those who practice the law have subjected themselves back under its condemnation, where the flesh has a heyday.

Don’t let these boys get to you, okay? Don’t let them intimidate you so that it appears they really understand what they are saying. They don’t, and their ignorance is showing big time!

Love, Jim