Unwritten Christian Dogma

How Christians Invent Law to Defend Errant

Tradition, and How Apostolic Record Exposes

the Pattern

Bottom line up front:

The B’rit Chadashah gives no positive warrant for a historically identifiable period in which post-apostolic Christianity may be presumed doctrinally faithful. In fact, it gives positive evidence against making that presumption.

The apostolic writings explicitly document doctrinal corruption, rival teachers, false apostles, internal rebellion, and resistance to apostolic authority while the apostles themselves were still alive. Scripture therefore provides no protected post-apostolic interval—not one generation, one century, or several centuries—during which later ecclesiastical tradition may simply be presumed faithful.

This does not prove that every post-apostolic teacher or assembly departed from the faith, but it does establish the narrower and more consequential proposition that no post-apostolic tradition can authenticate itself merely by institutional continuity or a claimed chain of succession. The New Testament canon itself places the reliability of such transmission in question while the first apostolic generation still lived.

Corruption Was Already Present During the Apostolic Age

The B’rit Chadashah does not portray apostasy as a remote development awaiting some later age. Sha’ul writes:

“For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work…”
— 2 Thessalonians 2:7

The Greek expression is mystērion tēs anomias. Anomia denotes lawlessness, violation of law, or disregard for law. Whether Sha’ul specifically anticipates the later antinomian tendencies of Christianity requires further demonstration, but these heresies did arise and the basic chronological statement is unambiguous: the mystery of lawlessness was already operating during Sha’ul’s lifetime.

The same problem appears throughout the apostolic writings. Rival gospels were already being preached (Galatians 1:6–9). False apostles were already presenting themselves as apostles of Mashiach (2 Corinthians 11:13–15). People were already distorting Sha’ul’s writings (2 Peter 3:15–16). Yahuchanon  also wrote that “many antichrists have appeared” and that some had already departed from the apostolic community (1 John 2:18–19).

Consequently, there is no historically uncontested period of Christianity even within the canonical period itself. The struggle between apostolic teaching and competing religious claims begins before our Bibles end. If, then, someone points to an “early church belief,” we must first ask how we could ever test its validity, which includes the necessarily non-dispositive parallel question: what were the other practices of the time?

Corruption Would Arise From Within Apostolic Leadership

Sha’ul’s warning to the elders of Ephesus is particularly destructive to any presumption of reliable institutional succession:

“I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.”
— Acts 20:29–30

The force of “from among your own selves” should not be understated. Sha’ul is addressing the elders of an apostolically established assembly. Acts 20:28 even describes these men as overseers whom the Ruach Ha’Qodesh had placed over the flock. Consider the horrifying meaning of this:

Sha’ul believes that men appointed as leaders by the Ruach Ha’Qodesh could subsequently fall away and speak perverse things.

This is not foreign to the Tanakh, so between Sha’ul’s canon validity and the precedence in Tanakh, we must all consider that the Ruach does not prevent sin in any given individual; therefore, legitimate appointment, apostolic proximity, ecclesial office, and participation in an apostolically established assembly do not guarantee faithful transmission, as, by extension, a spirit-led church could still collectively fall away. Sha’ul explicitly predicts that distortion will arise from within this very leadership population.

The warning therefore breaks the inference of the institutional churches, namely that legitimate apostolic appointment begets proper institutional succession, leading to reliable doctrinal transmission through time.

No speculative reconstruction of later church history is necessary to establish this problem. Sha’ul himself establishes it before the post-apostolic age begins. The burden of proof for the claim of proper succession therefore is truly upon the churches that claim succession, and to claim succession as doctrinal validity is circular, so they must argue everything afresh from scriptures alone.

The Apostolic Veto Was Already Being Resisted

Yahuchanon provides an even more concrete example in 3 John:

“I wrote something to the church; but Diotrephes, who loves to be first among them, does not accept what we say.”
— 3 John 9

Diotrephes was not merely holding a private disagreement. He possessed sufficient ecclesial influence to refuse those approved by Yahuchanon and to expel from the assembly those who received them (3 John 9–10).

Thus, while a living apostle remained available, an ecclesial authority was already capable of resisting that apostle and institutionally enforcing the rebellion.

This is critically important to the problem of succession. The danger was not merely that a teacher living five centuries after the apostles might misunderstand them. A Christian leader could resist a living apostle while the apostle was still available to contradict him.

The reliability problem therefore exists at generation zero.

There Exists No Biblical Promise of Unconditional Institutional Preservation of the Faith

Yahushua warns of false messiahs and false prophets capable of producing extraordinary deception (Matthew 24:24). Revelation likewise presents actual assemblies as subject to judgment rather than unconditional preservation.

To Ephesus Yahushua warns:

“Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and I will remove your lampstand from its place—unless you repent.”
— Revelation 2:5

Whatever the precise consequences of removing a lampstand, however visible this might be in history, the warning is incompatible with an unconditional guarantee that an existing ecclesial institution must remain a legitimate representative of Mashiach merely because it once was one; and yet, this warning does exist, which means that at least some churches can lose their lampstands and perhaps have. As far as we know, the removal of the lampstand does not remove the congregation in his name from the picture.

An apostolically established assembly can fall, and they did.

An apostolically appointed leader can become a wolf, and that happened.

A church officer can reject a living apostle, as we know from Yahuchanon’s records.

False apostles can operate while true apostles remain alive, the occurrence of which is canon.

The mystery of lawlessness operated concurrently with the eye-witness apostolic ministry.

The canonical evidence therefore points toward continual ecclesial peril rather than presumptive ecclesial preservation. Consequently, any assumption that a church could never lose its lampstand is a rejection of scripture, even the words of our Lord.

Scripture Provides No Protected Post-Apostolic Interval

Scripture never establishes a period following the apostles during which ecclesiastical transmission is guaranteed to remain faithful. There is no prophecy establishing fifty years, one hundred years, three hundred years, or any other interval of protected doctrinal continuity.

The approximate chronology instead places the warnings extraordinarily early, and as stated above, the apostolic witness places the lack of protection as being present and imminent in its coming overwhelm.

Yahushua’s crucifixion is commonly dated approximately AD 30–33. Sha’ul’s major letters belong primarily to approximately the AD 50s–60s. Acts places his warning to the Ephesian elders during his active ministry, conventionally around the late AD 50s. Kepha and Sha’ul are traditionally associated with deaths during the AD 60s. Yahuchanon is conventionally associated with the final decades of the first century, with Revelation frequently dated either before AD 70 or around AD 90–96 depending upon the chronology adopted.

The exact dates are not necessary to the argument. Even using broad conventional ranges, the canonical period itself already contains the corruption.

There is therefore no Scripturally established chronological firewall such as:

AD 30–100: apostolic purity
AD 100–300: reliable immediate transmission
AD 300 onward: possible corruption

Scripture gives no such sequence.

Instead, before the first century has ended, the canonical evidence already contains false apostles, rival gospels, distorted apostolic writings, internal wolves, many antichrists, rejection of a living apostle, and the mystery of lawlessness already at work.

The Death of the Apostles Changes the Epistemic Environment

The disappearance of the apostles nevertheless creates a decisive change. While Sha’ul lives, a disputed interpretation of Sha’ul can theoretically be submitted to Sha’ul. While Yahuchanon lives, a claimant who says, “Yahuchanon taught this,” can theoretically be contradicted by Yahuchanon. The apostles themselves function as a living veto against claims falsely attributed to them. Once they died, that form of adjudication disappeared.

One teacher may then claim, “Yahuchanon taught my teacher this.”

Another may answer, “My teacher received something different from Yahuchanon.”

Neither can produce Yahuchanon.

The surviving apostolic writings remain available as evidence, but the living eyewitness capable of definitively rejecting a fraudulent attribution is gone. Further, this is worse when competing claims involve different teachers, even in the immediate generation following the apostles.

For example, Polycarp and Anicetus of Rome maintained different Paschal observances. Irenaeus records that Polycarp would not abandon his practice because he had always observed it with Yahuchanon and other apostles with whom he had associated, whereas Anicetus maintained the practice received from the Roman presbyters who preceded him. Iraneus’ account fails to specify exactly what Polycarp observed with Yahuchanon, but Eusebius places the dispute within the larger controversy over the Asian tradition of an Aviv 14 Paschal observance and later records Polycrates of Ephesus explicitly identifying Yahuchanon, Polycarp, and the Asian tradition with observance of the fourteenth day, the exact reckoning of which is not explicitly given although the default assumption is typically that the Jewish lunisolar reckoning was authoritative. The historical evidence therefore strongly associates Polycarp with the Jewish Aviv 14 practice without preserving from Polycarp himself either an explicit statement of the date or the calendrical method by which it was determined.

Meanwhile, Rome maintained the emergent practice that the Paschal celebration should occur on Sunday. Whatever rationale was offered for that practice, Sunday cannot represent the weekday upon which Yahushua held the supper preceding his crucifixion; it necessarily preserves a different calendrical criterion or an admission of shifting the meaning of the celebration from the Mosaic installment of perpetual Passover Remembrance to the Resurrection and 8th Day motif. Yahuchanon and Yahushua, at minimum, inherited the scriptural command identifying Pesach by the fourteenth day:

“In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at twilight is Yahuwah’s Passover.”

– Exodus 12:6; Leviticus 23:5; Numbers 9:2–5

Of course, of further dispute is how that day was kept, as careful reading the gospels shows a calendar dispute, an issue that will not be explored here given its scale.

Nevertheless, both practices therefore carried claims of inherited authority within roughly a generation of the Apostles. Polycarp appealed to what he had personally observed with Yahuchanon and other apostles, while Anicetus appealed to the inherited practice of the Roman presbyters. Once the apostles themselves were unavailable to adjudicate between such competing claims, succession could preserve a claim of apostolic origin, but neither side had means to prove its claim merely by appealing to succession unless both agreed to appeal to the Scriptures.

This is precisely why Polycarp is historically valuable while still being epistemically different from Yahuchanon. Polycarp’s proximity to Yahuchanon makes his testimony significant evidence, but it does not make Polycarp another Yahuchanon. Once the dispute becomes a contest between claims about what an apostle transmitted, rather than adjudication by the apostle himself, the nature of the evidence has changed; and more importantly, the nature of authority within the faith has changed.

The Restrainer as Living Apostolic Authority

This circumstance makes the identity of the restrainer in 2 Thessalonians 2 particularly significant, and Sha’ul nearly provides the identity of the restrainer to us by association. Sha’ul describes two things existing simultaneously:

The mystery of lawlessness is already operating.

Someone or something is presently restraining it.

The Greek text refers to to katechon and ho katechōn — that which restrains and the one who restrains — and says that the restraining party remains until being “out of the midst” (2 Thessalonians 2:6–7).

The passage does not explicitly identify the restrainer. Consequently, identifying the restrainer with apostolic authority should not be treated as established merely from the vocabulary. However, whatever is claimed to be the restrainer must compete with this clear association with a force that does have significant restraining effect upon doctrine: the apostles themselves.

The living apostolic authority is an unusually strong candidate because it corresponds to a function explicitly documented elsewhere in the B’rit Chadashah. To review,

1)      False teaching already exists.

2)      The apostles presently oppose and correct it.

3)      The apostles warn of its expansion following their departure.

4)      The apostles eventually disappear through death and martyrdom.

5)      Direct first-order adjudication becomes impossible.

Acts 20 is particularly striking in this respect because Sha’ul himself connects his departure with the subsequent rise of wolves from within the existing leadership.

“Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them.”

If the restrainer is the corporate living apostolic witness, its removal requires no otherwise unmentioned event thousands of years later. Mortality, martyrdom, exile, and the progressive disappearance of the apostolic generation provide the mechanism of that removal, and the current lack of clear deference to a proper interpretive authority is a clear and exigent problem.

The Problem of Apostolic Succession

Once the living apostolic veto disappears, claimed succession becomes an evidentiary problem rather than its own solution.

A later institution may argue:

“Our doctrine is correct because it was transmitted through the authorized successors of the apostles.”

The necessary question is, “How can the reliability of that transmission be established?”

If the answer ultimately becomes, “Because the authorized successors testify that their transmission is reliable,” the argument is circular.

This circularity would be less problematic if Scripture positively guaranteed the reliability of the succession. But canonical evidence does the opposite: it explicitly warns that apostolically connected leaders and communities can generate distortion. Therefore, an asserted pedigree cannot authenticate itself. If anything reliance on the pedigree shows fault in the transmission of the knowledge of perpetual doctrinal peril – they have invoked precisely what the apostles showed could be guaranteed, which means they disagree with the apostles, demonstrating a faith contrary to that received by the eye witnesses of Christ.

This does not make historical tradition worthless, as historical testimony remains evidence. Early witnesses may provide extremely valuable information about beliefs, practices, manuscripts, disputes, and claimed apostolic memories. However, the best use of that evidence is to support precisely what the apostles feared: apostasy.

What history cannot legitimately provide, and what its interpretation cannot rest upon, is the automatic presumption that early, continuous, dominant, episcopal practices are valid. What history does provide is variance of those practices.

Scripture as the External Standard

An external standard is therefore necessary to adjudicate competing claims of apostolic continuity. Thankfully, the Torah already establishes the governing principle with anticipation of its need. Deuteronomy 4:2 prohibits adding to or subtracting from Yahuwah’s commandments, and Deuteronomy 13 goes further by subordinating even an apparently authenticated prophet to previously revealed covenantal truth, as signs and religious authority do not authorize departure from what Yahuwah has already commanded.

The direction of authority is therefore that prior revelation tests a subsequent teacher, rather than the retcon model where the subsequent teacher can re-interpret prior revelation.

This does not prohibit explanation, inference, lexical studies, or legitimate theological reasoning. A later interpretation is not automatically false merely because it is subsequent in history to the writings themselves. The problem arises when “doctrinal development” authorizes what prior revelation forbids, forbids what prior revelation authorizes, alters the covenantal standard, or makes the later institution authoritative over the revelation by which that institution must itself be tested.

Under Scriptural Collimation, apostolic succession must therefore be tested by the apostolic deposit rather than the apostolic deposit being interpreted authoritatively through a succession whose reliability is the disputed proposition.

The Transmission Problem Compounds With Time

Nineteen complete centuries have passed since the last apostles died.If a teaching-leading generation is modeled loosely at approximately 20–30 years, representing the age range of pastoral-instructive onset and the tenure of an elder at an assembly, this represents roughly 60–100 successive teaching generations. A 20-year interval produces approximately 95 generations across 1,900 years; a 25-year interval approximately 76; a 30-year interval approximately 63.

These numbers should not be mistaken for perfect chains in which every doctrine passed through exactly that many individual teachers. Institutions preserve written records, and transmission is far more complicated than a children's game of telephone. The numerical illustration nevertheless exposes the epistemic problem in a way we can all understand: a 1-percent error copied 100 times gives a 63-percent error (1 − .99100 ≈ .634).

If the reliability of the transmission mechanism were guaranteed at its beginning, longevity might demonstrate remarkable preservation, but Scripture tells the reader that the mechanism was already contested at its beginning. The problem therefore does not originate at transmission number sixty, seventy, or ninety. It exists at transmission number one, and the errors we see in that generation are not slight.

Only One Method Remains

Nothing in this argument proves that every post-apostolic Christian community failed, that every early Christian writer was unreliable, or that no apostolic teaching survived through historical tradition. The conclusion is narrower but far more severe:

Scripture provides no warrant for presuming that any post-apostolic ecclesial tradition remained faithful merely because it survived, became dominant, possessed bishops, claimed apostolic succession, or accumulated longevity.

The apostolic writings themselves document corruption during the apostolic period. Sha’ul predicts wolves arising from among apostolically established elders. Yahuchanon documents an ecclesial authority already rejecting a living apostle. False apostles and rival gospels were already active while the temple stood and operated. The mystery of lawlessness was already at work before major doctrinal disputes were settled into well-cemented “orthodox” practice. Yahushua threatens existing assemblies with removal of their lampstands in his revelation to Yahuchanon, meaning that we should not expect end times churches – and there is explicit eschatological mention in those letters – to remain faithful; we simply do not know the exact criteria for their removal, nor do we know the extent of his forbearance so that, were we to clearly identify such a removal, we might look back and see the onset of the disqualifying error.

Consequently, there is no Scripturally guaranteed “pure interval” following the apostles from which an unquestioned tradition can simply be inherited. Historical tradition remains a witness, but it cannot become its own court of final appeal. The surviving apostolic and prophetic deposit must judge the claimed succession, because the claimed succession is itself one of the things Scripture places under suspicion.

The question is not how ancient a tradition is. The question is why the hundredth transmission should be trusted when Scripture tells us that the first transmission was already contested. To presume the reliability of the institution despite that warning is to place faith in the institution first and then subject the interpretation of the very writings that warn against such confidence to the institution whose reliability is in question.

The apostles left precisely what their successors could not: writings carrying the testimony of the generation whose authority is not dependent upon a later ecclesiastical pedigree. If the apostles themselves warned that wolves would arise from their own elders, documented resistance from within their own assemblies, and subjected those assemblies to the possibility of rejection, then their writings must be permitted to judge every institution claiming descent from them. The proper response to their warning is therefore not greater confidence in an ancient chain, but rather a greater suspicion of every ancient or modern system wherever it conflicts with the apostolic and prophetic deposit. Otherwise, the very institutions whose failure the apostles foresaw are permitted to determine what the apostles meant when they warned of that failure – another circular authority claim, another fallacy, ultimately another appeal to faith in men as though faith in them were indistinguishable from faith in God.

The safer course, given the constant appeals and references to Tanakh by the Apostles, is clearly to appeal to Tanakh first, then the words of the Apostles as guides, and then to take no other man’s word for what The Ruach ensured was preserved for the Saints.

The faith, after all, was “once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3). Whatever legitimately follows the apostolic generation must therefore preserve that faith; if a subsequent tradition alters what was handed down, its antiquity, continuity, or pedigree cannot transform the alteration into apostolic faith. A faith that changes after the apostolic witness is, by definition, not identical to the faith once delivered.  

דבק — Dabaq

A Field Guide to Marital Reality

In chapter 19 of the Gospel According to Matithiyahu, Yahushua departs from the Galilee and enters Judea, which is ruled by Herod Antipas under Pontius Pilate. Yahuchanon the Immerser had been killed for publicly condemning Herod’s unlawful marriage to Herodias, and there now exists precedence for a political trap. If the Pharisees ask Yahushua to constructively condemn Herod’s marriage to Herodias in the public eye, they can expect Herod to move against Yahushua. Great crowds are following him, and he was teaching as he usually did.

So, the Pharisees approach Yahushua in front of the crowds and ask, “Is it lawful for a man to separate from his woman for any reason at all?”

This was not asked in Torah vacuum, either. By the first century, Jewish discussion surrounding Deuteronomy 24:1’s “uncleanness” qualifier for the divorce (“because he has found in her, ‘ervat devar’”) was under serious debate. The House of Shammai interpreted the phrase narrowly, limiting the qualifying reasons to cases of sexual immorality only. In contrast, the House of Hillel applied a broad interpretation, leading to what is now called the “burnt toast” divorce (“spoiling his dish” per Mishnah Gittin 9:10). The question was asking him to weigh in on an established, public controversy with the ulterior possibility of him offending Herod (Josephus, Antiquities 4.253).

‘Ervah’ is the key phrase, and this has something to do with sexual misconduct or something proximal.

Note this upcoming drift: the then-unborn Rabbi Akiva (c.50-135 A.D.) eventually says, “He may divorce her even if he [merely has] found another woman who is better-looking than her.” Divorce was growing continually more permissive (sound familiar?) in the Second Temple period. Akiva was focusing on the line “finds no favor in his eyes,” and using that as justification. This naturally arises from considering motivations and methods. Regardless as to whether this was exactly Akiva’s motivation, constructively, if a man can simply get upset with a woman, that burden is so low and commonly encountered that a perceived opportunity with a more attractive woman can cause a man to provide that minimal, unjust cause – or fabricate an accusation, if he might be believed improperly – by which he can discard the former for the new.

Josephus himself practiced the new permissive law, writing that being displeased with her behavior is sufficient justification. Of course, if everything is justification, no justification is actually required. That’s the controversy. It was by no means a fringe idea.

It is prudent to point out that neither Hillel nor Shammai were concerned about another woman, whereas Akiva would be. Akiva’s allowance cuts against the command to keep marital duties intact upon the taking of a second wife. A lawyeristic way to circumvent this would be for a man to invoke Hillel or Shammai to first justify the separation, then marry the woman who has caught his eye. This still ends with duties owed to the first woman being improperly denied. This upcoming ruling by Akiva is therefore the most complete and precise target of Jesus’ clarification of marriage law in Matthew 19. What God has joined, a superior beauty, a lack of affection, a ruined meal, or common household strife does not authorize a man to separate.

The resulting controversy from Akiva’s position is that “finds no favor” is used to override the need to determine proper cause (ervat devar), which means that ervar devar is treated as mere surplusage in the statute. Such a move is inexcusable, and the progressive debate itself strongly suggests that this was not the original interpretation of the statute and there is no compelling reason why that burden of justification should cease to control. If mere preference can overrule a burden of justification, there is no burden of justification at all.

This brings us back to the root of the question: (rephrased) “Can a man lawfully separate from his wife for any reason – or no reason – whatsoever?” The expected range of replies ranges from:

Minimal: No desire to keep the woman (motivation to invoke the nominal)

Nominal: She is displeasing to the man (Hlllel)

Maximal: She must commit adultery or something similarly grave (Shammai)

Yahushua cites Genesis 1 and 2 as cause for the question itself, motivation for the institution of marriage, and as a point of legal origin that informs the Torah as given to Moses.

If we assume that every statement in this passage is globally true, meaning we let Yahushua give the full doctrine in compact form, here is what we see:

1)      The issue must be answered while standing on Genesis 1, where Yahuwah makes humans male and female, telling them to be fruitful and multiply, filling the earth

2)      The foundation also covers the conjugal creation of Eve from Adam

3)      The direction of logic is, “for this reason shall a man (generally) forsake his parents (become his own legal head), bond (dabaq) to his woman, and the two shall become bodily-joined (basar echad, or “one flesh”)

4)      Due to the above three points, because they are no longer separate, but joined (“no longer two, but one flesh/meat”), what Elohim has joined together, no man is permitted to separate.

The real work is done is point 4, where Yahushua says that marriage is something God accomplishes as a permanent state unchangeable by mankind, at least in terms of legal-moral legitimacy. This echos John’s criticism of King Herod, where he denied the validity of Herodias’s divorce and insisted that she was still married to Phillip, Herod’s still-living brother.

This also establishes directionality of definition:

When a man:

1)      Achieves legal majority

2)      Bonds to a woman

3)      Has intercourse with her

4)      No human can separate them because God is presumed to have joined them

Whether true or not, at least as a legitimate procedure of law, no human of any office can separate or invalidate a marriage. Herod was a magistrate, and he still could not validly marry Herodias.

To explain point 3, we need to read 1 Corinthians 6, where t says, “Do you not know that he who is joined (kollao / dabaq) to a prostitute becomes one body (flesh, sarx / basar) with her? For as it is written, ‘the two shall become one flesh.’ But he who is joined (dabaq, throughout the Hebrew scriptures in this context of spiritual joining) to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him?”

So, when Yahushua uses this framework, a more conservative listener might have expected him to say that adultery gives reason to end the marriage. If this is true, why didn’t he say this, and why did his disciples say, “If this is the case between a man and his woman, it is better not to marry?” This should have been expected by anyone who knew his zeal for the Law (we’ll revisit this).

Look at what he said in sum, and we’ll see which types of “sexual immorality” may be proper cause.

Point 4 is unqualified: none may separate. If that is the case, a couple truly joined by God can not get a divorce even for adultery. So, which is it?

The key realizing that porneia (usually translated ‘adultery,’ ‘sexual immorality,’ or ‘fornication’) is not moicheia (‘adultery’). Porneia is a broad category that may or may not include moicheia. We must deduce whether moircheia is a species of porneia using the Biblical texts.

If the bond is truly indissoluble (Point 4), then adultery does not end the bond.

However, we can ask, “Whom does God not join in marriage.”

Well, 1 Corinthians 6 gives us one answer: marriages with prostitutes.

Leviticus 18 and 20 list unlawful degrees of kinship.

Leviticus 20 and Deuteronomy 22 ban adulterous unions.

Leviticus 18 and 20 ban men from marrying or even sleeping with other men.

Exodus 22 and Leviticus 18 and 20 ban bestiality.

Deuteronomy 7 bans marrying foreigners because they were in other religious systems.

We have case law from Ezra 9-10 and Nehemiah 13 that men ought to divorce these foreign and/or idolatrous women. By logical extension, they ought to divorce other disallowed partners, and this would not violate Yahushua’s words, because God’s law delegitimizes these unions. They are not valid marriages.

Yahuwah does not partake in sin; therefore, He does not join what He calls an abomination or to any other degree disallowed. This means we already have many reasons to divorce according to Matthew 19, and assuming that moicheia is part of porneia despite the obvious conflict with “what God has joined, let not man separate,” produces the following contradiction: apparently, moicheia is the means of legitimizing separation of what Jesus says shall not be separated and what Paul says is ended only by the death of the man. In other words, moicheia is neither death nor due process. This tension is cleanly resolved by removing adultery (moicheia) from the assumed umbrella category of fornication (porneia).

The consequences are subsequent in the chapter. Yahushua says, “And I say to you, whoever divorces his woman and marries another, except for porneia (not moicheia), and marries another, commits adultery.” This is a direct callback to Exodus 21:10-11, which reads, “If he takes another woman to himself, he shall not diminish [the first’s] food, clothing, or marital rights; and if he does not do these things for her, she shall go out for nothing.” This is significant because the second woman is not banned, which means God has presumably joined them and we should treat the union as fully valid and protected. It also means that he must refuse obligations to the first to set her free from the house; and she otherwise has no means of separation from that man. Yet, there is no affirmative right to remarry anywhere in the Torah so long as the man lives, which is why Paul writes this in Romans 7: “by the Torah, a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him.”

(It is worth mentioning here that putting one’s wife away necessarily deprives her of provision and intimacy, which is why the reverse is held as grounds to physically separate: the man is already neglecting her, so why should she remain?)

The consequences are subsequent in the chapter. Yahushua says, “And I say to you, whoever separates from his woman and marries another, except for porneia (not moicheia), commits adultery.” This calls us back to Exodus 21:10–11, which reads, “If he takes another woman to himself, he shall not diminish [the first’s] food, clothing, or marital rights; and if he does not do these things for her, she shall go out for nothing.” The second woman is not prohibited; instead, the man’s continuing obligations to the first are expressly protected. Plurality therefore does not itself dissolve the first bond. What can fail is the man’s will to perform the duties created by that bond.

This helps clarify what Yahushua means by hardness of heart. Hardness is not the mere existence of another woman, but rather the refusal to remain faithful to the duties created by the standard covenant — the unwillingness to provide, reconcile, endure, or do what righteousness requires when desire points elsewhere. Mosheh regulated the resulting separation because men with hardened hearts would in fact put women away; he did not thereby establish separation as the good toward which marriage was ordered. How can joining be ordered toward separation, a permanent bond intended for its own dissolution? Neither makes sense. Instead, this is a remedy within a framework of permanence, not a lawful process for ending permanence. Torah itself can even remove a man’s ordinary ability to put a woman away, declaring in a particular case, “He may not separate from her all his days [if he falsely swears that she was not a virgin upon marriage to him]” (Deuteronomy 22:19). Separation is therefore a remedy operating within a damaged situation, not evidence that the original bond was designed to be disposable. However, that remedy does not necessarily involve remarriage, which is an assumption read into the text. These are distinct legal acts and no explicit power to dissolve the marriage is ever given to either the man or the woman. Rather, there are only descriptions of circumstances where remarriage of the woman occurs, which appears to validate this practice, and this controversy is best handled later.

The important point for plurality is consequently not whether a man takes another woman, but whether he thereby violates the rights and duties already owed to the first. Torah condemns the neglect; it does not condemn the plurality. This brings us back to the reaction: If a man has to keep his woman or be at fault for the marriage ending, why would any God-fearing man take that risk and burden?”

The answer: “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only to those to whom it is given; because there are eunuchs who have been made so from birth, eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

In other words: “The people who truly receive the words of God can accept this teaching. Be celibate if needed.”

The reaction of the disciples heavily implies an unforeseen answer. Compare this answer to Hilel and Shammai.

Hilel: You can divorce her if she fails or annoys you.

Shammai: You can only divorce her if she commits sexual immorality.

Deduced / proposed answer: You can’t divorce her unless she was never your lawful wife in the first place.

You can see why this would have shocked people. This was outside the normal range of interpretations at that time.

To support this idea, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7, “To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.”

This gives us three categories of post-marriage women while the man is alive:

1)      Intactly married

2)      Separated but sexually unavailable to anyone else

3)      Rightfully divorced because the marriage was unlawful (lawfully annulled)

For a woman in categories 1 and 2, any sexual contact with a man besides her husband is adultery. This brings us back to Deuteronomy 24, the statute many read to permit divorce:

If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Yahuwah. 

If divorce were a positive power of the man, why would this be abominable? They would be lawfully dissolving marriages, and this would be a specific imposition that dissolution prevents lawful remarriage, but there is a better fit: the model we deduced from the scriptures.

This is the ‘ervat devar’ passage referenced earlier. The question is, “what unclean thing must a man find about his wife to validate his divorce and her remarriage?”

The answer we built is, “she must have been forbidden for him to marry in the first place.”

Let’s use a few examples.

1)      She is another man’s wife.

1.       The ervat devar here is that she is unclean to him, and he divorces her to repent of what he has discovered to be adultery.

2.       She is freed from the assumed husband.

3.       She goes and marries another man.

4.       That man provides just cause for the divorce (she is married to yet another, or she is his relative, etc.)

5.       The first man takes her back despite her having the same pre-existing disqualification

6.       This woman must have been defiled by at least one of the two men. If she belongs third, prior man, the two covered by the statute have each committed adultery with her.

The key here is that marriage is not presumptively valid just because a wedding was witnessed.

2)      She is the wife of a man’s father.

1.       The ervat devar here is that she is unclean to him, and he divorces her to repent of what he has discovered to be adultery.

2.       She is freed from the assumed husband (her stepson)

3.       She goes and marries another man.

4.       The rightful husband puts her away.

5.       The first man (stepson) takes her back despite her having the same pre-existing disqualification

6.       This woman still belongs to the original man (the father). Nothing in the sequence has removed the original disqualification: she remains the father's woman. Therefore the first man's taking her back cannot become lawful merely because another purported marriage and separation intervened.

Paul explicitly calls this porneia in 1 Corinthians 5.

3)      The man hates her and alleges falsely that she was not pure when they married (Deuteronomy 22)

1.       Man 1 hates his woman and falsely alleges that she lacked the required sexual purity when he took her.

2.       Contrary to Deuteronomy 22's judgment, he nevertheless puts her away.

3.       TShe becomes Man 2's woman.

4.       Man 1 attempts to take her back.

5.       The original fact remains unchanged: she was lawfully Man 1's woman, and his false accusation never altered that status.

6.       Her subsequent nonvirginity cannot establish that either purported marriage was invalid, because intercourse within the first relationship itself explains her nonvirginity.

Note that sexual intercourse cannot, by itself, be identical with lawful marriage; nor can nonvirginity, by itself, establish that a woman is unlawfully joined.

Exodus 22:16–17 is the key:

“If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and sleeps with her, he must pay a dowry for her to be his woman. If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the dowry for virgins.”

This disproves the simple claim that sexual intercourse is necessarily marriage. Torah expressly contemplates intercourse with an unmarried virgin followed by her father's refusal to give her to that man (Exodus 22:16–17). She therefore remains marriageable despite no longer being a virgin. Accordingly, nonvirginity alone cannot invalidate a subsequent marriage, or Torah would create a class of women eligible for marriage whom no man could lawfully marry. That would be an absurd result.

Further, because the Law gives no clarification about how to treat these women differently, we have to presume that the same rules apply. In other words, we have no way of knowing that the second man to sleep with her does not trigger the same obligations except that the bride price is only paid for virgins. So, if her father refuses the first, and a second man seduces her and her father does not refuse, she is obligated to be that man’s wife. If this is not the case, scripture does not give us any explicit or implicit instructions to do otherwise.

To be clear, under a general model of law and jurisprudence, if the act of sleeping with an available maiden produces a duty to marry her if she is a virgin, the lack of virginity must be expressly stated to change the procedure for those rescued from its originally-imposed remedies by the father’s ability to annul the obligation.

Due to the lack of clarifying statutes, we cannot reasonably infer that the father's refusal removes all consequences from subsequent intercourse. Such a reading would produce the absurd result that the first man incurs an obligation to take responsibility for her, while every subsequent man may use and abandon her without comparable obligation merely because the first man rendered her nonvirgin. This would effectively create a class of unmarried women whom men could sexually use without the marital consequences imposed upon the first man, contrary to Torah's prohibition against causing a daughter to become a harlot.

 In this case, the Deuteronomy 22 statute does not generally apply. It would, however, presumably apply if she falsely presented as a virgin, which would be falsely evidenced by the man paying a duplicative bride price. If she represents herself honestly, no bride price is paid by the man marrying her (it was paid by the first) and the current man has no non-virginity exit claim upon marriage.

The Finding: Marriage is a Paperless Status

By scripture alone, we can not insist on the production of a marriage certificate to prove the legitimacy of a man’s claim to exclusive marital possession of a woman because Yah never gave Moshe such a statute to legislate.

Search the scriptures. You will find divorce certificates, but zero mention, let alone a requirement, to certify or record a marriage, nor does any human being need to witness the marriage, nor is there any requirement of ceremony, notice, process, or proclamation of status.

This begs the question: How do we know that marriage has occurred?

Scripture does give us implicit and explicit routes.

Explicitly, if a man seduces a virgin, he must marry her.

By deduction, this extends to unbetrothed, annulled maidens.

Implicitly, he can simply forgo seduction and propose marriage.

Explicitly, he must consummate the marriage whether or not there was a proper betrothal.

Explicitly, a man can expediently marry a widow by taking her into a tent or other dwelling (David did this at least twice).

The former is because, explicitly, marriage is defined in Genesis 2:24.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. 

Now, this is the operative principle behind marriage, not the means of creation. A man cannot lawfully leave father and mother, be joined to his sister, and become one flesh with her to override the Mosaic statutes on incest. The law is greater than the man. Therefore, any man who does this has sinned and not formed a marriage. This is fornication, which prevents marriage. God does not join the two.

Back to the paperless component of the status: if there is no paperwork proof to establish that marriage has occurred, we must look at the facts of the woman’s history.

If a woman marries as a non-virgin and the assumed husband keeps her, and another man appears saying that she is his wife, how does he prove his case?

Let’s suppose the following history as verified by multiple witnesses to her life:

1)      She is seduced as a virgin and the man refuses to marry her.

2)      This happens repeatedly.

3)      The tenth man loves her, makes a home with her, and lives with her for years, engaging in sexual activity with her, seeing her as his wife.

4)      She leaves that man, goes to another land, and is betrothed to another man.

5)      They have an overt, ceremonial marriage.

6)      Some time later, that prior man finds her and claims that she is his wife. He has no paperwork.

Whose wife is she?

How do we know?

The claimant cites Genesis 2:24 and adds, “I left my parents’ house, got us our own place to stay, built a life with her, relied on her, and was relied on by her. We planned for the future and enjoyed sex from the beginning of our years together.”

The claimant produces a few witnesses and records of their co-habitancy and communications involving relational details to include longstanding sexual activity and family planning.

How do you think Jesus would judge the matter?

The defendant’s paperwork proves that a ceremony happened.

It does not prove that a lawful marriage occurred, only that it was presumed lawful.

The Torah explicitly allows review of the legitimacy of a marriage. In other words, a marriage presumed lawful in the absence of contrary evidence does not become irrebuttably lawful merely because no one challenged it when it was formed. Its legitimacy remains subject to the underlying facts.

Both claims require adjudication by experts in the Torah.

Men 1–9 demonstrate why sex isn't dispositive.

Man 10 demonstrates why function becomes relevant evidence without itself being dispositive.

Man 11 demonstrates why formal ceremony isn't dispositive.

Marriage is therefore not proven by any single artifact, ceremony, sexual act, or assertion. It is a legal status inferred from historical facts and judged according to Torah. A purported marriage may be presumed lawful where no contrary facts are known, but that presumption cannot survive proof that one of the parties was legally unavailable when the purported marriage was formed.

Whatever the right answer is presumed to be, incentives analysis tells us the consequences of standardizing each answer, while remedy analysis asks which result Torah actually authorizes.

Ruling A: The history of the claimant is sufficient to demonstrate de-facto marriage, and Genesis 2:24 insists that de-facto marriage is, in fact, de-jure marriage.

Ruling B: De-facto is insufficient, and despite there being no explicit requirement for the certification of marriages to render them legally enforceable, the court finds that failure to follow such a process denies standing to assert, by any combination of facts, that the de-facto marriage should be lawfully binding.

Ruling A says that the claimant only erred in not securing a certificate.

Ruling B says that the woman is free to remarry because she avoided the certificate and the defendant may be wholly protected by that paper and not any activity, as only the certificate and its lack thereof are informative.

Ruling C would be that both activity and the certificate are required, but then this is split by whether the claimant can get that certificate the retroactively apply to his activities. In other words:

Ruling C1: The claimant can certify the marriage either himself or by successful suit.

Ruling C2: The claimant cannot obtain a certificate for marriage to that woman because her marriage is already fully recognized.

If Ruling B or C2 are applied as general rule, either by precedence or legislation, the marriage process is reduced to the obtainment of paperwork and perhaps attached statutory solemnization.

If Ruling A is applied, accountability to activities is held in priority.

If Ruling C1 is applied, either the man can use A and his own signature to solve the problem, or he at least has grounds to sue for recognition.

Let’s flip the script the show the other side.

Suppose that Man 10 lived with her for the same time, and the woman wanted the relationship to last, but the man said, “Actually, I never certified this marriage. Therefore, you were never my woman. I have no marital obligations toward you. Get out.”

If Ruling B is true, her claim can fail for precisely the same reason his did.

If Ruling A is true, neither party can escape the marital status merely by denying it after having established it through marital conduct.

Formalism without a Scriptural formality doesn't protect marriage. It creates a means of escaping marriage.

Marital conduct creates enforceable status and duties. It is imperative that we properly define its formation. The same conduct can produce different legal consequences depending upon the preexisting status of the parties. Therefore, before determining whether subsequent conduct formed a marriage, we must know both what conduct establishes marriage and whether the parties were legally available to one another when that conduct occurred.

Now, for the thesis of this whole work:

If Relationship A and Relationship B are materially identical in everything Scripture associates with marital life — lawful availability when formed, sexual activity, common household, intended or presumed permanence, reciprocal reliance and duties — but somebody says A is not binding because the church/state did not solemnize or certify it and B is binding because the church/state did, then the legally dispositive variable is not the relationship. It is institutional recognition.

This begs the question: in this model, does God join, or does an institution join?

Another way of asking this is, “Is it about two becoming one by flesh, or by document?”

If the answer is document, then the institution has acquired a power that Genesis attributes to Elohim. If the answer is flesh, the document can still perform an important evidentiary function in that it can witness, memorialize, and help prove the status, but it cannot be what creates the status.

This is analogous to Matthew 21:24, where Jesus asks, “The baptism of Yahuchanan was from what source, from heaven or from men?”

The Baptism of John was authorized by heaven. Therefore, no ecclesiastical source or validation was needed for him to begin that practice. Likewise, if marriage is authorized, executed, and recognized by our Father in Heaven, there need not be an ecclesiastical or secular origin of its formation.

If God is, indeed, the One who joins a man and a woman, the document cannot be dispositive of its execution. Indeed, a document of earthly origin cannot simultaneously be of divine origin.  That is, no earthly agent can supply the divine act that it purports to certify, nor can anyone directly witness that divine act as a fact. Rather, we can only establish the underlying facts from which Scripture tells us that Elohim has joined them, and scripture supplies no standard of documentation.

Order of Operations

Careful attention must be paid to the exact, ordered definition of marriage given in Genesis 2:24.

It reads,

1)      For this reason (Adam’s proclamation that Eve was bone of his bone, flesh of this flesh)

2)      Shall a man (or men generally) forsake his mother and father

3)      [He then shall] be joined to his wife

4)      [And then] they shall become one flesh

These are presented in Chronological order.

Whatever dabaq means in part 3, it is separate from and comes before the basar echad part of the operation. Given what was already unpacked about this term, we can tell that dabaq is about a bond that presumably pre-exists sex, or at least definitely pre-exists ordered sex.

We see a form of this in betrothal. The two are not yet one flesh, but the woman is unavailable to anyone else. Therefore, virginity itself is not dispositive of general marital-sexual availability. Conjugately, sex is not dispositive of marriage.

Revisiting 1 Corinthians 6, we see Paul describe sex with a prostitute as becoming one flesh (some translations use “one body”) with her, yet no one believes Paul was saying that marriages are formed with each client. Such a thing would not be possible, as discussed above.

This also drags in the history of clandestine marriage. Before the Council of Trent (1545-1563), western canon law could recognize clandestine marriages by consent of the parties rather than the subsequently-required ecclesiastical form, meaning that the controversy of exactly what made a marriage stood for over 1500 years since the Ascension, and it was only resolved by adding a standard that the Church could not find in the Torah or early church history; otherwise, the issue would have been resolved in the earlier centuries. This is not to say that the Catholic Church has a controlling interpretation on the Torah – it does not – but this history does show how ambiguous the situation is given a lack of statute while simultaneously discounting any cultural practice is dispositive of the union. If those practices were sufficient, the Council would have said so. Instead, they resolved the controversy with a new uniform process, risking, of course, the very real consequences of denying those previous, more natural forms moving forward for the sake of a traceable process. For better and worse, their process is overt and reviewable.

In contrast to this, the Torah does hold that if a virgin is seduced and her father does not absolutely refuse the suitor, she is to be married to that man. This tells us that the truth of the standard is closer to this practice than reliance on overt ecclesiastical – let alone secular – process at the cost of recognizing the Torah cases or, to a lesser extent, the more natural informal cases of pair-bonding.

There exists between these models and methods a sliding scale of formality that should be weighed toward what the text provides, and we can test various positions by scriptural deductions.

At one end is pure natural/formal minimalism: relational bonding and sex are enough. But Sha'ul destroys the crude version of that in 1 Corinthians 6 because basar echad can occur with a prostitute without thereby making each sexual encounter a lawful marriage.

At the other end is institutional formalism: some authorized human procedure makes the marriage. But then you immediately have the authority problem you've already developed: where did Yahuwah give the institution the power to make its procedure constitutive?

Between these, and heavily toward the natural/minimalist side is one way to read Genesis 2:24 that prescribes order:

1)      A man desires a woman

2)      He should be a functional adult

3)      He should have developed a bond with her

4)      Then, the relationship can be consummated in an ordered way if the marriage would be lawful

Point 3 is effectively betrothal, either exactly or the cause of betrothal (“what God has joined”)

Point 4 is the undeniably marriage obligation threshold, pending annulment, as consummating a betrothal forms a marriage. This is the post-joining one-flesh (sexual) union.

It is also worth nothing that “one flesh” also carries a connotation of being united in body as well as in kin. Family formation comes from childbirth and extended family social function alike. If a man is spending holidays with the family of the woman he loves, the safe assumption is that she is maritally unavailable, especially given how likely sexual contact is once this becomes a routine occurrence.

In Matthew 19, if Jesus was speaking in Hebrew, it would have been most natural for him to use that same root to describe God’s joining: ”asher hidbiq Elohim.” The Greek makes this uncertain, but even the Greek uses a more similar concept to dabaq than basar echad, the point being that bonding is evidence of a God-joined pair, not the sex. In other words, what God has joined is known by something pre-sexual in a couple. This matches the statute of seducing a betrothed virgin, which renders it equal to normal adultery. This is because the pre-ceremonial state of bondedness that correlates with betrothal is already a God-joined state. Whether that bond causes betrothal in more a romantic formation or the betrothal exists to facilitate bonding in an arranged marriage, the betrothal is the legal mechanism that makes the man equally secure in the woman’s fidelity by providing the same protections to include the same punishment for her infidelity as though they were fully married. This correlation makes betrothal evidentiary but not constitutive of the dabaq step of the process, and this bonded status is what makes her unavailable to other men.

The legally operative pre-sexual relationship state following betrothal doesn't necessarily prove that Elohim has joined them, but the status gives legal evidence that a relationship exists which Torah protects as though the man's exclusive claim has already attached. In other words, there exists a point in a relationship where it should be presumed to have the same protections as a fully-ceremonialized, witnessed, notarized marriage. In effect, given modern western norms, if a ring could come out of the man’s pocket any given day, the woman is off-limits to other men.

The categories to consider are:

De jure/formal betrothal: “I am betrothed to this woman.” The status is overtly declared and therefore easy to prove.

De facto/informal betrothal: the relationship has substantially acquired the characteristics that formal betrothal ordinarily recognizes — exclusive commitment, intended permanence, established pair-bond, mutual understanding that they are proceeding toward marriage — even though nobody performed the conventional act announcing it.

The need to recognize informal betrothal follows from the same underlying principle expressed by verba de futuro: a sufficiently established mutual commitment concerning future marriage creates reliance and can acquire legal significance before consummation or ceremonial marriage. The commitment may be proved by words, but where no formal declaration was preserved, it may also be inferred from sufficiently unequivocal conduct.

More importantly: If formal betrothal and this relationship differ only in the formal announcement, where does Torah say that announcement is the legally dispositive variable?

Formal betrothal may establish the presumption of a protected bond immediately; informal betrothal requires the bond to be established from evidence. The difference is therefore principally epistemic rather than necessarily substantive.

There are four categories of betrothal:

1)      Express and readily provable: “I will marry you.” Written message, public announcement, witnesses, recorded conversation, etc.

2)      Express but difficult to prove: the same promise was privately spoken, but neither party can produce independent evidence.

3)      Implied but provable: “When we're married, we'll live here.” “When we have children…” “Once we're married, you can stay home with them.” Repeated future planning whose ordinary meaning presupposes a continuing marital future.

4)      Implied through conduct: years of exclusivity, household planning, financial decisions, family integration, turning down other opportunities or suitors, and other conduct intelligible only — or most naturally — as reliance upon an intended permanent union.

These categories differ by proof, but not necessarily by the bulk of the history of the relationship.

The lawyeristic escape hatch of, “I never promised,” is not substantially different from, “we never signed the marriage certificate.” If this defense succeeds as a general rule, the incentives become grotesque and damaging; people will be incentivized to make promises informally, implicitly, or secretly, accept the benefits of the other person’s reliance, and reserve the right to exist by carefully avoiding a statutory minimum crafted to be “safely” too high to “accidentally trap” people. The formula would exist so that people could invoke its absence as a defense – and now nobody needs to wonder, “why didn’t Moses tell us to record our betrothals or get marriage certificates?”

Absence of a prescribed form does not mean absence of a standard. It means the court must adjudicate substance from evidence rather than substituting an invented form for the substance.

Paperless does not mean lawless. Indeed, paperless marriage may be the most lawful way to handle the problem. Paper-based systems can create lawlessness except for the legal fiction that compliance with the prescribed process makes the resulting status lawful. Such systems depend upon the hope that the legal fiction will correlate with the underlying truth, while overlooking—or simply accepting—that people can use the process itself to obscure, escape, or deny that truth. A paperless system is therefore potentially the more honest and accountable system, provided adjudication remains accessible to the injured party. This is precisely what Mosheh’s Torah appears to construct: taken as a whole, its statutes make paperless marriage functionally lawful without ever prescribing a document that creates the marriage. In the end, a paperless marriage system, more so than any formal system, may be more likely to provide justice, ascertainable truth, and accountability than any system of what is essentially voluntary self-report – and thereby elective and legally forceful denial – of observable fact.

Application

Marriage, betrothal, and other qualifying bonded statuses are ascertainable, but there needs to be a uniform method – however non-uniform the many instances may be.

Dressing Wounds Lightly

Biblical Remedy and Condemnation for Therapized Christianity

“They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace.”

— Jeremiah 6:14

In the B’rit Chadashah, Yahushua and the Apostles state the problem thusly:

1)      The Divine Council is corrupted, and the whole world is under the sway of the evil one.

2)      Men imagine vain things and rule unjustly.

3)      Because of sin, this world is full of trouble, with narrow ways full of strife, deception, injustice, temptation, and death; whereas Yah offers a path to abundant life in the age to come.

4)      Those who love God are enemies of the world system.

5)      The church is infiltrated by wolves, false teachers, hirelings, and the self-interested, who corrupt its leadership and doctrines.

6)      Those who endure to the end, following the teachings of Yahushua, will be granted life.

7)      The Churches are full of those who call Yahushua “Lord” and yet do not know him.

8)      Yahushua will cast off all those who work iniquity.

9)      In the meantime, we are to bear each other up in love and maintain a system of ecclesiastical accountability, discipline, and corrective disassociation from members who do not submit to judgement from valid church structures, which are charged with adjudicating disputes according to what is written, rather than traditions of men.

In the modern therapized Church culture, the problem is stated as, roughly:

1)      Everyone is broken and spiritually immature.

2)      Jesus Christ is Lord of the Earth.

3)      Because of sin, we all die, we are all kept from proper understanding of love in Christ.

4)      Those who love God are empowered to love properly, selflessly.

5)      The church is the place we go for community, to share divine love.

6)      Those who believe in Jesus will have eternal life.

7)      The world is full of people who heard of Jesus but do not trust him to give them eternal life or believe that he is God, who died for them to free them from sin, which keeps them from the pattern of love they perceive and expect in the church, which is judgement free.

8)      Jesus accepts all who come to him, therefore the Christian is to accept all who come to him, loving his enemies and forgiving all trespasses.

9)      Until he returns, we are to refrain from judgement and condemnation of others, but we are supposed to condemn the self to crucify ourselves and be more like Christ.

The modern model is produced by distortions of the original model.

1)      Rather than seeing an authority/legitimacy issue, sin is moved into the self.

2)      Christ is seen as ruler rather than the priest who left to prepare the way and entrusted to mankind the enterprise of God (the vineyard of the parables), which allows all things to be done according to his will on earth too early.

3)      Sin, accordingly, is made out to be a lack of inner peace about circumstances as much as any external event.

4)      Love is defined as selflessness without regard to proper moral standards, human moral reasoning, healthy attachment operations within the psyches of men, or the Precepts and Statutes of God.

5)      The wolves, hirelings, selfish, ambitious, vain, unlearned, and unstable people of charisma and certain clever philosophies (Colossians 2:8) have exchanged certain truths for comforting lies about how to love our neighbors.

6)      Mere belief has been made dispositive rather than foundational; works have been rendered vain rather than the fruit of a living faith (James 2:17).

7)      Obedience to Christ, therefore, is about belief and rejecting one’s opportunities to judge the world (1 Corinthians 6:1-6)

8)      Yahushua will, by this reasoning, cast off those who never accepted his identity as God-Messiah, while those who judge others, being sinners themselves, are at risk of being cast off for failing to forgive.

9)      The Church’s role is to spread unconditional love and teach each other how to heal and not have any self-serving interest, even if the Law, being weak and ineffective toward proper spiritual formation (at least, this is how Paul is twisted), calls an action sin, even if that sin was worthy of death under Moses.

So, which is right? How can we know?

The church needs to answer this, because if X is condemned but a pastor says, “We should forgive all who do X and allow the perpetual practice of X because Christ forgave us,” which answer we choose determines who suffers and how; and which answer we choose determines our datum for how we identify statuses, determine standings, anchor disputes, assign authority, duties, and obligations, and how judgement is rendered in any case both as a matter of church discipline and of individual moral-causative reasoning.

It determines directions of control.

Meanwhile, the therapized model covertly does enact certain controls by asking questions such as, “Are you bitter? Are you forgiving? Are you controlling? Are you healed? Are you holding onto resentment?” rather than ask moral questions such as, “What was the immoral act? Do you want repair or vengeance? How can the church with its current soft power address this issue? How can we prevent this wrong through doctrinal development, scriptural re-evaluation, and education?”

We cannot determine whether someone's insistence upon something is wrongful “control” until we've determined whether he possesses legitimate authority or a legitimate claim concerning that thing. We cannot determine whether refusing reconciliation is vindictive until you've established the offender's status and what repentance requires. We cannot determine whether jealousy is pathological until we've determined whether something actually belongs exclusively to the jealous party. We cannot determine whether an expectation is selfish merely by observing that satisfying it benefits the person holding it. We also cannot legitimately call everything being grieved an idol. To do so is to charge someone with idolatry. Unsubstantiated charges are not loving.

Therapized analysis can reverse causal attribution:

A commits X against B.

B becomes distressed because of X.

B's distress becomes the presenting problem.

B's psychological characteristics are investigated to explain the distress.

B is instructed to change so that X produces less distress.

A's X consequently becomes background circumstance.

This moves causation from “X wounded B” toward “something within B made X wounding.”

This is victim-blaming.

Under an accountability model:

A's conduct toward B will be evaluated against an external moral standard; A may be required to repent, repair, cease, restore, or accept changed standing.

Under the therapized model:

A's conduct toward B causes B to experience distress; B's distress is evaluated; B may be required to forgive, release, heal, detach, relinquish expectations, or reconsider his motives.

The first is restorative; the second potentially justifies the wrong and immunizes the wrongdoer.

Which system we pick determines whether control is exercised upon the victim or the offender, the key problem naturally being: how do we identify offense and victimhood according to Scripture?

The Ultimate Remedy: Repairing the Individual

For all the therapy-coding of modern sermons and beliefs, the original therapeutic value of the faith was in the restoration of the individual to God. “The Law was added because of sin… [to confine] everyone under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe… to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.” (Galatians 3:19-24)

The whole of this passage of Galatians rests on the word for ‘justified,’ δικαιωθῶμεν (dikaiothomen) [G1344], and how it is implicated. There are two readings:

1)      The person is set into right alignment with God

2)      The person is declared innocent, regardless of truth

The natural question is, which is the goal of God? Is He more interested in transforming people by the renewing of their minds so that they abandon their sins, persevere in righteousness, and become sanctified; or that the unjust do not face consequences? Is this justification a means of preserving a man by fiat, or is proper justification a means of rendering a person properly-aligned with God so that fiat is no longer required?

Hebrews 12:10 gives the end plainly:

“He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.”

Rearranged, combining the Scriptures, in order that we may be Holy, as He is Holy, because he loves us, He chastises us as a father chastises his son, for He is Our Father. The justification mentioned by Paul must be transformative rather than declarative and transubstantiative by mere fiat. There is more to support this reading:

Romans 6:22:

“But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to Elohim, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.”

Romans 8:3-4:

“…He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Torah might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Ruach.”

Hebrews 12:7-8:

“Elohim deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.”

2 Timothy 3:16-17:

“All Scripture is inspired by Elohim and beneficial for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of Elohim may be fully capable, equipped for every good work.”

Consider the following: “Scripture cannot be broken.”

Matthew: 5:1718, 17:12, 24:35, 26:24, 26:54, 26:56

Mark: 9:12, 13:31, 14:21, 14:49

Luke: 16:17, 18:31, 21:33, 22:37, 24:25-27, 24:44

John: 10:35

Therefore, if these books are considered scripture, and they are general canon, then each verse informs the other. Therefore, if the telos of the Torah is, in one place, to teach us how to be righteous, then it is for teaching righteousness in every case. It cannot be in even one instance to merely condemn us so that we accept someone else’s deeds as qualifying for our record.  Stated another way, no interpretation of one passage can assign Torah a function that contradicts a function Scripture positively assigns it elsewhere. If it is said to do two things, it does both, even if a certain reading can insist on only one of the functions. Condemnation may be one operation of Torah; it cannot therefore be made its ultimate therapeutic end, and what kind of remedy is condemnation? And if God is training us up in righteousness, how is actionless belief sufficient for that transformation? It cannot be so.

When a man steals or slaughters an ox, he must pay back fivefold (Exodus 22:1); but the ultimate remedy of the Law is that a man sees his sin as true error, despises it, and cuts the behavior clean off from himself. The therapeutic value of the Law is repentance and transformation of the offender. The therapized type, in contrast, produces ascetically-disciplined victims. We either put on Christ in terms of function, or we merely wear his righteousness to hide from God, as if it were possible, that we are unregenerate; or we realize that fig leaves are not as pleasing to God as oneness with Him in whom there is no sin.

If we expect God to judge justly, then so, too, ought we to judge justly; but in order to judge, we must remove load-bearing beams from our eyes (Matthew 7:5).

The physician must provide the proper diagnosis and the commensurate remedy. All have sinned and fallen short of God, but is He able to heal human beings? If the Torah is not burdensome, and if sin is the sickness that separates us from Him, and being separated from Him is the cause of darkness and stumbling, then we should draw near, stop sinning (and sin is transgression of the law), and practice righteousness as taught by the Torah until it becomes easy and natural. We must do, and then we will understand (Exodus 24:7).

So, the universal medicine of Christ is the secret food: the scriptures from which he constantly preached and argued. The cure-all is not snake oil, but the oil of endurance.

The therapized model is, “The offender is accepted; therefore stop condemning him.”

Yahuwah’s model says, “The offender is accepted precisely so that he can submit to correction.”

Therefore, if we are adopted so that He may correct us, will we refuse the correction while insisting upon adoption and inheritance? If so, we become like those who only wanted food from our Lord in John 6:26. “You seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate some of the loaves and were filled.” Are you merely seeking earthly bread, or the words of Elohim as food?

None of this renders Yahushua unnecessary, nor is there any such implication considering the full canon. Regarding the full telos of Christ, the fulfiller of the Torah, the scale must shift from the individual to the cosmic problem, just as he left the earth and entered the heavenly spaces. There is a capability of Christ, the immortal, sinless, faithful human representative, that is beyond what the blood of bulls and the hands of the Levites could accomplish. “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” (Hebrews 10:4) That larger priestly remedy is beyond the scope of this paper. Here the narrower point is that whatever Mashiach accomplishes cosmically does not negate the stated purpose of divine instruction within the individual: correction, training in righteousness, sanctification, and ultimately participation in the holiness of Elohim (John 17). May we all be One with Him.

The Legal Fiction of a Lazy Soteriology

Suppose we provisionally grant the that forensic justification is unnecessary, and the justification key to salvation is merely the adoption of Yahushua’s perfect record. If there is no requirement to generate a better record – and we should ask what evaluates the record: the New Testament authors routinely cite the Torah of Moshe – there exists, then, this question with its perverse and obverse incentives:

“Is that declaration of the subject’s righteousness according to the works only of Yahushua the remedy or that which enables the true remedy?”

Let’s ask the apostles.

Romans 6:1–23 — old man dies; newness of life; obedience; sanctification; eternal life.

Romans 8:1–14 — Torah's requirement fulfilled in those walking according to Ruach.

Romans 12:1–2 — transformation through renewal of mind.

1 Corinthians 5 — church judges its own and removes wickedness.

1 Corinthians 6:1–11 — saints adjudicate; unrighteous behavior excludes from Kingdom; “such were some of you.”

1 Corinthians 7:10–11 — even separation doesn't automatically dissolve marital obligation.

Galatians 5–6 — grace/freedom cannot become flesh; conduct still has Kingdom consequences.

Ephesians 2:8–10 — not saved by works, yet created for good works.

James 1–2 — hearing without doing is self-deception; faith without works is dead.

1 John 2–3, 5 — knowing Elohim is evidenced by obedience; sin is anomia; commandments aren't burdensome.

Hebrews 12 — adoption entails discipline producing holiness.

The argument from the above section is not that δικαιόω (dikaioō) simply means transformation. The point is that the meaning and function of this key Christian term cannot be determined in isolation from what the apostles say justification is meant to produce. Even if δικαιόω is used declaratively in a particular passage – Yah declaring or accounting the believer righteous – it does not follow that the declaration itself exhausts the salvific action. The apostles repeatedly expect the person so justified to be corrected, renewed, sanctified, and transformed into a new pattern of life. Thus, the lexical question remains relevant, particularly where δικαιόω can carry a broader sense of being set right; but the argument does not depend upon proving that transformation is contained within the word itself. Whether declaration and transformation are both implicated in justification, or whether the declaration enables the subsequent transformation, the stated telos remains the same: the production of a righteous person through the Torah, Yahushua’s mission, and the corrective and administrative work of the Church.

The most direct proof, saved for the end of this section, is that James makes the answer explicit:

James 2:24: a man is dikaioutaiἐξ ἔργων (by/from works), οὐκἐκ πίστεως μόνον (not by/from faith alone).

James 2:22 supplies the process: Abraham's faith was working with his works (synergei), and through the works the faith was completed/perfected (eteleiōthē). So the natural next question for your paper becomes:

It is therefore invalid simultaneously to insist that Sha’ul intended justification to be merely declarative and that he agrees with Ya’akov. Whatever The Way understood justification to entail, it cannot exclude the works explicitly implicated by Ya’akov. Nor can justification describe only the beginning of the process, for at that point no work has yet been produced, no transformation manifested, and no evidence offered. Ya’akov addresses precisely this problem earlier in the chapter:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”

Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.

You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless?

This is the problem-answer set at hand as provided by Ya’akov. He expects the believer to produce an outcome with his faith.

The same man gave the decision of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15:

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

The practice of The Way was clearly to have the gentiles abstain from certain disqualifying practices while they learned to perform the works demanded by Yahuwah in the Torah. These same acts are tied to justification in James 2, which means that if Sha’ul in in agreement with Ya’akov – and this doctrinal agreement between apostles is a foundational assumption of typical Christian theologians – and Sha’ul should not be interpreted as advocating for the declarative-justification-only view. Man is indeed not saved by faith alone, but by a living faith as evidenced by its works.

The rejection of this clear fact produces a horrid result in the ecclesia.

The New Legalism of Counter-Torah “Safety”

The therapized model accuses the accountability model of legalism while imposing its own laws:

You must forgive.

You must release.

You must not judge.

You must not demand consequences.

You must relinquish expectations.

The distress of victimhood according to Moshe is then often turned into a problem within the claimant. This runs totally contrary both to Yahushua’s procedural description in Matthew 18 and Paul’s insistence on church governance rather than secular governance in 1 Corinthians 5-6. Rather than seeing a wrong done from an offender to a victim, the act is often seen as probative of a spiritual flaw within the victim/claimant, and that spiritual insistence upon “their own will” as opposed to God’s will, is offloaded both onto their moral-spiritual ledger (the claimant is wrong to be upset) and to the ledger of God as being the Soverign who either caused or allowed whatever wrong has occurred, and deemed something that the victim needs to “give over to God.” “[God’s] will be done one earth” moves from prayer to theological assumption.

This new legalism (and calling it “not law” does not make it not of legal force within the ecclesial domain) does not abolish the law, but rather transfers the duties involved in legal disputes, causing judgements grossly contrary to what would be expected by Moshe, Yahushua, Sha’ul, Ya’akov, Yahuchanon, and Kepha. Such action is indeed the equivalent of saying to someone injured, “Go in peace; be whole,” while doing nothing to assist them.

This new legalism is not merely something inside the church. The moral-legal passivity of the church and the general unwillingness to engage in the secular extension of the church’s authority, which is to train the saints up in righteousness so that they know how the standards of God, know how to judge, know how to argue, know how to vote, and are willing to export the true law into world causes the excess of everything contrary to the actual Will of God, which is that we routinely discuss his law, precepts, commandments, statutes, ways, and wisdom, so that we can not only affect the moral compasses of those within the church in the context of the church, but also that the same moral conscience follows them out of the assembly and into the world where it affects the consciences of others.

Justice as Evangelism

In Deuteronomy 4, Moshe tells the people:

“See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as Yahuwah my Elohim commanded me, that you are to do these things in the land where you are entering to take possession of it. So keep and do them, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is Yahuwah our Elohim whenever we call on him, or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgements as righteous as this whole Torah which I am setting before you today?”

Notice what Moshe said would evangelize the Canaanites:

1)      The wisdom and understanding of the people

2)      The nearness of Yahuwah, that he answers when called upon

3)      Statutes and judgements so righteous

“ In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” – Matthew 5:16

“Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” – 1 Peter 2:12

“Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life. And then I will be able to boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor in vain.” – Philippians 2:15-16

Ecclesial justice and individual righteousness, both of which are according to the Torah, will impress the people. After all, which law was kept that brought people all over the world to Christ? Surely, it was not a law unwritten that we have discovered recently, but rather a written law known to be authoritative to the Jews of his day, which is to say not the oral Torah but the written Torah – the statutes given through Moshe in the wilderness and the judgements pronounced by the prophets.

Telos as a Test for Grace

If “grace” produces a church that won't judge what Scripture commands it to judge, won't discipline whom Scripture commands it to discipline, won't require restitution/repentance, and transfers the resulting burden onto the injured party, then that doctrine has defeated the purpose Scripture assigns to grace, discipline, Torah, ecclesia and good works.

A remedy that prevents its intended outcome cannot be the intended remedy.

We are, therefore, presented with three models of a justifying faith in the grace of God as revealed through Yahushua:

1)      Antinomian Declarative Model: We come to believe the fact, perhaps also by conviction of the heart, that Yahushua is the Mashiach, a righteous man killed because of our sins, and by believing this, our records are wiped perpetually clean and we are freed from the burden of the law; therefore, we can go on sinning and merely preach this universal acceptance of souls unto God that they might believe similarly and inherit eternal life, being spared from the judgement to come

2)      Semi-transformative Model: By faith, the sinner is justified through the righteousness and work of Mashiach rather than his own works. Good works properly follow salvation as its fruit, but neither constitute nor preserve the believer's justified standing.

3)      Transformative Model: We come to believe that we have sinned according to the Law of Moshe, realize that change is required (adaptive justification), priestly intercession by Yahushua is needed to make us clean before God, by which cleansing we can go to the Father and He will forgive us our sins so that we can walk in a newness of life, which is to say in a new pattern, having put to death the old functional ontology (“old man”) and been “raised to life” in the new pattern.

Only one of these models necessarily satisfies the telos: a body of believers that can judge according to an objective, written moral standard approved by Yahushua and the shaliachim, so that they might be a peculiar people who partake not of the ways of the heathen and capture the attention of the lost so that these lost people can plainly see that they are set apart from the world and devoted to a god whose laws and wisdom are superior.

The argument now becomes, “which model of righteousness and grace, which method of soteriology, produces a man like Yahushua.”

The method of determination is necessarily, “which was the standard by which Yahushua lived?”

Whatever law Yahushua actually kept was the same law Moshe said would convince the world of the superior righteousness and wisdom of Yahuwah. This is necessarily, then, some law recognizable to Moshe, who lived in the middle east during the late bronze age. It will, therefore, likely be peculiar to a 21st century westerner. It cannot be something invented after Moshe died, nor can it be something invented after Yahushua ascended.

Model 1, the Antinomian Declarative Model, provides no ecclesial justice.

Model 2, the Semi-Transformative Mode, is much more sophisticated because it is designed to absorb objections by keeping the issue in tension. Defensive machinery is fully developed against making any particular act of obedience necessary. It permits transformation while prohibiting it normatively; we can’t insist upon compliance with the law that we know is valid, but insisting upon it is also deemed a spiritual issue. It can only convict the individual, but it cannot inform us in the handling of disputes; we can obey it, but we cannot insist that others do the same. Thus, Torah may survive as private devotional preference while being denied its function as a common standard of judgment.

The problem is not that this model is never valid: it is valid precisely at the beginner stage at which many remain. While new believers are meant to drink milk (Hebrews 5:12–14), they are also meant for solid food; and this belief passively keeps the believer stuck by not insisting upon transformation.

Model 3 leaves time for transformation because it always has. There is no necessary dialectic between antinomianism and rigorism in which grace must be preserved by weakening the normative force of righteousness. Transformative grace resolves the apparent tension. A man may truly sin without his sin becoming permissible; he may truly be guilty without his guilt becoming irreversible; he may truly repent without repentance being merely forensic; and he may truly be forgiven without forgiveness rendering his future conduct irrelevant. He may repent, be cleansed, be transformed by the renewing of his mind, cast off the deeds of the old man, and walk thereafter in newness of life.

The relevant question is therefore not whether a justified man can sin, but what Yahuwah intends to happen when he does; and this question applies to both people in a dispute.

Sometimes, the remedy of God is forgiveness between the parties.

Sometimes, the proper remedy is restitution.

Sometimes, the remedy can be separation, exile, or capital punishment.

The remedy is seldom to repair the social peace by insisting that a wronged party must bear the wrong – or worse, that he was never wronged – but to repair people and relationships according to the nature of the wrong and the remedy prescribed by God.

The Shaliach Principle

Agency as a Synonymic Identity

In the Tanakh, there are several instances where a man is identified as Yahuwah. Moses said the following in Deuteronomy 29 (NASB):

And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, “You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and all his servants, and to all his land;the great trials which your eyes have seen, those great signs and wonders. Yet to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to know, nor eyes to see, nor ears to hear. And I have led you in the wilderness for forty years; your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandal has not worn out on your foot. You have not eaten bread, nor have you drunk wine or other strong drink, in order that you might know that I am the Lord your God…”

Moses said, “I am Yahuwah, your God.”

This is because, in Scripture, an authorized agent may be spoken of synonymically with his sender. The agent is not numerically identical to the sender; he bears the sender’s identity within the commissioned act. His words are the sender’s words, his authority is the sender’s authority, and receiving or rejecting him constitutes receiving or rejecting the one who sent him.

This was even foreshadowed at the burning bush, where Moses was told that, because he would not speak, the people would see him and God and Aaron as prophet.

He also says, “Now it is not with you alone that I am making this covenant and this oath, but both with those who stand here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God, and with those who are not with us here today…”

This stands in stark contrast with Jeremiah 31:31-32, which reads:

“Behold, days are coming,” declares Yahuwah, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Yisra’el and the house of Yehudah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Mitsrayim, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares Yahuwah.

So, who made the covenant? Yahuwah, or Moshe?

Zechariah 11 contains this conflation:

“So, I pastured the flock doomed to slaughter… And I took my staff Favor and cut it in pieces, to break my covenant which I had made with all the peoples… And I said to them, ‘If it is good in your sight, give me my wages; but if not, never mind!’ So they weighed out thirty shekels of silver as my wages… And then Yahuwah said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them.’”

Zechariah did the work and received the money, but Yahuwah regarded it as His own valuation. This is because the prophet plays to role of God in these stories. This should not be a surprise.

“I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them everything that I command him. And it shall come about that whoever does not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him.”
—Deuteronomy 18:18–19

Moshe told the people to expect people who speak the words of Yah. A man speaks them, yet those words remain the words of the Father. Compare the following verses:

“The Ruach of Yahuwah spoke through me, and His word was on my tongue.”
—2 Samuel 23:2

“My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me.”
—John 7:16

“I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.”
—John 8:28

“For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak.”
—John 12:49

“The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father remaining in Me does His works.”
—John 14:10

“The one who has seen Me has seen the Father.”
—John 14:9

All of the above are statements of an agent co-identifying with his principal.

Even better, we have Yahuwah saying that this exists from his perspective in Exodus 7:

“Then Yahuwah said to Moshe, ‘See, I appoint you as Elohim to Pharaoh, and your brother Aharon shall be your prophet.’” Note: I will make you God to Pharaoh.

Yahushua explains this in John 10:

“Has it not been written in your Torah, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods, to whom the word of Elohim came—and the Scripture cannot be nullified…”
—John 10:34-35

Here Yahushua cites Psalm 82 to make a claim that much of later Christianity has been trained to resist: Scripture may apply the designation elohim to beings other than Yahuwah without identifying them as Yahuwah or making them equal to Him. Psalm 82 calls them both elohim and “sons of the Most High,” yet they remain subordinate, accountable, and subject to death:

“I said, ‘You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High. Nevertheless, you will die like men and fall like any one of the rulers.’”

Their divine designation therefore describes neither immortality nor equality with Yahuwah. It describes a derived position within Yahuwah’s government. They bear divine authority, but they may still exercise it corruptly and be judged by the One who stands over them.

Likewise, those who receive Yahushua are granted the authority to become children of Elohim:

“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of Elohim, to those who believe in His name.” —John 1:12

This does not make them numerically identical with Elohim. It gives them a derived identity, status, and authority originating in Him. Those subsequently sent by Yahushua represent him just as Yahushua represents the Father.

Immediately before Yahushua cited Psalm 82, his opponents accused him:

“We are not stoning You for a good work, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be Elohim.”
—John 10:33

Yahushua does not answer by declaring himself the one Elohim of Yisra’el, which was within his capabilities to state clearly. Instead, he challenges their assumption that applying divine language to an authorized man must constitute blasphemy. Scripture itself calls subordinate recipients of divine authority elohim. How much less can it be blasphemy for the man whom the Father sanctified and sent to call himself the Son of Elohim?

This also governs the meaning of his preceding statement:

“I and the Father are one.” —John 10:30

The immediate context defines that oneness through their united work:

“No one will snatch them out of My hand.”

“No one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”

Yahushua and the Father are “one” in the preservation of the sheep because the Father’s authority and work operate through the Son. That unity is real and important, but it does not collapse the sender into the one sent.

Yahushua later prays that his disciples may share the same kind of oneness:

“That they may all be one; just as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us.” —John 17:21

The disciples do not become consubstantial members of Elohim by becoming one with the Father and Son. They become united participants in the Father’s word, work, love, and purpose. John therefore interprets John: the oneness of John 10 is the representational and covenantal unity extended to the disciples in John 17.

The Shaliach principle explains all of these statements without dissolving their distinctions:

The Father acts through Yahushua, as he did with the prophets. Yahushua acts through those whom he sends. The agent may bear the sender’s words, works, authority, honor, and identity without becoming the sender himself.

The Banality of Delusion

A Field Guide to Epistemological Warfare

The Bible opens with a string of short, meaning-dense stories about a being, Yahuwah, the Ruach Elohim, speaking Creation into existence. He creates light on day 1, a division between waters on day 2, a boundary between land and sea and plant life on day 3, the timekeeping lights on day 4, the flying and swimming creatures on day 5, and terrestrial animals and mankind on day 6; then He rests on the seventh day, blessing the day, sanctifying it, and establishing the sevenfold cycle of time as an eternal ordinance.

With the cosmos arrayed, Yahuwah Elohim goes to a place where there was not yet an herb or shrub, and he forms a man there from dust. Upon breathing into the earthen mass, it becomes a living soul – Adam. He places the man, Adam, in a sacred garden space where there is one rule: don’t eat from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which grows next to the Tree of Life in the middle of the garden.

What happens next doesn’t merely begin human history; it frames our entire existence through a singular symbolic act. Adam doesn’t merely make a mistake, a cosmic slip of the hand; he commits the archetypal cosmic betrayal of the Creator, with whom he would walk in the cool of the day and speak to like a modern child does his natural father, and plunges Creation into the curse of a maladaptive pattern, a denial of reality, an engine of folly, destruction, and separation from God, who is Spirit and Truth, and in Whom we have our Truest Habitation.

The deception of Eve and the following rebellion of Adam came through three aspects of the fruit and one question:

It was beautiful.

It was good for food.

It would open their eyes. They would be like God, knowing how to judge matters on their own.

“Did God really say…?”

By judging for themselves, according to their own understanding, they found their relationship with God strained from their side. They knew that they were naked. Ashamed, they ran and made clothing for themselves. The Father asks Adam why this happened, and he blames Eve. He turns to Eve, who blames the serpent. The serpent is silent. Judgements are given. The couple is kicked out of the sacred garden, and the Apostle Paul tells us that the serpent became the “God of this aeon.”

The adversary took over the world with bad-faith hermeneutics.

For Millennia, people have yearned to find a way back home to that garden-mountain which Genesis tells us is guarded by a cherub with a sword of fire. We have built ziggurats, pyramids, towers, governments, philosophies, armies – everything but what it actually takes to live in the Kingdom of God: proper image-bearing.

But it’s dangerous to go alone.

You’ll need this book.

You’ll need to fight the lie with the truth, bad hermeneutics with those used by the Savior of the World. You’ll have to pick up his methods from the Bible and follow him.

Two thousand years ago, a Gallilean Jew named Yahushua Ha’Nezer (the Nazarene) attended the Feast of Dedication, known today as Hannukah, to commemorate the cleansing of the temple after its desecration by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid general who slaughtered a sow on the Holy Altar, igniting a war with the locals that led to temporary independence for Judea.

The Pharisees, leaders respected by much of the community, had traditions which they claimed to have received through a lineage going back to the Exodus. In effect, because of its interpretive authority claim, these men had an authority that superseded the written instructions.

As with the seven commanded feasts, many would go to Yereushalaiym and many would mill about Solom’s temple, where Antiochus committed his desecration.

Here, in the Levantine winter, Yahushauh was confronted by the Pharisees in front of a crowd. He had been calling them out publicly throughout his ministry, using the Law and the Prophets to attack their credibility, calling them false shepherds, thieves, robbers, a den of vipers, and blind guides who keep the seekers from finding, those who desire God from entering the narrow gate that leads to life.

These men in fine clothes, politically connected, wealthy, generally trusted by the people, encircle him. They say to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are Ha’Mashiach, tell us plainly.”

But they are not asking honestly. They are asking adversarily, trying to catch him in something they can twist into a blasphemy charge to discredit him, so he answers him with something all of the prophets would have understood, “I told you, and you do not believe; the works I do in my father’s name, these testify of me. (In other words, by my fruit, you will know me.) But you do not believe it, because you are not of my sheepfold. My sheep hear and obey my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I am the Father are one.”

The men pick up stones to stone him.

He asks them to defend their actions before the commit it, saying, “I showed you many good works of the Father; for which of them are you stoning me?”

They answered, “We are not stoning you for a good work, but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself out to be God.”

Yahushah remembers the words of a prophet and says, “Is it not written in your Torah, ‘I said, you are elohim? If He called them elohim to whom the word came – and scripture cannot be nullified – are you saying of the one whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming?’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God?’ If I do not the words of the Father, do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe my works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.”

This worked.

Most people shrug this off and keep reading, but halt. Yahushua kept himself alive with a legal argument that appealed to something that makes Christians uncomfortable: the Tanakh, what we call the Old Testament, says that there are multiple gods, and he links that with men hearing the words of God.

If we take this seriously, Yahushua is telling us that those who hear God are sons of God and gods themselves.

The same author, the beloved disciple, John, wrote this in the beginning of his gospel:

“But as many as received Him, to them He gave legal right and authority (exousia) to become sons of Elohim, to those believing in his name.” This is not power (dynamis), but something truly given by God, the source of authority on the earth – standing, permission, agency, jurisdiction, and these to become, themselves, like Our Lord, sons of the Eternal, Living God.

Humans are created in the image of God.

Yet, greater than this, is the Gift of Sonship.

This Gift of Sonship destroys simple category arguments, and it comes with a charge, an immense responsibility to fulfill the prayer of the man by whose title billions have named themselves: the Christians are charged with the Gethsemane Prayer, “Keep them in your name, the name which you have given me, so that they may be One just as We are.” He then affirms that Our Father had answered his prayer, saying, “The Glory which You have given me I also have given them, so that they may be One just as we are One.”

In Hebraic thought, a name isn’t just the sounds by which a person is called, nor is it merely also about someone’s social record and standing. Shem, the Hebrew word for name, carries also the connotation of authority and identity. We see in the scriptures that Yahuwah chooses to place His Name in certain places where he is obeyed. Yahushua is saying that he is crowning us with obedience to and understanding of God. He has aligned his disciples with God’s nature through teaching, having empowered them to accomplish the task of becoming a Son of God themselves by the renewing of their psyches, by meditating on (eating) and practicing (working out) the commandments of God. To properly image God, not merely bear the design but to function properly, is the role of a Child of God – by their fruits will you know them; by the voice they obey will you know who their shepherd is.

Our Savior used the word genesthai, the same root from which we get Genesis, the Beginning, to describe what happens after we are given the authority to accomplish the task. Before the task beings, we are first commissioned, charged to accomplish the task and empowered legally to be successful. The seed was given the ability to germinate, and if we do not sprout and bear fruit, we are not his seed; if we do not do the works of the Father, we are not the answer to his prayer – and his prayer was surely answered, so we are not his if we do not finish the race.

We lose things in translation all the time. These disciples are sent out and called Apostles, but the word has become associated with an office or title as opposed to its functional meaning. The apostles (apostolos) are those sent forth (apostello), and the Hebrew has a similar concept in the root, shalach, which was used when Moses was sent toward Pharaoh as a representative (shaliach). Note this fascinating decree from the Creator:

“Therefore, come now, and I will send (shalach) you to Pharaoh.”

And when he resists, citing a problem with his speech, Yah tells Moses to bring Aaron to speak for him after He tells Moses what Aaron should say. Moses is the agent, but Aaron is the mouth piece, which splits the typical prophetic role wherein the agent will address the crowd.

Exodus 4:16 says, “He shall speak for you to the people; and he will be as a mouth for you, and you will be as God to him.”

Exodus 7:1 follows this with, “See, I make you God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your prophet.”

This sounds absurd and blasphemous. Had anyone said that they were God and their brother were his prophet to the Pharisees, they would have been stoned to death; yet, these are the words of God, to Moses, written in the Torah.

All over the Tanakh, messengers of God speak for Him, using first-person language, as God’s representative. This was common in the ancient near east, as they understood the shaliach principle, whereby the shaliach (sent one) bears the identity of his principal or master. We have a faded remnant of this in the English language, whereby women are called “misses-[Firstname Lastname]” of their husband, and a still active, though unconsidered, continuation of this with agents of agencies, such as when we say things like, “the County stopped by.” The literal county, FBI, Fish and Game service did not stop by, but an agent did. It’s right there in our everyday speech.

This brings us back to Hannukah, when the Pharisees surrounded Yahushua. Accepting this, re-read the discussion. Notice that Jesus is claiming to speak for God the same way that an angel or prophet would, and the Pharisees didn’t stone him, meaning that they ceded the point that was raised. Jesus and his enemies agreed that those who do the will of God are the children of God.

Now, reconsider what was granted is Gethsemene: You have been given the right, power, and jurisdiction over yourself to become One with God, just the same way that Our Lord is One with Him – to know Him, to keep His commandments, to walk in His Wisdom, to be set free by the Truth, and to go out into the world as a faithful Shaliach.

The Law of Truth and Freedom

“If you continue in my word, then you are truly my disciples; and you will know the Truth; and the Truth shall set you Free.”

In Chapter 8 of John’s gospel, Jesus connects abiding in his word, which is following the instructions of the Father, with us knowing something freeing; but from what are his disciples freed?

James calls us to the “perfect Torah of Freedom.”

Psalm 119 contains, “I will walk at liberty, for I seek Your precepts.”

In this chapter, John relates to us, “If the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

Yahuwah is a loving Father, who teaches His children with examples. Yahushua images this by teaches us through his own example and through parables. To Yahushua, to Shaul (Paul), and to the psalmist, the instructions of Yah are liberating. To determine the chains, we can look at what the freedom is, knowing that it comes through instruction; and we can also remember what kind of slavery was constantly being alluded to in the gospels: slavery to sin.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.”

To be free from sin is to walk in righteousness. We know what righteousness is because Our Father had his servants write it down.

We are called in John 1 to sonship with God, which is Yahushua’s request in John 17. Here, in John 8, we hear our lord say, “The slave does not remain in the house forever; [whereas] the son remains forever.” Recall that he wants us to be sons of God, remaining with, dwelling with, him and the Father forever. The slave cannot do this. The one who sees the Father as a master is unable to inherit eternal life, but the one who loves him can; the one who is in it for himself merely hires himself out to righteousness, being inwardly a slave to sin, whereas the one who loves righteousness is partaking in the nature of God.

If we need the Scriptures to know the precepts that allow us to walk in liberty, then freedom is by the written commandments of God.

Look at what the Pharisees were claiming, being called sons of the devil: they had proper authority – as Jesus said, the seat of Moses – to interpret the law written by Moses, having been orated by God; and they claimed to have never been a slave to a people whose identity includes having been ancestrally enslaved in Mitzrayim (Egypt). They supposedly had all of the fence laws, all of the exceptions, all of the details supposedly passed down from the original 70 who were instated over a thousand years prior; but Yahushua tells them, “Truly did Isaiah prophecy of you

Sin is bondage to lies.

Later in Chapter 8, Yahushua says to the scholars, “Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear my word. You are of your father, the devil.”

This is not casual. This is a sonship claim. An authority-submission claim.

By their fruit are people known. By their rules are their masters known.

Yakov (James), the brother of the lord and leader of the Apostles, made it clear:

“But the one who looks intently at the perfect Torah, the Torah of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does.”

Sin is anti-reality. Lies are the technology of sin, the generating phenomenon and the result of sin. These make an engine of sin, called iniquity:

1)      People sin in thought (the fruit is attractive, good for food, and good for wisdom)

2)      The sin matures and becomes embodied, acted out.

3)      Consequences arrive: their eyes are open, and they are anxious.

4)      God confronts them; Reality asks, “Where are you? Did you eat of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it?’”

5)      The issue is avoided (“I hid because I was naked.”) and authority is offloaded. Another person or a circumstance is scapegoated (“This woman whom you have me did give me of the fruit and I did eat of it.”)

6)      The individual internalizes and defends the lie. By this action, the sin has fully grown and brought death, enslavement to the lie, and deafness to the words of God.

Yakov also tells us:

“Each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own desire. Desire, when conceived, gives birth to sin; and sin when fully grown brings for death.”

Reality always wins. God is truth, and when people can not stand the truth, His presence destroys them, so people hide with fig leaves of any variety. Yah’s answer is always to remember both the sin and the cost. He reprimanded them, cast them out of the garden, made them animal skins to wear, and taught them sacrifices of the first fruit.

It came to pass that when the children of Israel were in the wilderness they again accused God of bringing them out into the wilderness to die, so Yah had nakhashim seraphim (firey serpents) bite them. When they started dying, He had Moses create a bronze serpent and lift it up on a standard.

Everyone knows John 3:16, but few can recite John 3:14-15:

“Just as Moshe lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

All of this is done so that we will accomplish the Shema (Deuteronomy 6):

“Hear, O Yashar’el: Yahuwah Elohaynu, Yahuwah is one: And you shall love Yahuwah Elohayka with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart: And you shall teach them diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the posts of your house, and on your gates.”

The Shema, The Creed of Hearing and Obeying, is not casual. These words are our Life.

The word Jakov would have naturally used is shema (“hear,” usually obediently / understandingly), which is related to shem (“name” or authority); and this passage shows us what it means to the Hebraic mind. He tells us, “Prove yourselves doers (asah / poietes) of the word, and not merely hearers (shomea / akroates) who delude themselves.” In other words, do not be self-deceived; do not think that you can override God’s precepts by your own judgement; do not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Do not serve your own lies about righteousness, thereby closing your ears and putting out your eyes (figuratively).

To bear the Name (shem) is to obey (shema) through obedient action.

Going the Way of Cain

Cain was a worker of the soil.

His brother, Havel, was a shepherd.

Both were priests, offering sacrifices before Yahuwah.

It comes to pass that Cain gives a First fruits offering, and whereas Yahuwah looks in favor upon Havel’s firstlings offering. This angered Cain, and he was downcast.

Yahuwah said to Cain something all should consider:

“Why is something kindled in you, and why has your face fallen? Is it not certain that if you do well, it be exalted? But if you do not do well, sin is crouching in wait at the threshold; it has urges toward you, but you must subdue and govern it.”

The Father likens the drive to sin to a predator sprung back, ready to pounce at the tent flap of Cain’s heart. His heart is full of darkness. A fire is burning. A dragon is lying low outside his tent. Cain know he must fight it – unless he makes it his master.

Cain went out into the field with Havel and murdered him.

Yahuwah asks him, “Where is Havel, your brother?”

Cain answers, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper.”

Notice how he follows the same pattern as his parents:

1)      Cain sinned in thought.

2)      It matured, kindled, crouched in him; then overtook him.

3)      Consequence manifests: Havel is dead. His blood cries out. Reality is undeniable.

4)      The truth comes: Havel’s blood cries out and Yahuwah asks, “Where is Havel?”

5)      The issue is avoided; Authority structure is rejected: “I do not know. What am I? My brother’s keeper?””

6)      The individual reframes the situation: “My punishment is more than I can bear.” Cain makes himself a victim of his own actions.

But Yah is gracious and protective. He gives Cain a mark so that no man who finds him will kill him. We see God’s wisdom and justice here: Cain understands justice, and fearing consequence means that his moral-causal reasoning is intact. He admits the law: “Whoever sheds human blood shall have his blood shed by humans, for humans are made in the image of God.”

This pattern of Cain is an intensification of what his parents practiced. It becomes another archetype of human error. Regarding the pattern, Yehudah (Jude) writes this:

 “Woe to them! For they have gone the way of Cain, and for pay they have rushed headlong into the error of Balaam, and perished in the rebellion of Korach.”

Yehudah relates this pattern to something done by Balaam, the very real prophet of Most High who still rebelled in his office as a mouthpiece of Heaven, and also by Korach, who insisted on democratizing the Aaronic-Levitical priesthood system during the years of wandering. He says of them, “These are blemishes on your love feasts, as they boldly carouse together, looking after themselves; waterless clouds, carried along by ruachoth; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars for whom the nether gloom of darkness has been reserved forever.

He relates them to fallen angels, who are currently chained in the outer darkness under the earth, right before disclosing the book of Hanoch (Enoch) as the source of this reference in verses 14 and 15. These men, too, are messengers, “elohim” as we discussed in Psalm 82 – and they will all perish as mere mortal men. This loops his letter back in its chiastic structure to verses 6 and 7:

“And the angels that did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling have been kept by Him in eternal change in the nether gloom until the judgement of the great day ( summarizing 1 Hanoch 6-21); just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”

These people crossed divinely-assigned boundaries. This Enochic view permeates the 2nd Temple worldview, and references to this book are scattered throughout the New Testament writings. Jude is tying boundary violation to selfishness; disorder due to tyranny of one’s own appetite; a rebellion against the cosmic order with contempt in a way that corrupts or kills others.

Cain said, “I want to do things my own way and be accepted; and if I have one person to compete with, I can solve that with murder.” Cain did this as a practicing Yahwist priest, sacrificing to the One True God.

Balaam said, “I want reward and gain for a request I know that I cannot grant.” He did this while speaking the words of Yahuwah.

Korach said, “I want authority that was properly bestowed to another.” He wanted to obtain an office in service to Yahuwah.

All three have a forbidden desire that causes them to rebel against God by crossing a boundary, and it is still a sin even if their motives are good, even if they are attempting to serve God.

Notice also, the starting point of the letter:

“For admission has been secretly gained by some who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Yahushua Ha’Mashiach.”

Licentiousness is Yehudah’s main concern.

Mere belief does not make one holy.

The angels believe, and they do so with fear; and the ones who sinned know Him factually.

Yehudah is warning us that it tends to work this way. The devil masquerades as a Messenger of the Light. Balaam spoke true words of God during an act of rebellion. Pharaoh’s magicians produced miracles that rivaled what God allowed Moshe to do. There is an epistemological problem at the root of this whole operation: how do we know what is true?

Yah had told Balaam not to go, and he went. He was a rebel speaking the truth.

The devil recited scripture to Yahushua in the desert, but not to truly correct him.

Balaam wanted a reward of money and honor.

The devil tried to keep his reward – the whole earth – to himself.

Balaam was supposed to be a seer. He was blind.

He was made in the image of God. God spoke through a donkey.

So Balaam solves the problem: He gets the Israelites to cross a divinely-appointed boundary by sleeping with and marrying Moabite pagan women, who cause them to worship Ba’al Peor (the Master of the Land), the local deity. 24,000 of them perish.

These people had been explicitly commanded not to do this in Exodus 34:15-16.

“Otherwise, you might make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land… and sacrifice to their gods… and take their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods…”

A lawyer’s mind might say, “Well, this isn’t the land, so the rule doesn’t apply.” This is backwards. The law is teleological: you don’t want the result, so don’t do the action, no matter where you are. If you don’t want to reap it, don’t sow it. They were already a holy people since Sinai – holy meaning “set apart” (here, specifically unto Yahuwah). Look at these passages:

“Sanctify to me every firstborn, the first offspring of every womb among the sons of Yasharel, both of man and beast; it belongs to me.” – Exodus 13:2

“Now then, if you will indeed obey by voice and keep (shamar, guard) My Covenant, then you will be My treasured possession among all the peoples… and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy (set-apart) nation.”

Even the firstborn calves were to be set apart to God. This is pre-Levitical national priesthood – that nation being all who heard the law at Sinai and agreed with it, saying, “All which Yahuwah has spoken, we will do, and we will understand (shema).” (Exodus 24:7)

The entire nation, which is the entire body of the Covenant Assembly, was to be separated from those outside its jurisdiction, theology, and practices.

Notice, also, that they did not say, “We will understand, and then we will obey.” Instead, they put obedience before understanding, that by living the life, they will understand.

This takes us back to Yahushua’s words: “If you abide in my word, then you are truly my disciples’ and you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free (John 8)… and bear much fruit (John 15).” But you must be doers, not merely hearers (James), practicing righteousness (1 John).

Knowledge is not enough. It must be practiced.

This brings us to the definition of wickedness in Psalms 50:

But to the wicked, Elohim says.

“What right have you to recount my statutes

And to take my covenant in your mouth?

For you hate discipline,

And you cast My words behind you.”

Wicked (rasha) describes someone who has heard God’s commandments and put them away. His charge is this: People know and repeat his statutes; claim that they are his covenant people; then, because they hate discipline, live contrary to His commandments. These are condemned.

This begs the question: How does a person get here?

The answer is: The same way we’ve always obtained the problem.

The Tree of Blindness Concerning Good and Evil

Perhaps the most sinister line in all of scripture is the false promise of enlightenment given to Chavah by the Serpent:

“For Elohim knows that on that day your eyes will be opened, and you will be like Elohim, knowing good and evil.”

And now, all we do is continuously eat of this same fruit, calling it holiness.

The banality of Delusion isn’t exotic; it’s commonplace. This is the default condition of mankind.

The durability of the pattern comes from its honest definition: any system that is not Yahuwah’s system is a false and rival system. Indeed, this system is attractive to those who do not know God; it has many attractive features, including permissions to satisfy desires, to think oneself wise, and to see oneself as more righteous than their neighbor according to a system of their own construction.

On the Last Day, as occurred in Gan Eden with Adam and Chavah, Yahuwah will arrive and expose what mankind has done. Until then, the bulk of humanity will judge unjustly and practice a life incompatible with the One who made them, and the Son of Man will say to those who work iniquity, “Depart from me, for I never knew you,” even though they call him Lord, because we followed another prescription for righteousness.

By attempting to become better judges, by attempting to legislate a greater law than Yah has given us, we have only managed to create inferior laws by which the consciences of the many have been bound, and these will be trained up in these distorted ideas of righteousness, have their consciences seared, and will hold to their traditions as though they were the very words of God, and so they will live deceived and be surprised at the end.

People keep believing in a higher way.

People keep eating the fruit of which God said, “You shall not eat of it.”

These will not be able to eat from the Tree of Life,

Just like Adam and Chavah.

Situation Normal:

Because of Sin, Love Has Grown Cold

The Apostles foresaw a day when people would forsake sound doctrine, turn aside to myths, accumulate teachers according to their own desires, and embrace traditions of men and doctrines of demons (Mark 7:7–9; Colossians 2:8; 1 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 4:3–4).

They do not point forward to some coming assembly of teachers bearing enhanced, progressively revealed, argued-out, or updated commandments. Rather, they point us back to the man through whom the earliest believers could recognize and validate Yahushua: Moshe.

Yahushua said:

“For if you believed Moshe, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”
—John 5:46–47

Moshe validates Yahushua because Yahushua fulfills and reflects what Moshe wrote. Conversely, anyone claiming to follow Yahushua must reckon honestly with Moshe. If we reject the writings by which Yahushua said He could be recognized, we have rejected Yahushua’s own stated standard of validation (Deuteronomy 13:1–5; 18:15–22; Luke 24:25–27, 44–47; Acts 3:22–26).

This is also why, when the Apostles considered how believing Gentiles should begin turning to Yahuwah, they instructed them to cease immediately from four practices incompatible with fellowship and then added:

“For Moshe from ancient generations has in every city those who preach him, since he is read in the synagogues every Sabbath.”
—Acts 15:21

Ya’akov did not argue that Moshe was irrelevant because Yahushua was now being proclaimed. His reasoning depended upon Moshe continuing to be read and taught every Sabbath. The four immediate prohibitions were not presented as the entire moral obligation of a believer, but as an entry point into a community in which the Torah of Moshe was already being taught week by week (Acts 15:19–21).

Why must believers know Moshe? Because Yahushua wants us to know Moshe so that we may properly know Him. Moshe wrote the Torah that testifies concerning Him. Therefore, to understand Messiah, we must understand the Torah of Moshe.

Yahushua did teach that certain provisions within the Torah addressed the hardness of men’s hearts. Regarding separation, He said, “Because of your hardness of heart Moshe permitted you,” while immediately directing His hearers back to the created order: “but from the beginning it has not been this way” (Matthew 19:4–8; Mark 10:5–9). Such provisions must be identified and understood as provisions. They do not justify throwing away the Torah as a whole. The Torah must be studied carefully, interpreted faithfully, and understood according to the purposes for which Yahuwah gave it.

Scripture identifies sin with lawlessness — Torahlessness [Greek: anomia] (1 John 3:4). Yahushua warned that “because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). We now see the fruit of that lawlessness acutely in the West: rampant promiscuity, routine separation, failed or abandoned marital formation, the collapse of household formation, and deepening distrust between men and women.

People do not know Moshe and therefore do not truly know Yahushua. Many nevertheless want to claim Yahushua’s name. They want their claim validated—or, at minimum, protected from ever being invalidated. Yet Yahushua warned that many who call Him “Lord” will hear:

“I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.”
—Matthew 7:23

Calling Yahushua “Lord” is not a substitute for doing the will of His Father (Matthew 7:21–23). If we desire to be known by Yahushua, we must know the Scriptures by which He identified Himself, including the writings of Moshe, and we must return to the commandments for what they always truly were: the righteous instruction of Yahuwah, grounded in creation and reflected in the faith and obedience of Noach, Malkiy-Tsedeq, Avraham, Yitschaq, and Ya’akov long before Sinai (Genesis 7:1–5; 14:18–20; 18:19; 26:5; 35:1–7).

The Yahwist Papers is a project devoted to using Scripture and sound reasoning to recover the ancient faith obscured through generations of human tradition and schism within the assemblies. Its purpose is not to invent another revised faith, but to point people back to the faith once delivered to the saints: the faith of Yahushua, the Apostles, Moshe, and the patriarchs (Jeremiah 6:16; Jude 3).