Messiah

Messiah

Tim O’Connor – Center for the Preservation of Humanity – 10/26/2022

In this piece I will undoubtedly have something to say which you will disagree with. I hope that there is more we can agree on than disagree about. This article is about my coming to faith, God and Messiah, and my understanding of the Bible which is always growing more in depth.

I have always had an extremely difficult time holding my tongue. Even when I was little I spoke my mind. I was reprimanded often as a child. I can be very respectful and, likewise, I can be very disrespectful – it depends on the level of respect I hold for the individual I am interacting with. There are some people I just don’t like. There are a lot of people who don’t like me, which I’m fine with. There are people who I have known pretty well who no longer speak to me because of changes I made in my own life – namely coming to faith.

All of those are problems that I still have issues with. I can get very negative towards certain people but, as I have come to understand, that negativity is really me being disappointed in myself. The only way to fix that is to do better. I take it to God in prayer. It helps tremendously. So, before I get into the rest of this, I am fallible, human, and prone to emotional responses just like whoever is reading this. We go through this world together and as we go, people change. I thank God every day for changing me and look to Him for advice as to how to find favor with Him. It’s all written down in the Bible.

I’ve always enjoyed reading. When I was a kid I would read Steven King books all the time. I would read about space, ghosts, animals, and anything else that piqued my interest. My enjoyment of The Bernstein Bears gave way to Hardy Boys and any of the pick your own ending books. I hated reading for school assignments but never minded book reports as long as I could pick the book. As school got harder I decided to study video games instead of completing the homework I was assigned. I read less and less.

I started partying. I was reckless and looking back on those times, I really cannot believe I lived through it. When I was 19 I was still partying and I met my wife. We were married after dating for three years. The marriage lasted three years. We had a son right in the middle of that time. He was born about 3 months before 9/11 and I worried about what future he would have. When 9/11 happened though I remembered the prior attack on the Twin Towers and knew that all the Saddam did it horse manure was just that. By this time, when I was 23, I had stopped partying for the most part. And I also started reading again.

I read all kinds of books. I read a lot of history books. I read a lot of non-fiction books in general. I read a lot of books about true crime, the Mayans, the Olmecs, the Toltecs, other New Age books, satanic books. I read some of Noam Chomsky’s and Naomi Klein’s works and even watched some of Michael Moore’s documentary's. I had no God in my life. I had no direction nor purpose. I was going to school for criminal justice. To give you an idea of how much I have changed I argued in favor of the United Nations peacekeeping forces, freeing Palestine, and in favor of a nationalized police force. Yet, at the same time, I argued against having to watch Flight 93 and answer questions about the film because, as I put it to my instructor – “It never happened.” She didn’t fail me for my responses, but they were wildly different from those of my classmates.

Fast forward several years. I had graduated and moved to a different state. I had a Master’s degree and was working at a casino in security. In 2013 or 2014 a family member who is in no way shape nor form conservative kept posting articles from this website called prisonplanet.com and infowars.com about the environment. They were good articles. One day I figured out that there is a radio show on those sites and I listened. Alex Jones was screaming about Agenda 21. After hearing about Agenda 21 for about three months, I read it. Then I started reading history books about all the bad guys in history as well as about some of the good guys. I started reading conservative authors.

In 2017 I wanted to know what the Bible actually said. So I started reading it. I ordered a Defender’s Bible which is the King James version of the Old and New Testaments as well as the Apocrypha. On a blank piece of folded up printer paper I wrote all of the books down, how many pages each had, and if they were Old, New, or Apocryphal. Then I started in the Old Testament, went to the New Testament, went to the Apocrypha, and back to the Old Testament. Before I knew it I had read the whole thing – all 1,968 pages.

I started looking for a church which preached out of the Bible only. No church doctrine. No additions to the Bible. Just the Bible, the whole Bible. I settled on a Baptist Church which preached only from the Bible. They focused almost exclusively on the New Testament, but, it was all Biblical. When 2020 came around and everyone’s lives got turned upside down, the church went underground and I was not aware it was still operating. It didn't matter much anyway – by that August I moved to yet another state by myself to a place where I knew zero people.

Even before I moved; however, I had really wanted to attend a Messianic synagogue. I didn’t because of distance. I reasoned that everyone in the Bible was Jewish. The Bible supported my reckoning too, read Matthew 5:17 – it is a verse in which I have never heard a single pastor preach. I thought that curious because it reads “I come not to abolish the Law [Torah], but to fulfill it.” When I read that line I stopped thought about it, then read it again and thought about it some more. The whole Bible was in play all of a sudden.

When I moved to my new state, to my surprise, there was a Messianic Jewish synagogue. I managed to get up the courage to attend a service, and still attend services there currently. I had read enough church history and learned as much as I could about the original ‘Christians’ that I knew they were Jewish. The service was very different from any service I had attended as a child (I was confirmed Catholic), as a teenager (grandma used to take us to Sunday Methodist services), or the Baptist Church. The service is Jewish, in essence, and it also recognizes Jesus, who is called Yeshua. I am not Jewish, but the closest I will come to describing myself as a Christian is as a Biblical Christian.

So here is the part where the reader may get upset. I have encountered a wide variety of Christian and Jewish beliefs, especially since I began attending a Messianic synagogue. Frankly, some of these people describing themselves as Christians are absolute lunatics. Biblical literacy is important and some people just refuse to acknowledge what is actually written. Getting written into the Book of Life is important to me and following God’s Laws as best we can will not bring us salvation, necessarily, but will allow us to do good works in God’s eyes as well as grow closer to God.

I have had far too many encounters with Christians who claim that the Torah is only for Jews and they don’t need it. Most haven’t read it and none of them follow it. To me that is very sad. One of the easiest laws to follow is the Sabbath rest which falls on Saturday, the seventh day of the week. God worked for 6 days and on the seventh day he rested – not the first. That is part of the discarded Torah.

Another part of the Torah which is easy to follow are the foods we are supposed to be eating. Leviticus 11 spells them out. Prior to reading the Bible I loved to eat shrimp, bacon, pork chops, and lobster tail. Since reading the Bible I have not eaten any of those animals. This gets a huge amount of push back. Of course it’s delicious, cheap, and abundant; however pig is unclean and fish without gills are abominations to God. So I cut that out of my diet.

I have interacted with people claiming to be men or women of God who have straight-faced stated that God does not condemn homosexuality. I have interacted with others who have no problem with the 100,000,000 children murdered in the womb. Some of these types even march alongside NARAL and Planned Parenthood advocates demanding so-called women’s rights. Other ‘men or women of God’ claim that transhumanism and transexualism are just fine and that God will accept them even after they have mutilated their bodies and sold their birthrights. All of these topics are in the Old Testament. The only way to justify these positions is to ignore the Old Testament.

The New Testament focuses on Jesus’ time on earth, his persecution, and his resurrection as well as on His return. It also includes a lot of letters to the different churches, the end days, the acts of the apostles, and the rapture. Pertaining to Jesus specifically, what did he preach? He preached the Torah. Those lacking understanding of the Torah means they lack understanding of Messiah’s own teachings. How are we to understand the significance of Messiah performing miracles on Sabbath, or His rage at the money changers in the temple? How are we to understand the entire significance of His sacrifice if we fail to understand the full ramifications of what the Passover Lamb really was (imagine having to kill your favorite pet on Passover)? I could go on and on here. I won’t.

I will ask; however, if the Old Testament is irrelevant to our lives, is beastiality a legitimate activity? If not, why not? Is human flesh a legitimate food source? If not, why not? Is it okay to take a knife and shear off just some of an animal’s flesh and eat it? If not, why not? Is eating the carcass of a dead animal okay? If not, why not? And if those are permissible, why are they permissible? Is it wise to worship an idol?

Hopefully you read through those questions and decided to answer “Because God said those things are evil.” Correct, He said all of those things are evil – in the Old Testament. Why are we not following what God has told us to do? I’m going to let you figure that out for yourself.

This point, also, may make some angry. I will briefly argue my points about the rapture here. I see nowhere in the Bible’s I have read where there is to be a rapture before the tribulation. Contorting the words in the Bible is the only way I see that the rapture can occur at any time prior or during the tribulations. Would God not test His chosen? I believe He is and will continue doing so. Would God not allow His chosen to survive and to be spared during these times? Again, I believe He is and will continue doing so. I only see the rapture occurring, Biblically, immediately prior to the Day of Judgement. Obviously there are people out there that disagree with me.

I only bring that argument up because there are way too many people calling themselves believers in God who are sitting on their hands thinking, “well, I’m outta here soon, so why bother.” That attitude prevents many from taking action against the obvious evils which are inflicting massive amounts of damage upon the earth and the people, animals, and plants upon it.

If you happen to be one of these pre-tribulation rapture advocates, I have a question for you. Why would you go anywhere if you cannot, now, speak out against the baby murderers? Why would God prevent you from dying, allowing you to step into heaven directly from this earth, if you cannot speak out against the intensifying war against God and against the Messiah? I write often of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, chimerism, and the return of child sacrifice – do you think God condones those activities? If no, what have you done to prevent them from proliferating? Are you even aware that such monstrous projects, like the humanization of animals (chimerism), have been taking place for decades? Have you called your representative and demanded bans on creating new life forms, infanticide, child-sacrifice, and certain gene-splicing, engineering, and implementation projects? If not, why would God let anyone not fighting this evil step into heaven? If we cannot do these things effectively now, how are we going to leave a world where it is even possible for our children to instruct our grandchildren about what the Bible is, let alone encourage them to read it?

I don’t want anyone to be confused about what I am driving at in this article. I want anyone encountering this piece to ask themselves these questions. I have a desired outcome, but the choice is yours to make. Either the whole Bible is relevant or it’s not. The entire book is God’s Word front to back. All of it.

What did Jesus do? He died for our sins that we may live if we follow Him. Following Him means following the Father, just as Jesus did for us. Jesus flipped those money-changer’s tables over and beat them with whips because they were selling sin sacrifices inside of the temple, even on the Sabbath. Once Messiah’s blood was spilled and he uttered the words, “It is finished,” humanity’s sin was paid for. At the exact same time the Passover lamb’s throat was slit in the Temple. Jesus died for our sins so that God would no longer have to tolerate the repugnant sacrifices made to him as sin offerings. It became a racket. There was no repentance, only more animals being burnt to God asking to forgive the sins committed with no attempt from the sinner to stop sinning – which is what God was really getting at. God wants us to worship only Him. He wants us to love the sacrifice His Son made for our souls. The greatest thing I learned in my religious journey is that no one can be perfect, only the Messiah has ever been, or ever will be, perfect – as every Christian denomination pounds into their congregants heads – but we can be holy. To be holy, to be like Christ, we must follow the instructions God wrote down for us – the dietary laws, the idea of free will, respecting the Sabbath, how to worship Him, His festivals and high holy days. It’s not about being Jewish, it’s literally about being like Christ.

If you are upset, ask yourself why. If you feel so inclined, please try poking holes in this article. If you agree with every word I wrote or hated every word I wrote or are somewhere in the middle, my e-mail address is below. But above all…

Bless God and God bless.

My e-mail address is tim.oconnor@centerforthepreservationofhumanity.com