Help! Anyone with experience...

[HeIsEnough]

Our Messianic brothers and sisters are pointing out our mistakes and we don't like it. It isn't any fun to learn we may have screwed up and we aren't taking it very well. They question our translations and the validity of the Word we claim is from our Father in Heaven. It strikes at the heart of our belief system and I see many Christian websites verbally crucifying them with their remarks and character assaults. It sickens me to see what we have become. I am glad that I am old and will not live to see where this world is heading.

You appear to be referencing some things we are not privy to, so maybe you can give some specific examples.


They may be correct. I don’t know. Our translations may be flawed and our Savior's message certainly could have been delivered in Hebrew or Aramaic which they believe to be the language of the Jews of that time.

They are not correct. The new testament was written in Koine Greek. It is their burden to prove otherwise. But really, what does it matter? They only seek to divide by this tactic.

The Saviors message is clear, lastly given to Paul. It is grace through faith, not by works and not by gentiles following the Judaic customs. Paul and the Jerusalem council made this perfectly and completely clear. For them to hedge on this point, is not wise, and only serves to immediately identify them with the very same Judaizers which fought the Apostles and eventually had them murdered.

They feel foolish, humiliated, and stupid for listening to the cults in the first place and once they have turned their backs on us it is very difficult to open the discussion again.

If they have the love of God in their hearts, she will be healed of it eventually. I would agree, be there for your friend and keep reaching out. :thumb

[wintersnow]

Lets talk about one issue at a time shall we? Our main subject is our Messianic Brothers and sisters, their pointing out of our mistakes, and therefore the ministry of Lew White. At the root of it is his book "Fossilized Customs." I'll call it FC for easy reference. The other individuals, including Brother Lew, are being crucified on the internet by our christian brothers. A search under their names on Google will point up some of the websites I ran across when I attempted to see who they were after reading iSong6:3's initial questions. Lew is the most ethical and what I consider to be the most informed of the people she mentioned so lets go with his stuff if you please.

Many of the events and issues in his FC book have been pointed out by others many time, many years ago, and many times hence. I first heard of them while I was in High School (boy that was many decades ago) and it was then that I began researching to find evidence in history to refute them. The most pressing holiday is Christmas, and then Easter. Christian events that are dear to our hearts and our family units. Events we use to bring us together in His name at our churches and other functions.

In one of Lew's most controversial arguments, he states that the Christmas tree is an Asherah pole. Here's a bit of his argument on this:

"This consort of Baal was worshipped as Asherah, Astarte, Artemis, Athena, Isis, Gaia, Nana, Austron, Ostara, Eastre, Easter, Aphrodite, Eostre, Astoreth, Ishtar, Diana, Ninurta, Cres, Nut, Venus, Indrani, Devaki, Tanit, and others. "

His argument is good and this is not the first time I have heard/ read/ researched this controversy. We, as Christians, don't do it for the reasons they did it, but it still has it's roots in paganism. Christmas was also combined with Hogmany, The Feast of the Son of Isis, The Winter Solstice, Mithras the Sun God etc. The controversy continues today in some fundamentalist sects.

His other argument on Easter states that it is Asherah's holiday, 9 months to the tic from Christmas, which he believes was the birth of her bastard son, who was later worshiped as reincarnated Baal, the son of Asherah and her son, Nimrod. (Nimrod's roots are through the line of Noah) Nimrod was a horrible ruler who sacrificed children and was murdered by his uncle for it.

These are the holidays that individuals, who study and turn to their ways of thinking toward his, often abandon first... to the dismay and horror of their families and friends. iSong6:3's friend certainly has flagged these things to her and they are the issues that probably alarmed her in the first place.

I would not advise her to start her discussions with her friend with these things. She will loose. She would have better luck with Lew's study on the Name of the Creator of the Universe. I have learned through experience that we must first fight the battles we can win and try to avoid the most controversial of issues until after we have been able to find a common ground to come together with. In order to comprehend his initial study I had to first copy it into Microsoft Word and attempt the laborious task of finding his references and verifying the points of his argument. Lew's writing is often confusing, skips around as if you already know the subject, and includes Hebrew words and references to his other studies that he assumes the reader has already seen. It makes it hard to take him seriously for individuals who have never investigated these issues before. But Lew is on Fire for the Lord. There is no doubt in me of this.

I can email my edited version if anyone cares to read and discuss it.

I am currently on the Oregon Coast in an obscure and remote area where we are experiencing high winds up to 100 miles an hour. After posting this we will be taking our satellite dish down - probably until Monday or Tuesday - to prevent it from blowing away! Our slides are in and we are hunkered down for a bad storm hoping one of the giant trees around us do not fall on our heads.. . but if they crush our motorhome we'd just love to get rid of it that way! I plan to duck under one of the solid structures in the home if that happens so no worries. We are cetainly going to waddle over to the ocean to watch some of the violent and beautiful waves - when the winds slow down to 40 mph or so. See ya later :wave

[HeIsEnough]

These are the holidays that individuals, who study and turn to their ways of thinking toward his, often abandon first...

Yes, it is a road I am familiar with...along with foods, picking up the feast days, etc..


It makes it hard to take him seriously for individuals who have never investigated these issues before. But Lew is on Fire for the Lord. There is no doubt in me of this.

Lots of zeal, doesn't mean correct. No need to look further then Paul himself throughout the scriptures to understand God's viewpoint. We are in the new covenant, and it has no official holidays, food restrictions, and all of the other laws of Moses. I have noticed that most who go this route, end up believing that the feasts need celebrated, the food laws need observed...before you know it, that is all you do.

The pagan influences upon modern christian holidays is common knowledge. If anyone has no conviction from the Lord to quit observing these, that is between them and God. Paul is absolutely clear about this in Romans 14. So much so, that one who is overly zealous about these things, marks them as immature in the faith.


Romans 14
The Weak and the Strong
1Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. 2One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. 4Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

5One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. 6He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. 8If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

9For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. 10You, then, why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God's judgment seat. 11It is written:
" 'As surely as I live,' says the Lord,
'every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will confess to God.' "[a] 12So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God.

13Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother's way. 14As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food[b] is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean. 15If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died. 16Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil. 17For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, 18because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men.

19Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. 20Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. 21It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall.

22So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves. 23But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

The plain meaning of the implementation of the teachings of scripture, often show these types of false teachings as exactly that, false.

[medbiller777]

Our redeemer never heard anyone call him Jesus. His name in Hebrew is Yahushua. We know this because the angel of God told us what his name meant and he was a JEW so he had a Hebrew name.

I have heard this several times and it seems to be coming up alot lately. Is this true? Is the name Jesus a Greek version of his name? This confused me when I heard it a few weeks ago. (and I don't remember where I heard it.)

[iSong6:3]

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[iSong6:3]

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[wintersnow]

Whoa, those links of iSong6:3's were a confusing lot. They pull into them every nit pick and kitchen sink version of the Hebrew names that have ever been suggested. It really isn't all that difficult. Jesus is the Greek name. Yahushua is one way of writing the Hebrew name of our Savior.

The following has been plucked and edited from several explanations and it's a fairly complete explanation:

Back in 1599 the Greek word for Jesus was still IEOUS. The Norman invasion of 1066 introduced the letter "j" to England but the sound of the letter did not exist in the Old English language until the early 1200's. Over the next 300 years the hard "J" sound started to replace male names that began with I or Y because it sounded so masculine. Names like Iames became "James," Iakob became Jacob, and Yohan became "John."

During the time the letter J was starting to gain acceptance, John Wycliffe became the first person to translate the New Testament from Latin into English in 1384. He preserved the Latin spelling and pronunciation of IESUS but his translation was unread by the common man because only a few hand-written copies of his Bible were produced which were quickly banned by the Church. The KJV was legally the only "authorized" version allowed in England, and was produced to stamp out the Geneva translation (The Geneva "Bible" contained many footnotes, reference helps, and conveyed a high level of general information for people to learn).

When Gutenburg invented the printing press the Latin Vulgate "Bible" became the first book ever printed in 1455. The first printed bible in a foreign tongue was the German Mentel Bible of 1466 followed by the Martin Luther bible of 1522.

After William Tyndale was denied permission to print an English bible he went to visit Martin Luther and completed his translation of the New Testament in 1525. Tyndale had 18,000 copies printed at Worms and smuggled into England of which only two copies survive. After printing his revised edition of 1534 he was captured in Belgium, tried for heresy by order of the pope, and put to death in 1536 by strangulation after which his body was burned at the stake.

By the year 1611 the letter "J" was officially part of the English language and the King James Bible was printed along with pronunciation guides for all proper names like Jesus, Jew, Jeremiah, Jerusalem, Judah, and John. The name "Jesus" has been in use ever since.

Hebrews 4 and Acts 7 refer to "Joshua" (Yahushua more accurately), using the same Greek letters, IESOUS. Now think very hard; could the successor of Mosheh and the Messiah of Israel possibly have the same NAME in the original Hebrew? Scholars don't doubt it for a second that they did indeed. To learn the Hebrew name of your Savior, go look at the Hebrew letters for the spelling of "Joshua": Hebrew letters = yod-hay-waw-shin-ayin. Both had the Hebrew name: YAHUSHUA. The Greek alphabet cannot transliterate this word, and "Latinizing" the Greek form only makes it worse.

"The Name of our Messiah in the received Greek is written: IESOU and IESOUS. The ending "S" is added because the Greek language requires male names to end in s.

The translation of any word, phrase, sentence, or book is to carry across a meaning or interpretation from one language to another. Not sounds, but thoughts are transferred. What would otherwise be gibberish or confusion is explained and rendered understandable when the sound from one language is equated with a similar idea or concept in another. It matters not if the sound is written or spoken; the objective of translating a word is to convey or transfer the meaning of the word or concept, not the sound of it.

To transliterate a word from one language to another involves "trans-lettering" - to take each corresponding letter from the original language and use the closest sounding letters in the target alphabet to duplicate the exact sound of the word. The meaning of the word is not involved in this process.

Yahshua (or Yahushua, Y'shua) means "Yah is our salvation." Since it has been claimed (and defended by Jesuits for centuries) to be a translation into the Greek, & subsequently the Latin languages, it would be necessary to maintain some meaning in both languages that equals the meaning "Yah is our salvation".

Since this is not the case, the word JESUS is some sort of total replacement device, probably used in order to appeal to the hearers of the name.

Some people believe that the form "JESUS" was derived directly from "YESHU." The form "YESHUA" is from the acronym "YESHU", a mutilation of Yahushua's Name used by unbelieving Yahudim during the late 1st and 2nd century CE. The letters in "YESHU" stood for the sentence, "may his name be blotted out" (from the scroll of life). This "Yeshu" acronym is the real root of the form "JESUS", after going through Greek, then Latin.

Ironic isn't it? That unbelievers may have tried to blot out his name through their language and it has become famous as his true name.:wave

[HeIsEnough]

The following has been plucked and edited from several explanations and it's a fairly complete explanation:


Provide the sources for this material please.

[wintersnow]

We are talking about FC and the beliefs iSong6:3 will need to refute when she visits her friend. So it's from Lew White and a crapload of history books (that I no longer have in my possession) and Websters Dictionary. Remember I said that Ole Lew's writing is confusing and I had to copy it into Microsoft Word and edit it just to understand it... then I had to look up all the historic material to see if it is factual. Well that's where it's from. :faint

[HeIsEnough]

Yes, I understand. Thanks.

Here are a couple more..

http://www.sacrednamemovement.com/questpart1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Name_Movement