Category: Written

Why the Tree of Life is Our Logo

‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the Tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.’
(Rev 2:7)

Adam and Eve had one commandment in the Garden of Eden and that was to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were created immortal and given dominion over the earth with just this one rule, that they broke. After the fall, they were expelled from the Garden which separated them from the Tree of Life. This also separated all mankind from that tree which means we have been fallen, mortal beings ever since.

In the New Testament we learn about eternal life. God, who’s Name is Yahweh, has provided a mechanism for bridging the gap between mankind and eternal life through His Son, Yeshua. We know that the path to eternal life is to repent, accept Yeshua as the Messiah, be baptized, and then live a life of obedience. This lifestyle is outlined from Genesis to Revelation but is best illustrated through the life of Jesus the Christ, Yeshua the Messiah. He lived Torah perfectly and showed us how to keep the commandments, having died a sinless death for the sins of all who accept Him. He was resurrected by God and is now seated at His Right Hand. Yeshua is the Mediator between us and God and will return to judge the living and the dead.

The Tree of Life and the scripture verse that tells us plainly how to overcome is our logo. The recipe for attaining eternal life is comprised in one simple statement: Keep the Torah while believing in Yeshua. This represents the mission of this ministry. We strive to reach as many as possible with this simple message and help guide people into a walk that will lead us all to the Tree of Life.

Homeschooling Tips!

Any good parent cares immensely for the future of their child/children and part of that is thinking ahead for their educational path. While it is not for every family, homeschooling is a great option to consider. My family had its own journey and came through the other side, seeing success for our children.

We want to share some homeschooling tips from our personal experience. Your experience will and should be different from ours, so please don’t think of this article as a complete recipe for success.

Decision making

Early on, my wife and I decided that public school was not the path we wished to put our children on. Neither of us had great experiences in public school; my wife’s public school experience was so bad, and since her parents couldn’t afford tuition, she opted to work her way through private school by washing dishes in the cafeteria. 

Different states have different rules for homeschooling so please check your state before assuming anything. We are blessed to live in Missouri, which is one of the most favorable states for those who choose to homeschool. Homeschooling is a blessed path because you can tailor each child’s education to their God-given traits and personality.

Where to start

Tip 1:
Do not start from scratch!
We decided for the benefit of the family to begin each child with at least two years of private school before we endeavored to home-school them. We used this to establish basic order and teach them to read. Part of this journey is realizing where you need help and expecting to pay for that help.

Regardless of what avenue you choose, there is a cost.  Public and private schools have fees, wardrobe expectations, etc. Private schools have high tuition.  

Tip 2:
Designate roles.
I highly recommend that one parent be the designated breadwinner and concentrate on that while the other concentrates on the schooling. 

Both parents must realize that the parent doing the homeschooling is a human with limitations. There came times when my wife needed a vacation or just a couple of days off. The concept that being a housewife or home school mom is somehow not a job is absurd. My wife even went to a hotel for the weekend a few times just to have some alone time and unwind.

Prior to sending the kids to private school, we enrolled them in daycare for a couple of hours a day, a couple of times a week. My wife was the teacher and, frankly, sometimes she needed to be alone to get some chores done, or just run errands without the clan in tow. Daycare also helped the kids to learn order but was a necessity for sanity and for the house to generally operate.

Tip 3:
Be realistic.
The bread-winning parent needs to set realistic expectations of what the running of the household will be like. 

I traveled for work extensively when the children were young and I would come home to a disaster of a house sometimes. If a child or my wife had gotten sick, if an appliance had broken down, or if a kid had had a tantrum, sometimes the place would just be a hopeless mess. I had to learn to see that and realize she did not intend for the house to look like that, rather than becoming part of the problem by getting upset.

Tip 4:
Academic discipline.
Remember how I said this path isn’t free? We had a rule that each child had to master something like a sport or a musical instrument. This teaches them at a very young age how to achieve long-term goals and the satisfaction of mastering a skill that nobody can ever take from them.

Because of our geography, we were a bit limited as to what they could choose. Each child started with gymnastics and then had a choice to try one other activity or stay in gymnastics. My son and one daughter left and became black belts in martial arts. One daughter stayed and entered competitive gymnastics. Both daughters added music to their repertoire, one becoming a classical pianist and another learning guitar.

The point of this, and the private school, is to realize that accredited teaching is very valuable. It teaches the children to respect genuine authorities and then to become genuine authorities on subjects. A big drawback of leaving the public school system is the lack of authority-led instruction so we have to find a way to achieve this. The kids must understand how important it is to respect those who have put in the time to master things and how to recognize people in life who are, frankly, charlatans.

The curriculum is also very important. These can be purchased online or at stores like Mardel’s (Mardel Christian & Education). These cost a couple of hundred dollars and will walk your child through entire subjects or entire grade levels. They come in workbook forms and in computer forms. Alpha Omega (Homeschool Curriculum – AOP Homeschooling) and Teaching Textbooks (Teaching Textbooks — homeschool math curriculum free trial) were two resources we used to significant effect.

Tip 5:
The public library is your friend!
Libraries are a splendid resource for homeschoolers. They will host homeschooling events, offer classes, and host movie nights.

My girls were into reading and developed remarkably advanced vocabularies at a young age. Our library card offers online resources that rival the Library of Congress. One huge perk was free access to a language learning website called Mango Languages where you could learn any language on earth for free (if you linked up your MidContinent library card). This program is worth quite a bit of money and meets a graduation requirement: Remember, foreign language is a requirement for high school graduation, and entrance into most colleges and universities.

Mango Languages (Home – Mango Languages) is a program that excels because it teaches grammar, not just how to speak a foreign language.

Tip 6:
Transcripts are required.
Keeping track of what the kids learn is generally important but becomes crucial once your child starts high school.

Transcripts are required to enter community college. We used TranscriptPro | EdPLUS® (homeschooltranscripts.com) for our daughters and it was accepted without question. Granted, you have to fill it out yourself, so our experience may have been uniquely blessed. What’s great about this program is that extra-curricular activities like music and karate can count for credit as do jobs if you enter information properly. 

While transcripts were required for our kids entering college, my son went into a trade upon graduating from high school and has not had to show a diploma to anyone. He just enters that he graduated from homeschool on his applications and it has worked for him. We do recommend providing transcripts though, in case anyone ever does ask. 

Tip 7:
Encourage independence. 
I just touched upon entering the workforce or a trade. One great thing about homeschooling is the flexible hours. Our children started working the moment they could. They wanted out of the house and we wanted them to start earning money on their own so we could teach them about money management (a skill I don’t think public school will ever teach). 

Because of homeschooling, they were able to work during the day pretty much anywhere they wanted during the school year. This has helped them immensely as they have progressed into other jobs and my son entered a trade quite young. This is because they possess basic employee acumen and communication skills that most people don’t develop for a few more years. Our children are frequently mistaken for being much older than they are because they acquired experience and work skills at such young ages.

Tip 8:
Prepares students for real life!
With respect to college, homeschooling prepares a student for college while public school simply doesn’t.

Our kids have been studying like college students since middle school. The two who entered college are excelling because they are already independent studiers who are comfortable expressing themselves. 

Final BIG tip:
Dual enrollment.

The biggest tip I want to share:
We graduated our older daughter a year ahead to start community college early. She had earned it and we thought she had to be done with high school to enter college. While she had earned the honor of completing high school, this was a financial mistake. Because we live out of district, her tuition ended up being full cost from day one. Our younger daughter enrolled in community college at age 15, and we learned that she did not have to be graduated from high school to take community college classes. In fact, being technically “in high school” qualified her for a 50% discount; this is called dual enrollment!

There you go! The biggest tips we gleaned after homeschooling three children, all of whom grew through it into productive, mindful, young adults. Blessings! 

If you have questions or comments, I welcome them. You can either comment on this post or contact me here!  

(This blog post has been updated from an earlier version.)

Explaining the Hebrew Calendar

This site is for people who are eager to understand how the early Christians worshiped and what their doctrines were. As we study, we come to realize that Christmas and Easter were not observed by the early church but they kept the holy days of Leviticus 23 and perhaps a couple others. These days are observed on the Bible’s calendar which is not the calendar the world uses today to keep time. Because Yahweh’s holy days (moedim) are observed on a different calendar, they appear to move around on our modern calendar. I’m going to explain the difference in the calendars a bit here so those who are seeking can understand the differences.

Starting with the familiar, our modern calendar is based on the earth’s orbit around the sun. This calendar is called the Gregorian calendar because it was instituted by Pope Gregory XIII and is a modification of the calendar before that called the Julian calendar. The earth takes roughly 365 days to orbit the sun, thus this is determined to be a year.  Every four years we have an extra day, called a leap year, to keep this purely solar calendar from deviating from the seasons over time. These 365 days are then divided up by months. These months each always have the same number of days in them, except February which gets the extra day every four years. As you know, the modern year ends December 31 and the new year starts January 1, which normally coincides with the earth’s tilt being as far from the sun as it will be.

The Hebrew calendar is a lot different.

In Exodus 12, YHVH tells Moses “this shall be the beginning of months for you.” In Hebrew, this is called Rosh Chodesh or the beginning of months. The first month of the Hebrew year is the only one that has a name in the Torah. It’s called Abib. Abib is the budding state of barley, so from this tiny bit of information we know the year starts in the spring at the new moon that happens after the barley is in the abib state.

Numbers 10: 1-10  gives commands about using some very special trumpets. These are not shofrot (the plural of shofar). Shofrot are animal horns that many of us possess and use. These trumpets are chatsoserah, a different word entirely, and they are made of metal. These can only be blown by specific kohenim (priests of the house of Aaron) and ONLY by the command of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest of the temple. From verse 10, we know that these trumpets sounded the new months, which are new moons. And from this tiny bit of scripture, we get that each month can move around and is manually called by the High Priest. This is a lunar calendar and it isn’t anywhere near as precise as we are accustomed, hence the blowing of the trumpets to alert the people who would then spread the word.

In this system, the Israelites would not know how many days were in a year until the year was done. In fact, they didn’t even know how many days were in a month until the month was done. The months were numbered, not named, and the year would organically have a leap month (a 13th month) periodically because a lunar calendar is about 360 days instead of 365, so they would have to add a month when the barley was not in the abib state at the sighting of the new moon of the 12th month. This is preposterous to us because they would have a year every so often with 390 days vice 365.

For this system to work, we need a priesthood and some specific barley to be referenced. We do not have this today.

As we know, the Israelites were not very good about keeping Torah after the Joshua generation. They ended up being scattered and then Judah taken to Babylon. When they come back from Babylon they bring with them some variations on the calendar. One is calling the first day of the 7th month rosh chodesh. That’s contrary to Exodus 12. They also bring back names for the months that correspond to the Babylonian calendar. And, over time, they begin to make calculations so they can predict the new moon. In practicality, sighting the moon doesn’t work if it’s overcast. And one can count to 29 each month to know it’s about time for a new moon. We have to realize that this system of Torah was a lifestyle, a system that had to be practical for a nation to operate. And, frankly, Israelites were really smart when they put their mind to stuff. For a very good education on the history of the Jewish calendar, please reference CALENDAR, HISTORY OF – JewishEncyclopedia.com.

In the first century they had a temple and there is no argument about the calendar at all in the New Testament. The Kohen Gadol called it and that settled it. And Pesach, Passover, was kept on the 14th day of the month Abib, the Biblical first month of the year, universally. It’s the second century when Christianity started to turn gentile and they wanted to switch Pesach to being based on the spring equinox (solar, not lunar), which does often correlate to the 1st month but is not a biblical precept for calling a new month. This is called the Quartodeciman controversy, where an apostle of John called Marcion argued for keeping Pesach the way the apostles did while the bishop of Rome argued for basically using the Easter calculation (lunar). Over time, the equinox method took root and is the basis for calculating Easter today, but Easter is not Pesach.

After the temple came down in AD 70, Jews and Messianics got scattered but the Sanhedrin was relocated – not disbanded. The Sanhedrin had already been calculating the new moons so they switched to a mix of calculation and sighting, but it was still the Sanhedrin deciding when year/months began. The last binding decision of the Sanhedrin came in 385 AD when our current calculated calendar was effectively established. (The Sanhedrin was disbanded in 425 AD due to persecution from Rome.) Over the centuries after the temple came down, different places were keeping the calendar in different ways and unity suffered. So they decided to let the calculations they had been using become public knowledge so all who kept Torah could be on the same calendar. This is the same calendar we at this site use to observe the Holy Days of Leviticus 23. It is the same calendar that populates the dates of the Holy Days on your wall calendar. We have one exception, though, and that’s how we reconcile Shavuot/Pentecost, but it is still based on the calculated Jewish calendar. And the reason the dates “move around” on our modern calendars is because the Hebrew calendar is just a different reckoning of time than our purely solar calendar.

Once you get into this walk, you will encounter people who have different calendars. Some have slightly different calendars because they are sighting the moons themselves in parallel with the Hebrew calendar. Some are using NASA to tell when the new moon is. Some use the new moon locally. Some use the new moon in Jerusalem. Some look at some barley in Jerusalem while others look at different barley. In my experience, the calculated calendar is right more than any of the others and we are still in the same situation as those who instituted this calendar – no temple, no priesthood, all of us scattered. In 2014-2015 we had an astronomical anomaly where the moon was red on the First Day of Unleavened Bread and the first day of Sukkot, which are six months apart, two years in a row. For me, this was the end of any debate about the calendars. The calculated calendar was 100% right two years in a row, while the other calendars were all over the map.

It is my advice and recommendation to learn the Torah and follow the Holy Day cycles on the calculated calendar for at least a couple years before trying to challenge the calendar. As we learn quickly in this walk, we learn by doing, not just academic study. Tackling the calendar is better handled once you have kept a few festivals and noticed how nature aligns with what we are doing while also learning the more practical aspects of commandment keeping in large groups of mature first century Christians.

Holy Day Dates – First Century Christianity The upcoming dates to observe Yahwheh’s appointed times.

It’s time

This website is a miracle. And it’s time to start using it.

I started this path over 20 years ago. My wife challenged me to find Sunday worship in the bible. I took the challenge and lost. Like most people who have come to the knowledge of the truth, that initial reading of the bible started a change that I could not control. Not only is Sunday not in the bible, the other key doctrines of mainstream Christianity aren’t either. In fact, they often contradict the bible. Just reading the words in a normal modern translation uncovered so many errors that it was alarming.

What happens to us when we undergo this transformation is rather, well, violent, for lack of a better word. We go through a period of testing literally everything that we learned in church. And we often alienate our families and friends, trying to drag them along. Our world has been shaken to its core. And the urgency of “getting it right” seems immediate. Each error corrected seems like we were just snatched from the fire, so we keep moving, in search of doctrinal perfection regardless of the consequences. This time period is usually 3-4 years fore each individual.

Once I settled into the faith once delivered, I miraculously found a local congregation that was quite aligned with my new belief system. These folks allowed me to continue growing. They had patience, helped me to learn administration, and learn how to be a public speaker. This website was born, roughly 15 years ago, while I was in that congregation. I asked God, “why did you show me all this? What am I supposed to do with it?” Then I got a new computer that made the creation of websites remarkably easy. Then began FirstCenturyChristianity.net.

This website has effectively sat idle with just the key doctrines we hold dear for over 8 years. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, it is in the top searches for those seeking the truth about the Trinity, Easter, and Christmas. It has never had any paid marketing or search engine optimization (other than the automatic stuff). In April of 2021, this site got more traffic in one day than I’ve seen on my other sites for a month. And it was people looking for the truth about Easter.

Since then, I have been wondering what Yahweh was trying to tell me with the traffic. The site had been static for a very long time with decent traffic. That increase in April of 2021, and subsequent spikes, had to mean something.

If we take a step back and realize what has happened in the last two years, I think it becomes clear. People have exited the mainstream churches in favor of online only. Without the influence of the paid ministers, they are searching the scriptures on their own. Without the peer pressure of attending large congregations, they are more likely to make doctrinal changes. And they need to find the truth. Short, simple truth, packaged in a way they can understand.

So now is the time. I will ask you all to pray for this ministry to reach the people being called out of Babylon. And pray for me, that the Ruach ha Kodesh, the Holy Spirit, guides my words and my keyboard. All for Yahweh’s glory, in the Name of His Son, Yeshua.