The third stage of coming out of Babylon results in a period where you think you’re the only one in the world who can see the truth. That’s not the case, and this message is intended to let you know you’re not alone. I also include some tips for avoiding some doctrinal pitfalls on your walk.
Everybody is wrong… except me.
There are stages to coming out of Babylon. Well, we can call them stages, but it is different for everyone. The first is simply hearing the call. Whether you’ve been in a Christian denomination your whole life and realize some grievous error or you decide to pick up a bible the first time and start seeing that mainstream Christianity doesn’t line up to the WORD, just getting on the path is the first step.
The second step is normally pretty long. Years long. For those on this path, it’s generally about four years of independent study. It’s not like step one ends, and step two begins, mind you. This step is indistinguishable from step 1. You started, and now you’re going to finish. But you don’t even know what finished looks like. We start with reading the bible from cover to cover, any translation will do (NASB is preferred), and then you realize you’ve been at it for a long time. You seek out other translations and start to use Strong’s numbers or other translations. For me, I spent a lot of time trying to prove the false doctrines to be true. I did not want my family to be so wrong. I did not want the majority of mankind to have steered so wrong. So I studied and studied, trying desperately to find some magic verse or philosophy to effectively all of what I had just learned about the bible and the faith once delivered. Toward the end of stage two, folks often become like the title of today’s message. Everybody is wrong but me. And we think we’ve lost our minds. There are enormous denominations that have taught millions, if not billions, of people things completely contrary to the bible and only we seem to see it. And we see it so clearly that we start trying to convince others, which very seldom works.
Then we enter a period where we look for fellowship. Surely there have to be others out there like me. Surely others have figured this all out, too. And with the fellowship comes new teachings. When I came to this, the internet was a pretty new thing, and finding fellowship or other resources was difficult. I started my path somewhere around 1999 or 2000. The internet was a lot more pure back then. Having a website or an online presence was much more difficult; almost all of it was in print, not podcasts and videos. The benefit of that was that there weren’t so many crazy doctrines out there. We had to spend time learning, and that time often meant reading actual books, not listening to videos from who knows who. Today, it’s a complete deluge of information. And there are a lot of strange teachings out there that have taken on a life of their own. It’s surreal because we all got into this looking for the truth, and it’s quite possible to end up in a worse state than when we started by adopting strange teachings because the speaker used Hebrew words once in a while. So here’s a little guide to navigating stage three – looking for fellowship and using online resources:
The first thing is that to get here, you have to have read the bible cover to cover at least once. You’ve probably done it a couple of times and know a lot more than most ministers by this stage. The Ruach ha Kodesh, the Holy Spirit, brought you through, so keep trusting the Spirit and you know knowledge. If you hear something odd, or something that seems contrary to the Bible, then it probably warrants investigation.
There are a number of buckets that doctrine belongs in. The amount of things in these buckets changes over time. Let’s name the buckets:
Truth or Fact – these are the things that are 100% established by the Bible and aren’t going to change. The commandments go here. The state of the dead and resurrections go here. That Yeshua is the Messiah and Yahweh is the Father go here. These are concrete, proven, indisputable things.
The “I think” bucket. You’re going to have some ideas you believe but can’t prove. Everybody does. Even Paul wrote that he gave his opinion a time or two. Just be sure when you talk about these things that you label them as “I think” not “thus saith Yahweh”. A red flag warning is if you hear someone teaching something you know can’t be proven as fact. Be willing to challenge folks and ask how they got to those points.
The “people say” bucket. These are points where there are settled opinions but they could go either way. You probably have a strong opinion on them and have settled into your belief system, but you still acknowledge the other side’s stance. Being able to do this is the sign of a mature believer, by the way. When to start the count for Shavuot falls into this bucket.
The “I don’t know” bucket. You have to have one of these. If your minister never says, “I don’t know,” that’s a red flag warning. Frankly, there are things in scripture that may never make sense. It could be a translation issue, or we lack some piece of information that the original authors had. You’re “I don’t know” bucket will probably change over time. Mine has gotten smaller and bigger.
When I was combing through things in online forums back in the day, I was flooded by doctrines. These were the doctrines of traditional Christianity. Things like pacifism, apostolic succession, once saved, always saved, pan millennialism, and the like. I came up with an ad hoc system to sift through these things that I called “extreme fundamentalism.” Remember how I said you had to have gotten through the Bible at least once to get this far? Well, I had been through at least twice when I decided to venture out into the world, so I had a pretty good handle on what was biblical and what wasn’t. What I didn’t have was a ton of time to study each doctrine out so I implemented my homemade system to see if something was worth my time. For something to pass the test, it had to not contradict the main themes of the Bible. That’s the fundamental part. It had to jive with what the bible said or I moved on to step two. Step two was to take the concept to its logical conclusion, the extreme position, and see if it still made sense and didn’t contradict the Bible. So when people told me that the Sabbath was done away with, well, it wasn’t. The Bible never says this, and the commandments can’t change. So that was out. Then, if someone told me that apostolic succession was required, meaning each preacher in the NT had to be able to trace their authority back to Peter, well, that made no sense in the extreme because it would nullify the power of the Holy Spirit.
Today, though, people coming to the truth have a far harder path navigating doctrines than 20 years ago. Frankly, it’s the wild west out there. The internet is a double-edged sword and that puts good teaching on the same footing as bad. In fact, the bad tends to be intriguing and different, so the bad gets more attention than the boring truth. So here are a couple of things that I will offer up so you don’t waste your time, but they are big in our movement:
Paleo-Hebrew is a waste of time. I’ve spent more time on this than I care to admit. This is the pictographic Hebrew that is the precursor to the Ivri script. A brief lesson, the Hebrew script used today is called the Ashuri script. It’s very, very old, dating to the fall of the first temple. If you look at Strong’s, this is the script you will see today. The one before that, which was in use in the first century as well, is the Ivri script. There is no Torah written in this but fragments from Qumran. The one before that was hieroglyphics or pictograms. These pictograms represented sounds. Some will take the pictograms and make entire stories up about what words mean based on 21st-century characteristics of the images pictured. These stories will have nothing to do with the actual context of the word. While Hebrew characters definitely do trace back to pictograms, there is no value at all in trying to glean some biblical meaning by taking words apart. You are best to leave the words in context and also to understand real Hebrew and the meanings of the words.
Gematria is neat when it works but also not much benefit. Hebrew letters each have a numeric value. So one adds up the value of each letter of a word and tries to find an association. Perhaps another word has the same sum, or you come up with a biblical number like 40, 7, or 8, and you can make some association. There isn’t a rule for what goes where here, so it’s just interesting and nifty when you see something, but it’s not something one should spend time on. You’re better off reading the words in context and trying to understand the real Hebrew meanings of words.
Chiastic structures are really fun when you see them, but also not a lot of value unless you’re in your second or third decade of study. Chiastic structures are when a verse is kind of a hinge point, and the next verse up matches the verse below, then the second one up matches or associates with the second one below. These are real things, and the pattern is all over the Tanakh (old testament), but again they are just nifty. It’s best to just read the words in context trying to understand the real Hebrew meanings.
White fire and black fire is just silly. This is the idea that the spaces on a Torah scroll have meaning. It goes further than that, but there are actual people out there trying to glean information from the part of the paper that has no ink in it. I kid you not.
The canon of scripture, the Apocrypha, and the pseudepigrapha works. You may be wondering what I just said, which is actually good. The canon of scripture is the 66 book bible. That’s your absolute foundation. And that’s plenty of information for a lifetime of study. But some want to add to those 66 books, which is what the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha books are. Apocrypha means
These are some examples of doctrines or concepts that would be easy to get caught in and taken down bad paths. Trust me, been there, done that. These things can be more than a nuisance and time waster. They can be used to put bad doctrine into play, so you need to be careful where you spend your time and what you mentally consume.
The last thing I want to touch on is using extra-biblical resources. And by this, I mean scholars. One of the things in the “I don’t know” bucket is why there appear to be thousands of people out there who know more about the bible than most people ever will, who know the truth and the true meanings of words, and who write that truth down for us, but will never actually follow what the Bible says. Alas, these folks exist, and they have made commentaries for us. And dictionaries. And concordances. So we use them. Both from the Jewish side and the Christian side. Because it’s impossible to start from scratch and if you’ve read the Bible, it’s pretty easy to see when these folks are out to lunch. So feel free to use the resources and build on other folks’ knowledge. Just understand that they are human beings, not inspired scripture.
People who know the truth and don’t do it but are scholars… have to use them.