When and how you worship identifies which God you serve.
Video with slides from Rumble below.
Audio only from Spotify below.
When and how you worship identifies which God you serve.
When we think of the first three commandments we almost always think about false gods being idols. But what if worshiping false gods didn’t just involve what your worship but when? Unfortunately, most of Christianity worships a false god and breaks the first three commandments without even knowing it. But please bear with me because if you really want to be a part of the family of the true God Yahweh, when you worship is the actual sign. It’s about behavior as well as idols.
I spend a lot of time pitching the positive side of keeping Torah. You know, the benefits of following the entire bible and how the whole faith, from Genesis to Revelation, makes sense. This is in the vein of the Shema, which Yeshua said is the greatest commandment -to love YHVH your Elohim, the LORD your God, with all your heart, you soul, and your might. If you love YHVH, you will do what He says. And when you do what He says, the bible and our ultimate destiny become much easier to understand. But there’s a flip side to this walk:
Slide 2 Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king. (1Pe 2:17)
Slide 2 The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil. (Ecc 12:13-14)
The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The list goes on and on. And it’s hard to bring this side of the faith up because we are all sinners. But we must be moving in a positive direction, towards Yahweh, and sometimes the consequences of our actions need to be addressed to bring about the necessary change. Yeshua said the greatest commandment is to love Yahweh with all your heart and second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Loving Yahweh with all our hearts is displayed by simply doing what he said to do and not doing what He said not to do. Obedience and emulation are the best forms of worship. The second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves. If you saw your neighbor doing something that could hurt them, you are obliged to warn them if you love them.
So why is it so important for us to worship on the right day of the week?
Slide 3 YHVH spoke to Moses, saying, “But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am YHVH who sanctifies you. ‘Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people. ‘For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to YHVH; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely be put to death. ‘So the sons of Israel shall observe the sabbath, to celebrate the sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.’ It is a sign between Me and the sons of Israel forever; for in six days YHVH made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor, and was refreshed.” When He had finished speaking with him upon Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God. (Exo 31:12-18)
One of the biggest signs of God’s people, if not the biggest, is when and how we worship. One objection to this is that we’re not the sons of Israel so it doesn’t apply. Au contraire, my friends. Those who accept Yeshua as the Messiah and are baptized become adopted children of Abraham and heirs according to the promise. The NC was made with Israel and Judah. The path to salvation is inextricably tied to being part of the family of God. If you worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He has told us how to do this. And the 7th day Sabbath is a chief way of doing this.
Also in the passage above it says “sabbaths” in the plural. Leviticus 23 defines all of Yahweh’s sabbaths. The weekly being at the top and then we have annual observances, most of which are also sabbaths. I’ve spoken in detail in the past how these observances identify Yahweh’s people. The few times that Israel did what they were supposed to do by following Torah, one could imagine watching the nation from a helicopter view. Every Friday and sunset all motion would stop. All the kids would be in their houses, the streets empty and everything peaceful. On Saturday, you’d see people congregating to have their fellowships on Shabbat. In the days of synagogues, you would see people literally going to church on Shabbat. Then they’d go home and at sunset, you’d see some activity, but for the rest of the week you’d see normal hustle and bustle. Commerce, ranching, farming, and the like. Then on the annual sabbaths, you’d see the entire nation just come to a stop just like on the weekly sabbath. How is this a sign? Because it’s a culture. All the surrounding nations would know how to identify the Israelites by what days they observed. This is the true faith, not one of crosses or statues, but one of routine observances. Our behavior defines which God we serve.
Having a sign and a means to identify oneself as a believer is important. The flip side of having a sign is that it gives the adversary an avenue for attack.
Slide 4 ‘As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings will arise; and another will arise after them, and he will be different from the previous ones and will subdue three kings. ‘He will speak out against the Most High and wear down the saints of the Highest One, and he will intend to make alterations in times and in law; and they will be given into his hand for a time, times, and half a time. (Dan 7:24-25)
Satan wants to be worshiped. That also means he doesn’t want us worshiping Yahweh. In fact, Satan wants to actually be the ruler of the universe. So his playbook is to change the Torah, hence the change in times and law. The Torah establishes time in the book of Genesis. An evening and a morning is a day. The seventh day of creation, which is the seventh day each week, is the Sabbath. It’s the day Yahweh rested from His works and then we follow His example by doing the same. Remember, the fourth commandment even references the creation.
The cold reality of the situation is that the switch from Sabbath to Sunday isn’t just some switch in when to meet up for church, it’s a switch in gods. Friday sunset to Saturday sunset is the mark of Yahweh. So what god is served by keeping Sunday? You’ve go it, a sun god.
Pagan religions from antiquity worship the sun, s-u-n, the helium plasma ball at the center of our solar system. People, either ignorant of Yahweh or being influenced by Satan, realized that life and light go hand in hand. The sun brings warmth and plants grow when we have sunlight and warmth. When the sun went away, which we now know it stays still and earth’s tilted orbit makes it seem like it is moving when it’s us, it got cold and things died. When it “came back”, it got warm and things came back to life. So people decided that sun, s-u-n, was a god, the giver of life. Then they added in the planets and all sorts of other things to worship, which is idolatry. Over time, these other things got days and observances because it’s hard wired into mankind to want to have religious observances. Deis solis is the day of the sun and is Sunday on our calendars. The false gods had observance times because they are copies of the true God’s worship system.
When Christianity went forth from Zion, it started in the synagogues with Jews who accepted Yeshua as the Messiah. This continued for a long time. When gentiles began to convert, they joined with the Jews at synagogue. They gave up their pagan practices and adopted the worship of the True God, Yahweh, through His Son, Yeshua. This is why the council of Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, includes “for Moses is read in the synagogues every Sabbath”. The converts had already stopped worshiping on the false days, were attending synagogue on Shabbat, and were expected to keep doing that to hear Moses, i.e., the Torah, every week and learn the ways of Yahweh. So understand, that first century faith was one of people accepting Yeshua as Messiah, Jesus as the Christ, and then breaking with their pagan ways. They stopped worshiping false gods and switched to the true and did it by changing when and how they worshiped.
Unfortunately, Christianity grew apart from the synagogue and keeping the Torah as it moved west. Over time it became acceptable to blend the pagan practices into Christianity. This culminated in councils of bishops who had come to loathe Jews and the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Christianity grew into somewhat of a new religion, being an amalgamation of NT scripture, some OT scripture, legends, myths, and the observances of pagan religions. Sunday, Christmas, and Easter are all pagan celebrations that were brought into Christianity and ultimately subverted it. We have evidence of this in the councils of Nicea and Laodicea, where at the council of Laodicea they were forbidding keeping the Sabbath and mandating people read the Gospels on that same day. This is because, in AD 364, Christians were still reading Torah on Shabbat as the disciples expected them to do in Acts 15. Council of Laodicea – 364 AD – The Sabbath Sentinel
It’s remarkable to not that the same sin which got Israel smote repeatedly, mixing in false god worship with the true (syncretism), has become the foundation for Christianity. Most of the world’s Christians think that Sunday is the Sabbath and that we’re supposed to observe Christmas and Easter. All three of these things actually give homage to false gods and we really need to not do them. If you want the brutal truth about Christmas, please check out my post Are You Worshiping False Gods? – First Century Christianity where you can hear perhaps the most famous minister of our time admit live on TV that Christmas and all its observances are 100% pagan.
Brothers and sisters, if you’re hearing this info for the first time, it’s time to make a change. The change is hard. Yeshua said plainly that He didn’t come to bring peace but a sword. It was not a literal sword, but a sharp division between doing what is right and following Him and His Father versus going the other way. When I learned this information, I spent a ton of time trying to disprove it. But I had to come to the reality that Friday sunset to Saturday set is the Sabbath, the real 4th commandment. And keeping any other day like that is honoring a false god while cheating on the True God. How and when we worship matters.