If My People

There is a scripture that mainstream religion appears to have been using to fill its church coffers.  It is the scripture whose words begin with the title of this blog.  It is found in 2 Chronicles 7:14, and reads:

if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

In my understanding of that scripture I need to take into account another scripture that is found in the book of Malachi. The verse that I am thinking of says:

3:6 “Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me.
“But you ask, ‘How do we rob you?’
“In tithes and offerings. ⁹ You are under a curse—the whole nation of you—because you are robbing me. ¹⁰ Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it. ¹¹ I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not cast their fruit,” says the LORD Almighty. ¹² “Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land,” says the LORD Almighty.

Together with another the whole of the last chapter of Malachi which reads:

¹ “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the LORD Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them. ² But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall. ³ Then you will trample down the wicked; they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I do these things,” says the LORD Almighty.

⁴ “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel.

⁵ “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. ⁶ He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse.”

The religious organizations that we call the churches have taken Chronicles and Malachi 3:6 and misapplied it, taken them out of context, as Satan did with Yahshua those 40 days in the desert, such that they read or have been interpreted by the church to say, give me your money just as you are told to especially in Malachi 3:6 and watch, YHWH will restore double or triple the amount to you.  You’ll have no more money worries, material worries; you’ll be rich beyond measure!

The business of tithes, the 1/10^th of a persons income that is supposed to be given to the church, or so we are told, is a whole other study.  One needs to go back to the original language that these books we call the bible were written in.  It is easy enough to understand by just looking at one language, English, which has words that can mean two or three different things, depending upon the country that you live in.  Also to be taken into consideration is the very fact that it was a human being who interpreted from the original language.  I know that when I write something or provide you with my interpretation of what I think it says, I do so based on who I am and where I am at that moment in my understanding; that my thoughts are based upon my core essence, my thoughts and interpretations.

Is any man infallible, not subject to error, to missing the mark – even in the area of understanding?  Even though the RC pope says he is infallible, that is just a fallacy and a description of himself that he has chosen to apply to himself.  I choose to believe what YHWH says about all of us, and that is that not one of us is perfect, not one of us has not sinned or missed the mark.

If my people who are called by my name…. I call myself a Christian or a Messianic or an Hebrew or a Jew – and in doing so I do so to tell you out there that I believe what Yahshua or YHWH has said, and I am following His teachings, His path and therefore I have somehow earned the right to call myself by His Name.  In doing and saying so about myself, I am telling the external world that whatever you see me doing, whatever you hear me saying or read that I have written, because I am called by His Name, I am speaking or acting as He would do!  What a sham and what a scary responsibility it is to say that I am called by any one of those names.  What an awesome and trembling responsibility I choose to take upon myself by calling myself by His Name.  It means I would need to put more thought into everything that there is about me:  every thought, word and deed!

I don’t know about you, but I do not put a lot of thought into everything I think, say or do and in retrospectively looking back, even this past 24 hours of this human existence, I can see things I’ve done, heard thoughts I’ve thought or words I’ve spoken, that would indeed disgrace that Name by which I call myself.

Having said that about myself upon self-examination, I turn my eyes outward to the religions and to the nations.  North America, where I live and notably Canada (but including the United States as well) is a nation that calls itself Christian.  We have called ourselves by His Name and we thus think we have the right of blessing, because scripture says so:  if we call ourselves by His Name….He will open the storehouse of heaven and bless us.

Well I am here to tell you that we speak with a forked tongue.  Our speech is like the brass sounding of an empty gong.  It is just empty words.  I can say this because I only need to look around me at this nation that says it is Christian.  There is that charity and that love that Yahshua walked while sojourning upon Mother Earth?  Where is that charity that stops to help the man lying dying in the streets, that feeds the hungry and helps the widow?  Where is that foundation upon which we were built; our first schools teaching children from the Bible?  We have thrown out the Bible, created a void that has allowed evil to enter in and rule.  I am speaking nothing more than what we see day in and day out in the press.  We have pre-teens showing up in our schools with knifes and guns, killing one another over some perceived wrong or insult.

Brought up in the RC church there were things that I learned in that religion that are good things, like the fear of the Lord.  It however, was taught out of context, just as the other mainstream religions have taken the blessings of YHWH out of context.  They are all self-serving motives.  By way of example, and I have to laugh, the RC church gets money from us after our loved ones have died; like we can bribe the Lord with prayers after a person has passed on…and buy their way into heaven!   Give me a break.  It continues to this day, I only need look at how my own father made arrangements for special prayers and masses to be bought and paid for after the passing of my mother!

Then the other religions, well many have taken the death of Yahshua as having done away with the need to keep the law as foretold to Moses.  Yahshua’s death did away with the death penalty, not the need to keep the Holy Commands of His Father.  He came to show us the way back, the narrow road back to the Father.  Yahshua kept all of the Father’s commands, His Holy Feast Days; didn’t abolish any of them.  If Yahshua is the role model for those of us calling ourselves Christians, calling ourselves by His Name – then why do we not do as he did?  Why, instead, do we follow the dictates of another human being, an early RC pope (around 300 AD) who changed the Lord’s Sabbath to sun-day?  You might say it’s just a little thing; I’ve in fact often heard, it really doesn’t matter, I am keeping a day just for him, but it’s more convenient and makes more sense to do it on sun-day, ‘cause well my wife or my husband, well they work on Saturday (the true Sabbath).  Does it matter?  Absolutely for we go against what the Father set out as part of our guide to living a fruitful and restful life.  Give the devil an inch and he’ll take a mile!

You and I need to take a closer look at that Name by which we call ourselves, under the barometer or microscope of the life of Yahshua and the ancient prophets and kings; do a comparison with their lives to see when they were blessed or cursed – and really see which would be our heritage given our current way of living.