A belated Chag sameach Rosh Chodesh kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah on this the beginning of the 6th month of the sacred biblical calendar. This message comes a day late as I was too ill to either complete or deliver it yesterday.

Much could be said of the world situation but I am not permitted to say any more at this time. There is a great struggle going on between the forces of good and evil as I speak. The seeds have been sown by Yahweh's messengers and it but remains for them to sprout and mature. The seeds are already in the soil of the hearts of the righteous, those who have become so disgusted with their sinning and repented genuinely with a firm desire to live right. All we can do now is stand back and wait, for we have done much to fulfill our third commission to plant the seeds of truth far and wide, and in most cases have paid dearly for doing so. Nevertheless it is written:

"Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting. He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed, shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him" (Ps.126:5-6).

Wherever you are, keep working to build the Kingdom and respond to the Master's call to go where He leads:

"My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow Me...Whoever serves Me must follow Me; and where I am, My servant also will be. My Father will honour the one who serves Me" (John 10:27; 12:26, NIV).

The goal of every believer should be to cultivate a subjective experience of objective biblical truths. We can't, of course, know beforehand in exactly what form that will happen. We have expectations based on what we hear about others' experiences but no two people walk in exactly the same emotional and mental tracks and none of us knows exactly what we need, save in the vaguest terms - we just want to meet Him and commune with Him! We want to know He's there, real, and that we can interact with Him as we do another human being. Now don't get me wrong - the Christian/Messianic faith is not against the intellectual (theological, philosophical, scientific) - it is against the merely or exclusively intellectual. We were not designed to be cold fish. Yahweh gave us a mind and a heart and both have needs. The mind won is good, but a heart unwon is a salvation unfinished... incomplete. Salvation is of the whole man.

The reverse is also true: the combination of a full heart and an empty brain are just as likely to lead the soul astray. Both the mind and the heart have to be rebirthed into the spiritual domain of our Heavenly Father because without each other the soul will be incomplete and tossed about by every wind of doctrine and every emotional appeal. In a word, what you get from neglecting one or the other is a dangerous, if not insufferable, immaturity. Wisdom depends on both redeemed mind and redeemed heart and with each, as it were, confidently grasped with both hands, at length gives rise to experience. Focussing with an unhealthy exclusivity on the one or the other - mind or heart - is a sure recipe for partisanship, rivalry, schism and ever worsening denominationalism because it severs the communal ties of the Messianic Community (Church). An incompete soul soul at war with itself is at war with other people too, expecially whole people which the unbalanced soul can at best only minic. The result is a kind of spiritual autism.

The beginning of faith is certainly characterised by individualistic fervour in most but its maturing is necessarily a community affair. And I think it would be true to say that today, at any rate, in the highly subjective, emotionally charged and irrational postmodernist era, we have to first convert hearts and then carefully teach them to think theologically, philosophically and scientifically. Two centuries ago, in the Enlightenment era, it was the other way round. And too much of one (brain or heart) tends, unfortunately, to lead to an overreaction in the opposite direction when disillusionment sets in because of the tensions that build up in the soul as it senses its lack. And don't assume that it's only charismatics who are prone to anti-intellectualism, even if they are the most ripe for it - anti-charismatic, conservative Bible-thumping churches are just as guilty and vulnerable. Calvinists immediately spring to mind. The historical seeds of this modern anti-intellectualism are actually quite old, and can be traced back to the First Great Awakening in the United States between the 1730's and 1770's.

Yahweh created us to be beings of mind and heart, and the one cannot flourish without the other. The Second Great Awakening in America in the early 19th century just made matters worse, cultivating a deep suspicion of theological learning and challenging ecclesiastical authority itself by denouncing it as tyranny. The result was an anti-priestly fervour that essentially politicised religion into being 'of the people, by the people, and for the people'. It was excessively individualistic. Essentially what happened is Christianity became merged with Americanism, in the same way that, centuries before, Christianity had become merged with Imperial Romanism. The Americans democratised the truth while the Romans subjected it to imperial policy. Both were disastrous acts leading to the politicising of the Besorah (Gospel, Good News). Whatever democracy is - and I don't disagree that it's probably the best political system we have, so long as there is a well-educated citizeny with a common sense and a conservative consensus as far as morality is concerned, something which existed in the West at least until the 1960's and 70's - democracy is the lesser of all the available evils in the political spectrum except when it becomes detatched from freedom (whence you get the so-called 'peoples' democracies' like North Korea). Understand this, though: democracy isn't biblical, it isn't 'gospel' and cannot be naturally married to the Messianic Community (Church). Israel was, and still is, a theocracy ('God-rulership'), not a democracy ('people-rulership'). We don't get to vote on biblical doctrines we do or don't like becauswe they're indivisible - we embrace them whole or not at all because their authority is heavenly and they were designed for the happiness of both the individual and the community. Likewise we don't get to appoint our ministers by a show of hands. If they fall - and thet often do - there are proceedures for removing or reforming them when Yahweh's rules are followed.

Every true principle is theoretically - and more often than not in practice - corruptible and this is a reason we have to do history properly, if only to find out what the first believers believed in and did. As we have been discovering in our series on the Book of Revelation, the early Messianic Community or Church, after the apostles died, was unquestionably episcopal (ruled by Bishops). It was not presbyterian (ruled by elders or pastors) and it was not papist (ruled by a pope). And it certainly was not anarchistic (with no rulers at all). Moreover it's clear that this was the way the apostles set it up before they were taken home - there was never any program for repacing the original apostles with new ones once the firsdt ones had died. Had there been, they would have been replaced after each death, which they weren't. Indeed, there were to be no more apostles at all until the very end of the end-times.

The episcopy was a priestly system just like the Levitical system before it, though in the New Covenant the ministers are not confined to a particular tribe or race. Now we can criticise such systems all we want, and it's perfectly true that they are open to abuse and have been abused historically, but that doesn't mean we have the right to replace a corrupted system with an entirely new man-made one. That's just a different kind of corruption, a different form of idolatry, because idolatry cen be both the worship of creatures (including men and women like Joseph Smith, Jr., Ellen G. White and other charismatic leaders) and of systems (like Catholicism, Calvinism, etc.). In such a scenario, we must reform the corrupted system and restore it to what it was anciently, making sure that there are proper checks and ballances in place to prevent abuse in the future.

One of the reasons we were given the Olive Branch is to ensure that checks and balances are properly in place. All priests must be weighed impartially once a year in the autumn before Sukkot and their offices either confirmed or negated depending on their conduct and testimony. Investigators must be properly instructed and tested for their morality and ensure they really have been born again. The Messianic Community (Church) realised how important this was quite early on and introduced Catechetical Schools, much as we have done, because all sorts of unregenerated riff-raff were being admitted who were quenching the Ruach (Spirit) and causing congregations to spiritually degenerate, laying them bare to take-over by the carnal and wicked. Messianic Evangelicals have restored this system. It is not, therefore, enough to simply profess belief in Christ and, hey presto, you're 'in' and eligible to partake of the Master's (Lord's) Supper! It should be hard to enter a local congregation and easy to leave, not the other way round [1]. It is the reverse that is precisely a characteristic of the cults.

I began my spiritual journey with a prophetic dream and then devoted a very long time to applying my brain in studying the theologies of all the denominations around me in Oxford, and there were many. In the end my head was so packed with information that it could not satisfactorily process it all in order to make a decision. I was simply too inexperienced and not fully informed. I did what an academic is trained to do - study and research but I soon realised that the brain on its own was wholly inadequate. Many people have gone to our website and become enamoured with it because it is jam-packed with theological information, much of which doesn't exist anywhere else. But it's not enough to simply read our articles and sermons. Most of these people who fell in love with our teachings, where are they now? All but a tiny few are nowhere to be found, or else they stayed a while and realised that true religion isn't part-time but is an entire worldview and the lifestyle of one who has been supernaturally transformed into a new creature in Messiah. Spiritual life is, in any case, more than 'mere' theology too. Without chayim (life) theology is dead and useless. That is why spiritual regeneration is the top priority and is where Gospel life begins and ends. The rest is all about maturing into perfection.

So the first priority must always be to personally seek out Yah'shua (Jesus) for yourself and then follow Him wherrever He takes you. Like I said, my head was saturated with knowledge before I was born-again but I was 'none the wiser' in my state of unregeneration. So I closed all the books, stopped listening to all the preachers, started fasting, locked myself in my room at College and determined not to emerge until Yahweh Himself had unambiguously spoken to me and instructed me what to do. That same night I was born-again and was changed inside forever. You can read my story in Glimpse into Heaven which, interestingly because of the war going on there now, I first told in the Ukraine when I was a missionary in L'viv (Lemberg, Lwów) and Novovolynsk.

The New Birth experience was absolutely intoxicating - it was out of this world. I knew as I had never known before that Elohim (God) was real and not just a mental proposition, an idea generated by neurone synapses alone. This was my first major 'existential' experience but I soon learned that in spite of possessing the gift of seership, living in the emotional exhilaration of a spiritual relationship is not enough. I still needed to continue using my brain and 'do theology' because...and I know that Christians and Messianics who think that their spiritual rebirth automatically guarantees them faultness, 100 per cent accurate theology are going to be upset by this...because our first (and most important) regeneration of the mind and the heart does not imply we 'know it all' or that we won't still be deceived by our thoughts and emotions from time-to-time because the fullness is a product of MATURITY and maturity only comes about through experience which requires that we WALK OUT or PRACTICE our theology. A lot of what we learn comes through experiencing contrasts between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, light and dark, love and hate, which we can either do randomly (the irresponsible way) or through careful study of the Davar (Word). Spiritual growth is not exclusively 'charisma' but for the most part is hard, mental slog and (most unpopular of all) bending our emotions to Yahweh's Emet (Truth). We are extremely fickle beings and wage war against both a self-serving fleshy nature (by reckoning ourselves dead to it in Christ) and against dark spiritual powers are given rights of access to our souls, to confuse and hamper us, when we consciously choose to listen to their wisperings, believe them, and then willfully disobey the mitzvot (commandments).

It was not soon after I was born again that I made my first mistake. You might think that to be impossible but I was still an immature 23 year-old-or-so student. Now I had seen many visions during that time while fasting in my college room and one or two of them were false but I had the presence of mind and discipline to test them, as Scripture teaches (1 Jn.4:1), and exposed the entities behind the false ones so that when the genuine article came long, there was no barrier to my admitting the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) into my heart. The moment that happened, I quite literally experienced my mind expand and simutaneously felt this inrushing of simcha (joy) that that caused by heart to expand too that led to spontaneous praise which I had never done before...and on my knees. But as I said, my head was still crammed full of conflicting theology from many churches and groups, about which I knew next to nothing save in broad outlines, and it was not long afterwards that I saw a vision which seemed to be pointing me to join what turned out to be a false church that claimed to be the only true one! Yes, I fell into Mormonism for three years, attracted by many things in that religion, some undoubtedly good but much theologically deviant. And it's founder had false manifestations too. My problem was that I did not properly test that vision and I was in too much of a hurry to get 'stuck in'. I did not know that one did not need to join an organisation to in order to take the first steps in my spiritual walk. Impatience was my undoing for a whort while.

Today I know things I wish I had known in 1977 when I was born again. A big mistake I made early on was to focus on theology without considering doing good history (I never read the Church fathers until much later) and learning philosophy, because it's from history we can discover what the first believers believed and how they lived, and it's from philosophy that we can figure out just what the biblical worldview is and how easily that is corrupted by culture in every generation [2]. And it's not Roman or post-colonial American. It's Hebrew and it's theocratic. Which is not to say that we cannot learn from the mistakes of ecclesiastical organisations across the cenuries or discover how Yahweh used those institutions, however corrupt they may eventually have become, in order to nurture regenerated believers.

We absolutely can, and should, learn from our own mistakes whilst minimising as many as we can. In case you hadn't noticed, it's impossible to avoid making mistakes! But we can choose to limit both their number and type by trusting the Bible and making it our default source of truth (requiring some brain exercise) and by cultivating a prayer life to improve our spiritual discernment. I wish I had had more and better quality mentors during my journey and it's only now that some fantastic teachers have appeared on the scene, plus I did not realise at first that Yahweh wished to raise me as a mentor too. As teachers we must hone (sharpen) and refine our craft. A great responsibility falls upon our shoulders. Yes, we make mistakes, but hopefully as we mature and get wiser, we will make fewer and fewer of them. There's a reason why in the Messianic Community (Church) Elders are called 'elders' to whom we are expected to go and learn from! Yes, an 'elder' is an elderly, experienced member of a community, whether spiritual or cultural, not an 18 year-old Mormon missionary who has little or no experience of life nor a young schoolgirl called Gretha Thunberg who speaks authoritatively about things she has no clue about. And some of the historians whose writings I wouldn't touch when they were younger (like David Starkey) I now relish in their maturer years because they possess the benefit of experience. Age and experience counts. So seek out older, wiser folks.

I am not here just talking about intellectual wisdom, of course. The heart has an intelligence all of its own that obeys slightly different, though related, rules. We have a head and a heart for the same reason we have an up and a down, and a left and a right, so that we can make comparisons and then make reasoned and, at times, instinctual choices. The head and heart together give us stereophonic understanding! When our brains fail us we must rely to some extent on our hearts, and vice versa until we can get both connected properly again. The Enemy works hard to separate them and to create a false sense of security by getting us to overly rely on one to the exclusion or minimisation of the other. We tend to shut down the intellect is we have been fooled by deceived intellectuals or the heart if we have been emotionally abused. But like it or not, we are going to encounter disfunctional people with mental and emotional issues all our life and we must now allow them to shut us down. The gift of the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) is given to those who are regenerated so that they can be guided by all truth and not by the very determined, selfish and competitive fleshy nature or by the dark forces that push it hard.

So which universe do you live in? The real one or one of man's many inventions? C.S.Lewis once wrote that "the Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply does not fit the real universe" [3]. Materialism may not be your issue, though - it may be a competing religious system governed by various fantasies (like evolutionism, reincarnation, kabbalism, or Calvinism's belief in absolute predeterminism) which will lead you to conform your life to the unreal. And the problem with the unreal is that it eventually falls apart, potentially leaving you desolate.

With so many religions and philosophies being hawked on the market place these days, what is the seeker-after-truth to do? The real, created universe will intersect his or her life at some point, often more than once, and may at first appear 'alien' and 'unattractive', even 'repulsive', as does everything that clashes with reality because we're using a false systenm of weights and measures. I am reminded of an air disaster that occurred some years ago in Canada that had gone metric, because in the USA the old imperial units were (and still are) used. A new plane had been delivered to the airline from the USA and the instruction manual showed its fuel capacity in gallons and not liters. The ground crew got the two units mixed up and the plane ran out of fuel before it reached its destination, crashing and killing all onboard. Likewise in the realm of spiritual truth, it is "to Yahweh [that] belong the balances and the scales, all the weights in the bag are of His making" (Prov.16:11, JB). If we follow another non-biblical rule book, we're going to get our 'weights and measures' wrong too. There's only one way, and that way is Yah'shua (Jesus). It is He, and He alone, whom we must follow.

Quite recently when I was wrestling over an apparently insoluble problem and begging Yahweh for a clear-cut answer as to what I should do, I heard the words gently spoken back, 'FOLLOW ME'. We are to emulate the Master in all things for therein lies both safety and a reliable navigation chart for life. What did He do? He implicitly trusted in His Father, Yahweh, obeyed His instructions (i.e. followed His agenda and not His own), and lived by the Father's rule-book, the Torah. As we experience economic collapse we need to know what we are striving to do as the familiar spiritual landscape around us crumbles into a new, alien-looking one. You may find yourself cut off from people, as we have been when Facebook expelled us on 11 August, and in search of new spiritual landmarks. The chances are you are going to be alone a while so more than ever learning to be more reliant on Yah'shua (Jesus) and discerning His voice becomes all the more critical. We must adapt if we are to survive and prosper. Ministries will have to change along with individuals. If our online readership wants to get in contact, you can find ways of doing that on our discussions page. Until next Rosh Chodesh, remain in Christ, seeking Him the more earnestly, and you won't be alone. Shalom!

Endnotes

[1] See Conditions for Membership and How Do I Join ME? Advice for Seekers after Truth
[2] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois: 2004) & Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Charles Scribner's Sons, NY: 1960)
[3] C.S.Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, part 1, chapter 12, ed. Walter Hooper (Eerdemans, Grand Rapids, Michigan: 1979)