Why I Left Christianity -- Jen Fishburne

i am not mad at god i'm not hurt by the church i do not think the old testament jehovah is a mini monster i'm not confused about the end times i'm not bothered by a few discrepancies in the bible i can fully explain the creation story adam and eve and the walking talking serpent in the garden i have zero problems with noah's ark dinosaurs talking jackasses and jonah being eaten by a fish i do not blame god for saving for children starving in india or africa or for not stopping kovid or for my favorite candidate not winning the last election i'm not concerned about logical fallacies regarding god's omnipotence omniscience or omnipresence modern-day science is not my new religion i do not think the bible is a myth i am not an atheist or agnostic i am not missing something in the bible i didn't just suddenly give up or quit after living the christian life for 50 years and studying the bible far deeper than most but i am no longer a christian and here is my story of my journey in and out of christianity my name is jennifer fishburn and i live in san antonio texas where i raised and homeschooled my three wonderful kids i've been married and divorced twice the first one for 23 years and the second lasted barely a year i am currently a retirement income specialist and life insurance broker i help protect people's assets including their homes and their retirement accounts i'm going to start with a little background first so hopefully you can find that we have something in common and but i also want to show you how my journey has taken me in many different directions in christianity when i was born my dad was going to fuller seminary and then went on to wheaton and then got his doctorate in theology at the university of edinburgh in scotland my parents split up when i was five while we were in scotland and we moved back to seattle with my mom who read us bible stories every night while we were growing up my mom told me later that i prayed what i now call the magic prayer when i was five years old i told jesus i was sorry for my sins and asked him to come into my heart my mom then told me that i was now saved and was going to heaven because once saved always saved just for saying those magic words i got my golden ticket into heaven and nothing else mattered anymore for the first church i remember going to was a conservative baptist church in bend oregon there we learned that drinking smoking dancing playing cards and going to movies were sins my mom did let us go see the apple dumpling gang at the theater once and i felt like we were cheating i was baptized for the first time when i was about 11 because that's what you do in the baptist church do you remember the ask me campaign i remember wearing big buttons in junior high that said ask me and i would tell people about jesus i remember participating in the billy graham crusades and then my uncle and my stepdad decided to become traveling evangelists putting on campaigns in city parks all across america where my uncle would do elaborate tricks showcases beautiful chalk art drawings under black light and tell people how to get saved if you ever watched the moody science videos the moody bible science videos those were his baby they even made a movie called the adventures of the iron camel which showed how he became the first person to ride a motorcycle across the sahara desert and live to tell about it that is where he gave his life to christ as he came very close to dying do you remember the movie in the 70s a thief in the night life was filled with guns and wars and everyone got trampled on the floor i wish we'd all been ready the children died the days grew cold a piece of bread would buy a bag of gold i wish we'd all been ready there's no time to change your mind the sun has come and you've been left behind there's no time to change your mind the sun has come and you've been left behind that movie gave me nightmares every night for probably 20 years that is probably one of the most evil things christians do to children trying to scare them into loving jesus this was also the time period where i started memorizing thousands of bible verses i could earn my way to summer church camp free if i quoted 300 verses word perfect each year and i did that six years in a row for high school we moved to salem oregon so we could attend a private christian school this school allowed all protestant christian denominations so i was exposed to many different ideas and views there we also attended one of the first grace churches during high school christian missionary alliance and since we lived one block from church we were there every time the doors were opened i even joined the bible quiz team where i would memorize whole books in the bible word perfect and then participate in regional competitions to answer questions related to the book of john one year for example i even placed in the top ten in internationals during the summers i would lead backyard bible clubs which are like vacation bible school but at people's homes in the summer between my junior and senior years i was a camp counselor for three months at a christian camp in bellingham washington i even remember preaching sermons in high school and having a bunch of kids come forward to receive jesus so you can see that i was very steeped in christianity growing up i was a very good girl growing up but it literally meant nothing to me and i walked away from all of it as soon as i graduated from high school i moved in with my boyfriend as i was walking out the front door for the last time my mom told me it was a sin for me to move out of the house before i was married but since she had never mentioned that before i said it was too late and i didn't think about god or church for the next 10 years my mom and my step-dad became missionaries with wycliffe a few years later and went to papua new guinea while i was in the army stationed in germany i met a jewish man and we ran off to denmark to get married he said he'd never wanted to talk about god or the bible and i had no problem with that after about a year things got really rough when he said he didn't want to be my friend anymore but there were plenty of men in the army who were ready to be my friend i soon found myself pregnant with another man's baby and life went from bad to worse when my husband literally held a gun to my head and forced me to make an appointment with planned parenthood for an abortion i inherently knew murdering my baby was wrong but i had no choice on the way to the appointment he said he wanted to talk to the army chaplain first i was shocked we had never spoken to a chaplain before but he went in and spoke to him for about an hour while i waited outside in the waiting room when he came out he said that he decided to keep the baby and raise it for himself now i was even more shocked ultimately i ended up giving the baby up for adoption but was very grateful i was not forced to murder my baby for the next couple of years i worked at the crisis pregnancy center in colorado springs helping other women carry their babies to term rather than abort it was during this time that i gave my life to christ for the second time and got baptized a second time i wasn't sure if the first time counted or not then we decided to have a church wedding ceremony on our fifth anniversary and actually take vows since we did not have any vows when we first married at a courthouse in denmark we began going to pulpit rock church a non-denominational church and often went to ted haggard's church new life church in colorado springs do you remember him he was the pastor who became famous for having a homosexual affair after preaching against it so often we also got involved in the every home for christ school of prayer there as well and then we started attending the vineyard church where i became enthralled with worship it really didn't take me long to get back into making church a huge part of my life when focus on the family moved to colorado springs that was the icing on the cake we lived in evangelical mecca now you should have seen the city-wide easter sunrise services we would have at the top of the garden of the gods where nearly all the churches and christian ministries in town would come together to celebrate this is when i became very active in concerned women for america a christian and political group led by tim and beverly lahay when we moved back to germany we didn't have too many choices of churches so we went to the assembly of god church for the next six years that is the place where i learned how to love people of course they were all about being filled with the spirit and speaking in tongues so i went forward for prayer to be filled with the spirit and speak in tongues every sunday for six years but it never happened finally one lady took me aside and told me that she would just give me the words to say to get me started well i already knew the words well but this was supposed to be some miraculous filling of the holy spirit so i refuse to pretend that caused me to start actually studying my bible for the first time in my life as i painstakingly looked up all the passages on tongues i discovered it was really a known language but unknown to the speaker now it was time to outgrow my daily bread devotional and search for some real meat i joined the protestant women of the chapel pwoc a group of about 60 ladies who were from about 40 different denominations and we started doing very in-depth bible studies ones that required at least an hour of homework every day pretty soon i was doing two studies at a time and then i was teaching them i became a member of the board for six years i started with henry blackaby's experiencing god study and ended up teaching that 13-week study six times in a row my goal was to experience god in all his names i think i attacked attracted a ton of drama from that prayer i moved on to beth moore studies and then k arthur with precepts k arthur's method of bible study probably impacted me more than anything else in my story she simply taught me how to study the bible for myself who wrote it or who said it to whom when was it written where did it take place what was said what happened how did it happen why just all the typical questions we should be asking ourselves whether it's current events politics or reading any book she taught me how to use bible dictionaries concordances and do word studies she taught me that context is king she taught me how to outline passages and how to recognize and make lists this is kind of the stuff that we would do here she taught me how to compare and contrast and how to dig deeper studying one book of the bible at a time as i studied through nearly every book of the bible using her method i also chose to write that book by hand as well this started me on a whole new journey in my christian life this was how i first learned to study everything i could on my own before i ever opened a book or commentary on a passage or subject matter back at the assembly of god this was during the time of the brownsville revival a couple of leaders in our church went to the revival and brought back the spirit of revival to our church and people were falling out in the spirit every week from then on i tried i was open nothing happened i did get baptized there for the third time you know just in case i was a big fan of the national day of prayer but there were no events in germany so i decided to start one in heidelberg for the six years we were there i had 50 volunteers one from each state who prayed for five minutes each for their state we had 50 full-sized state flags on display with lots of music as well hundreds came from all over germany the news media showed up each year even the public schools sent their children over to sing with us while we were there my uncle my stepdad became biblical archaeologist with the astronaut jim irwin and formed an expedition to find noah's ark which they did this is the one that ron wyatt claims to have led but he actually was just a worker on the project and he stole all the video footage at the end and claimed it for himself they also went to egypt and found some of pharaoh's chariot wheels in the red sea and explored mount sinai illegally again ron wyatt stole all that material it was during this time that i began homeschooling my children and that provided even more opportunities for me to study the bible more with my kids and we began seriously getting involved in the messianic movement now it felt like i was adding another layer to my studies as we learned all about the historical and cultural aspects of scripture nothing fascinated me more after we moved back to san antonio texas we began celebrating the jewish feasts and i would invite a couple hundred people to our home several times a year i made literal feasts of food for all the guests everything from scratch we would wear costumes decorate the house and celebrate as closely as possible to the way we saw in the bible then i would explain how jesus had fulfilled these feasts or show what we were still waiting for or so i thought and then everyone would stay for jewish dancing until three in the morning it was so much fun we did this for years i think my favorite was the interactive play that i wrote for hanukkah for a couple hundred people everyone got to act it out what a fantastic way to learn the bible when we moved to san antonio we went to alamo city on sundays which was a non-denominational mega church and the messianic church is on friday nights we also went to john hagee's church and max lucado's now and then as well after we got kicked out of alamo city on public tv i can't even remember exactly why i decided to look for a home church instead and we found doug phillips church called bca or bernie christian assembly which was mostly a homeschool church doug was the kind was kind of the leader of the christian homeschooling movement and he was very much into patriarchy so we got caught up into legalism for about five years i wore long dresses all of the time dating was not allowed and women were not allowed to ask any questions you can imagine how well that part went over with me doug pretty much preached only from the old testament so we became very steeped in the law of moses and theonomy between that and our messianic studies i began to think that my husband and my son should wear robes like moses and that we should be sacrificing animals again thankfully nobody agreed with me during this time i decided to memorize the entire hymnal with my kids and we learned three new hymns every month practicing about an hour a day we stopped celebrating christmas and easter and we added saint nicholas day to our feasts we learned we started learning hebrew memorized long passages in the bible and attended many homeschool and historical events although our church became separatists we did not we loved a wide variety in life but also became very extreme in 2004 doug phillips father had a political party called the constitutional party and they ran a candidate for president michael perrotka well i had nothing against him personally i did not think a third party candidate could win the election so i opposed doug's promotion of his candidate he then preached a whole sermon against me on that i was excommunicated for that in january 2005 or so i thought it wasn't long after that the doug actually came out and said it was a sin for women to vote at all doug's church was our whole life we had not only had church we not only had church for about eight hours every sunday but we spent most of our free time with those people as well they were like-minded all my kids were there kids friends were there it was all that they knew at this point although they were not a cult when we first started attending there i did tell doug that once he started telling us who to vote for that they had now crossed the line to becoming a cult we were devastated at the excommunication we tried to come back we tried to make it right although we really had no idea what we had done wrong they refused to tell us i found out 10 years later that doug really just wanted to sleep with my daughter's best friend and he had to get me out of the way to do that we tried going to several other churches in town including grace churches and presbyterian churches as well as a few other home churches but doug was so powerful that he was able to get us kicked out of all those churches as well they were scared of his lawsuit threats because doug was such a major player in the homeschool movement i told my story online in 2007 i had over a million readers on my blog this book was actually written to tell my story well one of the chapters in here is about me in the patriarchy movement that was when i learned to forgive him give forgive doug and telling my story help me move on although we were terribly hurt at first i now know that it was an important part of my journey in life and i'm glad to have been set free from the bondage of legalism when we're under there after a few years of healing and desperately seeking a new church home i no longer had any desire to have someone else tell me what to believe and i have not gone to church for the most part in over 15 years now i now have complete peace about the whole situation it was then that i met a pastor named mike who was also a professor at dallas theological seminary he challenged me one day when i said we were still under the law of moses he started asking me questions that i could not answer and he offered to do a bible study with me i knew in my heart that he knew something i did not but by this time i was a truth seeker and i would not change my mind unless i was 100 percent convinced for the next 12 weeks might talk taught me a systematic way of studying the bible by studying every passage in the bible about law i studied eight to 12 hours every day he taught me how to interpret hebrew in greek he taught me logic he taught me biblical grammar and he taught me hermeneutics all classes he taught at dallas theological seminary i had a private tutor for seminary and he used this bible study that he had been teaching for 35 years on the law i was his last student before he died he said he knew all the answers by heart to the questions people would normally ask but i was his most difficult student ever because i asked questions that no one else asked and it caused him to go back to his bible once again after 12 weeks the light bulb finally came on for me we were never under the jurisdiction of the law of moses and it never had any authority over us the law of moses was given only to biblical israel he was asking the exact same questions i had learned from k arthur but he was taking it farther than i had i will never forget my question that totally stumped him if the new covenant was given only to the house of israel in the house of judah how can it apply to us today crickets in he told me in 2008 that he predicted that i would know twice as much about the bible in 10 years than he ever did and he asked me to write a book about the law of moses which i never did when i realized that we were not under the law of moses and i lived my whole life according to the law of moses i was lost what do i do now how do i make decisions in my life who is going to tell me what to do now he told me it would take time to learn grace the first thing i realized was that the bible did not tell me to wear long dresses i've been wearing them for about seven years at this point i went to sam's club and picked up some very loose fitting pants i took them home and stuck them in my closet too scared to try them on i was sure that god was going to strike me dead a few weeks later i finally decided to try them on and then i took them off again just as quickly as i put them on i looked around i was still alive you cannot imagine the level of fear i was living thinking i was under the law of moses and even adding tons of extra rules to make sure i kept it all perfectly i finally wore that pair of pants and of course nothing happened i was fine day by day i began to come to terms with each of the rules i had added to my own life and give them up i was very confused at this point so mike told me not to read my bible for a while and just to rest i'd been studying my bible for two to three hours every day for years and sometimes up to 12 hours a day i put it down and didn't pick it back up for a year or so it was just a time of meditating i got into new covenant theology next which was grace-based theology but mostly calvinist i learned the five points of calvinist calvinism and love to debate it but mike's teachings were always in the back of my mind when someone said calvinism was true because jesus said you have not chosen me but i have chosen you i immediately asked well who was jesus speaking to this passage was about jesus choosing his disciples not about unconditional election i suddenly began seeing the bible in a whole new light i was back to asking questions again matthew 5 17-18 was about jesus fulfilling the law but it was not just the law it was also the prophets jesus said he came to fulfill the law and the prophets that means that jesus must have already fulfilled the prophets if he had already fulfilled the law as i had already studied i had never heard of this before even when i studied all the views on revelation so i thought i must have missed something then i started looking at audience relevance who is the immediate audience in this passage and time statements when were these things supposed to have happened i told a friend that it seemed like jesus must have fulfilled all the prophecies in the bible but i have never heard of that before so i thought maybe i was crazy he actually turned out to be a preterist and told me to go watch don preston i watched one video by don preston that was enough and all i remember him saying is that jesus came to fulfill israel's old covenant that was the missing key for me and i was often running with full preterism it was like putting on a new pair of glasses for me suddenly i saw all those passages i had been studying my whole life in a new light they were not all about us today john 3 16 was not about jesus loving me but the world of israel all these passages were about old covenant israel getting ready to go into a new covenant with their messiah jesus i went to a couple preterist conferences right away and met a bunch of wonderful people but i quickly upset the apple cart asking so many questions what did i ask i simply thought we should be consistent if audience or relevance if audience relevance applied to our list of 101 time statements shouldn't audience relevance apply to every verse to every passage here are a couple examples in matthew 10 23 jesus said you shall not finish going through the cities of israel until the son of man comes who was he speaking to his disciples so logically speaking the son of man would come before jesus disciples would go through all the cities of israel well that has literally nothing to do with you or me and it certainly had to have happened while jesus disciples were still living the audience was his disciples and the time was in their lifetime matthew mark and luke all record jesus saying this generation will not pass away until all these things take place who was jesus speaking to peter james john and andrew they were sitting on the mount of olives and they asked jesus to tell them about the sign of his coming in the end of the age jesus tells them about everything that would happen soon to his disciples what they themselves would experience and then likens it to a tree in spring whose leaves are just about ready to come out it is that close and then he says this generation will not pass away until all these things happen that i just told you about and no none of those things happened at the transfiguration so what generation was he talking about the one that was alive in that day in fact this is the same generation jesus was speaking of in matthew 12 39-45 when he said that the men of nineveh and the queen of the south would rise up with this generation and condemn it when he was speaking to the scribes and pharisees he repeated his warning to this evil and adulterous generation in matthew 16 4 to the pharisees and sadducees in matthew 6 and matthew 23 jesus is speaking to the multitude and proclaims seven woes against the scribes and pharisees and then he said that all these things would come upon this generation in verse 36 this is still the same generation jesus is speaking of on all these occasions are the seven woes against the pharisees and scribes going to come to our generation today no of course not in fact the whole new testament is the story of one generation of people and it is that generation that jesus continuously spoke of the wicked generation of the scribes and pharisees and sadducees but from day one of meeting other full preterists i found that nearly all of them were inconsistent while i loved david curtis teaching style he could never give up his calvinism every time a calvinist pet burst would come up he would suddenly revert to us as being the audience instead of first century israel for example in ephesians 1 5 he would say that we are predestined to adoption as sons by jesus christ according to the good pleasure of his will but if we look at the context and remember context is always king paul starts out this epistle by saying he is writing to the saints who are in ephesus who are the saints in ephesus well i know that you and i don't live in ephesus well what about saints aren't we the saints well the greek word for saints is hoggios that is the same word that is translated elsewhere as holy as in holy spirit did you know that holy and saint are the same word hagios means different or other it is different from everyday normal things we might use the word sacred today to describe it as being set apart from the world for god's use like a temple or church so a saint was someone who was different set apart for a purpose does that mean that we are saints today not exactly you can call yourself anything you want but paul's letter to the ephesians he was specifically speaking of uniting two groups of people affected by the law of moses the first group the house of judah is the we found in the first 12 verses verses of ephesians 1. the second group called the gentiles is found in the rest of the letter these are the same two groups compared and contrasted by paul in romans 9 through 11 and that brings us to words biblical words church words it was about this time that i began to notice that there were many words in our english bibles that seemed contrived they were what i call church words they were not the natural definition of how those hebrew and greek words would have been used many of them had forced meanings and preconceived notions they were churchified the first one was gentiles in israel today they use or to mean someone who is not jewish but as i began to study patterns of how this word was used in the bible i began to see that it didn't really mean that at all in fact bible dictionaries quickly became relatively worthless to me at this point the only ones i continued to use were those that showed how the word was used in contemporary literature what did that word mean in other books outside of the bible and then i would look at how the word was used in other places in scripture to try and find patterns often i would see 20 30 even 50 completely different english words for one hebrew word that was a red flag to me i had taken a few other seminary classes on hermeneutics in the meantime and i also went to school at the university of jerusalem in israel to study biblical hebrew at one point i began studying words to the level of writing my own translation of the bible one that would be as accurate as possible i purposed to completely empty my mind of all preconceived notions and simply began reading the bible using as much hebrew and greek as possible to see what the bible said if i simply let it speak for itself and didn't try to force all those years of studying and reading into what i thought it should say here's an example from the first verse of the bible in the beginning of what the hebrew word bereshith is an idiom for the beginning of time all that means is that is what the hebrews thought in the beginning god god is elohim in hebrew elohim is always plural why do we have plural gods in the first verse in the beginning god created what does the word bra mean that we have translated as create it means to fashion by cutting or shaping so it doesn't mean to make something out of nothing in the beginning god created the heavens well what are the heavens the heavens are the skies above us in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth what is the earth the land so in the beginning of time plural gods fashioned out the skies in the land and the rest of the chapter tells us how they were filled wait what just the land and the sky what about the rest of the universe and where are all the planets i have taught on this in much greater detail here on my youtube channel if you are interested i also spent several hundred hours with michael much of that in preparation to write a book on the seven layers of meaning in the creation story too bad we never finished that book so i began to look at every passage in the bible in the same way sometimes i would look at words such as gentiles to try and find patterns i noticed that the hebrew translated as gentiles was always plural the first use of which is always key to determining a term was found in genesis 10 the table of nations it was actually found there six times and was used to describe the 70 nations just before israel became a nation what did it mean nation and in the rest of the old testament always meant nation now sometimes tribes were also called nations it was just a group of related people in the new testament the greek word ethnos is also translated as gentiles sometimes they translated as nations or pagans or people depending on what their mood is i guess but it still means nations you and i are not biblical gentiles because we are not nations you might be a gentile to an israeli today but they have nothing to do with the biblical israelites so it is best to keep them separate in your mind most but not all of the times ethnos is used in the new testament the word is referring to one or more of the tribes of israel by this time israel had divided into the northern and the southern kingdoms namely the house of judah the jews and the house of israel the 10 northern tribes of the dispersion outside of israel these were often called the uncircumcision because they no longer circumcise their males or the nations again horribly mistranslated as gentiles i could teach on gentiles for days but that is not my purpose today i merely want to show my kind of studying and thinking there were tons of other church words that i picked apart this way holy saint spirit church satan devil abyss hell faith righteousness salvation grace grace for example is a stay of judgment it meant that someone was guilty of breaking the law but they were given a period of time to make it right before they were judged and punished it is like checking out a library book and returning it during the grace period you technically are late but they give you a few days before they find you grace in the bible was always related to breaking the law of moses in the new testament 40 years was the grace period given to israel to get right with god before judgment came in 80 70. again it has nothing to do with us today speaking of hell a short study convinced me that our english word combined with dante's inferno in the 14th century created an incredible level of fear about something completely imaginary the jews never believed in hell why would jesus suddenly invent something new he didn't there is no boogeyman called the devil or satan demons either i spent several hundred hours studying the watchers which go by about 25 different names in the bible but are basically the other gods this is a major underlying theme in the bible that is mostly covered up by our english versions there are three secular documentaries made by the thunder gold thunderbolts of the gods project that really helped me to understand why ancient cultures used to believe in so many gods and where so many myths originated i'm not going to give a bunch of evidence for all of these topics here but i fully studied each one before i came to my own conclusion based upon the clear methods of study i had now learned between all the churches i attended in my life and all the ones i visited and even those where i was a traveling evangelist for about six months with all the bible studies i have done and attended and all the conversations i have had with christians from just about every denomination possible and studying most of the positions of the multitudes of doctrines out there i had to conclude that there is a ton of confusion in christianity if god is not the author of confusion but he gives us a sound mind then why would the holy spirit give us 46 000 different denominations today with 10 000 more facebook armchair theologians including myself other than reading that the holy spirit was the helper who was sent to get first century believing israel ready for their wedding to jesus it became quite obvious that people can claim whatever they want and then give god the credit for it the holy spirit told me no he didn't it's time to face up to the fact that people confuse their emotions with god so if there is no hell what happens when we die i get that question more than anything else as christians it has been drummed into us that life here on earth is all about getting that golden ticket to heaven that get out of hell free card but when you seriously study the bible that is not what the bible is about at all the bible is israel's history book the first 12 chapters are the backdrop to israel's history then abraham comes on the scene and the rest of the bible is about israel's old covenant even the new testament is still about israel's old covenant as they were transitioning into israel's new covenant which was a marriage covenant between the first century believing israel and their messiah jesus they were the chosen generation chosen to be jesus bride yes there were a few non-israelites who joined up with them but that is no different from the immigrants we have today wanting to become u.s citizens they still joined israel the whole new testament was the story of israel's betrothal to jesus and how the bride was preparing herself to get married that wedding took place in 1870 in whatever form you think it did but jesus is not a polygamist and he does not get married to new people every day since then you and i are not married to jesus that is only in your imagination so the bible is not a book of basic instructions before leaving earth it is not about preparing to die it is not about where we go when we die it is not about being tortured after we die in fact it has very little at all to say about death the few verses that do talk about it are about the resurrection of the bodies out of hades which was the temporary holding place of the jews until the resurrection and judgment in 80 70. here is the only passage that we could say possibly talks about what happens when we die here is the answer everyone has been waiting for ecclesiastes 12 7 says and the dust returns to the earth as it was and the spirit returns to god who gave it that's it our physical bodies became the dust of the ground again and our spirit goes back to god now this is not a theological statement in the book of ecclesiastes these are the musings of a philosopher on the vanity of life and how fleeting life is so what does it mean that our spirit goes back to god who knows but one thing i do know whatever happens to me will happen to you and to every single person who ever lives including hitler and stalin and even trump and obama we are all the same so what about faith well what about it can you find a verse that says you actually need faith in god today no because audience relevance is always going to tell us that that passage is not about us today but was about those israelites in the first century who were choosing to either stay in the old covenant with all of its upcoming judgments or move into the new covenant with their messiah jesus and what about salvation don't we still need to be saved today what do you need to be saved from do you need to be delivered from the judgment of the law of moses have you broken a law you were never under have you sinned against israel's law does being saved get you into heaven today no that biblical salvation which really should have been translated as deliverance was being delivered from the judgment that came upon israel in a.d 70 with the destruction of the temple and all its worship system it was a very difficult time between the cross and ad70 they were transitioning from one age the old covenant age to another the new covenant age there was a 40-year period of transition between those ages it was great chaos and tribulation now personally i think we are transitioning from one age to another age right now but that is the normal cycle of the stars and has nothing to do with the bible we are not in the end times today but that is why we are experiencing so much chaos and turmoil today do you need to be saved from doing bad things in your life sure everybody everybody does but it's not a magical prayer you pray and suddenly you are saved it is simply called taking responsibility for your own actions in life owning your stuff healing from your hurts and maturing as a human being there is nothing inherently spiritual about it you don't need an outside god to come live inside your heart to do that in fact most christians i know still have a lot of growing up to do so i'm all about consistency and being a truth seeker i studied the bible as logically as possible i studied it in context of the genre i looked at history compared books written by the same author learned their language of culture applied audience relevance in every passage until i realized that there was nothing in that book about me and kept the whole story in its time frame a couple years ago i wrote a commentary on the whole bible chronologically with ansel mcbarnett well we never did finish revelation i participated in a public debate about the flood taking the worldwide or global position even as i studied most of these things i always felt like there was a little bit more and i could often see value in everyone else's position as well i have prayed every day never asking for stuff but seeking wisdom and guidance and just loving the father and jesus who are a family not a trinity my christian life was not about head knowledge but having a true heart relationship with jesus well i have never been strict israel only i have long claimed to be 98 io israel only i never did explain that so i want to explain now first by a strictly math perspective after the first 11 chapters of the bible the rest of the bible is certainly about israel with the occasional story of how they interact with the nations around them i think it is a huge reach to say that the first 11 chapters are about israel when israel did not even exist yet but second even though the bible is primarily the story of israel there are obviously secondary principles that apply to all people for all time i have said for nearly 10 years now that the bible was the natural pointing to the spiritual in my mind these things all tie together perfectly by natural i mean the story of israel's history or it can also mean nature or just anything concrete spiritual is the application of it paul talks about this in first corinthians 15 and he gives examples of all the areas of creation sun moon stars people animals fish birds as being the natural they also teach us spiritual applications which are not given in that chapter but some examples may be that the sun gives us light and reminds us of good things especially when the light is being shown on the evil things done in the dark or the sun moon and stars in joseph's family a dream was his family or the lines in a leaf are the same as our lungs and it reminds us that we need to breathe in fresh air around trees or the many stories and parables in the bible that tell one story but have a much deeper meaning in other words when you look at things in nature first we appreciate the gift of life here on earth but there is always a deeper application if we look for it and that application the bible never changes just don't try to write yourself into someone else's story the story is about israel the practical application is for you and me a year ago i was teaching on youtube and every time i gave a lesson the more i realized that not everything added up right and so i stopped teaching to dig deeper only then was i brave enough to study how we got the bible do you ever have this feeling that there are certain subjects you know you should study but you also know you are not ready for them yet i can point to several times in my life that happened i didn't want someone else to be right about something i held so dear so i buried my head in the sand for a while longer until i was ready it's okay to know yourself but don't get so comfortable that you refuse to study things that tug on your heart i'm not going to get into all the details here either but because of the internet biblical historians and scholars as well as you and i now have access to tools and methods to study things we were never able to before in the last decade or so they have been able to look much deeper at the history and authors of the books of the bible did you know that matthew mark luke and john did not write matthew mark luke or john then who did we don't know but at best it was a friend of a friend of a friend who knew jesus mark was written first and it was probably written 40 or more years after jesus death burial and resurrection matthew and luke copied mark and added a few of their own details john was on a different planet altogether not not one person wrote about jesus while he lived if those stories were passed down orally telephone game style how accurate do you think they are when we argue about the details of jesus words even in greek now what are we really arguing about what evidence do we have that any of that actually happened that way we don't we just have to trust that a friend of a friend of a friend accurately told the story 40 to 50 years after the fact and what evidence do we have that jesus actually existed we do not have any birth records for him we have no records of his crucifixion his death his burial or his resurrection we have no records of masses of people rising up out of graves either at jesus resurrection or in 80 70. we have no records of masses of people floating up into the sky disappearing in a rapture other than very brief mentions by josephus and tacitus which were both written many years after jesus we have no records of the major chaos jesus would have caused in jerusalem i want to be clear here i am not saying that jesus did not exist he will could have and probably did but if the jews were adamantly opposed to human sacrifice why would they say that god now wanted his son to be a human sacrifice my whole point here is that we really know nothing at all about jesus he was probably a good man who actually lived but the stories that grew many years later are just that stories with nothing backing them what about the rest of the new testament well scholars mostly agree that half of paul's letters were not written by paul they are forgeries why well there were many possible reasons for that but really what was happening in the first three centuries was really no different from participating in a facebook bible debate group today he who shouts the loudest and the longest wins there were a lot of politics going on then and people are people no matter when in addition to that it seems that all of paul's letters in james letter were also forged they were not written by them either they were written by someone with an agenda so where does that leave us if half the new testament is clearly forgeries and we have no clue if any of the stories of jesus are actually true or not this was my defining moment this was a straw that broke the camel's back for me i spent nearly my whole life studying the words in a book that may or may not be true i do not take the position that the bible is a meth as so many of my friends do i have seen too much archaeological evidence that supports many of the the stories in the bible but that doesn't mean that the stories themselves are accurate it is my position at this time and i do not expect it to ever change that the bible is historical fiction i think that the bible is israel's history book but just like any good history book it is highly biased depending on who is writing it and just like all stories grow and morph with time so too do the bible stories of israel i would probably trust the stories in the old testament as being more accurate than those in the new testament but nevertheless i would say that we don't really know which parts are historically accurate and which are fiction so i'm going with historical fiction well i love reading historical fiction i do not see any reason to continue studying it in the way i have all my life why should i study the details of a fiction book unless it was just for literature's sake and no i do not believe that god miraculously preserved his word now i know what you are going to ask next do you still believe in god what about jesus do you still pray are you still a preterist the answer is yes but yes i believe in god but it is not it is not at all like the god of the bible no it is not some other religion and not even new age although it may sound like it to you i also enjoy studying history and science and in my mind this earth did not just happen out of the blue there must be a creator i don't think the creator needs to have a name i have no problem with the creation story being similar to what really happened although i don't take it as gospel truth but there are even big bang proponents who say that science shows that the order of the creation story is roughly that of the big bang as well i just think it was created on purpose i don't think god is some invisible being sitting on a big throne in the middle of the universe somewhere looking down on all of us i don't think we need to invite our father to come into our lives or send his son into our hearts i love studying electromagnetism and energy and i think those subjects answer many of our spiritual questions to me god is energy energy can be neither created nor destroyed but it can channel that energy by fashioning and forming one thing into something else we are all connected by energy and through electromagnetism whether you realize it or not it is being connected that way that makes us all one we are all one in our father the creator of all it is not as mystical and out of reach as we have been led to believe it is actually basic science energy plus electromagnetism is what keeps us attached to one another united is one that is why it is difficult for some of you to cut me off even though you don't agree with me anymore we are connected at a much deeper level and that connection is why prayer works or doesn't work prayer is not about saying the right words to your god people pray to buddha or allah or mother mary all the time and their prayers are answered people also pray to jesus or the dalai lama or yahweh and their prayers are not answered have you ever wondered why your prayers were answered sometimes and other times not why can two football teams both fervently pray that their team wins but only one does every time why does the whole world pray that their god would stop covid but it still continues isn't there at least the amount of faith as a mustard seed right now why are so many bad things happening right now and no matter how hard we pray it doesn't change prayer is simply a transfer of energy you can pray for another person and that transfers your energy your thoughts of good will your vibrations to that other person this is not new age this is really straight science if you pray for a new car for example the nebulous car on the other end of your prayer does not respond to your energy however you can certainly attract certain things by praying for them i cannot get into all the details of that right now but suffice it to say that most people pray for the wrong things it really doesn't matter who or what you pray to prayer is simply a transfer of energy yes i am still a full preterist in as much as the story of the bible was about old covenant israel and it all ended with israel's new covenant i will leave you all to debate about all the details of that from now on the book portrays a certain story in that certain and that story is not about me or you however the beauty of the bible that will never change is that the principles found therein apply to all people for all time if you want to know the purpose of the bible i would say that it is to give us guidance on how to live our life today how to appreciate this gift of life i don't need a book of rules to tell me not to murder my political enemies not to steal from my neighbor or that bad things will happen if i commit adultery the law of sowing and reaping will always be an effect if i do bad things bad things will happen to me whether outwardly or just inwardly but love is the overarching theme of the bible and i think it is the overarching theme of our lives as well if we love one another we will have a good life i still strive for peace and joy in my life patience is still a virtue and so is self-control how i treat others matters i don't need to put on a show for some imaginary god in the sky i need to be able to live with myself i make choices in life because they are the right thing to do life is a journey each person must walk their own journey in life the people we meet and the books we read serve to shape our journey i am still the same person i was all along this journey only i have matured along the way and grown up i no longer feel the need for religion in my life i look at my walk in christianity as a training ground for the rest of my life i am very grateful for all the things i learned for all the people i met and for all my experiences so far both good and bad it has made me who i am today i am not here to tell you how to live your journey in life but our paths have crossed for some reason so i hope that something i have shared here resonates with you and that our journey will continue together for a while we are given one life to live unless reincarnation is true so love others with all your heart love your creator and enjoy all the good gifts of creation we have been given here on earth find your gifts and skills in life and use them to the best of your ability love life love yourself and love everyone you are connected to that is what we are here for i hope you enjoyed my story see you next time

Channel: Answers From Jenesis

Views: 288,051

Keywords: Bible, Christian, Preterism, Full Preterism, Israel Only, Christian Deconstruction, Church, God, Jesus

Id: yfdvTpxeLSE

Length: 57min 22sec (3442 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020