This page is recommended reading before the Blog. The Blog is written for those who already know what I am laying out here. Think of this as the prerequisite. Not the bachelor's degree before the master's, or even the freshman's class before the sophomore's. This is remedial Christianity, the basics - TORH 099.

It is my plain and sincere contention that anyone who wishes to follow Christ (called in the Hebrew, Moshiach) must walk as He did. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's a quote from Scripture, but my goal is not to write a polemic, just to state clearly what is afoot here. To continue, Christ obeyed the Mosaic Law, also known as the Torah, or the commandment, and explained better as "God's teachings in righteousness." The Torah is perfect, but it cannot lead to salvation, because even though it is spiritual in nature, it is acted out by a body of flesh. Unless there is a new "inner man" propagated by a second birth, the Law only condemns. After the second birth, the believer is "grafted in" to Israel as a son of Abraham by faith, and becomes a partaker of the covenants, including the New Covenant. The New Covenant is this: the spirit of God - the one true God, YHWH, in the Hebrew, יהוה - indwells the believer and writes the Torah on his (or her) heart. Then their sin (that is, their transgressions against the Mosaic Law) will not be held against them and they will enter into salvation and be given a place in the World to Come. This is not the entire New Covenant. It has not yet come to its full fruition.

Many, who are untaught and unstable and who twist the words of Paul (also known as Sha'ul) to their own destruction (mostly as a result of passages being ripped from historical context, ripped from grammatical context, ripped from cultural context, translated with bias, or a combination of all four), insist that the Law, which is perfect and righteous, is no longer to be followed. This is called antinomianism, or in the Greek, anomos - lawlessness. This is what I hate, and יהוה also hates it, and Christ also hates it, and will not suffer any lawless ones to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

This, along with the four extended definitions (Christ, Church, Torah, Sin), is my basic premise. If you disagree with it, you will probably find little of use in the Blog, and you may in fact be offended. If you agree, welcome home. If you have not decided and you wish to see Scriptural support, you will find it scattered about, but the good folks at YashaNet have already done all the legwork. Please enjoy this article, "Not Subject to the Law of God?"

What is Hope Abbey? It is a real place where anyone can come to learn how to live. To live, you must obey the commandments of יהוה. It is also a website, which I currently use as a sandbox, a place where I set my thoughts out into words and paragraphs so I can work with them and perhaps organize them more fully later. I try to update four or five times a week but I cannot always. I hope you enjoy it. If you have something to contribute, an agreement, a disagreement, or anything else, please contact me at the email address on the right side of the page.