The Congregation of Yeshua the Messiah is anyone that confesses trust in the Son of God, and then assembles with others who do the same. In the time of the Apostles, that congregation had access to the Scriptures. But there was a season where that access was not granted to all people.
After the invention of the printing press, the Bible began to proliferate not only among the new ‘clergy’, but all people, as men began translating the scriptures out of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin into local vernaculars and distributing it to the masses. This was a major cause of the Protestant Reformation.
So, access to the written word of God is not a problem in most cases today. In America, there is an abundance of Bibles in various translations.
So, why is there so much variation in religion? It is not a lack of access to His Word, obviously, that has caused such variation. Neither is it a lack of ‘hearing’ His Word, necessarily. Rather, it is failing to understand the greater impetus of the Hebrew word “Shema”, which starts the greatest command in all of Scripture, according to Yeshua: “Shema!”, where that means ‘hear and respond’. In other words, listen intently enough and then act accordingly.
So, when Yeshua said repeatedly, “He who has ears, let him hear what The Spirit says…”, He was not trying to gain listeners. They were His congregation, they were already studying His Word! It was and is a call to understand and respond rightly to what God had already spoken. The Written Word and the Spirit always agree. [Rom 7:14]
God’s voice is unchanging. The written Word of God makes it abundantly clear that God the Creator does not change. His identity doesn’t ‘morph’, and His will doesn’t equivocate. “For I, יהוה , do not change.” [Malachi 3:6, Heb 13:8, James 1:17] “God is not a man, that He should lie” [Numbers 23:19]. So, what God says in the “Old Testament”, He also means in the “New Testament”. “Forever, O יהוה , Your Word stands fast in Heaven,” writes the psalmist [119:89]. This is true of both the OT and the NT. The same psalm states, “The beginning of Your Word is truth, and all your righteous ordinance endures forever.” [v. 160] So, if the Spirit of God speaks, it is not going to speak something ‘new’ that contradicts what He has written in His Word. Yeshua told us that! “But when The Spirit of Truth is come, it will guide you into all the truth; for it will not speak from itself, but what it hears it will speak…It will glorify me [Yeshua, The Word], because it will take of my own and show it to you ” [John 16:13]. The Spirit will show us how Yeshua taught The Word, if we ‘hear’.
Again, this will be consistent throughout human history. Many teachers teach that doctrines have changed because of ‘progressive revelation’, in other words, that God has continued to reveal things beyond what is in His Word. This is a contradiction of The Word, so it cannot be ‘true’. Yeshua’s brother, Judah [Jude] writes, “fight for the faith which was at one time delivered to the holy ones.” And Paul wrote concerning the revelation of Yeshua that “Yeshua the Messiah is the same yesterday, and today, and forever,” showing the Messiah’s divine, eternal, unchanging nature which He inherited from His Father.
There is a precedent for hearing The Word but not ‘getting it’, in scripture. And it was not addressed to ignorant, unlearned people, but to the academic and theological leaders. Yeshua echoed the prophet Isaiah, showing that His generation had not heeded the warning of the Prophets to return to the simple ‘hearing and doing’ of Scripture. Isaiah told Israel, “Go, and tell this people, ‘You hear indeed, but understand not; and you see indeed, but perceive not’”. Again, this is Academia He is addressing. [Is 6:9] Yeshua very nearly quotes Isaiah verbatim in the gospels, speaking to the same group of people in His day, saying, “they see and yet cannot perceive; and they hear and yet do not listen, nor do they understand”. [Matt 13:13] He actually cites Isaiah another time when He has a conversation with the spiritual leaders of His day over their added rules to the Torah and their calling those manmade rules ‘commandments of God’, which were actually outside the boundaries of the Torah: “The Prophet Isaiah prophesied very well about you, O hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. And they worship me in vain when they teach as doctrines the commandments of men.’ [Mark 7:6-7] Might this be the same ‘hearing’ but not hearing He encountered from the same people?
Yeshua also had a problem with His own followers, who struggled just to understand what He said: “He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures”. [Luke 24:45]
There is a reason, perhaps, why in Luke those men could not ‘understand’; they had yet actually to believe that Yeshua had been raised from the dead. So, we can give them some latitude for needing Yeshua to help them understand the Scriptures! Paul explains this: “For the natural man rejects spiritual things; they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” [1 Cor 2:14] A man is still utterly ‘natural’ until he is regenerated into life by Yeshua. But, even after that, a person is still susceptible to not perceiving The Word. That is exactly why Yeshua said, “He who has ears, let him hear what The Spirit says…” [Rev 2:7, 11, 17, 29, 3:6, 13, & 22] seven times. Yeshua was not addressing unbelievers here, telling them to hear the Spirit, because unbelievers cannot, until they believe that Yeshua is God’s Son raised from the dead. Yeshua was talking to His whole congregation, figuratively represented by the seven congregations He listed. The congregations were full of all the same errors addressed in the apostolic letters. They had not heard the apostles.
So, even though The Word speaks plainly, it is absolutely entirely possible that people, even today, just don’t get it. Not everyone hears it correctly.
Misreading The Word is caused by bad teachers. The letters that Yeshua had John write may have fallen on deaf ears. Because Paul wrote letters of reproof and instruction to several of the congregations, and those letters were widely circulated by the time John wrote his gospel, the Revelation, and finally his epistles. His reproofs were varied, but notably He warned them about false gospels and philosophy.
There would have been no need to warn them if those errors were not already noticeable in the congregations. “Beware, lest any man mislead you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the teaching of men, after the principles of the world, and not after Messiah.” [Col 2:8] “For the time will come when men will not listen to sound doctrine; but they will add for themselves other teachers [other than Yeshua and the apostles] for the itching in their ears; and they will turn away their ears from The Truth, and they will turn to fables.” “Fables” in this context are ‘moral lessons based on a story’. Instead of teaching The Word [The Truth, John 17:17], people, Paul said, would begin to teach little stories to ‘try’ to teach how to be good, or who Yeshua is, or what Salvation is. “The Truth” in the minds of ancient Jews was another name for The Torah. Peter shows this, when he gives a similar warning about people twisting The Scriptures. He writes, “our beloved brother Paul also… has written to you, as also in all his letters he speaks concerning these matters, in which there are certain things so hard to be understood that those who are ignorant and unstable twist their meaning, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction. You therefore, my beloved, seeing that you know these things beforehand, beware, lest you follow the error of those without Torah, and fall from your own steadfastness.”
This matches what Yeshua said when He rebuked the teachers of His day by quoting Isaiah, and when He told them, other teachers of Israel, “You err, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God”. [Matt 22:29] Again, He was addressing learned people, and not the ignorant. So, the issue was never that there is a lack of Scripture, or access to the Scriptures. The error is how The Word is being taught. Bad teaching causes misreading.
Peoples’ belief is guided as much by how their teacher arrived at that belief, as by what the Bible actually says. The Scriptures are very plain. But what people believe, many times, is not so plain, and often does not match The Word. That should not be.
Scripture actually shows us how to read and teach scripture. Moshe wrote the words of the Torah ‘very plainly’ when he inscribed them on the two mountains after arriving in Israel. Then he read them, and they affirmed them. Ezra read the Torah in similar fashion right after Israel returned to the promised land after exile: “And they read in the book, in the Torah of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” [Neh 8:8] This shows us that the Scriptures are to be read and understood in context. Notice that in the case of both Moshe and Ezra, they read to the people, very clearly, they expounded, and the people understood. This was not a theological degree at work, or systematic methodology, this was simple reading and explaining, to a group of people who lived the context.
Does this mean that we cannot see ‘deeper things’ in the scriptures? No. “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter [davar: a word]; it is the glory of kings to search out a matter [davar: a word].” [Prov 25:2] This is hinting at what had long been taught in Israel, that there are layers of studying God’s word. There are things that The Word just plainly says, and they are very easily understood, but there are things that have to be ‘sought out’. There may be many interpretations, but there is not a multitude of truths. The Spirit of God speaks consistently with the Word He has already given. Where we differ, it is not because God has spoken differently, but because we have not all heard Him rightly.
The “Sent Ones”/Apostles read the scriptures in layers. These layers were commonly known to ancient Jews, but did not get written down until the Talmudic Age. There are four levels at which the study of The Word is done:
The Plain Meaning is Peshat
Prophetic ‘hints’ is Remez
Interpretive expansion is D’resh
Deeper mysteries sought out is Sod
What the Talmud did is label these with a mnemonic: PaRDeS, but you can see these ‘layers’ of exposition in the Biblical texts themselves.
In the book of Matthew, the passage from Hosea 11:1 is interpreted on a Peshat level: “And he [Joseph] remained there until the death of Herodus, so that what was said from יהוה by the Prophet might be fulfilled, “I have called my son from Egypt.” [Matt 2:15] This means that Hosea foretold that the Messiah would come out of Egypt, even though the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. It is not ‘hard’ to see this.
Paul shows us interpretation at another level: “Now all of these things which happened to them are an example for us; and they are written for our admonition, for the fulfillment of the ages has come in our time.” [1 Cor 10:11] Paul is here using Peshat-level information from the Exodus and Numbers in order to teach a truth: that we need to be obedient and resist temptation. Passing through the Red Sea is compared to immersion, spiritual food and drink is compared to Messiah’s Passover, and punishment for rebellion is a warning on believers. The passage from verses 1-10 is thus examined by Paul on two layers, D’resh, where he draws ‘meaning’ from a peshat text, and Remez, where he hints at future realities through typology.
Paul uses another Peshat account, this time from the book of Genesis, to go into the deeper layer of D’resh, and even possibly Sod. In Galatians 4:21-31, he actually writes, “Now these things are a symbol”, meaning the bondmaid and the freewoman who both bore children to the same man under different conditions, after the flesh, and because of a promise. Some translations actually use “allegory” instead of “symbol”, showing that Paul is intent on interpreting the passage at the D’resh level. Hagar is a symbol of bondage, Sarah, of promise, showing that Paul is drawing theological meaning from an otherwise plain text. He’s alluding to covenants not expressly mentioned in the text, so he is starting to reach into the Sod level as well.
When Paul does go all the way into the Sod level, he tells us he did! “Behold, I tell you a sod!…” he writes in 1 Corinthians 15:51, when writing about something that is never mentioned on the peshat level in the Scriptures, writings that Paul had studied his whole life [Torah/OT]: he teaches us concerning a natzal, a ‘rapture’. “… we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the Last Shofar; for the shofar shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” Paul, by saying this is a ‘sod’, a biblical mystery, is telling us that the rapture is in the “Old Testament”, and he gives us the information we need to know where: Last Shofar. The Last Shofar is commonly referring to “Rosh HaShannah”, what the Torah calls “Yom Teru’ah”, or the “Day of the Awakening Blast” [Lev 23:24]. One has to study all of the Scriptures in order to ‘see’ this “Day”, but it is in there. This is Sod interpretation that is grounded in Scripture.
These later layers are not random categories of information being inserted into the text: they are covenant based, they are rooted in the text, and they are consistent with wider Biblical themes. They do not add to the plain meaning of the text, nor do they violate the plain meaning of the text. When people use fables today, they often do violate the text. That is why Yeshua said, “You do violence against the commandment of God in order to sustain your own traditions.” [Mark 7:9]
First-Century Jewish interpretive methods are visible all through the “New Testament”. Hillel was the most famous teacher in Israel before Yeshua came, and he taught Israel to read the scriptures very plainly, and to follow certain rules when reading. “Kal vakhomer” means ‘light and heavy’ and in interpretation it’s like saying ‘from the lesser to the greater’. We see this in Yeshua’s words in Matthew 6:30. “Now if God clothes in such fashion the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow falls into the fireplace, is He not much more to you, O you of little faith?” Yeshua is taking a proverb and strengthening the imagery to teach a lesson. “Gezarah Shavah” is ‘equal degree’, and it is the method of comparing passages that have the same or very similar wording in order to make a point. Paul does this by using the Psalms’ wording about the “priest forever” and links it to Yeshua being eternally seated at the right hand of God. He also uses the Psalms’ words “this day have I begotten you” to explain the Sonship of Yeshua. “Binyan Av” means ‘a building of a father’ and is the literary tool of establishing a ‘foundational pattern’. Paul uses this method by taking peshat information about Adam to show him as a prototype of Yeshua in the gospels: Adam brings death, but Yeshua brings life, yet both men are ‘heads’ of generations. These are not random literary interpretation techniques, they show us that the apostles reasoned within the Jewish interpretive framework, and taught the scriptures that way.
The New Testament Scriptures came to us from a Jewish world. The language and thought processes of the Renewed Covenant Scriptures [NT] did not emerge from a Greek worldview. They arose from a people who spoke Hebrew and Aramaic and worshiped in God’s Temple and in the Synagogue on the Sabbath. The 1st Century Jewish life was built around the commanded feasts of Leviticus 23, and society was built around Levitical codes of holiness.
Israel had been influenced by Aramaic because of the exile in Bavel [Babylon] where the sister language of Hebrew was spoken. Judaism borrowed words and phrases from Aramaic, and the Aramaic Targums were read in some Synagogues after the Scriptures were read in Hebrew. This influenced Yeshua and the Apostles heavily in the way they thought and spoke, and eventually how the Apostles wrote concerning Yeshua.
Even the Greek texts show some of this. “Abba” is used instead of Av, for Father; “Talita kum” is directly quoted and then translated, ‘little girl, arise’; and at the end in the Revelation “Maranatha” is “Come, Master” in Aramaic.
There are Hebraic idioms in the texts: “B’nei HaMalkhut” is ‘sons of the kingdom’, an idea that only existed in Israel. “Binding and loosing” is actually ‘forbidden or permitted’ terminology from the Hebrew perspective, and it fits the message of Yeshua in that He was teaching about authority when He used those terms. Yeshua also used Hebrew, poetic parallelisms in His teachings. All of these are Semitic patterns of thought that are unique to Hebrew and Aramaic, which are a bit shrouded when brought into Greek.
This matters, because all of the Scriptures, OT and NT, were written from a Hebrew mindset, in a Jewish context, and an overarching history of Israel that built the society of first-century Galilee. To read these texts only through a later abstract or purely systematic Greek framework [or any other framework] disconnects the reader from the text, loses intended meanings, and interprets ideas through foreign categories.
The Apostles did not use Greek ideas and philosophy to write or teach the Bible. The faith was indeed intended for the whole world, and Yeshua Himself instructed Peter to open that door at Caesarea, and Paul to take the gospel into the four winds. But their interpretation of and practice of The Word was according to how Yeshua taught it.
After John died, interpretation of Scripture began to drift, and people used abstraction, systemization, and philosophical categorization in order to interpret the scriptures. When those approaches dominate, you get proof-texting that is extracted out of context, you lose the continuity of the Biblical narrative, and the reader/student is separated from the covenantal context of the whole counsel of Scripture.
Peter was caught not wanting to go into a Gentile home, even before he was even invited. Yeshua told him, “Do not call any man unclean that I have made clean”, [Acts 10-11] so that He could send him to Cornelius’ house. Peter was following a Rabbinic law, and not following the Talmud. Yeshua corrected him.
Paul was a Rabbi, going around the region to arrest and imprison and even kill Jewish people who believed in Yeshua. Yeshua told him, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” The ‘goads’ are the Commandments of the Torah, given by One Shepherd, according to Ecclesiastes 12. Paul, as a Rabbi, knew the ‘remez’ connection Yeshua was making. It so affected him, that Paul considered all his Rabbinic training as ‘dung’ [Phil 3:7-8]. He had studied for years under Gamaliel the Rabbi, and learned to teach and enforce all the rules of Rabbinic Judaism that made Peter not want to eat with gentiles, or caused the Pharisees to accuse Yeshua’s students of being unclean because they did not wash their hands. Those were manmade ‘rules’, and not divine commandments.
But, Peter was corrected, and Paul was the one to correct him. [Gal 2:11-14] And later, Peter scorns Jewish and Gentile believers, and warns them not to twist Paul’s words, as some teachers were already doing, ‘as they twist the other Scriptures’. [2 Peter 3:14-19]
Paul also warned about using wrong teaching methods: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit…” [Col 2:8] “Do not go beyond what is written…” [1 Cor 4:6]. [People are] tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine/teaching”. [Eph 4:14] Paul instructs Timothy to “Rightly handle the Word of Truth”, and warns “They will turn away from the Truth and wander into myths”. This means they believed there was a right way to handle scripture, and a wrong way that leads to ‘fables’/made up stories for allegory that do not actually teach The Word. Yeshua Himself also warned of this. Five times in the book of Matthew He asks, “Have you not read?….” He was forcing the Pharisees to admit to the plain meaning of the text in those instances [12:3,5 19:4, 21:16,42] “You do violence against the commandment of God in order to sustain your own traditions.” [Mark 7:9] People use their traditions to reinterpret The Word, and Yeshua chided His generation for it. At the same time, when the Pharisees were too bogged down in the plain meaning, Yeshua scolded them as well for that: “You tithe, but you neglect the weightier matters of the Torah…”.
There are many other places where Yeshua shows the Jewish people how to correctly read and interpret the Scriptures. The most significant may be, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit Eternal Life?” And Yeshua told him, “You know the commandments..!” “If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments!”
The New Testament does not merely warn against false doctrine or teaching, it repeatedly warns against mishandling the Scriptures. And those warnings always went to very learned, educated people. Error begins not in what is ‘believed’, but in how the Word of God is read, interpreted, and applied. The Scriptures do not give us a methodology of reading, on the surface. But, they condemn distorted handling, bad interpretation, and philosophical application. Yeshua actively corrected the method of interpretation, not just the conclusions.
The Prophets and the Apostles all saw what was coming. God saw the propensity to modify His Word ahead of time. The Serpent twisted The Word after mankind added to it, and this is what caused the fall. Khava [Eve] thought she was doing a good thing by adding a ‘fence around the Torah’, saying God said not even to touch the tree! So, when God gave Israel the commandments, He instructed them: “You shall not add unto The Word which I command you, neither shall you diminish from it, that you may keep the Commandments of יהוה your God which I command you.” [Deut 4:2]. When Jeremiah was ministering to Israel after they began to mix their worship with the worship of Ba’al, stopped calling God by His Name but called Him “Lord”, and justified every vile sin they committed, Jeremiah told them the cure: “Thus says יהוה , ‘Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths’, “Where is the good way?”, ‘and walk therein, and you shall find rest for your souls’.” [Jer 6:16] Jeremiah is the one who prophesied the renewing of the Covenant, and Ezekiel anticipates that renewal, and teaches that the giving of the Spirit will cause adherence to the Commandments: “And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you shall keep My ordinances, and do them.” Paul, in seeing some of the issues already mentioned in all the early congregations with Greeks and Arameans in them, advised them three times to stick to the plan: “Hold to the Jewish traditions that you were taught!” [1 Cor 11:2, 2 Thess 2:15, 3:6] John likewise encouraged all believers writing one of the last letters of the Apostles: “he who says “I am in Him” ought himself also to walk His halakha.” [1 Jo 2:6] “Halakha” is ‘how a student [disciple] ‘walks’ the Torah the way his Rabbi teaches it. Yeshua walked according to The Word only, rightly interpreted inside the ancient Jewish framework. They all meant for all believers to read the Scriptures how they read them, understand what they understood, and walk as they walked.
As stated, John was the last living Apostle. It is the study of all his writings in preparation for teaching, in fact, that led to this article. The Scriptures were written for one reason: to instill belief in God, and in Salvation in His Son. John said so: “these [things] are written, so that you may trust that Yeshua is the Messiah, The Son of God; and when you trust, you shall have Life Eternal in His Name.” [Jo 20:31] Paul echos the sentiment when he writes in Romans 10:4, “Messiah is the goal at which the Torah aims”, where the Torah is the very foundation of all of His Word [Eph 2:14-19].
As the last living apostle, John was keenly aware of the potential drift away from Judaic interpretation of The Word. He wrote His gospel to clarify who Yeshua is, and oddly it is used the most to re-identify Yeshua away from what the Apostles taught about who He is, and it is called ‘progressive revelation’ or ‘digging out’ the truth. After he wrote his gospel, he was given the Revelation, and Yeshua addressed the drift away from the congregations’ ‘first love’, which was the study of the Scriptures under Messianic Jewish tutelage. [Acts 19:10]. Yeshua instructs the ‘whole’ congregation to repent, to correct their error, and to ‘hear The Word/Spirit’ rightly. [Rev 2-3] John had more time on his hands after the Isle of Patmos, and seemingly had a desire to give some final instruction and warning about deceptive teaching, and deceptive spirits. [1,2, and 3 John]
John tells them 1900 years ago that ‘it is the last time’. This means we are guaranteed that we are indeed in the last times. “you have heard that a false Messiah shall come, even now there are many false ‘anointed ones’, and from this we know that it is the last time.” Most people interpret that to mean people standing up to say “I am Jesus”, but it is not. It is people standing up under a false anointing and teaching falsely about Yeshua the Messiah. That’s why he says ‘they went out from us’. They left the teaching of the Apostles and started teaching other things, which is why John wrote all that he wrote.
False anointed people follow deceiving spirits that are not from God. These spirits convince people that these teachers are ‘prophets’ and walk in God’s authority. But John tells us to test them. And that test is anchored in the identity of The Son of God as a human being: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Yeshua the Messiah has come [and remains] in the flesh is from God. And every spirit that does not confess Yeshua has come in the flesh is not from God; THIS is the spirit of the false Messiah, which you have heard is coming, and even now it is already in the world.” [1 Jo 4:2-6] In both Hebrew/Armaic ‘has come’ is in perfect tense and thus also has a ‘present result’ nuance to it just like the Greek: ‘has come and remains in flesh’ is the full meaning. Any spirit that teaches otherwise, that Yeshua is not a man still, is a lying spirit. Even if they justify that notion by using other methodologies of interpretation, which is exactly what most people do, denial of Yeshua as a man is the indicator of a false teacher. Peter preached it very clearly, “Men of Israel, ‘hear’ [rightly and respond correctly] these words: Yeshua the Nazarene, a MAN who was from God, … this MAN who was consecrated for this purpose by God, you have delivered and have executed and murdered Him, whom God raised up.” [Acts 2:22-23] Paul also testified in similar fashion, upwards of 20 years later, with no doctrinal change in preaching Yeshua: “For He [God the Father] has appointed a day in which He will judge all the earth with righteousness by the Man whom He [God] has chosen.” [Acts 17:31] And Paul asserts that Yeshua is still a man in heaven: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the MAN Yeshua the Messiah”. [1 Tim 2:5] Each of these support John’s assertion that one must preach that Yeshua remains a man in order to be preaching the Truth of God’s Word.
All of John’s writing efforts were to ward off doctrines that were already infesting the Messianic Community. When he died, that oversight died after only one successful generation. John’s message of ‘return’, ‘hear rightly, and walk faithfully was ignored by many who came after him in the second century. [read here].
The Spirit today is not bringing new doctrine. God is calling people back to alignment with His Word. “Come out of her, my people”. The same thing Peter told Israel, God’s heralds today are telling all the congregations: “Repent, that times of refreshing may come, so that He [God] may SEND the Messiah [Acts 3:19-21]. Yeshua said “Elijah will come, and he will restore ALL things”. That restoration is the old ways that Jeremiah told us to search out. It is not ‘innovation’, or progressive revelation, it is restoration.
The invitation to ‘hear and respond’ comes with responsibility. “Come, everyone who thirsts” as spoken by Isaiah [55:1] was echoed by Yeshua during the season of Sukkot, “If any man thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.” [Yeshua, Jo 7:37] And that call is echoed in the Revelation: “And The Spirit and The Bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ And he who is thirsty, let him come. And whoever will, let him take of the Living Water freely.” [Rev 22:17] That ‘Living Water’ is the rightly interpreted Word of Truth! “Be doers of The Word, and not ‘hearers’ only!” [James 1:22]
There is no ‘shadow of turning’ in God. The issue has never been whether people possess the Word of God. The issue has always been whether they hear it rightly. Israel had the Scriptures—and still went astray. The teachers of the Law in Yeshua’s day knew the text—and yet did not understand it. The early congregations received instruction and correction directly from the apostles—and still drifted. So the question before us is not, “Do we have access to the Bible?” We do. The question is: Do we hear what the Spirit is saying through what has already been written? Because God has not changed. His Word has not changed. His Messiah has not changed. So if doctrine shifts… if definitions are reworked… if meanings are reshaped to fit new frameworks… then it is not the Word that has moved. It is us.
“He who has ears to hear…” is not a call to passive listening. It is a call to return. To return to what was spoken from the beginning. To return to the way the Scriptures were given, read, and lived. To return to a hearing that leads to obedience. Not adding to the Word. Not diminishing from it. Not reinterpreting it through foreign systems. But hearing it— as it is.
And doing it. Because the Spirit does not speak something new. It calls us back to what God has already said. “And the Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come.’” The invitation remains.
But so does the responsibility. “He who has ears to hear— let him hear.”