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HEAR, O ISRAEL!
The Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 1, 2025 – As many of you know, I came to belief in God and in his Messiah, Jesus, directly from atheism. I didn’t meander down a long and twisted path of “Is he?” or “Isn’t he?”, trying to apply logic and deductive reasoning to the existence of God and by extension to the messiahship of Jesus. You can’t logic your way into genuine belief, as your belief exists prior to knowing you believe. In other words, I believed before I knew I believed, because my belief in God came from God, not from me. Genuine belief is placed in us as a measure of God’s Holy Spirit; it isn’t generated by us. Genuine belief comes from God and is God.
You can’t genuinely believe in God based solely on logic and reasoning. You can only genuinely believe in God if God is working through you, by his Holy Spirit. So when I went from unbelief to belief in under a second, it wasn’t my doing. It was God’s doing. All I did was choose to forgive, and God did the rest.
Which brings me to the topic of today’s discussion, which is God, and by extension his Messiah, Jesus. These are two distinct beings, with God being God and Jesus being the Messiah. God is Lord over everything and everyone, and Jesus is Lord over those areas and beings God designates Jesus to have lordship. They are two distinct beings with different and in some cases overlapping jurisdictions, but in the cases of overlap, God still has ascendancy, as Jesus pointed out when he stated: The Father is greater than I.
God’s Holy Spirit is God manifesting in time and space. The Old Testament prophets well knew this, as should we. When the Holy of Holies was built as the inner sanctum within the temple, according to God’s specifications, the Holy of Holies was meant for God to come to visit his people on designated days or sometimes to show up unannounced. It wasn’t meant for a “lesser” spirit that was tapped by God to represent him. It was built for God himself to descend to the temple in Spirit form, as he was and is wont to do when he interacts with earthly beings (not just humans). God had previously descended in Spirit form on numerous occasions in the tabernacle that he specified be built just after the exodus from Egypt. Again, it wasn’t a messenger of God that Moses went to be with in the tabernacle, it was God himself, manifesting as the Holy Spirit.
Old Testament prophets also knew that God’s Holy Spirit was God himself manifesting in Spirit form. Whenever they’d inquire of God or be inspired by God, it was to God directly they’d inquire or by God directly they’d be inspired. They knew it wasn’t a messenger sent from God they were interacting with, but very God himself. Genuine prophets today likewise inquire of God directly through his Spirit and are inspired by God directly through his Spirit. If you’re genuinely reborn, you would know this, because you have a portion of God’s Holy Spirit in you at all times (not just on occasion, like Old Testament prophets). You are one of several perambulating Holy of Holies that Jesus, by his sacrifice, enabled you to be.
God directed Moses to declare:
HEAR, O ISRAEL: The Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Jesus later declared this the greatest of all God’s Commands, and yet it rarely features in any list of the Ten Commandments. It should always be there, front and center. If Jesus says that the most important of all God’s Commandments is that the Lord our God is one Lord, and that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and might, then it’s unquestioningly the most important of all Commandments, and as Jesus’ followers, we need to know it and embrace it and live it and preach it.
Which is a roundabout way of saying the doctrine of the trinity is nonsense and has no place in the hearts and minds of genuine believers. When I was born-again and taught directly by God, as scripture says his children will be, God never taught me the trinitarian doctrine. It’s not in the Bible and it’s certainly not in the Ten Commandments. In fact, I only came to know about the trinitarian doctrine when I first started attending Catholic masses about six weeks after I was reborn. Which is to say, I had to learn about this doctrine from men, not from God. Which is to say, this is one of those dreaded doctrines of men that Jesus (and later, Paul) warned us about and dismissed.
To be honest, I dismissed the trinitarian doctrine the first time I heard of it. The trinitarian concept of God was not the God I knew as my heavenly Father, and certainly not the Jesus I knew as my Lord, teacher, big brother, and best friend who, during his time on Earth, had a greater measure of God’s Spirit in him than anyone before or since, but that still didn’t make him God. It was this exceedingly great measure of God’s Holy Spirit in him that enabled Jesus to perform so many miracles, but that still didn’t make him God. It made him Lord, but it didn’t make him God.
Nor did the trinitarian doctrine reflect the Holy Spirit that I knew was God’s way of interacting with me as a mere mortal, the same Spirit God placed in me by measure at my rebirth, when he adopted me as his child. As Jesus said, “God is spirit”, and so he is to us now, but if and when we get to Heaven, Paul promises we’ll see God as he is, “face to face”.
You can’t limit God to this or that or one or the other, as God is all-powerful and can do all things, far beyond anything we can imagine. But when God stated to Moses that he is One Lord, we need to take him at his word, not spiritually genetically modify him into something he clearly stated he isn’t. We can’t sub-divide God into three co-equal beings that are somehow by some tortured human logic still all “God”, all while thinking we’re adhering to the Commandment that God is one Lord.
God is God, our heavenly Father.
Jesus is God’s Son and the one and only Messiah.
And the Holy Spirit is God manifesting in time and space.
This is not difficult to understand. God never meant it to be difficult. Truth is never difficult, not to those who have God and Jesus in them.
SOCIAL MEDIA, GOSSIP, AND BEARING FALSE WITNESS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 11, 2025 – The Ten Commandments are non-negotiable, which we, as born-again believers, well know. Every Commandment needs to be kept to the best of our ability, no excuses and no exceptions. The Commandments that garner the most attention (e.g., the ones about not killing and not committing adultery) tend to overshadow the less oft-cited Commandments and push them farther away from our spiritual awareness. But all the Commandments need to be kept, not just the “sexy” ones.
One of those less oft-cited Commandments is the one about not bearing false witness against your neighbor. In fact, it’s so overshadowed at times by the other Commandments that it’s even been misconstrued on occasion as “Thou shalt not lie”, which is not what the Commandment states. The Commandment is not about not lying: It’s about not bearing false witness, which, though it can share some characteristics with lying, is in a separate category by itself or it wouldn’t be a Commandment.
Bearing false witness against your neighbor can manifest in two different ways: 1) purposely twisting or omitting facts to cast guilt on an innocent person, either in a court of law or in the court of public opinion; or 2) openly speculating, again either in a court of law or in the court of public opinion, about the probable or possible guilt of someone, based solely on your opinion of the presented or presumed facts.
This article concerns the second violation of the Commandment, specifically, open speculation in the court of public opinion.
We all speculate. It’s not wrong to speculate. When we hear of a crime or a potential crime, we speculate as a way to make sense of the mystery that we’ve been presented with and don’t yet have a solution for, not being privy to all the facts of the case. Speculation in and of itself is not wrong. God gave us a mind and intends for us to use it. But speculation that involves the possible or probable guilt of someone we only suspect might be guilty should be kept between us and God. The instant we go beyond God and openly share our speculations on someone’s presumed guilt, we enter the realm of bearing false witness against a neighbor. We cross the line and we break the Commandment.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have crossed that line and nearly crossed that line on numerous occasions without realizing it. Case in point: Two children, age four and six, have gone missing from a rural community in Nova Scotia. This happened about a week ago, and speculation on social media has been rife with unsubstantiated claims about what could have happened to the little ones. Having lived for a time not far from where the children disappeared, I was immediately drawn to the case; and being a woman with latent but still intact maternal instincts, I also became emotionally involved with it. For every fact about the disappearance that trickled out through mainstream media, social media responded with a flood of what can only be described as salacious speculation. No-one who had access to the children before their disappearance was spared public pillorying. Given my emotional involvement, it was difficult for me not to get caught up in the rumors and innuendoes, and so I did get caught up in them, until God hauled me up short and showed me what I was setting myself up for.
I did not get involved in the public speculation about what happened to those children (who, at the time of publication, are still missing). When I say I didn’t get involved publicly, I mean I didn’t submit a comment on any of the social media forums or talk about the case with anyone. I kept my speculations to myself, but I was tempted on many an occasion to jump into the online discussions that form the widespread court of public opinion. I was tempted. I was very tempted. And I thank God I didn’t do it.
When we speculate between us and God, God will guide our speculations, if we ask him to guide us and if it’s to our benefit. God decides on both of those criteria. But when we breach the containment of our mind and shift to openly speculating in the court of public opinion, we run the risk of breaking the Commandment about bearing false witness against our neighbor. No, I don’t know the people involved in the case of the missing children in Nova Scotia, but they’re still my neighbors, according to Jesus’ definition. And no, the court of public opinion doesn’t take place in a designated court of law, but it still has the same spiritual impact. Even if you believe your speculations to be accurate and the person or people you’re speculating about to be guilty, you need to keep your speculations between you and God. You’ll be tempted not to, but you need to keep them between you and God. The minute you voice your opinion publicly (even just among friends and family), you cross the line and break the Commandment.
But what if your suspicions end up being correct? What if you’ve uncovered an angle that doesn’t appear to have been considered by law enforcement agents? What if your witness isn’t false? Are you still breaking the Commandment if you share what turns out to be true?
As long as the case being speculated upon is still in the realm of speculation (that is, hasn’t yet been solved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law), you need to be very careful about what you share and how you share it. You can share your personal revelations without pointing fingers, but that’s a very tricky process that borders on breaking the Commandment. You can do it but be very careful. Unless you are an eyewitness and are 100% certain about what you saw, you are treading a very fine line that may wrongly implicate someone, which will then rebound to you spiritually and cause you enormous suffering.
There are no exceptions when it comes to keeping God’s Ten Commandments. The devil is always laying traps and offering temptations to get us to violate God’s rules, so we need not only to be aware of the Commandments at all times but to understand what each one looks like when it’s walked out in real life. If God hadn’t shown me, I would never have connected spit-balling someone’s possible guilt with violating the Commandment about bearing false witness. I would just have thought of it as discussing possibilities with people who are also discussing possibilities. But all words, whether spoken or written, have an impact on the hearers and readers, swaying them this way or that. You don’t want to be the one swaying someone to a conclusion that falsely accuses another of a crime, because you’ll be held responsible for that false accusation by God, which will have a far worse outcome for you, as a born-again believer, than if you’d committed the discussed crime yourself.
Be very careful of what you say and write. It’s better to keep things between you and God than to climb onboard the gossip train of social media and fall into the devil’s trap of bearing false witness.
BIBLE READ-THROUGH: DAY 7 REFLECTION (DEUTERONOMY 1-27:26)
“40 Days and 40 Nights of God’s Word”
DAY 7: JULY 29
DEUTERONOMY 1 – DEUTERONOMY 27:26
GREENVILLE STATION, Nova Scotia, July 29, 2021 – Today’s reading is the final (fifth) book of Moses’ contribution to the Old Testament. It’s essentially a summary of the highlights of the Israelite’s 40-year trek through the wilderness, as delivered in a series of speeches (or sermons) by Moses to the children of Israel just before his death and their entrance into the Promised Land. Don’t blink in this reading, because you’ll miss something important.
- What I find compelling is the repetition of important points that Moses obviously wanted to drive home to his listeners and future readers (that would be us!). When I first started reading the Old Testament years ago, I would occasionally think I had lost track of where I’d stopped reading the day before and was going back over the same text, but that wasn’t the case. It was different text but the same topics. The repetition serves the purpose of hammering into us information that needs to be so familiar that it becomes second nature or part of us, and the way to do that is stating the same things over and over but using slightly different words.
- Here are some of the main topics that are repeated by Moses: 1) We need to be obedient to God or we’ll end up like the heathens and get the same punishment as them; 2) we need to remember the children of Israel’s slavery in Egypt and how God brought them out with miracles; 3) we need teach our children and others about the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt and how God brought them out with miracles; 4) we need to keep the Commandments and all relevant laws, statutes, and holidays (note that for us born-agains, most of the laws, statutes and holidays are no longer relevant, other than for the Ten Commandments and the Passover feast, which Jesus commanded us to celebrate in the way he showed us on the night before his crucifixion. But we do – without exception – need to keep the Commandments); and 5) we need to separate ourselves from the heathen (no intermarriage) and not adopt their demonically-inspired sinful ways.
- The fifth point mentioned above became a major trap for the children of Israel. They end up intermarrying with the heathen, which then made them susceptible to adopting the culture of the heathens, which then pitted them against God. I like how God tells his people to utterly smash down the demon-worship pillars (that is, the obelisks) in the heathen cities, and yet today we see obelisks everywhere in supposed Christian nations, including and especially in Vatican City. Some of the abominations in that alleged Christian enclave have even been brought from Egypt at great financial and human cost (with several people dying in the transport of the abominations). It’s like no-one in Vatican City has ever read the Bible, or if they have read it, they decided to do the opposite of what God tells his people to do.
- I have to laugh a little bit at how God reminds his people through Moses (who, by the way, appears to be speaking for himself now that Aaron has passed away) that they were not chosen because they were such a great (i.e., populous) nation or because they were so righteous. In fact, God tells them that the only reason they were chosen is because the heathen were even wickeder than they were. So it’s like God gave the Israelites a D- for their righteousness, but because the heathen got an F, the Israelites win the prize. But a D- is nothing to crow about! One of the prophets later says that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and Jesus says that none is good but God. So God isn’t actually expecting us to achieve righteousness, though we still have to try our hardest to achieve it. No dropping out or quitting, even for ‘mental health’ reasons. The harder we aim for righteousness, the more God blesses our efforts.
- Why did God make the children of Israel wander for 40 years in the wilderness? There were actually a couple of reasons, and Moses mentions them in the reading. The first is that the generation that sinned early on in the wilderness trek needed to be killed. God didn’t want to kill them all at once, as they had their uses, but none of them were allowed to cross the River Jordan into the Promised Land. So it took 40 years for them to die in various ways, most of which were natural causes.
- Another reason for the 40-year wander is that God needed to pace the overthrow of the heathen nations. This couldn’t be done all at once. So he organized for them to sack a certain place and purge (i.e., kill) all the inhabitants but keep the food and cattle, and then live there for a while until he told them to sack the next city and purge all the inhabitants but keep the food and cattle, etc. In this way, the Israelites were provided for but didn’t overextend their military resources or take on too great a burden (too much booty).
- But the main reason for the 40-year wander in the wilderness is that God needed to prove the Israelites, to humble them, to know their heart, and to see whether or not they’d keep his Commandments. If you’re born-again, you know exactly what this means. God is proving you and humbling you, even as he’s providing for you, in order to see what’s really in your heart and whether or not you’ll keep his Commandments (especially under duress). In other words, the Israelites’ 40 year-trek was a training time and a testing time as well as a filtering-out phase for what didn’t belong in the Promised Land. As a born-again believer, I 100% identify with the children of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, because I’m living them now. All born-again believers live them. It’s our earthly reality until we make it to our Promised Land of Heaven (that is, IF we make it to our Promised Land of Heaven).
- I’m going to include most of a passage here, because for me it sums up everything we should be and do as inheritors of God’s promise and followers of Jesus. God, through Moses, is speaking directly to us:
12 And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,
13 To keep the commandments of the Lord, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?….
16 Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.
17 For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward:
18 He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.
19 Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
20 Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name.
21 He is thy praise, and he is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen.
(Deuteronomy 10:12-21)
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I hope you guys are enjoying the read-through and getting out of it what you need to get out of it. Feel free to leave a comment below if something jumped out at you in this reading that you want to share. We all read the same words, but God highlights different ones for each of us at different times. In this way, God’s Word always stays fresh and always has something new to teach us, to cherish, and to apply to our lives.
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For the full schedule of the BIBLE READ-THROUGH on PDF, see below:
BIBLE READ-THROUGH: DAY 3 REFLECTION (EXODUS 5 – 31:18)
“40 Days and 40 Nights of God’s Word”
DAY 3: JULY 25
EXODUS 5 – EXODUS 31:18
GREENVILLE STATION, Nova Scotia, July 25, 2021 – This reading is the meat and bones of the Old Testament. It’s so rich, you could read it every day for the rest of your life and still find something new, something that impresses on you in a way it hadn’t before.
- It’s good that God told Moses in advance that his efforts to persuade Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go would fail multiple times before finally succeeding. Otherwise, Moses might have given up after the fifth or sixth try. God talks to all his children, to guide and encourage them. This spiritual fact has mostly been lost on Christians today. They think prayer is a one-way channel to God, but the communication flows both ways, as we see throughout the entire Bible. God is a very present God and Father for those who love him and serve him and heed his advice.
- Interesting that the Egyptian magicians (demon-summoners) could turn a rod into a serpent and back, and turn water into blood, but they couldn’t turn dust into lice, or call forth the frogs, or any of the other miracle plagues that God struck the Egyptians with. Even today, some people who claim to be Christians can perform miracles in Jesus’ name, but they’re actually summoning demons to do the task. Jesus warned us about those people. Just because someone performs a miracle in Jesus’ name doesn’t mean the miracle is from God.
- Note that the plagues didn’t affect the Hebrews, just the Egyptians. The Hebrews were protected by God. Note also that later in the reading, when the Hebrews are in the wilderness, God tells them they won’t get sick (“I will take sickness away from the midst of thee”). These are the protections promised to those who obey God’s Commandments and other directives. We are not of the world; we are in the world, not of it. Remember that.
- “SPOIL THE EGYPTIANS!” After 430 years of slavery, the Hebrews were only too happy to take whatever they could get from the Egyptians, and God made sure the Egyptians gave generously. But why on Earth did God direct the Hebrews to take gold jewelry and fabric on their wilderness journey? Would they not have been better off taking food and water? We find out later in the reading that the gold and fabrics are for the building of the Ark of the Covenant and everything that went with it (candlesticks, basins, etc.). God’s directions to you initially may seem odd and even nonsensical, but they always have a purpose, as you eventually find out.
- The Egyptians thought they had the Hebrews trapped when they heard they were camped on the shores of the Red Sea. The Hebrews, when they saw Pharaoh’s army coming for them, thought the same. But God’s whole purpose in bringing the Hebrews to the shores of the Red Sea was to trap the Egyptians, not the Hebrews. The Hebrews he safely led through the sea on dry land by miraculously parting the waters, whereas the Egyptians who followed after them he drowned. God ALWAYS makes a way for his people. No matter how hopeless and impossible it may look, GOD ALWAYS MAKES A WORKAROUND. We need to remember this for what is coming. You don’t have to give into evil because you don’t see a way around it. God will get you through it HIS way (that is, in a way that you cannot conceive at the time), if you trust him and follow his advice.
- THE TEN COMMANDMENTS! These are the core of scripture. None of them have changed, and they are all as equally valid today as they were thousands of years ago when God first gave them to Moses. Remember that, at the time, the Commandments were to apply to Hebrews only, so killing a non-Hebrew was not considered a sin. Jesus later expanded the jurisdiction of the Commandments to include everyone, whether believer or not, and God then wrote his Commandments on everyone’s heart, believer or not. So none of us now has any excuse not to follow them. No-one can claim they don’t know the Commandments, and no-one can claim they don’t apply to them. The Commandments now apply to everyone.
- Do you keep all of them? Your answer had better be “YES!” without thinking twice, or you have some repenting and restorative work to do.
- Fascinating directive about the altar – you’re not supposed to go up steps to get to it, and if it’s stone, it’s not supposed to be hewn. Strange, but nearly every altar I’ve seen in every alleged Christian church I’ve been to has steps leading up to it and is made of polished marble or some other manufactured stone, wood, iron, or artificial material. I don’t recall one altar in an alleged Christian church that was simply unhewn stone. Anyone know of any? How about graven images of people that are prayed to, decorated, or have lit candles around them – seen any of those in alleged Christian churches? “By their fruits shall ye know them.”
- I LOVE THE SABBATH! Obviously, God does, too, since he made it a Commandment and stressed that we need to keep it to “refresh” ourselves (his term). The Sabbath was made for our refreshing, so that we can rest physically and mentally and have plenty of time to get another hit of God’s Word without feeling obligated to perform other duties. It is the one day a week to be Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus rather than Martha running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off. There’s nothing better on Earth than spending the whole day with God and reviving yourself through scripture. If you don’t do that, you don’t have the refreshing you need to get through the next week. As Jesus said: “The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. God wants us to refresh ourselves in mind, body and spirit one day out of every seven because he knows we need it. He made us that way.
What were your impressions of this blockbuster reading? Did anything jump out at you that you hadn’t noticed before? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts. Happy Sabbath, everyone!
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The BIBLE READ-THROUGH SCHEDULE on PDF is directly below:
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A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 