Shalom to you, the reader, today, now, with us. I pray that you can experience real shalom, peace that only God can give, while you are here on our website. (The God of the Bible has a Name which He tells us MANY times in His Word to proclaim: YHVH= “Yehovah.” Yehovah is what some Bible scholars have found to be the pronunciation when they recently discovered vowel points in ancient manuscripts [check out Nehemia Gordan: Hebrew Voices podcasts].)
I want to address something most personal but most important. This topic is CRITICAL. Please bear with me. We all serve something or Someone. Whom or what do you worship? You can tell by your priorities. Worshiping self comes in many different forms. Does the love of money drive you? Having stuff? How about the sense of safety/security/self-sufficiency? Power? Capability? How about fame/recognition/reputation? Family? Sports? Celebrities? Physical fitness, health or appearance? Your vast education and knowledge? “Happiness?” Drugs (not excluding alcohol and cigarettes)? Sex? Religions and their icons? Nature? Do you worship creations rather than the Creator? How about “nothing?” Atheism is a religion.
I serve YHVH, the God of the Hebrews, the God of Israel, the God of grafted-in gentiles (Goyim), the Creator. I know that YHVH is superior to everyone and everything because He tells us in His Bible, His Word that He is. I have no need to roam the earth to prove that His Word is true. I’ve heard testimonies of miracles in people’s lives, I’ve seen Him do miracles in nations and I have been touched by Him doing miracles on my own body and in my life. He has reached me at the depths, the core, of myself. When I've been at the weakest points in my life, the place of complete helplessness and brokenness, that's when His Presence and Power and Love are the clearest, the most tangible to me. (In fact, that's what the Beatitudes in the Scriptures are really addressing.) There's no experience like REALLY coming to the end of oneself and finding God's Powerful Hand. He loves His creation and He desires us to cry out to Him in joy and in desperation, with praise and worship drawing near to Him, clinging to Him. He gives life and He IS life! He is (c)hesed. (c)hesed is a fantastic Hebrew word that we’ll study about later on.
YHVH has never promised to keep troubles away but He has promised to use that suffering to help us become better “us.” He knows us perfectly and He knows, like a Potter knows the clay (that’s the name of a beautiful worship song, by the way), how to mold us, through circumstances in our lives, into perfect things useful for His Purposes. While I rarely understand things that happen to me and around me, I trust YHVH completely to do what He knows I need (and not necessarily what I THINK I need.) I praise Him continually. I thank Him for choosing me. I can't imagine living one second without Him.
My husband and I welcome you to the following pages (a work in continual motion) where we share with you how we study the Bible as close to the original Hebrew writings/thought processes as we can (a new adventure for us as we both grew up in a Greek/Roman paradigm in the western culture “christian churches.”) We desire to understand the culture, the context, the audience and the purpose of each Word in the Bible. We love spending our energies learning what YHVH’s Ways are and how He, our Maker, desires us to serve Him every minute of every day in the midst of hardship or joy and with Shalom. How exciting that He actually provided us with an Owner's Manual for life! It's up to us, however, to diligently search out brave teachers of truth (not man-made religion) and to pray sincerely for YHVH’s Illumination of the Word (the Bible was mostly written in Hebrew in an ancient time period to a culture that most of us westerners have zero clue about.) We want to allow God’s Spirit to lead us into understanding of His Word (not man-made traditions), to study His Instructions with trepidation and all diligence and to OBEY them with pure hearts of service... that means sacrificing self... and that's what (c)hesed is all about.
