LIFE AFTER RELIGION
After our relationship with institutional religion ended in 2005, we entered into an exciting new spiritual life in which we were dependent on no individuals and no organizations for instruction. We took seriously what God says about digging our own spiritual wells and began to study both the Old and New Testaments looking to discover how fully integrated the Bible is. It was just us and God as provided in the New Covenant where we are taught by the spirit of God – not by a human teacher. From that point forward, we did our best to avoid interpreting the Bible literally. We always read to understand the symbolic meaning which is the spiritual law. This ability did not come quickly or easily.
Even though we had rejected church, we replaced it with another religion: Messianic Judaism. Our understanding of that religion required that we work our way through the Old Testament on the weekly Torah and Haftarah reading schedule. We thought that if we did what the Jews did, and merged it with our understanding of Christian doctrine, we would be doing the right thing in God’s eyes. For us, this was the best of both worlds (Judaism and Christianity).
As good Messianic Jews do, we spent most of our time in the Pentateuch, which is loaded with symbolism that is impossible to understand if we rely exclusively on intellectual knowledge. Even after consulting our dictionary and concordance that led us to related scriptures elsewhere in the Bible, we often found ourselves lost after wandering downs “rabbit trails.” Sometimes we could not remember where we started and often found other topics along the way that we were enticed to explore.
For the first few years we found more questions than answers, but that was OK because we were satisfied by the asking, knocking, seeking process. We did not always find the answers that we were looking for, but we had fun winding our way through the Bible and we found just enough answers to keep us engaged and hopeful that more answers would come sometime soon. What we learned in this process is summarized in STUDY, Study for Discipline, Study Tips, Bible Study Tools, and Free Online Bible Study.