Yeshua & Mashiach
66 essays carry this tag, newest first.
Essays
We Turned Jesus Into a Thing
Fourteen ninety-nine for a fifty pack, at the largest Christian bookseller online. The price tag is the most honest thing in the building. How the person became inventory, what got sold off in the trade, and the question the men at the front owe an honest answer.
True Worshipers
Colossians 3:16 sent me looking for the psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs of Scripture, from the Song of Moses to the song of the Lamb. Who we worship matters, and so do where, when, why, and how.
I Have Been Screaming the Wrong Word
Rome mediated, and burned the men who handed out keys. Protestants gatekeep. For years I aimed the first charge at the second church. This is the correction, and the word Yeshua actually used.
There Were No Jews at Nicea
There were no Jews at the Council of Nicea. That absence was not an accident; it was decreed by one empire, defended in the emperor's own letter, and enforced for centuries. What the severance cost, who carried the thread anyway, and why the whole record is evidence for Yeshua, not against him.
Titles He Refused
Yehoshua accepted every name that described work he was doing and refused every name that would have frozen that work into a chair only one person could sit in, which is why calling him a rabbi hands him both an office that did not yet exist and one of the three titles he explicitly declined. The refusal was a governing rule about how his people would organize themselves rather than a gesture of modesty, and the movement that preserved it abandoned it within three centuries.
He Lived It for You, Not Instead of You.
Christianity says Yeshua lived a perfect life as a substitute for yours. Read tamim in Hebrew and a different picture appears: not a spotless record waiting to be transferred, but a whole man shown to you. A word study, a doctrine with a birthday, and the question almost nobody asks about what the life was actually for.
The Torah David Longed to Keep
Psalm 119 is not a praise poem. It is one hundred and seventy-six verses of a man who loved the Torah and could not keep it, begging to be changed from the inside. The new covenant is the answer to that cry, and from Yeshua's own mouth to the last letter of Yochanan, the Brit Chadashah is standing exactly where the psalm stood.
Ramifications of the New Covenant
Learning to know [yada] the Lord
The Grave Was a Mikvah
Ask what happened in the three days between the cross and the empty tomb and you will get one of two answers: a holy pause, or a raid on hell. The Hebrew was built to say something else. The grave was a mikvah, the immersion of the new covenant itself, and what came up out of that water was a crowned King and a heart of flesh. Down a servant, up the King, and the water He rose through is the same water you were buried into.
YHWH as Yovel
This theological and socio-economic essay explores the divine Name of YHWH not as an abstract philosophical concept but as the literal acoustic and systemic trigger for the Biblical Jubilee, or Yovel. It argues that the historical movement of the Ebyonim (the dispossessed) understands the sounding of the shofar as a proxy for the raw, distressed outcry (tza'akatam) of the oppressed, framing Christ’s cleansing of the Temple as a deliberate activation of a systemic economic reset meant to shatter imperial debt structures while preserving life through divine intervention.
He Did It Himself: The Garden, the Covenants, and the Hebrew Savior Christianity Forgot
The Garden was never a metaphor. It is the concrete foundation of the whole of Scripture. Every covenant after Eden pointed right back to it. Every framework Christianity later built around the cross only added man-made complication. The Hebrew Savior came to restore the Garden. Which is why He had to be both.
Who Inherited the Covenant?
When the title Masch'yah traveled over the Greek bridge to become Xristos, four distinct traditions reached out to inherit the ancient trunk of Covenantal Yahwism. This essay tracks how two of those lines grew into world religions by dropping the hard economic weights of debt release and Jubilee, while the heir that kept the trunk's constitutional substance whole was quietly written out of the will.
The Baptism of the Holy Spirit is needed today
This is an explanation for normal believers. I need to do this because of all the lies, distortions, and manmade doctrines which have arisen because of the panic of Satan and his minions.
Let's Unpack This Thing Called Judaism
This is the story that will not break, held not by the hands of men but by the very word of God. Garden to city, one arc, no rupture. The only faith that came straight from the text, before men fenced it and Rome tried to dissolve it. And the High Priest who returns to Jerusalem to end every institution built in His absence.
Written on the Heart
The 613 commandments are not the point. The Torah is the Father's own self-disclosure, a letter written so we could know Him, and the Ruach is the One who writes it on the heart. A Hebraic reading of why both the Rabbinic fence and the Western claim that the law is finished miss the very same thing.
Why the Holy Spirit within is so important today
Talking about the trouble both jews who know Messiah, and institutional Christians have with e Holy Spirt. Why it matters.
Paul According to the Ebionites
A consolidated portrait of Paul through Ebionite eyes: the Fish of the Great Sea, formed in philosophical Tarsus and trained in Gamaliel's academy, adjudicated a false prophet on four constitutional grounds by the community that knew him best. The verdict stands, and yet the handful of true sentences in his letters belongs to the Covenant tradition whose vocabulary they were written in, and reclaiming them is not generosity toward Paul but repatriation.
Saul Already Knew
The West pictures a proud man thrown from a horse and converted to a new religion. There is no horse in the text, and there was no conversion. Saul of Tarsus was a Torah-trained Jew who, on the Damascus road, finally recognized the One his own Scriptures had been pointing to all along, and followed them all the way home.
Gnats, Frogs, Camels—Oh My!
Jesus warned against straining out gnats while swallowing camels. In an age consumed by denominational controversies and endless theological debates, have we overlooked a much larger problem? This essay announces the dangers of allowing anti-Judaism and supersessionism into the church.
Who Shall I Say Sent Me?
A supply-chain logistician turned mendicant scholar introduces the Archive of the Ebyonim: the wager that the Covenant was never a religion but a constitution for a society that refused to extract, and a map of the books, translations, and stories built to recover it.
The Community You Cannot Build
Church community is sold as the cure for loneliness, but the lobby, the stage, the lighting, and the program are a production, and a production holds you only as long as it runs. The Hebrew edah gathers people around a shared purpose, not a building. You cannot manufacture organic community. You can only become someone around whom it forms. There is one ekklesia, and no program built it.
Christianity Is the System
A Scripture-led wake-up call: everything we call Judeo-Christianity today is a civic institution that mediates access to YHWH through human architecture the text itself never authorized.
The Feast They Were Already Keeping: Shavuot, Pentecost, and the Church's Founding Misunderstanding
Pentecost is not the Church's birthday. It is the appointment HaShem set on His calendar before Israel had a calendar. Shavuot was already there. The Ruach was already moving. You are grafted in, not displaced.
I am a thief. I am a murderer.
The thief on the cross has been weaponized for two thousand years. Tradition says he did nothing and was saved. The text says otherwise. A walk through what the story actually tells us about salvation as wholeness, about why the Sinner's Prayer was manufactured, about why the same tradition that uses the thief to argue 'no works necessary' then turns and requires baptism, and about the veil that YHWH tore with His own hand while a thief was being made whole next to His Son.
When Kavod Gets Redirected: A Hebraic Reading of the Megachurch Capital Campaign
The kingdom of Yeshua and a named fundraising drive have been welded into a single act. The page indicts itself.
The Mikvah Beneath the Water
The water has been the same the whole time. We just forgot what it was for.
Falling for a Different Gospel
I was the good Christian girl. Then I read what Jesus said his Bible was about, and the framework I had inherited unraveled.
How History Hijacked God
A Hebrew reading of what translation did to the God Yeshua knew.
The Root: Yasha — The God Who Rescues
The Hebrew word behind 'saved' means rescue, not legal acquittal. A root study tracing yasha from the Red Sea through the Gospels, naming what penal substitution changed, and documenting the psychological wreckage it left behind.
Welcome Jacob Hotchkiss to the Table
Jacob Hotchkiss is a house-church pastor from Springfield, MO whose union-with-Christ theology runs deep and whose Torah questions run honest.
If It Had Been a Man
If a man had taken a bullet for us, we would carry his name the rest of our lives. The Rescuer whose Name we claim did more, and still the story comes out flat. A Journal entry on the strange quiet that follows a rescue we never saw with our own eyes.
Once a Son, Always a Son
"Once saved, always saved" is true. Just not the way you were taught it. Part one of a three-part Berean walk through the phrase that built the modern altar call.
More Than Easter
A personal note..
Forgiven Into What?
How Christianity turned covenant restoration into a courtroom verdict — and why the difference matters.
Unpacking #15: The Breath You Were Never Taught to Recognize
How the Set-Apart Breath of the Living God Became a Theological Third Wheel
The Jewishness Yeshua Wore on His Body
What the woman in Mark 5 knew about Yeshua that most churches don't.
Welcome Shashue Monrauch to the Table
Before there was a table, there was David.
The Algorithm as Priest: How Superintelligence Builds a Religion Without a Temple
You don't need a decree to build a one-world religion. You need a dependency.
Unpacking #13: The Crucifixion – We Made It Pretty. It Wasn't.
The Crucifixion Was Not a Symbol. It Was a Sealing — and the Crown of Thorns Was Only the Beginning.
The First One at the Table
Before there was a table, there was David.
From Temple Storehouse to Church Budget
How the Meaning of Tithing Changed Over Time
The Source Problem
The loudest thing the tree in the garden says is also the thing most people refuse to sit with.
The Table Is Growing | Welcome Cathy Colver Garland to the Team
Cathy Colver Garland has earned a seat at the table. Bible nerd, deliverance minister, and the kind of writer who spends six months on a Hebrew name and comes back with something that changes everything. Welcome her right.
The Table Is Growing
There's a word for what this space is trying to be.
Unpacking #12: The Heist Nobody Noticed
How Rome Stole a Hebrew Faith, Gave It a Greek Makeover, and Sold It Back to the World as "Christianity"
The Church's Quiet Crisis: We've Taught Conclusions, Not Discernment
If believers can't think biblically, they'll always be led by personality instead of Scripture.
Why I Built This Place
The Scholar's Table is now B'Chavruta — named for the Jewish tradition of wrestling text as equals. This is why I built sergiodesoto.com: a permanent home for everything I write across four lanes — faith, family life, religion, and business — because no writer should build on rented land.
Unpacking 11: The Quiet Renovation of God
Most people do not reject God. They renovate Him. This essay traces the cognitive dissonance mechanism behind the renovation, the five-step God Makeover that runs across modern Christian life, and what an honest turn looks like when shuv replaces feeling-as-repentance.
The Doctrine That Ate Itself: What Total Depravity Actually Teaches and What We've Done With It
The doctrine of total depravity contains a logical crack nobody in the Reformed tradition wants to name: willful sin requires moral awareness, but total depravity claims that awareness was annihilated.
He Wasn't Trying to Be Different. He Was Being Faithful.
The outsider is not a personality type — it's what covenant faithfulness looks like from the outside.
Nobody Gave It to Me
Your worth was declared before anyone had a chance to withhold it.
Your Label Is Not Your Lord: How Ideological Identity Replaced Covenant Allegiance
Every theological label you carry — Calvinist, Arminian, Reformed, Progressive — is a human product. Not one appears in Scripture. Not one was spoken by Yeshua. When did the label become the lord?"
The Veil Tore. The Church Sewed It Back.
The hierarchy wasn't revealed. It was imported.
Unmasking the Tithe Trap: Exposing Manipulation in Modern Preaching
A pastor dismisses the Torah in one breath and demands its tithe in the next. We test every claim against the text it hides behind."
The God Who Rations Grace: Why TULIP Doesn't Survive Contact With Real People
If God handpicks who gets saved and damns the rest before they're born — what exactly are you preaching to the homeless?
The Gospel Is Not a Transaction: You Didn't Recite a Prayer and Buy Fire Insurance
If Yeshua's death was obedience to the Father, why did the church turn it into a product for your comfort?
The Bereans Weren't Impressed — They Were Suspicious
Acts 17:11 is the most misquoted verse in evangelical epistemology. The Bereans weren't model students — they were skeptics. And that changes everything about how you're supposed to read a book like Richardson's.
The Boy in the Wagon
I was hired to photograph a hospital event. A little boy in a wagon smiled at me. A week later, Grandpa called with news that changed how I see everything.
You Can Debate Baptism for Two Hours and Still Miss the Church
Two serious theologians debated infant baptism for two hours at Orlando Grace Church. They were both right about the wrong thing. Meanwhile, CCV is handing out free gifts to first-time visitors and checking kids into classrooms like a theme park. Nobody's asking the harder question.
Ralph
A dying man in a storage closet taught me more about faith than any church ever did. This is the story of Ralph.
Albert
A young man out of jail kept telling me about someone named Albert. I stopped by the shelter to meet him. That visit changed the trajectory of my giving.