Teshuvah, From What Exactly?

"What You Talkin Bout Willis"

There was a time I followed the religious rhythms of Christianity without much question. Sunday sermons, Bible studies, church culture, it was all I knew. I believed in Jesus, read my Bible, and did what most believers do: trust that what was being taught was worthy. To some degree it most certainly was worthy

Why was Jesus Jewish?
Why did God choose them to present the Bible?
Why is Israel the only nation God said would be born again?
Why does everything hinge on what is being revealed through them?

But something shifted, radically. I kept wondering why pastors never gave the Jews credit for the material they were teaching from. God answered this question for me one day back in 2007

Those weren’t small questions. They challenged the foundation of what I thought I understood. What I discovered was that most of what’s taught in churches today is disconnected from the historical, cultural, and covenantal identity of Jesus, the Jew. The Lion of the tribe of Judah. The King of Israel.

Not the figurehead of a new religion, but the embodiment of a promise made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets.

This wasn’t just a new theological insight. It was a paradigm shift, total reorientation. I began to see that what the church teaches about Jesus has been legally and theologically distorted. Over the centuries, covenantal language, terms like "Son of God",were redefined as biological relationships, rather than what they were: legal designations tied to kingship, authority, and divine representation.

I’ve come to believe that Yeshua and the Father are not separate persons, as many teach, but one and the same, the same being acting within different legal functions. What man interpreted biologically, God revealed covenantally. The lack of a paternal family with a son in the way that family was ordained was always a sort of stickler for me. Why just a father and why just a son?

Christianity, in its current form, may have a 2% grasp of the Bible’s full message. The other 98%, the covenantal, prophetic, kingdom-centered reality, has been buried under 1800 years of tradition, theological abstraction, and cultural detachment from Israel’s role in the story.

I don’t go to Sunday church anymore. Not because I’ve rejected God, I’ve drawn closer than ever. I can't pretend the preaching matches God's story. The sermons are often filtered through doctrines built in Rome, structured in Europe, and made palatable to Western ears, rather than grounded in the soil of covenant and prophecy. Prophetic men and women of the Bible were always calling upon Israel to return or to teshuvah to covenant governance ordained by God.

I’m not trying to be Jewish. I’m trying to live as a citizen of the kingdom, grafted into what God is doing through Israel, not what man institutionalized through religion.

And yes, it’s lonely sometimes. When you walk away from the comfort of tradition, it’s not always clear where you belong. But I'd rather walk alone questioning, researching, and discovering more than what was poured into me when I gave, “My Life to Christ.”

The more I study, the more I realize: this story is limitless. We’ve inherited a faith that's been condensed, filtered, and removed from its source. I’m not interested in that version anymore. I wanted more. Nevertheless, that version got me here. Studying for myself less the antisemitic culture of western doctrines opened a much bigger door into the past that was more important to me than the future.

The Biblical account is asking those who believe to return……