Read the text yourself
Nothing on this site is a substitute for the Bible in your own hands. These three free tools let you get past a single English translation and look at what the text actually says.
- Blue Letter Bible puts Hebrew and Greek lexicons one click from every verse. When a teaching turns on a word such as “fulfill” or “food” or “law,” you can see the word behind the translation and every other place it is used.
- Bible Hub offers an interlinear text and dozens of translations in parallel. Reading a passage across several translations quickly shows where translators agree and where they have made a choice.
- The World English Bible is a modern public-domain translation, free to read and copy. It is the translation quoted throughout this site, with the divine name rendered “the LORD.”
Teaching we’ve found reliable
119 Ministries produces free video teachings that work through Scripture passage by passage and insist that everything, including their own material, be tested against the text. Their series on the Sabbath, the appointed times, clean and unclean, and the writings of Paul cover the same ground as our study questions in much greater depth, and our thinking lines up closely with theirs.
Their Torah Quick Reference Guide is a good place to start if you are wondering what keeping Torah looks like in practice: what a Sabbath is, when the feasts fall, what is and is not food, and which commandments can be kept today without a temple and priesthood.
We link to a teacher because we have found them careful, not because we have handed them our judgment. Weigh them the way you weigh us.
How to test what you hear
Scripture tells us to test everything, and it tells us how. This is the method we try to use, on this site as much as anywhere.
- Start with the text, not the teacher. “Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The Bereans were praised for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether what Paul said was so (Acts 17:11). If a teaching cannot survive that check, it does not matter how good the teacher sounds.
- Measure it against the law and the prophets. “Turn to the law and to the covenant! If they don’t speak according to this word, surely there is no morning for them” (Isaiah 8:20). Moses and the prophets are the standard by which later words are judged, not the other way around.
- Do not be moved by signs or results. Moses warned that a prophet could work a real wonder and still be leading people away from God’s commandments; the test is whether he keeps you walking after the LORD (Deuteronomy 13:1-4). Sincerity, growth, and answered prayer do not make a doctrine true.
- Read the whole passage, and the whole Bible. Ask who is speaking, to whom, and about what. A reading that makes Paul contradict Moses, or Jesus contradict his Father, is a wrong reading. Scripture does not contradict itself.
- Then do what it says. Testing is not an end in itself. Hold firmly to what is good, let go of what is not, and walk in it.