Investing your trust in Yeshua as messiah is not unlike school loan consolidation, when you think about it. Instead of attempting to keep track of numerous debts, you are taking the opportunity to pull them all in one big pile that can be dealt with all in one act.

Where the analogy breaks down, of course, is that while student loans can seem insurmountable, the debt for our sins is not something we can ever satisfy on our own. There is only one payment that can balance the scales between haShem and humanity, and only Y’shua was qualified to pay it.

If you commit a crime with a friend, you cannot serve your friend’s sentence for him, because you are guilty as well; only an innocent man can take the place of a guilty man and still have the debt considered paid in full. And only Yeshua qualified for that job. He is the spotless Pesach Lamb.

It’s a place I’ve been in life, a state of being many have been or can at least empathize with.

“I believe in Adonai,” we sometimes say. “I love him and I believe him. But I’m just finding it hard to trust.”

There are many things that can sap us of our ability to trust. Disappointments are the most common. Perhaps we thought, in our desperation to connect with an attractive member of the opposite gender while we were single, that haShem was “calling us” to coupledom with a certain someone, and when that relationship did not work out as hoped, we felt disappointed, even betrayed.

Or perhaps we grew up believing G-d would let no harm befall us, which worked fine until living through a tragedy like a fire, a devastating storm, a personal assault or whatever other ills tend to befall unsuspecting people in this fallen world. As a result, our trust can be affected in haShem’s ability to keep us safe.

These are deep, personal, painful issues that cannot be resolved in a single blog post, but they are worth exploring in greater detail than a term life insurance policy.

For now, let this be said: the Torah makes little distinction between faith and trust. To some translators, the two terms are interchangeable. Was Noach inspired to build an arc in the middle of nowhere, with no water around, by a distant, mental-state concept like faith? Or did it require an action-inspiring trust?

Food for thought.

While most folks understand that there are 613 points in the written laws of Moshe, not all people understand that no one could possibly keep all 613 points of the Torah faithfully. Even many messianic Web sites and synagogues don’t grasp this.

No one can keep all 613 point of the written Torah for one very simple reason: not all of the points are for everyone.

Some can be observed only by women. Some can be observed only by men. Some can be observed only by the priests. Get the idea? No one person can observe all 613 points of the written Torah because there are plenty you cannot fulfill personally depending on your gender, depending on whether or now you are a priest and so forth.

The Torah is extremely detailed because it is setting up all the rules for holy living for an entire people in the promised land. Sure, it stops just short of endorsing a particular brand of organic dog food, but otherwise it’s pretty comprehensive. It’s also there to cover folks of every stripe.

Being Torah-observant isn’t the overwhelming task the 613 points of written Torah would make it seem. And when Yeshua takes his place as messiah of your life, the hardest part is already done for you.

These days, we don’t think much of careless talk, gossip or other forms of evil speech. Hollywood thrives on it. Sports news is filled with it. Politics gets its lifeblood from it. And too often, even our churches and synagogues are infected with it.

How often have you heard someone disguise gossip in the form of a prayer request? Or justify their mumbling complaints and jealousies against someone else with the simply rationalization, “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

If a hair fell out of our head every time we engaged in careless talk, we’d soon all be bald and in need of the services of Dr. Larry Shapiro.

B’midbar (Numbers) 12:1-16 shows us what haShem thinks of careless talk and gossip. There was nothing false in anything Miryam said to Aharon about their brother, Moshe. But she said it out of jealousy, out of disapproval of Moshe’s marriage to an Ethiopian woman, and her heart’s intent was not pure.

Adonai afflicted her, turning her skin and hair ashen white and banning her from the camp of the house of Israel for seven days before being allowed back in. It was a harsh, though apparently harmless, example of just how much haShem cares about careless talk.

One has to wonder how long TV gossip shows would have young, attractive starlets hosting them, how long most newspapers would be held together, and just long long most churches and synagogues would last if Adonai always afflicted those who engage in evil speech in such a manner, every time they did it.

I get the feeling, at the minimum, that the market for “color-safe bleach” would plummet.