Death tests your faith.

Once you are facing the end of your days in this life, you quickly find out how deeply you believed all those praise songs and Bible verses and sermons. Either your faith is rooted deeply or you quickly find out it was all just surfacey, good-time-rock-n-roll bull.

I suppose there are some who capitalize on grief, and if one has no conscience, they could find a lot of small business opportunities in the grief business. However, I believe now that there is definitely a place and time for grief-oriented services.

My wife and I are being cast as the strong ones in our family, the ones who will sacrifice everything so that everyone else can sacrifice nothing. Add all that responsibility to the loss we’re suffering and although we’re holding up well under the time of crisis, we have agreed we need to seek out a support group so we can work things through once Mom passes.

Marriage, like faith, takes effort and work and I’ll glad I have a wife who’s as willing to put in the effort it takes as I am.

My Dad’s way of dealing with my Mom’s approaching death is avoidance. It’s not that he doesn’t love her; it’s that he loves her so much he just can’t face watching her slip away.

“I’ve seen one person die in front of me, and it never leaves you,” Dad told me today. “I don’t want that to be my last memory of Gert. I’d never get over it.”

This is a perfectly reasonable and understandable rationale, but it can seem cold and uncaring to some people. All I can say in response to that is, wait until you’ve been married to the same person for fifty-five years and then we’ll talk.

So if Dad would rather help a neighbor with a paper route once in a while than be at Mom’s bedside every single second, or dream of Las Vegas travel instead of staying in a hospital all day long, I think that’s his perogative.

As Mom herself said, we all have our own ways of dealing with things and we’re all doing the best we can under the circumstances. Judging one person’s way of coping as better or worse than another’s isn’t going to help anyone.

Yet that didn’t stop someone today from telling Dad, “Mom’s in the hospital and is going to die of cancer because of you.”

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Mom’s cancer is no one’s fault except perhaps her own for spending her whole life smoking. She’s received a generous 78 years, which is a lot more than most folks who smoke.

You don’t tell a man who’s losing his wife of 55 years that he’s at fault for her death. Some things should never be said. It is the very definition of laShon hurrah.

On Friday my wife and I got the call that mom had been taken out of the home and moved into the hospital. Her stage four cancer is advancing quickly and we’re now definitely in her final days… probably her final week, at best.

While we stayed Friday night for Erev Shabbat Service in order to charge our spiritual batteries for the long, difficult time ahead of us, we were on the road home the next day and fortunately found very good hotel deals on short notice; on a weekend no less!

It’s difficult to be talking so plainly about Mom not being with us anymore in a few days; ironically, Mom is handling it better than any of us. She is a strong believer and the strength of her faith at a time like this – a time when most people would feel more like cursing God than praising Him – is humbling and an inspiration.

So, you may ask, what is replacement theology, anyway?

It’s the kind of question that’s important to ask because it’s not as easy to recognize as the difference between a Sleep Number bed and a TV lift cabinet. It’s more subtle than that.

At its core, replacement theology is the notion much of Christianity is afflicted with that says, “God rejected the Jews. All their promises transfer to us now, but the curses are theirs alone. We (usually “we” is considered to be either the Christian church or, in the USA, this nation) are the “new Jerusalem” and “the shining city on a hill” spoken of in Scripture.”

It’s a mindset that says the “law” (e.g., Torah) is done away with and now we only have grace, only have forgiveness, and since we’re forgiven, anything goes, really… since it’s all a matter of repenting and claiming the forgiveness found in Jesus.

And it’s also the mindset that assumes the rules are different for “Christian” believers than it was for Jews who followed Adonai and His Torah. In doing this, the replacement theology mindset robs the Jewish people of all that Adonai promised them, and transfers it to Christianity. The danger in this, seldom recognized by those who hold such beliefs, is that makes Adonai a promise-breaker, not a promise-keeper. It makes haShem someone who changes, rather than someone who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. It ultimately robs haShem of his character, so in essence, replacement theology constitutes lashan hurrah against the L-RD Himself, and if that isn’t blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, it’s getting pretty darn close at least.

Not everyone who holds a replacement theology mindset, however, realizes they hold it, or that it’s wrong. It’s simply a false teaching that’s been around since the time of Constantine, and arguably before him since he merely codified it into “the Church.” And since it’s been passed down from generation to generation for nearly 1900 years or thereabouts, it’s the only thing many in Christianity know as a way to think about these things.

How do you recognize it? It can be as simple as recognizing what the implications are when someone utters a few off-the-cuff words like, “That’s an Old Testament thing.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, my friend. The things done in the flesh still matter. Believing otherwise cheapens grace and diminishes the work of Yeshua at Calvary.

One of the most difficult tasks for a messianic believer is confronting replacement theology when it pops up. This does not have to be done in a hurtful or antagonistic way, but I do believe one must defend the truth when they are a believer, even if it’s with a kind word of correction.

It’s not always easy, though. Sometimes it comes at you from sources you don’t even expect it from. Case in point. I recently met with a long-time friend and we were talking about some of the movements and ideas active in Christianity that disturb us.

As a messianic, I’m a bit more on the outside looking in on that count; as a mainstream Christian, my friend is more of an insider critiquing the movement he’s a part of, at least in the larger sense. We agree on many things, though not on everything.

The topic turned to the messianic movement and some errors within my side of the fence. I’m fully willing to express as much concern about the movement I’m a part of as I am about mainstream Christianity; bad teaching ought to raise concerns, no matter what movement is the source of it. I mean, some folks get so theologically off-base, their sermons may as well be about Leptitrex as anything found in the Torah. And it can happen in any movement.

As the discussion evolved, I shared with my friend a lesson I’d been working on and a comment from one of the Sages relating to the absolute holiness of haShem and how liars and those who engage in evil speech (lashan hurrah) cannot even experience the Shekinah of the L-RD.

My friend, who studied Jewish roots before I ever became messianic and ought to know a bit better, looked up at me and said – innocently enough, mind you, “Well, remember, that’s an Old Testament thing.”

Simple reply? No, it’s not. But in that moment, I didn’t really have the right words – or even those words – at the ready. I let it slip by, I think, with a, “Not really…” and the conversation moved on. I could and should have done a bit better than that.