Some may wonder why I spend time on Hebrew Roots/Torah Observance doctrines. Why refute this doctrine? There are many reasons. We are to contend for the faith. We seek converts to the truth. This post is about another reason. It’s about what happens when someone follows the logical consequences of his worldview, and how, when you do that from any unbiblical starting place, you end up shipwrecked in your faith.
Not long after I began studying this theological system, in the course of familiarizing myself with its popular promoters, I came across Justin Best and his “Christian Truthers” YouTube channel. As the name suggests, Justin is “conspiratorial” (his word) in his thinking, seeking the “truth” behind the narrative.
When I found him, we seemed like your typical Hebrew Roots guy. I subscribed to his channel and interacted a little with his content, but not much more.
A while later, though, he released several videos in which he explained why he was rejecting Paul as a false apostle. This is actually quite common within the Hebrew Roots movement, and I had encountered many such people in the comments on my videos. The primary reason they reject Paul is, in their words, because Paul “teaches against Torah”. In other words, they recognize Paul’s teaching as representative of a changed relationship to the Law of Moses that people in the New Covenant possess. Since they reject any such change, they reject Paul. Others within the movement attempt to harmonize Paul with their own teaching, and so affirm him as a true apostle.
Justin anticipated, rightly, that people would predict that he would be rejecting Jesus next. I know he was right, because I predicted just that. I thought it would take longer, and left room for the Holy Spirit to bring him back, but my ultimate point was that you cannot consistently reject Paul and affirm anything else in the New Testament.
In less than a year, Justin rejected Jesus and said he was not going to do the religious content anymore.
When that happened, I did another episode discussing primarily two things:
⁃ The first error was not rejecting Paul, but rejecting the reality of the New Covenant and trying to hold Torah observance together with faith in Christ
⁃ The fact is that the coming of Christ rendered the following of the Old Testament alone untenable. This is why so many Jews are atheists.
Well, less than 6 months after rejecting Christ, Justin has described himself as agnostic, and the whole Bible as mind control literature.
I’ve said before that I admire Justin for his attempts at being consistent. Many think that by rejecting what they consider “mainstream”, and adopting some other belief system, that they now have the truth and they stop working at it. Others, like Justin, aren’t satisfied with that. They keep thinking things through.
The problem is the starting point. If your starting point is a false system, and you keep trying to be consistent, you will end up farther from the truth than when you started.
Finding the truth isn’t easy. Many are caught in false systems and religions and need to hear the truth. But when you run into inconsistencies in your worldview, you have found out one thing. There’s something false in your worldview.
The only true worldview is biblical Christianity. This is because the only God-breathed source of truth is the Scripture. I have been down a similar road as Justin. I grew up in a religious cult that said they believed the Bible. I got out by studying the Bible. I found many of the things I had been taught to be false in light of Scripture, and I even adopted new false beliefs on the way, only to be corrected again. When Scripture contradicts your worldview, you have to change something. For Justin Best, he repeatedly changed Scripture, either by twisting Paul to fit Hebrew Roots, or rejecting Paul when he couldn’t twist hard enough, or rejecting Jesus when he couldn’t keep Him without most of the Scriptures that are about Him, or rejecting the Old Testament when he no longer possessed the whole point of the Old Testament.
By God’s grace, whenever my worldview has been challenged, I’ve laid it aside to conform to the words of God. I do not pretend that I’ve arrived, and I’ve made enough embarrassing mistakes along the way to know better than to think I can make confident pronouncements on things I’ve studied little. But what I can always say firmly is what God has said.
Justin has thought he can decide truth apart from God, that there are no guardrails. Without Scripture, his channel has become just another channel ranting against religion, unhitched from anything solid. I pray God opens his eyes to the fact that he has been changing, while God remains the same. His position has become increasingly unstable, while Jesus remains the Rock.
Don’t look lightly on error. Seek it in yourself first. Call on others to hold to the truth. And it might take some effort at times, but it’s worth it. And it’s life and death.