Am I A Religious Nut?
I crack up when people ask me that question; especially when you consider that at one time, I think I believed I may have been a religious whacko.
However, truth is truth! I have always sought the truth in everything I did or about anything I was told that was supposedly based on truth.
When I was a kid I was told by my parents and teachers not to lie but to always tell the truth. Like most kids, I found myself lying instead of getting punished for something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I always found myself feeling guilty whenever I lied.
Later on in life I also discovered something else that was new. It was a way to shave the truth and still get away from lying. I became pretty good at shaving the truth or as they say now, to embellish the truth and make it more believable. I became very good at shaving the truth, and embellishing facts and information, or by also using intimidation tactics. It was all about winning, regardless of the ploy I used.
I also found out that many of my friends and associates were also good at shaving the truth, and we often spent time B.S.ing each other and we called that “debating.” Nonetheless, it was still lying. I became a Born Again Christian in 1975 to remove the feeling of guilt, and it helped tremendously. As a Born Again believer I learned that it was better to always tell the truth and to face the consequences. It worked! Guilt was reduced; knowing all I had to do to rid myself of guilt was to confess my sins to Jesus and received forgiveness. From then on to today, it's hard to read anything or even comment on any issue whatsoever unless it's the truth!
Several decades ago I decided to do some research about how the world was going to end. I began the research because much of what I was hearing from my pastors and religious teachers about The End didn’t seem right with what the Bible said.
So, I began to study. I didn’t just read the Bible, I began to study what key words meant in the original manuscript, by using the Greek and the Hebrew dictionaries, as well as hundreds of commentaries ranging back two to three hundred years old. . But I also found out that many people were not able to understand what some of those words in the Bible actually meant. Most folks took the meaning of those words for granted, simply because others before them interpreted the words the way they thought they should be interpreted.
Well, what I discovered was that way too many people were not using certain words correctly thereby distorting the actual meaning of those key words. Someone told me that what I was doing was using an etymological approach to solving confusing verses in the Bible. Etymology is the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language. This approach to studying the Bible helped to eliminate any doubt as to what key words really meant. After using this approach for several years, I was able to discern the Bible in a more concise fashion as well as establishing a premise that would hereby become immutable. In other words, I was trusting that what God wrote in the Bible was truth, not man’s mere process of interpretation or conjecture to fit their specific doctrine.
20 Years later, I finished this book, The End Times Passover, a book I challenge any nominal Christian to read, or anyone else for that matter, regardless if you are Christian or not; just as long as you are seeking truth. The book isn’t designed to tell you when the world is going to end or how. But it will disprove the Rapture and Left Behind notions being put forth by folks like Tim LaHaye and John Hagee.
Am I a religious nut? I guess I used to be, because I believed all those tails about being snatched up to heaven when all hell breaks loose here on earth. Since then I found this doctrine to be full of lies; and lies do not provide you with the comfort and security we all seek. Now, I’m no longer a religious nut, I’m just merely a person who not only wanted and sought the truth, I found it and want to share it with others.
Joe Ortiz, Author
The End Times Passover
