Growing up in a Christian home, my parents, paternal grandmother & Aunt Doris told me about God. I was told He was the Creator of the world and He loved me.

Sacred Text

I was also told the Bible was the Word of God.

I learned about the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. And because Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, I was taught that all of mankind was guilty of sin and deserving of death.

But then, I was told:

“For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

And if I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior, and did what he said to do, I could be saved and go to heaven after I died.

The Teachings of Man

Every Sunday, my family and I went to church.

Children’s Church and Sunday School were where I largely heard stories from the Bible, and I was taught to memorize Bible verses like John 3:16 quoted above.

I was also taught to pray.

I learned to bow my head, close my eyes and clasp my hands together and pray the following before every meal:

“God is great. God is good. And we thank Him for this food. Amen.”

And then before bed every night, I learned to say:

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

And then afterward I would thank God for my family and for everything else I could think of.

The Traditions of Man

Every year, my family celebrated Christmas and Easter.

In the winter we’d put up a tree & decorate it, and my sisters & I would often get presents under the tree “from Santa”.

And then in the spring we’d sometimes color eggs for Easter and go on Easter egg hunts. And for a time we’d get baskets with chocolate bunnies & chocolate eggs in them.

Of course, we also went to church on those occasions, where we celebrated Jesus’ birth (on Christmas) and his resurrection (on Easter Sunday).

All of this rolled into my faith in God.

My Faith in God in the Past

I held the understanding that the Bible was the ultimate basis for my faith in God.

I thought all of the teachings and traditions centered around God and Jesus Christ that I was exposed to and believed & participated in all my life were founded on what the Bible said.

So, when I was about 40 years old, and I started taking notice of certain things the Bible had said that I never abided by, I began to ask about it at church.

Why do we eat pork, bacon and ham when the Bible says that the meat from pigs was not considered food and was abominable to God?
Why don’t we acknowledge the seventh day of the week as a holy day of rest?
Why do we celebrate Christmas and Easter when they’re not in the Bible?
Why do we only hear about Passover and not the other “feasts of the LORD” talked about in the Old Testament?

The overarching answer I’d typically get is that everything changed when Jesus came on the scene.

But then I pressed for more explanation given what Jesus said in Matthew 5:17-18 and what wasn’t said anywhere in the New Testament regarding changes being made.

The Sabbath Day commandment was apparently still being kept by Paul after Jesus’ resurrection. And there was no mention at that time of celebrating any new holidays — such as Christmas and Easter.

When I couldn’t get an answer that satisfied me, I threw myself into the Bible and began to voraciously consume its contents — all the while praying for clarity and understanding.

I Was Incredibly Ignorant About Much of the Bible

While I had believed the ultimate foundation of my faith in God was the Bible, I knew I was incredibly ignorant when it came to what the book actually said (& didn’t say) in its entirety.

And this was despite the fact that I was a Christian for as long as I could remember.

I had spent most of my life going to church (& Sunday School), participating in a host of Christian programs, and even attended a Christian university & served as a wing chaplain for three years.

Why was I so Biblically ignorant?

At first, I blamed the Church. They should have told me more, I thought.

But then I eventually took ownership of my own lack of knowledge & understanding. I was a grown adult who had always possessed a Bible. And I knew how to read. I really had no excuse for being so ignorant of the Bible’s contents.

So, I began to search for myself what the Bible actually said (& what it didn’t say).

I shut out all preachings, teachings, and Biblical commentary and focused only on reading (& studying) the Bible — day in and day out.

I read whole books at a time from start to finish and posed questions at every turn.

Why would he say that?
Who was he talking to?
What are the people on the page talking about?

I looked to the text itself to find the answers to questions like these.

And then I inquired about the meaning of the words I was repeatedly seeing.

What does “Sabbath” mean?
And what does it mean to be called “Christ”?
Was there a difference between the Law of God and the Law of Moses?
What does “law” even mean?
And what does it mean to be “holy”?

I used a Strong’s Concordance to identify what the words were in the source language of the KJV Bible. And I used Thayer’s Greek Definitions and Brown Driver Briggs’ Hebrew Lexicon for dictionary definitions of those words.

After a short period of time, I set the New Testament aside for a while (since I was already very familiar with a lot of it), and I focused on reading the Old Testament.

And eventually, I got the bright idea to treat the book more like a regular book vs a reference book and started reading it all in order, beginning with the book of Genesis.

I set aside what I thought I knew, and I read the book as if I knew nothing about God or Jesus or any of the people mentioned in the book.

And whenever I came across the words “God”, “LORD” (in ALLCAPS) or “Jesus”, I swapped them out with their Hebrew counterparts: “Elohim”, “YHVH” and “Yeshua”. I did this to avoid any preconceived ideas I had with the English words.

I genuinely wanted to learn what the book said.

More Concerned with Learning than Proving My Belief

I wasn’t really that concerned about my beliefs regarding the Bible’s contents because I was willing to yield to whatever I found to be true through the reading of it. (At that point I still held fast to the notion that the Bible was the Word of God.)

Doing all of this, however, eventually led me out of Christianity because I saw for myself that the triune God and virgin-born Jesus Christ of Christianity were not the God & Jesus Christ portrayed in the Bible.

During the course of my personal study, I crossed paths with others seeking the Hebrew Roots of their faith. We even shared paths for a while. But because I chose to remain steadfast in keeping with the Bible, I never veered off into Messianic Judaism (or Judaism in general).

Instead of exchanging one set of religious teachings and traditions for another, I found the clarity and sound understanding that I was looking for.

And my faith in a Creator remained intact. I still consider Him to be God. (Although I now doubt that the Creator of this world actually said and did everything the Bible says about Him.)

I also still hold to the notion that the Jesus of the New Testament was the anticipated messiah of the whole house of Israel spoken of in the Old Testament. That never changed for me.

However, my understanding of what the Bible actually says (& doesn’t say) has been clarified. And my understanding of what the Bible is (& isn’t) has also been made clear to me.

I no longer believe the Bible is the Word of God.

My Faith in God Today

Today, I acknowledge a natural world filled with life and living, breathing beings. And given its masterful design & complexity, I acknowledge a Supreme Being to have designed & created it all and then ordered it to function as it does.

While I can’t prove it, I have chosen to believe this Creator is also the Source of all life, and I acknowledge Him as the God over it all.

Maybe He’s the god of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. Maybe He’s not. I really don’t know. But He’s the God to whom I give glory & praise for this place I feel blessed to inhabit, with its natural law & order, and for all the life abounding therein.

[This page was last revised on 10/18/25.]