The answer is found in 2 Thessalonians 2.
Having been a formally-educated christian for five decades, part of me really understands how people can be so deluded and deceived by what they have been taught their whole lives. But, it’s still hard to grasp why it often seems impossible for so many christians to realize they’ve been duped and lied to by the common tenets of christianity.
They can be shown the truths through scripture and IN the Father’s traditions, and yet, they seem unable even to see them to understand them. In ignorance, they often fall back on banal and false refutations about the law, or the Old Testament, or “legalism,” even though they haven’t the slightest idea how it all fits perfectly together, and how the true faith has never changed, and never will.
Whether one was born before or after the fulfillment of the Passover—the sacrifice of the Perfect Lamb of Yah—the true faith has never been altered. Belief in Messiah, whether looking forward to His first coming, or memorializing it and awaiting the gathering of His bride in the air ten years before His second coming, the true faith has never changed.
It is the cultivated olive tree, and being grafted into it no longer has anything to do with bloodline or geography—but, the tree never changed. The Father’s traditions have never changed. His law was fulfilled, so the PENALTY and PERFECTION (details) of it were abolished at the cross.
But, the law is still a physical foreshadow of future revealed spiritual real substances. And, Yah’s traditions were given ALONG WITH the law, and they exist separately from the law. They are the traditions (Greek: “paradosis”) that Paul, a Pharisee, observed himself, and taught to the Gentile converts as the means of identification with Yah (1 Corinthians 11:2, 2 Thessalonians 2:15).
The Sabbaths (weekly and feasts) are a sign between the Father and His children, and, as Paul taught, they are a shadow of things that are TO COME (they are prophetic). To state that they were done away with is to speak ignorantly—to speak from spiritual darkness. And, that is why it is so hard to understand sometimes why so many christians willfully remain in that darkness—even when the light of the Holy Spirit’s truths, revealed both in the scriptures AND in the traditions, is shown to them.
Paul addressed this blindness in 2 Thessalonians 2. Speaking prophetically of the period from his own era to the union of the Bridegroom and the bride in eternity (the New Jerusalem), he told of a falling away that would occur before the antichrist was revealed. That “falling away,” or apostasy, mentioned in verse 3, was created in the early centuries after Paul had died, and it was the invention of a religion that was loosely based on the truth, but which abolished the foundations of the faith—the Father’s traditions.
Christianity is that “falling away,” as it removed the Father’s traditions and replaced them with pagan counterfeits and the traditions of men. The path to salvation being demonstrated and represented within those traditions, christianity threw away those physical pictures when it abolished the traditions, making the entire belief system a counterfeit of the true faith.
That counterfeit has grown and flourished over the centuries with the mothership Rome, and her pope, who will be the false prophet who confirms the antichrist. The tentacles of the false religious machinations of Mothership Rome reach into all her Protestant daughters.
Paul then explains in verse 11 that those who willingly buy into the lies of christianty, and who refuse to see the truths of the Holy Spirit, will be sent a spirit of delusion that will keep them blind. That tragic delusion is seen throughout christianity and its adherents, who will vehemently argue against the truth, and will fight voraciously trying to prove that the false teachings that were invented in the early centuries AFTER all the apostles had died, and were codified by Constantine in the 4th century, are true.
They are who we see in Matthew 7:21-23—christians who would tell you “I know that I know that I know I am saved,” but when asked who told them they were saved, how they were told, or what they were told, they have no answer, and erroneously contend that their English translation of scripture “told” them they were saved. How sad and eternally tragic for them.
Those who are Yah’s children are TOLD, personally, directly, literally, and uniquely, that they are His. The Holy Spirit is not a book, it is HE who is the Word (dabar/logos) to Messiah’s bride, and when Paul said in Romans 8:16 that the Holy Spirit testifies to Yah’s children that they are His, he wasn’t speaking of a book.
He was speaking of the direct testimony of the Spirit to the spirit of believers. That is literal, and the communication by the Spirit to our spirit is a unique message that is given in dreams and visions, which is what Peter declared on the very day that the seal of the Holy Spirit upon Messiah’s bride was revealed as the New Covenant to all races of mankind, and not just the physical Jews, who were but a foreshadow of the true bride (Acts 2:17).
When the Word (Hebrew: DABAR) came and SPOKE to the prophets, He often did so through dreams and visions. When John was “in the spirit,” he was shown a vision of what is to come—the Holy Spirit revealed those things TO JOHN’S SPIRIT.
The Holy Spirit is the Word (Greek: LOGOS) to the bride, and He testifies to her the same way He has always testified to people. He testifies TO THEIR SPIRIT. That communication is usually by dreams and visions (Acts 2:17).
And, that is exactly how HE told ME that I am Yah’s child!
For more information: How Do You Know You Are Saved?