Several of you have asked me why I left the faith. What where the reasons? Why did I do it? How could I leave after 17 years of service to Christ? Some just decided to accuse right from the beginning, believing me to have been a liar and a deceiver for the last 17 years of my life. All sorts of ideas and theories seem to be floating around within the circle that I had once walked in.
Some wonder how long it took me to de-convert (the word used by those that have left the faith). I had stated that the process took me about two weeks and some struggle with that idea. How could I have taught the Bible for so long, become a pastor and a missionary and then leave it all after about two weeks? As with most things in life, it is a bit complex. It was a two-week process, but it was also a 17 year process. And not only was it a 17 year process, but the process of a lifetime as well.
Let's do a brief recap of the beginning. At the age of 25, while still in the Marine Corps, I had come to a place where I wanted to find answers to some questions that I believed were meaningful. I wanted to know if the concept of god were a true one or not and, if so, what was to be done about it. I started by going to the battalion chaplen, who was a Roman Catholic priest. When he found out that I was from Jewish stock (as if the name Silverman did not clue him into that fact) he promptly closed the conversation and sent me to the base rabbi, claiming that I was simply in search of my roots! I met with the rabbi, who preceded to tell me something that sounded like Star Wars theology. God, to him, was a force out there, somewhere, that we could all tap into. His answers did not satisfy me and so I left, still searching.
To make a very long story short, I eventually met up with a pastor of an Independent Baptist church near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He talked to me, tried to explain some things to me and eventually gave me my first Bible. I took it with me and read it. I became fascinated with the Bible. Within were stories that I had not heard before. I did not understand a lot of what I was reading, but I wanted to know more. Eventually I was witnessed to by a friend. I stayed at their house one evening and they handed me a tape by an evangelist named David Benoit (not the musician by the same name). In the tape David explained about the plan of salvation. Toward the end of the tape I came to believe that I was a lost sinner, in need of a savior!
It was at about midnight on Friday, June the first. I was convicted. I walked out of the guest room that I was staying in clutching my Bible to my chest and having a concerned look on my face. The owner of the home happened to come out of their room at about the same time. They saw the look on my face and said, "What's wrong?"
I responded, "I need to get saved!"
The person answered, "Praise the Lord!"
After that, they led me through a sinner's prayer. I don't recall exactly what was said, but I do recall that I felt different. I believed I was forgiven! That Sunday I was baptized by Pastor Mike Duffield of Victory Baptist Church in Clemmons, North Carolina. My life changed forever from that weekend onward.
I was still in the Marine Corps at the time and had several months left before completing my active duty contract. While still serving, I met another Christian on base who began to teach and train me. I learned how to read my Bible, how to compare one passage with another and even how to use a concordance. I was taught that the Bible was the word of god, without error! I was told that all the answers a man needed could be found within its pages. I was shown that, in order to truly please god, one needed to attempt to model their life as closely to what was spoken of within the pages of the Bible and that the holy spirit of god would be there to help us do just that (as long as we relied on him and not our own strength).
After getting out of the Marines, I began to attend school at Piedmont Bible College (now called Piedmont Baptist College) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was there that I met my wife and soon I was married. After completing my year at PBC, I then transferred to the Institute of Biblical Studies with the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministries where I completed their nine-month intensive training program. This school is now a part of the Philadelphia Biblical University and its name is now the Institute of Jewish Studies or IJS.
From all the training and discipling that I had received, I had learned much about how to work with the Bible. In fact, I was soon teaching Sunday School classes, leading evangelism classes and teams and devoting much of my time to prayer. After getting married, both my wife and I sought to find churches that would be interested in learning about reaching Jewish people with the Gospel of the Jewish messiah, Jesus. I specialized in such things as teaching the messianic prophecies and I even developed an eight week course called the Biblical Perspective of Israel (BPI). In fact, I recently had a Christian friend, knowing that I had de-converted, contact me and ask if I would mind giving him my course notes on BPI as he intended to teach it one day!
One thing led to another as time moved on. I became an elder in one church, was sent to another church to be their interim pastor and eventually went to the land of Israel to serve as a missionary there. After serving there for four-and-a-half years, our family came back to the United States to help take care of my wife's mother.
During these years there were a lot of things that caught my attention. While I don't recall ever doubting my salvation, I do recall having many questions. I can recall reading passages of the Bible, studying them out and trying to reconcile them, but not being able to do so with the doctrine and dogma of the church. I can recall further researching the writings of other theologians, both ancient and modern, to see how they resolved the issues and finding that many did not agree with each other and that they all seemed to be jumping through some form of theological hurdle in order to try to match biblical teaching with dogma. This troubled me.
Even though this was troubling, I was told, and had read, that there was an enemy seeking to devour us: the devil! And this being, as well as the minions that served him, had the ability to implant thoughts into our very minds! Not only that, but the Bible itself said that our very hearts, the very essence of who we are, were deceiptful above all things and desperately wicked! This meant that even my own thoughts could not be trusted. After all, they could be implanted by the devil or his minions or they could have originated with my own deceitful and wicked heart! The only thing left to do was to rely on god's spirit and god's word! But the issue was that I was seeing problems with god's word!
I knew that we were in a spiritual warfare. I knew that the devil did not like the word of god going forth. I knew that the devil had a plan, no matter how hopeless it was, to take down god and to ascend to his throne. And so I came to believe that these negative thoughts about the Bible ... the seeing of possible problems within the Scriptures ... were nothing more than a part of that warfare. As a result, I simply cast out the thoughts in the name of Jesus and moved on. Little did I realize that my subconscious was hanging on to these thoughts and working through them little by little.
But biblical problems were not the only things that caught my attention. I was confused between what I was reading in the Bible and what I was seeing in real life. I saw that the believers in the Bible had received the spirit of god and that this spirit, despite human flaws, brought men into a unique harmony one with another. Oh, there were problems. Paul had to withstand Peter. Peter had to be convinced to take the Gospel message to the Gentiles. But the spirit of god always overcame these issues and a oneness was achieved. Sure, there were letters, like those written to the Corinthians, but the goal was oneness and like-mindedness. But I was not seeing this in the church. And as I worked as a leader, seeing what went on behind closed doors, I saw even less oneness of mind than I saw outside in the pews!
I also found that, in the Bible, god was good about directing his people. Paul would receive a vision telling him which direction to go in order to bring the Gospel to a needy people. People would pray and god would answer in an unmistakable way. The Bible was rife with stories such as this to the point that it seemed like it was the norm for the believer. However, I never saw this in the church (and I served in quite a few during my time).
There were times when someone would come forward and tell the pastor that he had been told by god to do this or that. The pastor would not seem to think that it was a good idea, but the person in question was convinced. Later, the person would fall flat on their face and suffer as a result of their decision. But I sometimes saw this happen with a pastor as well. And when you would talk to any of these people, it became evident that the spirit of god was not really leading, but that these people were making decisions based on their own knowledge and the circumstances around them and not on some clear indication from the spirit of god.
As an example, I was in an elder's meeting in a church in New Jersey. During that meeting we were discussing the support of missionaries. One of our own members was going to serve in a country in Africa and needed $800/month to have her needs met. We happened to have a surplus in our missions account and so I recommended that she get the full $800/month. She was only going to go for one year and so this was not going to be a life-time commitment. Some agreed. Others disagreed because there was already a church policy in place to support missionaries from our church for the amount of $110/month. We seemed to be getting nowhere. So I suggested that we all stop and take a moment to pray, asking god to tell us what he wanted us to do. All the elders agreed and we all got on our knees to pray.
After some time spent in earnest prayer, we got back into our seats. The pastor then passed out small pieces of paper to each of us and asked us each to write down the figure that god had told each of us individually. He then collected them. Few of the numbers were the same! Most were completely different! So the pastor simply added them up and averaged them and thus was this missionary's support from our church determined!
Where was the oneness of mind that the spirit of god was supposed to bring? Where was the mind of god in this? What an amazing thing it would have been if all of our numbers had been the same! But, instead, very human reasoning was used. Each figure turned out to be about the same figure that each man was arguing for to begin with. There was no spirit of god there, only men's spirits, it seemed.
So now, stuffed into my subconscious, were these issues with biblical passages and also these experiences of the utter lack of the holy spirit leading in men's lives. But I didn't see it for what it was at that time. I figured that god just worked in mysterious ways. I figured that people were just sinful and so the all-powerful holy spirit of god was just having trouble working with us as a result of it. We just refused to listen and the holy spirit was a gentleman, not willing to barge in and force his will upon us (even though he did this from time to time in the pages of the Bible).
In any case, my subconscious continued to gather these thoughts, or so it seemed. From time to time they would creep to the surface of my mind and I would cast them back out in Jesus' name.
As time went on, I found myself teaching the Bible more and more. And I was trained to constantly restudy the subject. It did not matter how well I thought I knew the subject, the Bible was a deep book, being the word of god. So I would study and study and I would look for ways to shore up my teaching on this subject and that. And each time I would find more questions than answers.
I loved to teach the messianic prophecies. However, as time went on and I taught the class more and more, and I studied the subject more and more, and I read more books by theologians on the subject, I began to be troubled by these same prophecies. Less and less they looked like they were pointing to Jesus of Nazareth. More and more it was looking like they were not speaking of him at all! I simply assumed that I was under spiritual attack because I was trying to shore up people's faith in god and, obviously, the devil did not like that! But I wanted to know the answers! It seemed to make sense to me that a perfect god, who knew his creation, could perfectly communicate to us via his word. So I believed that the answers to my questions could be found within the Bible, especially when it came to the prophecies that supposedly predicted the coming of his son to planet earth to purge our sins!
The final straw came for me back in August of 2008. In a sermon at Heritage Baptist Church, the pastor made a reference to First Samuel chapter fifteen. It was only a casual reference. However, the pastor mentioned that this passage may need more clarification and he encouraged people to study it and to come to him with any questions. Therefore I decided to study the passage. And I was shocked at what I learned.
In the passage in question, god is reported as telling Samuel to go to Saul, the first king of Israel, and to command him to kill all of the Amalekites, including their women, children, babies and even their animals. None were to be left alive. Frankly, at that time in my Christian walk, I was not really bothered by this (as harsh as that may sound). I figured that the all-knowing god had a reason for doing this. In fact, the reason is givin in verse two of the same chapter:
“Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.”
This verse screamed out to me. I had to study it more. The reason that the Bible gave for the slaughter of the entire people of the Amalekites was that king Amalek had laid wait for Israel when they came out of Egypt during the exodus.
As I studied this, I found that the original event, the laying wait of Amalek, took place a little less than 400 years earlier than the events in First Samuel! This meant that the people of Amalek were going to all be killed, including their babies, for something that their king had done 400 years before!
This struck me hard! My Bible had taught me that god was merciful and forgiving. My Bible said that god wanted none to perish and that all should come to repentance. And here was god, himself, commanding the death of an entire people (this is called genocide) for a crime committed some 400 years earlier! My Bible said that god was just, but this did not seem just in the least.
I talked with some Christians and some pastors about this passage. They started to find excuses for god. They would sometimes try to tell me that perhaps the Amalekites, being pagans, were tempting the Israelites to stray from the god of Israel and, therefore, god wanted the Amalekites gone in order to help keep his people faithful. And while that might have seemed plausible, that is not what the passage said. Verse two explicitly said that the Amalekites where being punished for what King Amalek had done hundreds of years before. If god had intended to destroy the Amalekites for causing the children of Israel to stray, then you would think that this is what the passage would say. But it doesn't.
Others would point out all the prophecies foretelling the destruction of the Amalekites. I knew about them. I agreed that these things were written in the Bible. However, I was not arguing that the Amalekites were destroyed or even that it was prophecied. I was arguing the ethics and morals of it! If god is all good and never changes, if god is just, if god is moral, if god is merciful and compassionate, then why should an entire tribe of people be destroyed, including their babies, for a crime that they had nothing to do with? The only connection they had to the crime was that they were born of mothers that were born of mothers that had a connection to King Amalek's people some 400 years earlier. And, according to the Bible, it was god that knit the baby in the womb to begin with! It would have been god that placed those babies in the wombs of the Amalekite woman. And if god was truly all-knowing, then he knew that he was knitting them together only to destroy them. Justice? Mercy? Love? It all began to unravel for me with First Samuel chapter 15.
With that, the flood gates opened in my mind. Things long forgotten came back. Biblical passages that I had struggled with came to the surface. Problems in this church or that church came to mind in vivid remembrance. Unanswered prayer that was prayed according to god's revealed will in his holy word came to mind.
I decided to resolve this once and for all. I decided I would pray and study and I would come out completely committed to god. And so, each night, while the family slept, I studied. I prayed. I read my Bible. I logged onto a Baptist forum to chat with pastors, ministers and lay people a like and ask my questions. I even went to atheistic web sites and forums to hear their take on things. This struggle ... this delving ... lasted about two weeks. As each day passed, as each night of study went by, I found myself moving further and further away from the Bible and, as a result, away from faith in the god of the Bible.
As jarring as was my salvation experience, so too was my de-conversion! Just as I looked at the world with new eyes after having accepted Jesus as my savior, so too did I see the world with new eyes upon leaving the faith. I was excited and frightened at the same time. I was excited because I had come to a resolution and this resolution, believe it or not, was liberating in so many ways. I was frightened because of what my decision would mean to my wife and to all those that I had known throughout the years. Virtually all of my associations were within the realm of the church!
For several days I wondered what to do. I tried to continue to function as I normally would, going to church, etc. But the message no longer attracted me. In fact, I had become convinced that I had believed a lie for the last 17 years ... that I had been deceived. No, I did not think that anyone had intentionally deceived me. I did not blame any pastor, missionary or Christian friend. I felt that they had been deceived as well. The deception had started hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. And I felt so small for having succumbed to it.
And so, after some time of struggling about how to best approach this, I finally had the talk with my wife and let her in on my struggle and my decision. The rest is history. So, yes, my de-conversion took about two weeks. And, yes, it took about 17 years as well. But, no, I was not deceiving everyone for 17 years. I honestly believed in the god of the Bible and I wanted to serve him.
