Our Debt of Love
The Jewish People
| The Jewish people have made great contributions to humanity in literature, law, history, philosophy, art and science. How is it that such a small group of people has filtered to the top in many professional fields? The enemies of the Jewish people would have many reasons to express their hatred of them. But what is the perspective of the Bible and of God, it’s author? We need to look no further than the Abrahamic Covenant in the first book of the Bible, Genesis. In Chapter twelve, verse three, God makes a covenant promise to Abraham: | ||
| “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” | ||
| In this part of the covenant, God says to Abraham “those who bless you I will bless, and those who curse you I will curse”. That pattern has held true through the scriptures and throughout history, whether it is an individual or on a national basis. The Jewish people have survived all the great gentile kingdoms of the past, and they are still with us today as a testimony of God’s faithfulness to Abraham. Any individual or nation that has cursed Israel in the past has been cursed of God. Likewise, any individual or nation that has blessed Israel, has been blessed by God. In fact God has said in Jeremiah 31:35-37 that “if man can measure the heavens above and search out the depths of the earth, then I will also cast off all the seed of Israel”. What a statement! | ||
| I can not express the depth of the Abrahamic Covenant in this short section, but let me give you this statement that I read from another author, and please ponder it: | ||
| “The central portion of all Scripture is the Abrahamic Covenant. Everything else is commentary on it.” | ||
| When the great missionary movement began in the 1700’s, the presentation of the Gospel to the Jews was a priority. Even when I went to Bible College we had a course on Jewish evangelism. Why? Because it was recognized by many believers that the Gospel of Christ was to go out to the Jew first, and also to the Gentiles. But in these last 20-30 years, there has been a noticeable shift in missions from the local church, right up through our great mission agencies, a noticeable shift in relation to their commitment to reaching the Jew. It can simply be stated this way: We are interested in the 10-40 window and getting the gospel in the languages of the unreached people groups. After all, the Jewish people have been exposed to Christianity for 2,000 years. | ||
| Is any thing wrong with this? Well not per-se, but in the change from the concept of world missions to the 10-40 window and unreached people groups, the Jew is left out! They are now “just” another people group instead of the covenant chosen people of God, who Paul was so clear in saying, should receive the Gospel FIRST. God’s missions program is not Home and Foreign missions, but Jewish Missions (to the Jew first) and world missions (and also to the Gentiles). I believe in our zeal to reach the world for Christ, we have left the Jew out of our Great Commission. If we are to be effective in world missions and have God’s full hand of blessing, we must put Jewish evangelism first, and thus bring the heart and reason for missions back into missions. I believe the net result will be a more effective missions outreach to the world when Jewish evangelism is put back into its position and priority, TO THE JEW FIRST. I saw a sign at a mission conference which said: | ||
| “To the Jew first, the great omission of the Great Commission” | ||
| Understanding Jewish Culture and Customs | ||
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| You may say, what does that have to do with my position in the Messiah? Well most of us spend our time studying or reading the New Testament and most likely the Pauline Epistles. But all scripture is inspired of God, not just the Pauline Epistles. All my Christian life, in the church we would receive teaching from the epistles, with the stories of Jesus, His miracles, parables and teachings. If we open the Hebrew scriptures we usually read of biblical characters like Joseph, Gideon, Samson, David, Elijah or Daniel. The only other thing that we may study is prophecy. I love the Pauline Epistles and the stories of Jesus and the other characters of the Hebrew Scriptures, but not to the neglect of the whole of scripture. | ||
| What is my point? Simply this, that we have lost the teaching of the whole of scripture. The Hebrew Bible, which is called the Old Testament, is neglected, yet it contains two thirds of the Bible. For fifteen centuries the Church has considered the Old Testament to be inferior because it is Jewish and speaks of the Laws of Moses and thus obsolete. Let me introduce to you the Old Testament Scriptures. In the previous section I referred to a quote. Let me repeat it here: | ||
| “The central portion of all Scripture is the Abrahamic Covenant. Everything else is commentary on it.” | ||
| What does this mean? The Abrahamic Covenant is a central theme in the Bible. From this covenant you have three other covenants that are encompassed in the Abrahamic Covenant. They are: | ||
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| When you read the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible, it speaks of God’s people Israel, their Law, their sin, and the promise of restoration. If you eliminate these covenants and the Law, you will also eliminate most of what the Prophets had to say to Israel. In summary, if you ignore the importance of the Abrahamic Covenant you eliminate most of the writings of the Hebrew Bible. Lets look at the New Covenant as an example. Do you realize that Jesus at the Last Supper said, as He picked up the cup and proclaimed these words, “this is the New Covenant in my blood.” He was referring to the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31:31-34, and that He was to be the Passover Lamb offered as a substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of the whole world; both Jew and Gentile. The New Covenant is a Jewish covenant. It is not a gentile covenant, but yet we as Gentiles are included in the covenant. The New Testament is also called the New Covenant. The outcome of His death on the cross was the establishment of the Church, a mixed body of believers. Jews and Gentiles. This was a real struggle for Peter and other Jewish believers of the first century church. The implication is that Gentiles did not have to become converts to Judaism, but rather stood on equal ground with the Jewish believers in Messiah Yeshua. The New Covenant will be fulfilled at the Messianic Kingdom when Israel is saved, as Ezekiel 36:26-27, Hosea 6:1-2 and Romans 11 say. | ||
| The Bible is Jewish! The 40 plus authors of the Bible are all Jewish! Jesus was a Jew! Your salvation comes to you from the Jew, and a Jewish Saviour! | ||
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| In conclusion, hopefully this short statement proves that Israel and the Messiah as the substitutionary sacrifice for sin are the predominant themes throughout the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. The Church over the centuries has done us a great disservice by ignoring the Jewishness of the scriptures. The Church has tried to remove the Jewishness of the Scripture by translating passages in the Hebrew scriptures and applying them to the Church. The Bible is a Jewish book. We should attempt to understand the culture and customs of the ancient Jewish (or Hebrew) people to understand what God is saying to the Church today. The Bible was written in a Jewish cultural context and translated into our cultural context with the desired result being not to lose the original intent of the original author. But when we do study the Scriptures from its context the Bible comes alive with rich meaning that can have an impact on our lives and the relationship you have with the Saviour, who is the Jewish Messiah. | ||
| Monotheism | ||
| While the world was worshiping stone and wooden images of many different gods, the Jew was worshiping the LORD GOD in Jerusalem at Solomon’s Temple: the one true God who claimed to be the only God, and that all others were the imaginations of the evil hearts and minds of the pagan peoples of the world. The Jew gave to the world the true God. To this day the Jewish people will quote Deuteronomy 6:4: | ||
| “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD.” | ||
| Where would we be today without the Jew? We’d still be worshiping stone and wooden gods who cannot see, hear, or touch. They are lifeless images of the imagination of our sinful hearts. That is where we would be today; unsaved and separated from the One Living God, the God of the Jewish people. So because of the Jew, we born again Christians should be unceasingly giving thanks to God for His people, the Jews, who through their spiritual heritage gave us the One True God. | ||
| Scriptures | ||
| Today we open the pages of scripture, and because it is so common in our part of the world, we forget that these 66 books that make up the Holy Bible are all written by Jewish authors: men like Moses, Joshua, David, the prophets, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, James and Jude. These were all Jewish men, and as Paul said in Romans 3:2, “unto the Jew was committed the very oracles of God”. Without the Jew we would not have the scriptures to learn about the Father and the way of salvation through His Son Jesus, the Christ. Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, “salvation is of the Jew (John 4:22b)”, placing the emphasis on the Jewish people. No Jew, no salvation. No Jew, no scripture to point us to Him. | ||
| King and Redeemer | ||
| Throughout the pages of the Hebrew Bible, you will find that God made promises to Abraham, Judah, and then David, of a coming king who would rule Israel and the world righteously. He is called the Messiah, the Son of David, the King of Israel and in Him will be fulfilled all the promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is the promise to Israel. | ||
| There is, however, a promise to Abraham, which is a promise to the Gentiles in Genesis 12:3: | ||
| “in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” | ||
| Deuteronomy 32:21 says that God will provoke His people through the blessed Gentiles in Abraham to make His people jealous: | ||
| “So I will make them jealous with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.” | ||
| In Isaiah 42:6 & 49:6 this Messiah is to be the “light to the Gentiles”. The Jewish Messiah was not only to be a King for the Jewish people, but the redeemer of the whole world, both Jew and Gentile. Moses said, “in Abraham” will all the families of the earth be blessed (Romans 11:12, 15). Look at the genealogical list of Matthew 1:1, starting at verse one; | ||
| “The book of the generation of Jesus, the Christ (Messiah), the son of David, the son of Abraham.” | ||
| The Messiah would have two comings for two distinct purposes: | ||
| first, to be rejected by His people and become the Saviour of the world, | ||
| second, to fulfill the promises made to His people in the Hebrew Bible, and be their King. | ||
| Our debt of love to the Jewish people is that they gave us the written word of God, the only way we have of knowing who God is and how we can find eternal life in him. | ||
| New Covenant | ||
| One of the most fascinating truths in scripture, and not understood by most believers, is the truth of the New Covenant. When God made the promises to Israel, first to Abraham, He promised three things: (1) Land, (2) Seed, (Kingdom, and King), (3) Blessing. Those three aspects of the unconditional Abrahamic Covenant are expanded by three additional, unconditional covenants. They are not separate and distinct covenants but are all connected to the primary covenant to Abraham: | ||
| The Land is explained in Deuteronomy 30 | ||
| The Seed, Kingdom and King is explained in I Chronicles 17:10-14 | ||
| The Blessing is explained in the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31:31-33 | ||
| In Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36:26-27 we find a very interesting description of the New Covenant. But first remember in Luke 22:20 (Matthew 26:28), when Jesus was celebrating the Passover with the eleven, He picked up the third cup, called the cup of Redemption, and said, “This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in My blood.” To be even clearer, this celebration became known to Christians as the “Lord’s Table” or “Communion”. Paul uses it the same way in I Corinthians 11:25 for our communion service. The writer of Hebrews deals with this, and other subjects in Hebrews 8-10. Now let us go back to the Jeremiah and Ezekiel passages for a description of what this covenant does. Jeremiah 31:33: | ||
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| This covenant was going to make them observe His Law from the heart and not by outward conformity to 613 laws of the conditional Mosaic Covenant, which God says they broke (verse 32). | ||
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| The Jewish people will be changed from the inside out. | ||
| Look at Ezekiel 36:26-27 | ||
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| When we read the description given in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, you can quickly recognize what happened to those of us who are Gentiles when we accepted Jesus as our Saviour and Lord. His Holy Spirit has come to dwell within us, giving us a new heart, and He has put his Word in our inward parts. Jesus, the Christ became our Redeemer by giving His body and blood as the substitutionary sacrifice for our sins, the New Covenant in His blood. | ||
| But wait! The New Covenant is a Jewish covenant! How did we get the benefits of it? It is through the blessing aspect of the Abrahamic Covenant, where all the families of the earth would be blessed. So the Debt of Love to the Jewish people is that God made the New Covenant with them. They have the priority, and we are partakers with them in their covenant. So very clearly, without the New Covenant you could not be saved without converting to Biblical Judaism. We as Gentiles today in the age of Grace have the benefits of the New Covenant, along with Jewish believers in the Messiah, the remnant of Israel. Some day all Israel will be saved, and the main aspect of which these passages speak, is that the New Covenant will be fulfilled to the Jewish nation, as a whole, in the Messianic Kingdom which begins at His second coming. | ||
| Romans 11 | ||
| In Romans 9-11 Paul deals with the promises to Israel in light of the beginning of the Church. God is temporarily setting his plans for Israel aside to reach the gentile world. Paul takes these three chapters to show that God has not cast off Israel, but will in the future bring Israel back into the for-front as he prepares them for the second coming of the Messiah and His Kingdom. | ||
| This chapter has many things to look at, but we cannot possibly cover this chapter in this short space. So we will look at a few highlights of this chapter. | ||
| In Verses 1-5, Paul says that God has not cast off Israel because he himself is a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin. He speaks about the principle that there is always a remnant of Israel who will believe. In the last seven years I have met many of that remnant; Jewish believers in Messiah, fellow brothers and sisters in faith in Christ. | ||
| In verses 6-10 he says that the remnant, the elect will be saved, but that most Jewish people have been blinded; | ||
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| Look closely at verse 11. Has the Nation of Israel “stumbled that they should fall? God forbid”! Now look at this, | ||
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| What does this say? That Israel, through their act of rejecting their Messiah, salvation is come unto the Gentiles. Do you understand this? Because of their fall, their rejection of the Messiah, God has opened the way of salvation to the Gentiles without having to adhere to Jewish Law. Salvation has come to YOU because of their “transgression”. Paul lays the responsibility before our feet and we are to pick it up. We are to provoke the Jewish people to jealousy. What does this mean? You and I can have a one on one personal relationship with the God of Israel, by living daily the changed life that God has given to us through their Messiah, Jesus the Christ. This is what was promised in Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36. Throughout his epistles, Paul goes to great lengths to teach us how to live and walk in the new life in Christ. This is awesome. For century upon century the “church” has persecuted the Jew because of his rejection of the Messiah, instead of doing what God said to do, provoke them to jealousy for their God, whom we also worship and trust. So even the salvation that you enjoy in Christ is a direct result of their rejection of Him! | ||
| Paul continues to build on this in verses 12-15, then in verses 16-25. You have three metaphors used here: The (1) Root of the Vine, (2) the natural Olive branches, and (3) the wild Olive branches. What are these three things? The root of the vine is the Abrahamic Covenant and all that God promised to the Jewish people. The natural Olive branches are the Jewish people in general and the wild olive branches are YOU. God, because of their unbelief, has removed them from the vine (the place of blessing), and YOU have been grafted in. You are not the natural product of the vine, but grafted in because of their unbelief. Again, do you understand that your salvation and the place of blessing, that you treasure, was not yours but belonged to the Jewish people, and by their unbelief God grafted you into the vine, in their place? But Paul warns the gentile believers God that did not spare the natural branches, but removed them from the place of blessing temporarily. Take heed lest he also spare not you! Look at verse 25. Remember, the grafting in was a mystery in the past, so do not be wise in your own conceits. “Blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in”. | ||
| So, in short, your Debt of Love to the Jewish people should be great, because your salvation was only given to you because of their rejection. Israel is still the apple of His eye. We have the wonderful opportunity to experience the blessing of God through the Jewish Messiah in our salvation from sin and from the penalty and power of sin. It is all because of them! | ||
| So take a moment, relax and think about some of the benefits that you have as a Christian, a follower of the Jewish Messiah, and the fact that you are: | ||
| Regenerated: | you have been born from above | |
| Justified: | you have been declared righteous | |
| Imputed: | His righteousness has been credited to your account | |
| Reconciled: | you are no longer the enemy of God, He has Reconciled you to Himself which we were total incapable of doing | |
| Sanctified: | you have been set apart as holy | |
| Redeemed: | purchased by the blood of a Jewish Messiah | |
| Advocate: | the Messiah is your defender | |
| Adopted: | into the family of God | |
| Propitiated: | the blood of the Messiah has satisfied all the righteous demands of a Holy God, which enabled Him to demonstrate His love for us at Calvary. | |
| Sons of God: | your position in the Messiah | |
| This list could go on and on. Because of this Jewish Messiah who is our Saviour, we will rule and reign with Him for all of eternity. Praise His Glorious Name!! | ||
| A simple summary: There would be no patriarchs, no prophets, no apostles, and no Bible, and no Saviour to provide so great a salvation, without the Jewish people and a Jewish Messiah. Do you understand the Debt of Love that you should be expressing to the Jewish people today? Everything you cherish as a Christian is totally dependent on what they have done for you. Remember you are to make them jealous of their own God, and you are His ambassador! | ||
| Yours in Messiah, John Metzger |
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