We Should Care About the Jews

A Response to Messianic Jews, and to the Church established among the Gentiles.

Traditions are fine and beautiful. Of course, you can follow them. They tell you how to do things that may not be completely clear in the Torah. And they help you to maintain your ethnic identity and boundaries (if you want and need boundaries). BUT, if the oral traditions contradict the scriptures of the Torah, or the Prophets, or even the Writings that have been canonized as truly given by God, then those traditions are WRONG, and must be ignored.

Following a rabbi who contradicts the Scriptures is the same as being blind, and allowing another blind man to lead you. You will both end up in a ditch. Doing that, or despairing of the difficulty, was a cause for many of the problems that you struggled with before the Roman Diaspora. If you so desire, of course, you can still celebrate Shabbat, and Pesach, and Yom Kippur, etc. It is only necessary to add to the Holy Days, or to subtract, whatever you must in order to acknowledge that the Messiah has come, and He is Jesus, or as you say, Yeshua.

Yeshua did not come to abrogate the Law of Moses, but to show how it should be fulfilled by seeking how to interpret it by its intent and spirit. He did not hang up on trying to find every possible application, or discerning each angle, or turning the oral law to fit all situations.  Such nit-picking leads to what he called "straining out a gnat, but swallowing a camel" if you miss the point. The idea was to keep it simple, so that the yoke would be easy, and the burden stay light. Six hundred and thirteen laws are too many to remember, especially if they can be boiled down to a couple dozen or fewer. And you certainly don't need any more.

But as I said, traditions are fine if you want to keep them, so long as you remember their purpose. Let them help you to define who you are. And try to be meek before the Lord; acknowledge when you have a stain on your conscience. He is always ready to forgive all who repent.
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I still find it odd that so few seem to ever remember that the ancient Israelites, when they first asked for a King to lead them, were refused. That was because God had it in mind to be the One to lead them. He knew that a man would screw it up, and probably lead them astray, or refuse to obey what He asked them to do. But, in the end, Adonai relented and allowed it, and history proved Him right, over and over, until He had to take the Kingdom away from them.

Instead, He gave them the promise of a Messiah, who would be a righteous King, one descended from his favorite, David. And so, to get what He planned (to be the King), and to keep his promise, He chose to be born Himself as a man - to be the long awaited Messiah - and show what it means to be a servant of all the people, and to lead them as the King.

But the Jews never understood that the Messiah had two roles to fulfill: to be a servant, and to be a King. They clung so tightly to the expectation of a Son of David, that they forgot to connect those other prophecies in the scriptures of Isaiah. And it was far too "spiritual" for them to grasp that the Enemy was not going to be some political ruler among men, no matter how cruel or oppressive.

The real Enemy who fights against us, and challenges the way we should worship and follow God, is Satan. Satan lies to us, and tries to bind us in sin, and tells us that we can never properly serve God, but that we owe allegiance to him. Satan wants us to fail and be condemned as rebels. We are thereby forced to struggle against Evil, just so we can choose to follow Good.

That is why Jesus came - to fight against Satan and his legions of demons. He came to proclaim liberty to the captives, and his most prolific miracles were those that cast out demons. And those demons knew Him, and knew they were beaten. This was the war that began so long ago, which led to our captivity to the powers of sin. A war that still continues, and some of the worst chains of demon possession are those of addiction, to whatever once appealed to our vanity. Jesus came to set us free, and to put us back in a right relationship with God, and He can still do that for you today.

And the penalty for sin, the ransom that Satan demanded while he held us captive - kidnapped from the Garden of Eden - was paid by the death of the Messiah on the cross - a righteous man, in place of all the sinners who would believe. Jesus is raised up as a standard, a flag to follow, just like the dead snake on a pole that the freed Israelites were told by Moses to follow across the desert, when they were afraid and threatened by poisonous serpents. Jesus is the seed of the Woman, who was foretold to come and smash the head of the evil serpent in the Garden, and He did it.

His success was proven by his rising from the grave. And Jesus' resurrection also proved that his authority to teach and do miracles came from the Father, even when He claimed to be able to do things that only God can do, or made exceptions to the strict observance of the traditions that had been elaborated by men.

And this is the battle that we continue to fight to this day, because we are born into this world, under the occupation of the Rebel's legions. We struggle to get free of the snares of Satan. But we only need to claim the promises of the King, and we will be given the power and authority to put Satan's minions in their place. When we follow the Messiah, and choose the Way of Life and Truth, then lies must give up and retreat. We are promised Victory, forever!
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And yet we still wait for the Messiah to come. We are waiting for the King to return and place all of the nations under his feet. We wait for the eternal Kingdom to begin. For surely, Jesus' proclamation that "the Kingdom of God is among you" did not mean 'this is all there is to be, and it's all up to you.' The Church has been trying that, without success, for 2,000 years. Jesus promised, according to the Scriptures, that He would come again, in the Glory of God's Kingdom, to begin his millenial rule.

So why is He taking so long? Perhaps because we have not yet fulfilled all that He asked us to do first. We have not done the one thing He was doing when He was here among us. He preached the gospel to the Jews! We need to help Him to save as many of his own people as possible.

For many generations, we have neglected to offer the Jews the good news in a way that they can relate to. Many of them yearn for a personal relationship with God, but we have not shared our faith with them. We have disdained their faith and traditions, and snubbed them because of their ethnicity - which was given to them by God! And yet, they were promised a great role, as an illuminated priesthood, leading all of the Gentiles through the proper observances in the renewed Temple in Jerusalem. How can they come to know the King of the Jews, if we don't tell them all that we know? To be illuminated, they must be saved!

And now there are some who claim to be "Messianic Jews" who barely sound like Christians, and most certainly believe as heretics, because they don't know what we have learned through the centuries. We must both embrace them and share the Truth as we know it, to bring them into the community of the Church. For 2,000 years, we have fought against the heretics, and we shall not now follow them, even if they are Jews. Their heresies were the cause of Jesus' arguments with them in the first place, and their ignorance must not be the cause of our being led astray in the end.

The Church, in all its proper denominations, must make a concerted and coordinated effort to evangelize the Jewish people, and actively refute the objections of the rabbis who have been keeping them in darkness for so many centuries. But we must do it with kindness, not arrogance, humbly admitting that we have been at fault for all this time, by not speaking to them as the brothers and sisters whom they have been all along.

And if we are to properly love them, we must treat their traditions with respect, even as we put them in their place on the dusty shelves of history, among the mistaken ideas that used to hold us back from the Truth. But what they want to keep, once they know Jesus as Lord and King, we should let them keep, so long as it does not contradict the Scriptures, or change the basic theology that we have drawn from the Scriptures.

And we must be gentle and careful not to impose our own particular "oral traditions" in the place of theirs, or Jesus may be as angry with us as He was before. If it turns out that they have their own fourth kind of "denomination" alongside of our Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, perhaps that is as it should be, so long as they accept the creeds that we do. There are four Gospels, after all, and one was written for the Jews.