Jewish Roots (Part 1)

The Jewish Roots Movement — Steve Gregg

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Jewish Roots (Part 2)

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Jewish Roots (Part 1)

The Jewish Roots MovementSteve Gregg

Jewish Roots (Part 1) by Steve Gregg discusses the Jewish Roots Movement and its focus on Jewish believers in the Messiah. The movement emphasizes the belief that God desires Jewish people to adhere to the Torah, the Jewish law. While some Christians see the movement as elevating the status of Jewish roots, there is no inherent superiority for being Jewish in the faith. The lecture also explores the role of Messianic Jews in God's plan and their unique witness, as well as the challenges they face in maintaining their Jewish identity.

Transcript

The announced topic is The Jewish Roots Movement. The Jewish Roots Movement has two aspects. I'm going to take only one of them tonight.

We're going to have another meeting like this in about a month. I know it's a long time to wait for the second installment, but we're going to divide it into a very natural division because there's two very different aspects of this movement. When we talk about The Hebrew Roots Movement, we have on the one hand what we call Messianic Judaism.

Messianic Judaism primarily has to do with the way that Jewish believers sometimes feel inclined to observe the traditions and the laws of the Jewish religion after they become Christians, even having Messianic synagogues. As much as they can, they like to follow the protocol of the unbelieving Jewish synagogue, except of course they interpret all the traditions in light of Jesus. Their focus is on something slightly different, actually considerably different than the non-believing synagogues do.

Nonetheless, they mimic them as much as they can. They're mainly concerned about, as Jewish people who are believers in the Messiah, being faithful to what they believe God wants Jewish people to be. That's the Messianic Judaism.

Now, as far as their attitude toward Gentiles, many of the Messianic Jews do not make any imposition of the law or the traditions on Gentiles, although they welcome Gentiles into their Messianic synagogues, they do not believe that Gentiles are required to keep these laws. They believe that the Jews are God's special people forever, just as they were in the Old Testament, they are now and ever will be. And because of that, there are certain laws and traditions that God has given them, which set them apart from the Gentiles permanently, even as Christians.

Now, they would argue that Gentile Christians are equal to them in terms of, you know, privilege and salvation, but not given to the same cultural practices. And they believe that the Jews have a very, excuse me, a very special role in the end times that is not the same as what the Gentiles will have. And so they do keep very distinctly the duties of themselves as Jews, Messianic Jews separate in their minds from those of the Gentiles that are Christians.

And that's the movement we're going to be talking about primarily tonight. The other aspect of the Hebrew Roots movement is we would call it, I would call it universal Torah observance. Torah of course, is a reference to the law.

It's the Hebrew word for the law and universal Torah observance is something that's promoted mainly by Gentile believers. I suppose there might be some Jewish believers who, who promote it, but it's different than Messianic Judaism because most Messianic Jews do not believe, as I said, that Gentiles need to observe the Torah, but there are people out there who say that we should, all of us Gentiles and Jews alike are supposed to keep a kosher diet, observe Sabbath and the festivals of Israel and do the things that Jews had to do. And that is a second aspect of this movement, which we will take the next time we take up this subject.

Tonight I want to talk about Messianic Judaism, but let me begin by a quotation from the website of the Jews for Jesus. Now the Jews for Jesus are an organization I've had something to do with back in the seventies. Moish Rosen, the founder is a friend of mine and I did some work for them.

Some actually some comic work for them. I drew some comic books for them, but they are of course a well-known Jewish evangelism organization with an outreach to Jews, but they do not follow in many of this, the ideas of the Messianic Jewish movement. They do not, for example, necessarily advocate Messianic synagogues.

The Jews for Jesus, I think for the most part, go to regular churches. They are Christians who are Jewish, but they don't really push for Jewish distinctives of Jewish people when they're converted. And in that respect, although they certainly are Messianic Jews, they are not so much part of the movement I'm talking about.

In fact, it's the Jews for Jesus website that I'm choosing to use to give the definition of the movement we're talking about tonight. And this comes from their website. They say the Hebraic roots or Jewish roots movement refers to various organizations with a common emphasis on recovering the original Jewishness of Christianity.

This recovery comes through studying the Bible in its Jewish context, observing the Torah, keeping the Sabbath and its festivals, avoiding the paganism of Christianity, affirming the existence of original Hebrew language gospels, and in some cases denigrating the Greek text of the New Testament. In trying to understand the movement, we find a certain fuzziness that makes it difficult to characterize it by any one set of doctrines. Continuing to quote Dwight Pryor, a leading voice for evangelicals in the Jewish roots movement, warns that some believers are forsaking Jesus and Christianity because of their growing fondness for Judaism and its teachings.

They are crossing a line from appreciation to adulation of their Jewish roots. It almost seems as though these lapsing Christians believe that a special insight into their roots somehow elevates their status, as though there is an inherent superiority in being Jewish. Hebraic roots teachers call upon believers to study Hebrew and learn about Jewish culture, which most of us can appreciate.

More often than not, however, they call Gentiles to a Torah observant and or festival observant lifestyle as a means of drawing closer to Jesus and being conformed to his image. Even though most do not believe that these observances are necessary for one's salvation, there is often an implication that this is a higher way." Now obviously that definition took in both branches of what I'm calling the Jewish roots, those who believe that Gentiles are exempt from the Torah and those who believe that Gentiles are not exempt from keeping the Torah. And that is of course the larger umbrella of what we're talking about.

But as I said, I want to focus more on the Messianic Judaism tonight and then we'll take the Torah observant movement next time. Now most Jewish Christians attend regular Christian churches and do not necessarily refer to themselves as Messianic Jews. The terminology Messianic Jew places the emphasis on Jew because Jew in that phrase is the noun.

Messianic is merely an adjective. They're saying, I'm a Jew. I happen to be a Messianic Jew instead of some other kind of Jew.

I'm not a Orthodox Jew or Reform Jew or Conservative Jew. I'm a Messianic Jew, but I'm a Jew. And Messianic Jew is a term that emphasizes the Jewishness.

Now many Jewish people who become Christians recognize that in Christ there's really no Jew or Gentile and that being Jewish isn't really an important factor in their spiritual lives. They mix with Gentiles in regular congregations and they don't see any need to separate off into Jewish congregations or synagogues. That's the majority, frankly, of Jewish Christians.

But the Messianic Jews, which are in the minority of Jewish Christians, have actually sought to establish synagogues and urge Jewish believers to attend synagogues. In some cases they indicate that there's an obligation to do so because they're looking to have a distinctly Jewish witness in the last days for God and for Christ. Again, they believe, based on their eschatology, that there's a special role for the Jewish people.

When you say, well, I thought Paul said there's no more Jew or Gentile in Christ. They'll say, well, he also said there's no more male or female. But we know that there's different roles for males and females.

And although they are equal in Christ, they have different function. And they would say, so also Jews and Gentiles who are in Christ are equal, but they don't have the same function. They say the Jewish people in Christ have a different function.

It's interesting that they identify the function of Messianic Judaism more with Judaism than with Christianity, because they would say that I, who am not a Jew, but a Christian, don't have the same function they do. But they speak about the Jewish people, most of whom are not Messianic at all or Christian. They speak about Jewish people as being those that God has this special function for.

They simply believe that they are the first fruits of a larger ingathering of Jews in the last times, and that when all Israel should be saved, then they will have a role that the Gentile church, as they sometimes use the term, has never had. They will have a special kind of witness. Now, in preparation for teaching, I've read several books by Messianic Jewish leaders.

And I have to say, it's not very clear to me what they believe that special role is. They do believe that they have a special way of reaching Jewish people or that they will. They believe that they'll have a special testimony for Christ that Gentiles don't have.

I'm not sure exactly what that testimony will be. The truth is that every testimony that is biblical for Christ has been able to be born by Christians, Jews and Gentiles. And it's hard to imagine any way in which being Jewish would give you a greater ability to bear testimony for Christ than a Gentile believer.

And therefore, I really believe that it's kind of hazy in their own minds. Exactly. If you ask them, what exactly is the function of the Hebrew Christian or the Messianic Jew or the Jew in general in God's plan? They believe, of course, in many cases that the world evangelization will take place by Jewish believers.

And maybe it will. But there's certainly nothing about world evangelization that couldn't be done by believers, Jews and Gentiles, or for that matter, has been done by Jews and Gentiles for the past 2000 years. So it's not real clear to my mind what it is they think that the Jews are supposed to do differently than everybody else.

Now, examples of the Messianic Jewish movement would be organizations that you may or may not have heard of. Some of them are very well known. But if you're not really familiar with the movement, you may be totally unfamiliar with these organizations.

One would be Ariel Ministries, which is right over in Orange County, near to where we are. And Arnold Fruchtenbaum is, I think, the leader of that ministry. And actually, he's more moderate than some Messianic Jews in his views on some things.

But he still does advocate Jewish synagogues, that is, Christian Jewish synagogues. And also there's Chosen People Ministries. There's International Alliance of Messianic Congregations and Synagogues.

There's the International Federation of Messianic Jews, the International Messianic Jewish Alliance. And of course, Jews for Jesus in its own way is a Messianic Jewish organization. And there's Menorah Ministries and many others.

Stan Telkin, who is a Hebrew Christian who does not identify himself as a Messianic Jew, because he wrote a book called Messianic Judaism is Not Christianity. He's formerly associated with the Jews for Jesus. And he wrote this, quote, Go to your search engine and type in the words Messianic Judaism.

Do not be surprised if more than 33,000 sites appear. You will probably never take the time to visit each of these sites. But if you visit even a few dozen of them, you will find a variety of descriptions of and explanations for Messianic Judaism.

And you surely will see that most of them are focused more upon Jewishness than upon the Bible, unquote. And, you know, I've over the years that I've been in the industry, I've had quite a few Hebrew Christian friends, Jewish Christian friends. They used to in the 70s, they used to call themselves completed Jews.

If you were a Jew who became a Christian, you'd say you were completed Jew, because Jesus completes your Jewish heritage and your Jewish expectations and so forth in the Messiah. But the Hebrew Christians I knew didn't attend Messianic synagogues in the 70s. And yet I have noticed over the decades that when I meet Jewish Christians and even Gentile Christians who sometimes say, well, I'm not a Jew.

And sometimes go to Messianic synagogues. There seems to be such an emphasis on the importance of being Jewish. It's like there's a fascination, even among many Gentiles, with all things Jewish.

Now, many of the Messianic Jews are not dispensationalist in their theology. And one reason that sometimes they distance themselves from dispensationalism is because dispensationalism argues that in this present dispensation, the law of Moses has no relevance. Most Messianic Jews are somewhat emphatic about keeping those laws.

And so they distance themselves from dispensationalism. But I really think that the predominance of dispensationalism is what was necessary to give this movement its impetus because it's dispensationalism in the 19th century that introduced the idea that the Jewish people are going to be prominent in God's purposes in the end times. And this obviously is a foundational doctrine for most in the Messianic Jewish movement.

And of course, most people who've been taught this dispensational view are Gentiles. I remember when I was young and a dispensationalist myself, I had the distinct impression that Jews were more important than Gentiles. I remember I was drawing a comic book for Jews for Jesus in the early 1970s.

And I actually made the comment in there, the Jews are the most important people in the world. And my friend Moish Rosen said, why don't you change that to just saying the Jews are a very important people, you know, or something like that. I was a little too emphatic for him.

I was a little too excited about Judaism. In fact, I've told people that when I was young and single, I wanted to marry a Jewish girl. I didn't know one, but I wanted to be able to marry a Jewish Christian girl because then my children would be Jewish because a Jew is defined as someone who has a Jewish mother.

I didn't have a Jewish mother, so I couldn't be Jewish. But if I married a Jewish Christian girl, then my children would have the advantage of being Jewish. I truly thought that was advantageous.

I no longer think there's any particular advantage in being Jewish. But I remember the mentality of the dispensationalists who really take seriously this idea that in the end times, the Jews are going to be the total focus of God's attention. They're the apple of God's eye.

They are his favorite people. And although he loves Gentiles too, he just loves Jews a shade more. They're more special.

He's got bigger plans for them. They are his eternal chosen people. The church, we were told, is kind of a parenthesis in God's dealing with the Jews.

God dealt with the Jews throughout the Old Testament until Jesus was rejected. And then God began to set them aside for a little while, a couple thousand years. But then he's going to deal with them again when he's done with the church.

The church is like a parenthesis in God's dealing with the Jews. And I remember thinking, because I was more or less a pacifist when I was a teenager. First of all, it was kind of in style to be a pacifist, especially in times of the Vietnam War.

I remember thinking and saying to people, you know, I wouldn't fight in any war for any country except maybe Israel. And I've heard other dispensational Christians say that too. You know, I wouldn't fight in any war except for Israel.

I would fight for Israel. And that's because we felt like Israel was different. Israel was the key to the end times.

And therefore, that attitude tended to encourage admiration for all things Jewish. When you'd meet a Jewish person and had that mentality, you'd almost feel, wow, I'm in the presence of something very special here, a Jewish person. Now Paul, of course, didn't think that way about himself.

He said that he had been a Hebrew of the Hebrews of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, you know, top flight Jew before he was a Christian. But he said all that, he counted as dung and nothing. He says, now that I know Christ, I've given up all that Jewish identity.

I don't count it as anything important. Now, Hebrew Christians, I should say, Messianic Jews, they often argue that Paul remained a Jew and maintained his Jewish identity all his life. And they base this on the fact that Paul would go into synagogues to preach on the Sabbath and that when he went to Jerusalem and James encouraged him to pay the fees for the vows that some Jews had taken in the temple, he did it without complaint and that he took a Nazarite vow on one occasion and so forth.

Now, in other words, Paul did have some Jewish practices that appear in his life as a Christian. However, that shouldn't be too surprising because he himself tells us in 1 Corinthians 9 that as an evangelistic strategy, when he's among those who keep the law, he keeps the law too. When he's with the Jews, he becomes like a Jew.

He says, so that I might win those who are under the law, so that I might win the Jews. In other words, if they have sensitivities about what they eat, well, I'll honor those sensitivities when I'm with them. I won't eat something that bothers them.

I'll live as if I'm under the law. But he said, when I'm with those who are without the law, I live as one without the law. In other words, he has no existential Jewishness about him that would require him to keep the law when he's not around Jewish people.

He did Jewish things when he was around Jewish people. That's what he said he did. And he said he did not do Jewish things when he was not with Jewish people.

So that we can find things in Paul's life that reflect his continuing to show sensitivity to Jews after his conversion does not mean that he identified himself as being different than the Gentile Christians because he was a Messianic Jew. His identity as a Jew, he said he counted as his dung and as nothing after he came to know Christ because he said those things didn't profit him at all. And it's only Christ and Christ alone in whom he finds his identity.

Well, but there are people who think it's very important. And these are, of course, the Messianic Jews who think it's very important to maintain Jewish identity. And this is one reason that the movement sees itself as significant.

I'm going to give you several reasons that I found in their literature that they believe it's the Messianic Jewish movement is significant historically, biblically, eschatologically, whatever. The first is they do believe it's important to maintain Jewish identity. This is something I would dispute, but this is something that is a foundation of their movement that's important for us not to lose our Jewish identity.

For example, Arnold Fruchtenbaum wrote, one major difficulty for the Jewish believer is the fear of losing his Jewish identity. Since his own culture is rich with heritage and history, he naturally does not wish to lose it. If he does not fear for himself, often he fears for his children that they will lose it.

And this is one reason he gives for Jews who are Christians having separate synagogues, Messianic synagogues, so they can maintain the Jewish culture and raise their children in the richness of the Jewish identity. And they think that's very important. And so that's one reason that they are strong in their opinion that this movement is something that needs to be promoted and needs to be maintained.

A second reason that they believe their movement is significant is because they believe that this movement is preparing a remnant, the remnant of Israel, to ultimately fulfill the last day's purpose that God has for Israel. I mentioned a moment ago, they believe that Israel has a function different than Gentiles in the kingdom of God. And whatever that function is, they feel like it's important for Jewish believers to come out strongly as Jewish believers, not so much as believers, but as believing Jews, as Jews, to maintain the specialness of the Jewish function and calling.

They also believe that it's important for them to support the state of Israel and encourage Jewish people if they if they are so inclined to move to Israel and to help them do that. Because they believe that Israel is supposed to be regathered to the land. They believe the diaspora is going to eventually have a change of heart and move from the various countries where Jews are today back to Israel.

And they believe this too is part of the fulfillment of prophecy. Now in order for Jews to live in Israel and be accepted in the Jewish community, they feel they need to have all the distinctives of Jews themselves, that they need to be dressing like Jews, acting like Jews, speaking Hebrew and doing the things that they could be as Jewish as possible so that when they come to Israel, they'll more or less fit in and be recognized and accepted as part of the Jewish community. In fact, they want to be accepted as part of the Jewish community even here in the diaspora when they're not in Israel.

But they also see themselves as the first fruits of the general harvest of Jews in the last days. They believe that all Israel is going to be saved. Now of course, you know, Paul made a statement concerning that in Romans 11, 26, he said, and thus all Israel will be saved.

And they take that to mean the natural Israel, the Jewish people worldwide, at one point in the future, a generation of Jews will all be saved. Maybe not every last Jew. David H. Stern, who's one of the most prolific writers in the movement, and he's actually the translator of the complete Jewish study Bible, and he wrote the Jewish New Testament commentary and a lot of other books too.

David Stern wrote a book called Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel. And in that book he said, in the future, all Israel will be saved. In the Tanakh, which is the Hebrew word for what we call the Old Testament, the Old Testament they call the Tanakh.

He says, in the Tanakh, that is to say in the Hebrew thinking, the word kol, which is all, in reference to a collective does not mean every single individual of which it is composed, excuse me, but rather the main part, the essential part, the considerable majority. Therefore, I believe, he says, that when all Israel is saved, it will not be that every Jew believes in Yeshua, but that the Jewish nation will have a believing majority and or a believing establishment. So they believe that maybe not every Jew is going to get saved and come to Christ, but the majority will.

And that those who are now Messianic Jews are the first fruits of that harvest, which they assume is probably not very far off since they believe we're living quite near to the end and to the coming of Christ. Now you notice, of course, that the name Yeshua was used. This is the Hebrew word for Jesus.

It's the way the name Jesus would have been pronounced in Aramaic in his, where he lived, at the time he lived. And this is one of the features of the Messianic movement is they like to use Hebrew names, not only for Jesus, for God also. They like to refer to God as Yah or Yahweh, which are, of course, legitimate things to do.

Calling Jesus Yeshua is likewise legitimate. There's nothing wrong with doing so. However, they do so in a way that kind of, some people feel like you almost have to use these Hebrew names.

I sometimes have had callers on the radio tell me that you really ought to pronounce Jesus' name the way they pronounced it when he was on earth. Well one of the problems that these people don't know is no one knows exactly how it was pronounced. And some Hebrew roots people think it was Yahshua and some say it was Yeshua and some think it was Yahoshua or Yahashua and some other forms of the name have been suggested.

If we have to pronounce it exactly the way it was pronounced by Jesus and his friends and his mother and father when they talked to him, then we may be in trouble because even the people who are committed to doing so can't agree as to exactly how that's supposed to be pronounced. And obviously to insist upon using the Hebrew form of names is a little bit, I don't know what to say, anal. I just really can't really think of a reason why that would be important to God.

But they not only use the Hebrew names for Jesus and for God, they also like to use the Hebrew names, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew, the English translation of the Bible that's called the Jewish Bible, which David H. Stern translated. All the names are given their Hebrew form. So Saul is Shaul and Peter is Kepha and James is Yaakov and some other Hebrew variations on these names.

Now, truly, these men were Jewish people and it's very possible that people did call them by these Jewish names. But the interesting thing is in the New Testament, they didn't call themselves by those names. When Paul wrote, he didn't say this is Shaul, an apostle of Jesus Christ.

However, in the Jewish Bible that David Stern translated, Paul does call himself Shaul. But in fact, he called himself Paulus in the Greek New Testament, which is the language he wrote in. And so it's almost an artificial forcing upon the biblical characters, the Hebrew form of their name when they didn't even use it themselves when they were speaking to Gentiles.

Now, if it's Jews speaking to each other, Paul might have called himself Shaul when he was in Jerusalem because that was his Hebrew name. But his Greek name or his Latin name was Paulus. And that's the name he went by when he wasn't among Jews.

And there's no particular reason why it's more spiritual to use the Jewish form of the name, although that is one of the features that's very, really sets the Messianic Jews apart is that they like to use the Hebrew names. They think they are more, I don't know, holier. A lot of people, not even necessarily Jewish people who are Messianic, but Gentiles who joined Messianic synagogues, they want to learn Hebrew conversationally.

They want to move back to their homeland of Israel. And these are Gentiles who it never was their homeland. But everything Jewish is so valuable to them.

We even have, of course, in many churches, Israeli flags on the platform. I've never quite understood why a church would have an Israeli flag on the platform. Israeli flag stands for the nation of Israel.

Even if you believe the race of the Israelites is somehow God's chosen people, the nation of Israel is a political entity that isn't even religious. And so I'm not really sure what place the Israeli flag would have in a church. Of course, I'm not really sure what place the American flag has in a church.

The truth is the church is its own kingdom and it's not associated with any one nation. We're international phenomenon. And let me just read what David Stern in his book, Messianic Judaism, gave as four valuable aspects of the Messianic Judaism movement.

One is he says they're helpful by providing a Jewish environment for Messianic faith. Messianic Judaism is useful in evangelizing Jews. Now hold on to that thought.

He assumed that Messianic Judaism is going to be useful for evangelizing Jews. We're going to find out that that frankly isn't true. The statistics don't support it.

The second usefulness of this movement, he said, is it's useful in focusing the church's attention on the Jewish people so that Gentile Christians may appreciate their own Jewish roots and have a correct understanding of Jewish tradition. Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with Christians having a good understanding of Jewish tradition, truly when we read the Old Testament or even the New Testament. We're reading about people who lived in a Jewish milieu under Jewish law and tradition and therefore to know something about the idioms they used and the cultural things that they were relating to.

There's nothing wrong with knowing that. But you don't have to be in a Messianic synagogue to do that. You can, in any pulpit, a preacher can comment on the Jewish culture when it's relevant to something in the Bible and good Bible teachers usually do.

So I don't really see how that justifies a special Messianic Jewish movement so that Christians may appreciate their Jewish roots. The truth is I don't think Christianity has Jewish roots. Now let me make this very clear.

I realized Jesus was a Jew and that the apostles were Jews, but the church is built on Jesus and the apostles, not on the race of the Jews. Yes, it was the Jewish people who gave us the prophets and gave us the law, gave us the Psalms. In other words, it's often said, you know, we owe a lot to the Jews because they gave us the Old Testament.

They gave us the Messiah. They gave us the gospel. I think the way we should rather change that statement is it was God who gave us those things and he used the Jews almost against their own will.

The Jews killed the prophets. The Jews disobeyed their laws. It's amazing.

There was a remnant of them who preserved those things so that we could have them because the Jewish people as a whole, for the most part, rejected the prophets and the ways of God and the law. They worshiped Baal and Moloch and things like that through most of their history. And therefore, it's not really to the credit of the Jews that we have these things.

They tried to stomp those things out. It's to the credit of God that he preserved those things in spite of the hostility of the Jews. Likewise with the Messiah, it's Jesus.

God gave us the Messiah. The Jews killed him. Not to say the Jews killed him sounds sketchy to some people because they know the Jews didn't kill him.

The Romans did. Well, it is true. The Romans actually, we might say, pulled the trigger.

But they were put up to it by the Jews. And unless we're not going to accept what the Bible says about it, Paul said that the Jews are the ones who crucified Christ and killed their prophets. He made that very unambiguous statement in 1 Thessalonians, Chapter 2. And this is not an anti-Semitic statement.

Paul was a Jew, a Jewish man. He was not anti-Semitic. But he was in touch with reality, which is good for us to be also.

And he said in 1 Thessalonians 2, Verse 14, For you, brethren, he's writing to Gentile Christians in Thessalonica, became imitators of the churches of God, which are in Judea. That is, the Jewish churches in Judea, in Christ Jesus. For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, just as they did from the Judeans, who, the Judeans, killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets and have persecuted us.

And they do not please God and are contrary to all men, forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved. So as always, to fill up the measure of their sins, but wrath has come upon them to the uttermost. Now, say that Christians have that's 1 Thessalonians, Chapter 2, Verses 14 through 16.

So to say, you know, we owe the Jews a great deal. Paul said the Jews, they're the ones who tried to prevent us from preaching to the Gentiles. They killed the Lord Jesus.

They killed their own prophets. Now, if this was an Aryan or, you know, a skinhead saying these things, it would be an anti-Semitic sounding statement. Paul said it because it was true.

Now, if we say, but the Jews didn't kill Jesus, the Romans did. The Bible describes it that they put Pilate up to it. Pilate wanted to let him go.

Pilate didn't find any fault with Jesus. And several times he tried to let him go and he was pressured and eventually blackmailed by the Jews. They said, if you don't kill him, we're going to tell Caesar that you're not afraid to seize him.

Now, they knew how to push his buttons. And so Pilate said, OK, whatever. But Pilate had no interest in killing Jesus.

It was the Sanhedrin that condemned him or looking desperately for a way to get the Romans to play along with them. Look what it says over in Acts chapter two. This is Peter preaching on the day of Pentecost.

Acts 222, Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst. As you yourselves also know him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God.

You, he's speaking to a Jewish audience in Jerusalem. You have taken by lawless hands, have crucified and put to death. So he says, Peter says, you killed Jesus through the instrumentality of Roman lawless hands.

True. But it was laid to the door of of the Jews of that time. Now, by the way.

In the centuries that have since been when when Christians and others have referred to Jews as Christ killers, this has been very unfair. The Jews today are not Christ killers any more than anyone else is. We're talking about a certain group of Jews living at a certain time in history who turned Jesus over to be put to death.

The Jews living today were not specifically complicit in this. And anyone who'd refer to modern Jews as Christ killers is simply out of touch with history and is probably a racist, an anti-Semite. I'm not an anti-Semite.

I just want to be historically accurate. Like Paul and Peter, they said that the Jews were responsible. The Jews at that time.

Had Jesus crucified. The only reason I bring that up is not to put any kind of a stigma on Jews today, but simply to answer the idea that the Jews gave us Jesus, so we are so grateful to them. No, God gave us Jesus.

According to Scripture, the Jews killed him as they did their own prophets and forbade Paul and others to preach to us Gentiles. So in other words, to say that Christians need to appreciate their Jewish roots. We have our roots in Christ himself.

Yes, Jesus was a Jew, but he came as the son of man. You know, when Nathaniel met him and he told him, I saw you in the fig tree before Philip called you. Nathaniel said, you are the king of Israel.

And Jesus said, no, I'm the son of man. You will see what? Because because I saw you in the fig tree, you say you believe you'll see great things. You'll see the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man.

He's not just a son of Abraham or a son of David. He's connected to the human race. He came as a new Adam.

He didn't come as a new Abraham or or a lesser Abraham. He didn't come as a loyal follower of Moses for for all eternity. He came, the Bible says in Galatians, he was born under the law.

He was a Jew by race and a race in a Jewish culture. And therefore, you know, he lived as a Jew, just like if he had been an Irishman, he would have lived in under Irish culture in Ireland. It's not important what his race is in terms of saying.

Who do we owe our salvation to? We owe it to Jesus. We owe it to God. And I certainly have no problem with the the believing Jew being at the same level as us.

I don't think Jews are worse than anyone else. But I don't think that we have a debt to them that some people think we do and that somehow it's important for us to identify them as a separate group of Christians. The the messianic Jews, they're somehow different.

I don't think they're different. I don't think they're better or worse. I don't think I'm better than them or they're better than me.

There's no Jew or Gentile in Christ. And while again, as they point out, Paul also, there's no male or female. We do recognize differences in function of male and female.

Nobody can really very clearly identify a separate function for believing Jews from the function of believing Gentiles, because all are one new man in Christ. God has broken down the middle wall of partition between the Jew and the Gentile and created in himself one new man. So making peace, our identity is Christ and not in some race.

Now, therefore, I think I'm not very sympathetic with David Stern and his suggestion that we need to have a messianic Jewish movement to help Christians appreciate their Jewish roots. The Bible never refers to our Jewish roots. It does say we are rooted and grounded in Christ and Colossians.

And Paul says that we are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. Interesting there in Ephesians 2, Paul doesn't say you're built on the foundation of Judaism. No, you're built on the foundation of the apostles of Jesus Christ.

That's and Christ made a new covenant with new leaders and new practices. And it's that foundation that he built his church upon. Jesus said upon this rock, I'll build my church, not upon the rock of Judaism, but on the Christ himself and on the apostles, as Paul himself says.

David Stern says also it's a messianic Judaism is useful in ministering to the Jews who have accepted Yeshua as Messiah. OK, so there are Jews who have accepted Yeshua as Messiah. There are probably hundreds of thousands of them.

Some have estimated there's more than 100000 Hebrew Christians in the United States alone. So are they being ministered to through the messianic Jewish movement? We'll find that this is not so. Most estimates are that of the Hebrew Christians, less than 5 percent of them are part of the messianic Jewish movement.

Ninety five percent of them are in churches where they're getting ministered to. For David Stern to say we need to have messianic synagogues to minister to the Hebrew Christians, to the Jews who have come to believe in Yeshua as Messiah. Now they're being ministered to without the synagogues.

I mean, I'm not saying they can't be ministered to in messianic synagogues. I'm not saying that that can't happen. I'm saying that doesn't look to me like something that's needed to justify a whole new movement separate from the church, which is basically what they are.

They they usually don't allow themselves to be called Christians. They believe Christians applies to Gentile believers. They're not Christians, they say, or messianic Jews.

You notice they're building a wall of partition there. They'll say they're not. But they but I mean, I can't see how making that distinction between Gentile Christians and messianic Jews is not building a wall of partition.

Then, of course, he says the messianic Jewish movement will also be a witness to the world. And I guess this is this is part of what they think the special function of the Jews in the last days is it will be a witness to the world, the healing effect of God's love on Jewish Christian relations expressed through messianic Judaism will speak to the non-Christian Gentiles. I'm not sure he's getting that.

I don't know of any scripture that that that says this, that the Jewish messianic Jewish movement is going to speak in a special way to non-Christian Gentiles. Maybe, maybe it would. But there's that speculation entirely.

There's no no scripture that says that's going to happen. So. These four reasons for there being messianic Judaism given to us in the book called Messianic Judaism by David Stern, one of the most prolific writers and leaders of the movement, don't seem to really carry very much weight biblically.

Now, I do want to give a list of my own criticisms and or concerns about the messianic Jewish movement. First of all, back to what I was talking about earlier, the problem of identity. What is the identity of a believer in Christ? Now, I've just found out because my wife and I just did this.

What the thing that gives us our DNA results and so forth. Ancestry. That's what it is.

Ancestry.com. Found out I've got a lot more Irish in me than I knew. I'm not half Irish. I didn't know that.

I thought I had more German or something in English. In any case, I don't care. I don't feel any different about myself having learned that I'm half Irish than all my life before that when I didn't know I was half Irish.

It doesn't matter to me what my race is, because race is a non-issue for a Christian. A Christian is not identified with their racial group or with their gender group or with other fleshly considerations. Paul said, henceforth, we know no man anymore after the flesh.

If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things are passed away. All things have become new.

And therefore, whatever my identity may have been before I was a Christian, Jew or Gentile, Irish or German, whatever. I don't I don't know myself or you by what your racial identity is. That's kind of a racist way of thinking.

If you say, well, you're an African Christian, I'm a Caucasian Christian. And that's different, right? We're different from each other. Well, not in any way that's important.

I guess our skin color is different. But if that's important to me, then I'm a racist, isn't it? I mean, if I judge people based on who their ancestors were, what country they came from or what their physical characteristics are, I'm not thinking like a Christian. I'm thinking like a racist.

Paul said, we don't think that way anymore. Second Corinthians 516. Henceforth, we know no man anymore after the flesh.

Though he says we once knew Christ after the flesh. But from now we don't know him that way anymore. And he says, if anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation.

So our identity is not in being Gentile or Jewish or any other thing, but being in Christ. When I am in Christ, I'm absorbed into his identity. I share in his name.

That's why I can act in his name, because his name and his identity become mine, along with every other person who's in Christ. We have one head and we're all members of one body. And it's not racially distinguished.

It's diverse, but not distinguished racially. Those things are not important. William Varnier is actually a Gentile, but he was at one time a major leader in the Friends of Israel movement.

He's not a Messianic Jew, but he has in some ways critiqued Messianic Judaism, though he's very favorable toward Israel. In one place, he wrote, is the assumption that Jewish believers ought to seek to maintain their Jewish identity a valid one in light of scripture's teaching about a believer's new identity? He says, texts like 2 Corinthians 517 and Galatians 328 are key in this regard. To Paul, every believer is a new creation, something that didn't exist before.

That new person was not to be defined by fleshly distinctions. Be they distinctions male, female, slave or free, even Jew or Gentile. While these distinctions still exist, of course, they're not where one's identity is now found.

From now on, we recognize no one according to the flesh, 2 Corinthians 516. Is maintaining one's ethnic identity really what any believer should be vitally concerned about, whether he is Chinese, Latino, African-American or Jewish? Whatever his background, from the moment of regeneration, a believer is in Jesus Christ. And he should no longer define himself according to worldly fleshly standards and distinctions, even though he may still retain those outward distinctions.

They should not matter to him anymore. And all that should matter now is who he is in Christ. Unquote.

I certainly agree with that 100% because that's what the Bible teaches. It does not teach something opposite that in any place. Another problem I see in the.

Messianic Jewish movement. Is that they seem to have a difficulty defining what a Jew is. And this is especially true when they mix the idea of being a religious Jew with being an ethnic Jew, because obviously, Jew can refer to an ethnicity.

People who are descended from the tribe of Judah were called the Jews. That's where the word Jew came from. People who were physically descended from the tribe of Judah.

And therefore, were part of the nation of Judah after the split in Rehoboam's day. And then, of course, there were Israelites from the north who came and became part of Judah also. And they eventually were called Jews also because they were absorbed, but they were racially Jews.

And then, of course, there's the Jewish religion called Judaism. Now. It seems to me in the Messianic Jewish Community.

The emphasis is on being religiously Jewish because being racially Jewish. I mean, we already have we already have Hebrew Christians. That's not that doesn't satisfy them.

They don't want there just to be Hebrews who are saved. They want them to be in in synagogues Messianic synagogues. They want to them to maintain Jewish religious practices and yet the religious practices, they want to follow are not the practices of biblical True Judaism, because, of course, keeping the Torah means offering animal sacrifices.

It means having a Levitical priesthood. It means making pilgrimages three times a year to Jerusalem. And frankly, Messianic Jews don't do that and don't believe they need to They acknowledge that there are 613 laws in the Torah.

But they know that they can't keep more than half of them because more than half of them have to do with the temple sacrifice system. And so they're satisfied to keep the less than half of those laws and say, well, what can you do. We'll just keep those laws because we can.

And say, well, what can you do. We'll just keep those laws because we can. It doesn't seem to occur to them that may be the reason that the temple was destroyed in the providence of God, and has been kept Out of the picture for 2000 years is because the system and the law of which it was apart have been replaced by a new covenant.

It's not something that they really understand that way. And you know the practices they have, the wearing of yarmulkes and the prayer shawls and the various things they do, blowing the shofar and you know carrying the Torah scrolls through the synagogue and things like that which are part of their ceremony. Those ceremonies were never part of biblical Judaism at all.

Those are ceremonies that were developed after the destruction of Jerusalem at a council, a Jewish council of Jabna where the rabbis got together to decide now that we don't have a temple how do we be Jewish in our religion? And they came up with what we call rabbinism, rabbinic Judaism or Talmudism, that religion of the Talmud. And it's from these man-made customs that the Messianic synagogue has adopted much of its practices. They're not specifically biblical Judaism.

I mean what is biblical Judaism is temple Judaism and they don't have that now and they know they don't have that now. Some of them, there are some people who think that there will be a temple again and that they will offer sacrifices again but that isn't happening now and therefore following the law of Moses is not even possible. Now let me read you something here.

This is from a website of the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations. They said quote, most Messianic Jews are much more zealous for the law, Torah, than their Gentile Christian counterparts. In this they are following the example of the first century Messianic Jews.

Now this is not true. The first century Messianic Jews went to the temple until it was destroyed. They were zealous for the law.

Paul when he came to Jerusalem, James said we have many brethren here who are zealous for the law. It's true. Jewish Christians living in Jerusalem where the temple was still kept a lot of the Jewish law along with their being Christian.

But after the temple was destroyed they didn't and a Messianic Jew today is not zealous for the law in the way that the Messianic Jews in the first century were because they can't be. There's no temple there for them. Stan Telkin, a Jewish Christian who doesn't call himself a Messianic Jew, he wrote, are these statements accurate? Consider the Torah contains 613 commandments from God that are binding upon the Jewish people.

Do those who attend Messianic synagogues even know these 613 commandments? And if they do not know them how can they zealously keep them? What they seem to be zealous for is the word Torah and the emotional coloring of carrying the Torah scrolls around the synagogue during the service. That's their zeal for the law. They can't be keeping the law.

Even Arnold Fruchtenbaum who does have a synagogue, Messianic synagogue, he says do we approach the Day of Atonement exactly as outlined in Leviticus 16? He says not at all because no temple has existed since AD 70, no altar is present, and the priest of Levi cannot minister. So I mean these they admit we can't keep the Day of Atonement in the way the Bible says. You can't keep any of the festivals the way the Bible says because they did require animal sacrifices.

And so when when these people say we should be keeping the Jewish festivals, in what way? They will do it the way the rabbis came up with at Javna. In the rabbinic Judaism which was not practiced by Jesus, was not practiced by the Apostles, was not practiced by any Torah observant Jews prior to 70 AD. What they practice, including all the Passover things they do, are really the rabbinic practices.

And so it's not really a zeal for the law of God at all. Another problem that I have with the movement is that not many Jewish Christians have been converted through the Jewish synagogues, through the the Messianic synagogues. Stan Telkin also made this comment, he says, almost all the Jewish believers will testify that they were not saved in nor do they attend Messianic congregations or synagogues.

In almost all cases they were saved because of caring Gentiles who shared the gospel with them and they attend churches. This also certainly helps explain the results of the Jewish believers survey for the period 1986 to 1991 which showed that only 4% of believing Jews were evangelized by Messianic congregations. 96% of believing Jews were evangelized by Gentile or regular churches.

4% of Jews who became Christians became Christians through the Jewish synagogues. That's not much evidence that we need these Jewish synagogues to reach the Jews. The Jews are being reached by other means, predominantly.

Also it's kind of interesting, if you had heard of Messianic Jews and Messianic synagogues before you might have assumed that if you would visit one of these you'd meet a lot of Jews there. The truth is the vast majority of people in these synagogues are Gentiles who have become fascinated with all things Jewish and there's relatively few Jews in them. Let me read some quotes and these come from, all of them come from Jewish Christian sources.

As reported by almost all who have experienced these congregations, the overwhelming majority, sometimes as much as 85 to 90% of the attendees are Gentiles. Certainly they are being blessed but the movement's primary declared objective was to bless, not to bless Gentiles, it was to reach Jews. Yet as many as 85 to 90% of the attendees at the synagogues are Gentiles, not Jews.

David Sadaka, who is one of the leaders of the Messianic movement, wrote, one of the main reasons for the existence of the Messianic Jewish congregations is to identify themselves with the Jewish community. While this is in itself a worthy cause, it has had its collateral effect as the reluctance to promote evangelism. The congregation is always careful not to say anything that might endanger its relationship with the outside Jewish community.

Now by the way, Jews in general, especially religious Jews, do not have any respect for the Messianic synagogues. You know it's kind of a sad thing that these Jewish Christians are trying to reach out to their Jewish countrymen by being more Jewish-like in their lifestyle and worship style and so forth, but they're not paying attention to the fact that a religious Jew will never respect Messianic Judaism because a religious Jew cannot accept Jesus as the Messiah or as the Son of God. The very concept of God having a son and the Trinity is absolutely abhorrent to Jews unless they become Christians and therefore no matter how many Jewish traditions you adopt to make yourself ingratiated to the Jews, they're still going to be tripped up on the one thing and that's Yeshua.

They don't believe in Yeshua and they don't want to believe in Yeshua because he's not the Messiah that they thought they were looking for and therefore Messianic synagogues are not going to change that fact. A Jew can only become a Christian once Christ is revealed to them by the Holy Spirit to be their Messiah and it doesn't take a Messianic synagogue to do that, obviously, if most Jews who become Christians have never been to one. I have a few other quotes here about this and this is Arnold Fruchtenbaum said, it is self-deceiving to believe that a Jewish lifestyle is the means of being accepted by the Jewish community or the Jewish leadership.

Those who think that living a Jewish lifestyle is going to reach the secular Jews, they're deceiving themselves, he said, and he actually leads a Jewish Messianic synagogue. Telkin said, gaining acceptance by the Jewish community seems to have become one of its primary objectives. Hear me clearly as I rewrite the statement.

As Jews who believe in Jesus, Messianic Jews want to be identified with and accepted by a Jewry that largely has rejected God in his word. Clearly this is not a biblical objective and there are the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations put out a statement says they do not missionize. They say we do not hand out pamphlets, we have no association with the Jews for Jesus, who have an entirely different mentality, outlook, and starting point.

I was in Australia back in 19, I think it was 83, and there's an organization called the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and one of the representatives came to, I think it was Sydney where I was at the time, and gave a talk and I went to hear him. And I knew this organization because one of the elders in our church had been favorably disposed of this organization and made our elders known about it. But this is an organization that believes that Christians should just bless Israel.

Not necessarily evangelize Israel, bless them. Sure, evangelize them if you can, but they don't evangelize because they say they'd be kicked out of Israel if they evangelize. That's true, they would.

And there was a Q&A after this guy spoke in Sydney and I raised my hand and I said would you tell the people here what exactly your role is in, what role the gospel plays, preaching the gospel plays in your mission. And he hemmed and hawed and stuttered and so forth and he wouldn't answer directly because I knew and he didn't want to say in that meeting that they don't really preach the gospel. They're seeking support from churches and they would use that support to lobby for Israel, you know, try to get financial and economic support for Israel, military support for Israel from other countries, but they don't evangelize and yet they're a Christian organization.

The guy came up to me after and said, I didn't answer your question very directly, he said because the Israeli ambassador to Australia was here in the meeting and I didn't want to tell him that we would privately evangelize people because we'd get kicked out. So of course if we had a chance we'd evangelize people but it's not our primary mission. Blessing Israel with the gospel is not necessarily what these people always are about, although some, most of my say that Jews are, but there are a lot of missions out there that are not.

Peter in Acts chapter 3 was preaching to a Jewish group in Jerusalem and he said in verse 26, Acts 3, verse 26, to you first, means to the Jew first, God having raised up his servant Jesus sent him to bless you in turning away every one of you from your iniquities. God wants to bless Israel, he sent Jesus to bless them. The blessing is turning them from their iniquities, turning them from sin to God, getting them saved, bring them to Christ, that's the blessing for Israel and yet Israel doesn't want this blessing for the most part and having a Jewish synagogue that's messianic isn't necessarily going to change their attitude about that.

I'm thinking about taking a break here because we've got about an hour. I think I have a shorter amount to cover in what's left. Why don't we take, why don't we take about a five or let's take a five-minute break and we'll finish this up so I can let you stretch.