Jewishness & the Gospel

God entered into covenant with Israel. In fact, he created the nation of Israel with the express intention of entering into covenant with it, and of using the nation to bring a holy happiness to the world.

God gave Israel covenants, promises and warnings. He gave them kings and rulers to lead and defend them, prophets to exhort them and a law to serve as the nation's guide.

Israel chose to go its own way. A short while after the law was promulgated, while the people were still at the foot of the Mountain, they choose to pervert the image of God into idolatrous terms they learnt from the surrounding nations. This was a mistake our people repeated with such determined persistence that they were finally driven out of the land into exile. A false view of God led to a false view of life, of society, of morality and of privilege. Israel became a hedonistic, materialistic, selfish society in which man consumed man and the weak and needy were abused, neglected and destroyed.

God sent prophets to warn the people, but our fathers would not listen. He urged them to turn from their ways and assured them of forgiving grace, but they developed a system of self-reliance and would not budge. Even in exile, when finally purged of overt idolatry, they conjured up a new kind of idolatry – that of the mind without a physical image. God was made subject to the rabbis, subject to man's abilities and achievements.

His sovereignty was replaced so that one of Israel's rabbis could declare, "all is predetermined in heaven (by God) – except the fear of heaven (of God)"! Here man was free and God could do not more than wish and hope. He was subject to man's beck and call, or at the mercy of man choosing to ignore him.

By the time Messiah came, this system had become in many Jewish minds the sine qua none of spirituality. Jesus challenged that system and was rejected for that. His disciples were hounded out of the nation, expelled from participation in the day-to-day of Jewish life on any level, described as traitors to the national cause.

Meanwhile the church, seeking to distance itself from anything Jewish for reasons we need not go into here, forced the Jewish believers to disavow their Jewishness.

But the message Jesus the Messiah taught is exactly that of the prophets, of the law, of the promises of God to Israel. Faith in Jesus is the most truly Jewish thing there is! It is high time to redeem the message from its historical contortions and to rediscover its solid roots in the Five Books of Moses, the books of Israel and of Judah's history, in the Psalms and in the worlds of the prophets.

Israel's future has to do with its faith in Jesus. Israel's destiny is to love, obey, enjoy and glorify Jesus. That is Israel's only true salvation.

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