My Christian mother taught me from an early age to love and respect the Jews. My Saviour, Messiah Jesus, is a Jew.
While living in the Midwestern United States limits my exposure to the Jewish community, I am in constant gratefulness to the faithful remnant for the blessing that I receive daily as I study the Old and New Testament Scriptures. The New Testament is filled with passages from the Old Testament which testify of the Messiah and God’s purpose for His children.
God saw fit to establish Israel as a peculiar people and a nation through which He would reveal Himself. Israel became an apostate* nation by departing from His Word and living in disobedience to God, not unlike what today’s professing Christian church has done.
The Northern Kingdom of Israel departed from God first and then later the Southern Kingdom departed. The Jews remained religious, but their leaders turned from true worship to worshiping God their own way. They turned from depending on God to depending on their enemies. God responded by replacing His presence in the temple with four hundred years of silence until the time of Messiah’s birth.
God through His prophets constantly warned Israel to repent. God was merciful each time they came back to Him, but when they rejected the Messiah Himself, God had to judge Israel. I do not rejoice in that judgment. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
In my blog articles about speaking in tongues, I have talked much about God’s judgment upon Israel. This is because of the Apostle Paul’s quote from Isaiah 28 in I Corinthians 14, which is a warning of coming judgment. Understanding the context of Isaiah 28 is the only way to properly understand the gift of speaking in tongues as a sign to unbelieving Israel.
In the Old Testament setting, when Israel heard the foreign tongue of their enemy, this was an indication that God’s judgment was near. God’s judgment came because Israel turned to their enemies for help rather than to the God of their fathers.
The temptation for many when seeing judgment upon the nation of Israel is to focus on the Jewish people in a bad way. Some have used God’s judgment of Israel as justification for their hatred of the Jew. I am writing this to remind you, my fellow Gentiles, that we are the branch of the wild olive tree which has been grafted into God’s plan (See Romans 11:19-25). The graft does not support the root, but the root the graft.
If we reject the rule of God in our hearts by rejecting God’s provision for our sin through Jesus Christ (our only hope of salvation), then we are individually rejecting His kingdom in this present church age as surely as the nation of Israel rejected the Messiah. God’s judgment will come to the individual Gentile as surely as it came to Israel as a nation.
Like the majority of Israel, who retained outward ceremony with an unregenerate heart, professing “Christians” will face God’s judgment along with all other unbelievers.
The majority of the professing Christian church today is apostate.* It is apostate because of its rejection of the Bible as the churches’ sole authority for faith and practice. The church is apostate because of its rejection of what the Bible says about itself, salvation, and Messiah Jesus.
Messiah Jesus speaking:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Luke 13:34
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. John 3:14-18
Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth? what is his name, and what is his son’s name………, if thou canst tell? Proverbs 30:4
Note: The church is not Israel.
God is not finished with Israel (See Romans chapters 9-11).
*To commit apostasy is to desert, to revolt, to stand away from.