Pot Shot Series: Objection 2: You should be ashamed of yourself!August 16th, 2010 If you have not done so, you might want to read the Introduction to this series. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this from my Jewish people. My response is invariably, “why?” Should I be ashamed because I am saying what I believe to be true and of import to my Jewish people? Should I be ashamed because I care enough about my Jewish people to let them know that their Messiah has come? As one disciple has said before me,
This pot-shot statement is simply a defence mechanism, of course. When asked why I should be ashamed, the person has no answer. The truth is that they can’t answer. They don’t know why. Such individuals are ignorant of the Christian faith or the Gospel claims, and most don’t know what the Hebrew Scriptures say about Yeshua (Jesus), let alone the B’rit Hadashah (the New Testament). Now I have no problem with them believing I am wrong – it is God who opens our eyes to the knowledge of His truth. So they have a right to think I’m wrong, just as I have a right to think them wrong. (That’s true tolerance by the way: graciously allowing others to disagree with us and respecting others when we disagree with them.) As I say, I have no problem with them thinking I am wrong, nevertheless, I think if anyone should be ashamed of themselves it is the person who says, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” and then doesn’t give me an answer when I ask, “why?” If you are or ever have been a purveyor of such a pot-shot, let me point out why. I share the Gospel because I have an absolute belief that Messiah has come; that he is Yeshua (Jesus) who was God come in the form of man (c.f. Genesis 18:1-33); that he came to earth to die for our sins and then was raised again to sit at the Father’s right hand, so that those who believe in him and in the efficacy of his sacrifice will have sure hope of eternal life. This is what I believe, as certainly as I believe that there is air that I breathe. And I care about you enough to tell you all this so that you can have that joy and certainty as well. My question to you, oh purveyor of this pot-shot, is this: if you think I am wrong, why do you not stop and try to correct me when I ask you why? Where is your love and concern for me? If what I believe is foolishness, then why are you afraid to tell me why it is foolish? Where is your love for your fellow Jew? I think the truth lies in the fact that you are certain of what the rabbis teach, even though you don’t really know the teachings of the rabbis. (I generalize here, of course – but I believe it to be a fair generalization.) The rabbis have told you that what I proclaim is wrong, but you don’t know why they say it, or whether they can be refuted. If you are ignorant of the facts and the arguments of the case – if you have never honestly and fairly explored whether or not there is truth in the claims of Jesus – then on what basis do you tell me that I should be ashamed? You think I’m wrong? Then tell me why. But if you can’t tell me why, then at least be honest enough to listen and consider the facts as presented. In the end, I’m not asking you to believe me (or the rabbi), but to pray to God and ask him to reveal to you His truth. He promises to answer (Jeremiah 33:3; Matthew 7:7). If you want to know more, or if you have any questions please feel free to contact us. We also would love to hear what you have to say, so feel free to comment but please do so in a polite manner. We do publish dissenting comments. Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum. Posted in Evangelism, Jesus and Jews, Jewish Objections to Jesus, Jewish Tradition, Jews and Jesus, Messiah in the Tanach, Pot-shot Objections, Uncategorized | No Comments » Pot-shot Series: IntroductionJuly 2nd, 2010 I have been sharing the Gospel for several years, and it has been a long time since I have heard an objection to it that is new. It has been a joy to receive these objections, when they are sincere, knowing that there is a biblical response to every one of them. There are some people, however, who are not sincere. While sharing the Gospel on the streets, they will come up to you and express their objection and then scurry away. It might be some comment made before the door is slammed in your face, or the phone is hung up. No doubt these people feel that they have scored some point, but in reality they have acted quite cowardly and missed the opportunity to know that there is a reasonable and biblical response to their objection. In most cases, if the opportunity arises to ask why they believe these objections they cannot tell you. The reason is that they don’t know themselves. They are not able enough to give a response, nor are they honest enough to stick around for a response. It is for this reason (and because of a recent encouter of this kind) that I have decided to do a series on these pot-shot objections and give my response. Perhaps you are one of the perpetrators of such an attack. Then I hope you will be honest enough in this anonymous setting to now hear the response. Perhaps you are someone who has had the same concern and honestly wondered about the answer. Or perhaps you have had someone bring up such an objection to and you didn’t know how to reply to them. Whatever the reason, I hope this series, which will be added to over a period of time, will bless you and inform you. If you have any questions or concerns, please respond to the appropriate blog article or contact us.
Posted in Evangelism, Jesus and Jews, Jewish Tradition, Jews and Jesus, Pot-shot Objections, This, That, The Other Thing | 1 Comment » Anything goes, but JesusJune 7th, 2010 In the grand scheme of things you can be:
The only thing you can’t be, apparently, is a Jew who believes in Yeshua (Jesus). Is it not possible that the one thing that most Jews say is un-Jewish is the one thing that is really Jewish? Most of the Jews in the bible were wrong. Read it and you will see. Why should anything be different? “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. (Proverbs 14:12;16:25)”
Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum.
Posted in Blog, Jesus and Jews, Jewish Tradition, Jews and Jesus, This, That, The Other Thing | No Comments » Listen to your rabbiJune 4th, 2010 When I share the Good News with a Jewish person that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah promised by Moses and the Prophets, I always remind the individual that they should not take my word for it. And if they say, as they sometimes do, that they want to talk to their rabbi about it, I always tell them to go ahead. The reason is simple. I am not afraid of what the rabbis have to say. In fact, many people have come to faith after talking to their rabbi (or many rabbis) and receiving inadequate answers to the genuine questions asked by the seeker of truth. Now if you who are reading this are a Jewish person seeking to know whether Yeshua is the Messiah or not, I can tell you that your rabbi will specifically tell you not to talk to me and certainly not to listen to me. (I confess I am generalizing here.) They will tell you that what I believe is foolishness. They will tell you anything they can to keep you from asking me questions. If you are truly seeking to know the truth about Yeshua, this is what we would ask you to do: listen to your rabbis and listen to us. Most importantly check the Scriptures to see if what we (the rabbis and us) say is true. Then pray to the Lord your God and ask Him to reveal His truth to you. Not my truth – not the rabbis’ truth – but God’s truth. Yeshua said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7)“ If you have any questions about Yeshua and his claims to be Messiah and Lord, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to answer your questions confidentially and without expectation. We would just like to share His message with you. Your decision we leave in your hands – and His. Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum. Posted in Evangelism, Jesus and Jews, Jewish Tradition, Jews and Jesus, Knowing God, Uncategorized | 2 Comments » Tradition! Tradition!June 3rd, 2010 One of my favourite theatre musicals is ‘Fiddler on the Roof’. Of all the tunes from that show, none is so popular as the song “Tradition.” While I love the tune, the song itself makes me sad sometimes. Traditions are not bad in and of themselves, but when traditions are followed blindly they can lead us down wrong paths. How many of my Jewish people (Orthodox and secular) have refused to hear about Jesus in the name of their tradition. It is for this reason that I offer this story – to challenge this dependence of tradition which I believe is leading the vast majority of my Jewish people astray. I don’t know from where this story originated, but it makes the point.
You have your Jewish traditions? So did the Jewish people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel before God sent the Assyrians to destroy them and scatter them throughout the earth (hence the Ten Lost Tribes, see 2 Kings 17:6-23). Don’t keep tradition for tradition’s sake. Read the Tanakh (Hebrew Scriptures) and, God willing, the B’rit Hadashah (New Testament) and find out what God really wanted. Want more information? Please contact us, and we would be glad to help. Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum. Posted in Jesus and Jews, Jewish Tradition, Jews and Jesus, Knowing God, This, That, The Other Thing | No Comments » No milk with meat. Really?June 3rd, 2010 Can someone explain this prohibition to me? According to the Talmud, it is forbidden to eat milk and meat at the same time. This ruling is deduced from the verse, “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. (Deuteronomy 14:21)” What the verse states is a far cry from what the rabbis have come up with: that it is against God’s will to eat milk and meat. It is more likely to have prevented the Israelites from practising the fertility rites of the Canaanites around them. Yet the rabbis have construed this meat and milk prohibition from the verse and have then said that to disobey it is to disobey Torah. Why? This ruling is even more difficult to comprehend when one considers that Abraham, (whom many religious Jews believe followed all the Talmudic laws,) provides a luncheon to God and his two angels in Genesis 18 and clearly disobeys this provision. “Then he [Abraham] took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them [God and his two angels]. (Genesis 18:8)” So Abraham gave to God and his angels some milk and meat together. Not only that, but the same verse goes on to tell us that Abraham, “stood by them under the tree while they ate.” So God ate the curds and milk along with the calf that had been prepared! How did the Jewish sages come up with this interpretation of Deuteronomy 14:21, how did they justify this interpretation, and how did they defend it in light of what we see in Genesis 18:8? I would love to get a coherent explanation. Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum. Posted in Jewish Tradition, Talmud vs. Tanakh, This, That, The Other Thing, Uncategorized | 3 Comments » Nothing but the truthMay 19th, 2010 I have a friend named Alan who is a Jewish believer in Yeshua (Jesus). After he became a believer some years ago, he went to Israel and lived for about a year with a Lebovich family. He told me he remembers one of the men in the family making this statement: “You don’t want to read the New Testament to much or you’ll start to believe it!” What an ironic statement. The gentlemen was warning Alan – warning him that the New Testament can lull him to a false truth just by reading it. What is more logical, however, than that reading the Gospel can lead to belief in Yeshua as Messiah because its claims are genuine and true? I would go one step further however. I suggest to you, dear reader, that the fact that the New Testament is true is what makes the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures or “Old Testament”) true. If Yeshua was not the Messiah as he and his disciples claimed; if he did not die on the cross for our sins and was not raised on the third day; if faith in him is not the way to eternal life, then the Tanakh is false and is not to be followed or believed in. The Tanakh promised a righteous servant who would be as one accursed, cut off from his people and killed – one who would be an asham (a guilt offering) for our sins though he was sinless, and through whom he would share his victory by giving eternal life (see Isaiah 53:1-12). Furthermore, the Tanakh promised a B’rit Hadashah – a New Covenant – that would not be like the covenant he made on Mount Sinai. This is a new covenant in which God’s laws would be written on our hearts and by which our sins would be remembered no more (see Jeremiah 31:31-34). Not only that, but this Messiah would come to his temple (Malachi 3:1). Yeshua fulfilled these promises and they could only be fulfilled by him. There are many other promises of Messiah that were fulfilled by him and him alone. And so God’s promises are fulfilled and we can see his faithfulness in keeping his word in Tanakh and the trustworthiness of the promises of Tanakh. Meanwhile the rabbis continue to deal with an Old Covenant that no longer is binding. How could it be? There is no temple in which to fulfill all the Levitical laws, a good third of the laws of Torah. There is no way given in Tanakh by which we might have atonement for our sins, since the temple has been destroyed. Instead, they have added and subtracted to the laws God gave Israel, something that they were warned not to do. Although there is much that is beautiful in rabbinic traditions, the truth of the matter is that they by and large make the truths of Scriptures into not-truths. They nullify God’s law and God’s promises in favour of their own traditions. This is why Yeshua said in the Gospel of John 5:45-47,
If the Tanakh is true, then the B’rit Hadashah is true. If the B’rit Hadashah is false, then so is the Tanakh. Read the whole of Scripture for yourself and you will see that it speaks the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And that is why if you read the B’rit Hadashah enough, you may very well come to believe it! Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum. Posted in Jesus and Jews, Jewish Tradition, Jews and Jesus, Messiah in the Tanach, Talmud vs. Tanakh, Uncategorized | No Comments » Rashi and a lying GodMay 11th, 2010 The title of this article might seem a bit incendiary. I certainly hope it grabbed your attention, but the purpose of this article is not to be incendiary, but to highlight a concern of mine. You see, I believe that God is a promise keeper, not a promise breaker. I also believe that if the highly acclaimed medieval scholar, Rabbi Sh’lomo ben Yitzhak (better known as Rashi) were alive today to be asked, he would say the same thing. Nevertheless, in the midst of his concerted efforts to shut down Christian attempts to make the Messiahship of Yeshua (Jesus) known in his day, Rashi creates an interpretation that would make God out to be a promise breaker to his covenant people Israel. The passage under consideration is Isaiah 53, a passage in the Tanakh (Hebrew Scriptures) that I think everyone should check out for themselves. Here it is:
If you look in the Talmud you will see that those ancient rabbis who wrote of these verses understood the passage to refer to the person of Messiah. They had no problem at the time with the picture of a suffering servant Messiah. In fact, there was an understanding in the 1st Century that there were two pictures of Messiah in the Tanakh: the victorious king Messiah (ben David), and the suffering servant Messiah (ben Yoseph). The similarity between this prophetic description and the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Yeshua are mind-boggling and hard to ignore without some wilfulness. It was enough of a problem in the mind of Rashi, that he came up with an interpretation that made hash of the passage’s grammar, and went against the traditions of the elders. Rashi interpreted the passage in such a way that the suffering servant became, not Messiah, but the nation of Israel. To this day, many rabbis and religious Jews will use this interpretation as a polemic against the claims that Messiah Yeshua fulfilled this prophecy. In Rashi’s day, this interpretation was by no means universal, however it became very popular. It appeared to be a very convenient response to the claims Christians made. There is one major flaw with this argument however. It makes God out to be a liar! God, speaking through his servant Moses to the nation of Israel in Deuteronomy 28, tells them that if they would be obedient he would bless the nation, but if they were disobedient he would curse them – bring calamity upon them and spit them out of the land he had given them: the Promised Land. Now God kept his promise and eventually exiled both the Northern and Southern kingdoms, in their turn, because of their disobedience. One might consider the fact that in rejecting the Messiah when he came, they were again punished – the temple destroyed in 70 AD and the people disbursed for 2,000 years. But in Isaiah 53:11 we see that the servant spoken of in the passage is a righteous one, yet “we esteemed him stricken by God and afflicted. (v. 4)” Here is a righteous servant being afflicted, wounded, crushed, killed. If this is the nation of Israel, as Rashi claimed, then God has broken his promise with it. He becomes a liar. God is not a liar however. God shows himself time and time again to be a promise keeper. Furthermore, when was Israel ever righteous as a nation? Throughout the Tanakh, we see the tendency of the people of Israel to turn away from the Lord, and they were punished accordingly. I’m not trying to knock Israel, but to point out that even Israel with the Law and the Prophets were not able to keep on the right track – to be righteous servants. How much less likely is it that the other nations of the world can do any better? The point of the Gospel – the reason the Messiah was afflicted and destroyed, and yet able to see the light of day (to be resurrected) – is that we are incapable of being righteous on our own, and more than Israel was. We need a saviour! And so God the promise keeper, in keeping with his promise through Isaiah, came in the form of man to be the suffering servant Messiah, Yeshua. Think about it, and tell us what you think! Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum. Posted in Jesus and Jews, Jewish Tradition, Jews and Jesus, Messiah in the Tanach | No Comments » |
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