DEFENDING THE FAITH

DEFENDING OUR FAITH

                I recently watched a video of an Orthodox Jew interviewing Christians near the Wailing Wall. To each Christian he would say “You believe in Jesus right?” they would answer “yes.” And so the Orthodox Jew would go on to say, “So this prophet goes around working miracles and then he is crucified and supposedly rises from the dead and you call him God? Again the Christian would answer, ”Yes.” And so the Orthodox Jew would reaffirm it saying, “You call a man God? How can that be? God is eternal, He cannot be seen. He is everywhere. How can you call a mere man God? Did you not know that this is idolatry?

                I find it interesting that the Sanhedrin has been formed in Israel and that they have taken on the same accusations against Christians that they hurled at Jesus Christ when He was on earth 2000 years ago.

                I admire the Christians for taking a firm stand for Jesus and I don’t know if I would have had the presence of mind to build a better defense, being caught off guard like that, but if I could I would answer his questions with a question asking: for thousands of years you sacrificed animals for the forgiveness of sins and you are preparing to do so again, but you say that only God can forgive sins… have you not then made animals into gods?

                And what about Genesis 3:15 where God promised that the seed of a woman…not the seed of a man would come into the world and crush Satan’s head? That in itself requires a virgin birth and who else but God could impregnate a woman without the help of a man?

                Then one of your own prophets was baptizing people for repentance in the Jordon River and when he saw Jesus approaching, he said under divine inspiration: “Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world.” Was not Jesus then the true Sacrifice to which all of your animal sacrifices pointed? In truth only God can forgive sins. And just as an innocent lamb died in your place, so God came and died in our place, but God cannot die… so He came in the form of a mortal man in order to die a death that could actually take away the sins of the world.

                So are you going to accept God’s perfect sacrifice or are you going to go on trusting in animals to save you?

                The tables are turning and Jews are being emboldened by the almost universal acceptance of the Noahide laws to call Christianity “Idolatry” and before it is all over they will outlaw Christianity in Israel and Messianic Jews will either be exiled or killed for their faith and the Jews themselves will not understand until the antichrist steps up into their rebuilt temple and claims to be God, that their own words will come back to bite them.

                They will have been persecuting Christians for believing that Jesus is God in human flesh and yet now with one horrifying revelation they hear another man… the one in whom they have put their faith to make them the head and not the tail and to establish them as the promised people of God, will suddenly call Himself God and will demand their worship.

                What a shocking betrayal that will be and every Jew who is a real and faithful Jew will flee the city and every Messianic Jew that remains will flee the city, while other Jews, such as the Talmudic Jews and the Cabbalists will swallow the pill and stand with the antichrist for he will be the embodiment of all that they have believed and the fulfillment of their cabalistic, Talmudic hopes. After all, how could Hashem deceive them so?

                The next question they must ask is “If this man, the most powerful man ever seen on earth, the one who made all of their hopes possible… who placed them at the head of the New World Order and its global religion and built their temple … if this man is not the Messiah, then who could it be?

                And now they are in very deep trouble because all of the nations of the world are gathering against them in what will prove to be the final battle of the ages and if this man, this antichrist has betrayed them then who will defend them?

                This betrayal by the antichrist is said to take place in the middle of the 7 year week, or about 3 ½ years into the tribulation and I am not even going to attempt to say whether Christians have been taken from the earth by then or if we will be here to see these events take place. That is a different subject. All I know is what Romans 11 tells us for Paul said this:

                “For I do not want you, brethren to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your own estimation that a partial hardening (or blindness) has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and thus all Israel will be saved as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, HE will remove ungodliness from Jacob and This is My covenant with them when I take away their sins. From the standpoint of the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers: for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Romans 11:25-29.

                Many Christians today cannot accept these verses as being true for we are far less forgiving than God is. We find it impossible that God would forgive those who have rejected His only begotten Son and worshipped the antichrist in His place.

                But God has not imposed a partial hardening or blindness upon us and yet we betray Jesus every time we put ourselves and our own interests before God. We have the evidence that Jesus died for our sins and that He then called us to enter by faith into His death, to die to the kingdom of this world and then to be born again into Christ’s kingdom by the power of His resurrection… to live as new Creatures in a new kingdom… enabled by His indwelling Holy Spirit to carry on His work in the world and yet we, with this full knowledge, often choose to live by the world’s standards, to live by the flesh rather than by the Spirit… to concern ourselves with our own earthly gain rather than answering the call to discipleship.

                As Christians living today, how many of us drop our nets and follow Jesus? How many of us simply embrace a Christian philosophy without actually being transformed into His image? How many of us toss our doctrines around like animal sacrifices rather than to actually live by His Spirit. Like the Pharisees, we often love to argue every last little point of doctrine even as we plot Jesus’ death. (Not overtly of course, but with the way we choose to live our lives… the way we choose our priorities… our comfort… our pleasure.

                It is easy to point fingers at the Jews and to condemn them to eternal death, but we refuse to see the sad state to which Christianity has fallen even as many main stream and evangelical leaders go with hat in hand to Rome to lie up for the coming global religion of the beast. So who do you think deserves the grater judgment, those who have been temporarily blinded by God or those of us whose eyes are wide open even as we choose self over God?

                We are coming into crunch time in earth’s history when all of us, both Jews and Gentiles will be confronted with the awful truth about our faith and whether or not it has changed us. How have we treated the poor, the naked, those in prison, who are sick and dying without hope? In the end our love for God is demonstrated in how we treat each other.

                Like the Pharisees of old we pride ourselves sin keeping the commandments even as we love ourselves more than we love God and lavish gifts upon ourselves even as the poor go hungry in the streets. We have locked ourselves away in our plush sanctuaries even as we shut ourselves away from the needs of a dying world.

                Sometimes we need to just fall on our knees and cry out to God. Who deliver me from this body of death so that I might truly live by the Spirit of God and what will it look like exactly? We have no idea just how shallow our commitments are.

                Throughout Christianity there is what is called the 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of the people carry the financial load, the physical load and the work of discipleship in any give church while 80 percent are merely casual observers who come for the goodies, but never lift a finger to become disciples. They come for the loaves and fishes, but never enter into the truly born again spirit filled life that is the true Christian life.

                We claim that Jesus is God in human flesh … the very One through whom God created all that exists… the One who became the innocent sacrifice for our sins… the One who calls us to be His disciples. The first disciples dropped their nets and followed Him. Jesus became their everything and they turned the world upside down with their testimony. So even as we approach this resurrection time, we would do well to ask ourselves what it actually means to us that He has risen to become our High Priest and King. Is He truly the God of our lives, or is He merely a philosophical figurehead… a mascot for our doctrines… one who stands outside the door and knocks?

                Let this be the year that we give it all to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is not an idol, for God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. In Him dwelt all of the fullness of the godhead in bodily form. He was God’s answer to our hopelessly lost condition. He was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He is the Messiah for both Jews and Gentiles and He is soon to return in glory. Worship Him in all that you think and all that you do.

                I will apologize in advance for the pithiness of this article, but it applies to me just as much as to anybody else, as all of us need to evaluate the level of our devotion to Christ and our commitment to His transforming power. The issues forming in the world are bringing these things into sharp relief and I believe that God has designed the last days in this way in order to separate the wheat from the tares. The harvest time is both a time of glory and a time of threshing, because we need to be separated from our chaff.