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To: Buggman

Did you read the start of the thread? These evangelicals believe that Jews will be sent to Hell... This is why most Israelis (and most Jews) are very suspicious of them... It's not ahavat Israel you see here!

Some say that the only real Jews are the ones that converted to Christianity... (Met some...)

Some do discover the Tanakh, but very few... Generally they love to say where we Jews do not understand our own scriptures...

The way to get respect is to respect others... I haven't seen a respect for Judaism and its millenia-old traditions in most evangelists...


73 posted on 11/24/2004 9:15:48 AM PST by Pitiricus
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To: Pitiricus
I understand completely why that sticks in your craw (and I have a similar reaction to Roman Catholics sometimes, so I really do sympathize), but let's be fair here: The Evangelicals are not singling out Jews and saying, "All Jews are going to hell."

What we believe, because Yeshua Himself said it, is that the Messiah is the only way to God. Anyone, Jew or Gentile, who thinks that in and of themselves they are righteous enough to stand before the Lord's judgment is going to be sadly mistaken. God doesn't change; He didn't become a big softie sometime between Mt. Sinai and now. Since no one does (or can) keep Torah perfectly, He provided for substitutionary sacrifice to atone for sin. As Christians, we believe that the Messiah was the perfect sacrifice whose blood, unlike those of lambs and goats, atones for our sins for all time.

Ultimately, we believe that only by trusting in the perfect Lamb of God and the atonement He achieved on the Cross can we stand before the Lord in the day of judgment.

That's exclusive, yes, but it's not anti-Jew.

Having said that, I do not believe what many Christians have falsely taught for most of the last era, that Jews must be Gentilized to become believers in Yeshua. On the contrary, Yeshua Himself was a Torah-keeping Jew and affirmed that the Torah and the Prophets would never pass away. So did Paul (not that you'd know it the way his writings are interpreted) and the Twelve. What the early Church did was to allow Gentiles to be a part of their community and be believers in Yeshua as Messiah without forcing them to convert to Judaism, keep kosher, etc. About the second century, this got twisted around to mean that Christians mustn't be Jewish in their culture, in keeping the Torah, and so on. This got worse after the fourth century, when so many pagans were forced into the Church by the State and brought their own traditions with them (which is where we got Christmas and Easter instead of Sukkot and Passover).

What we've seen in the last couple of centuries, in spurts and starts, is a slow awakening to the role of Israel in God's plans. Indeed, without that awareness and growing respect for the Jewish people, Israel would not have been reborn, Holocaust or no, and many Christians are more enthusiastic supporters of the state of Israel in the midst of her enemies than many Jews.

I myself keep Torah (including the kosher) simply because my Lord did. I worship in a congrgation of Messianic Jews and Gentiles who do the same. I consider it one of the great tragedies of the Church that we stopped keeping the Jewish feastdays in favor of co-opting pagan ones. When I can find them, I enjoy reading rabbinical works--not because I always agree with them (any more than I always agree with my Christian brothers' commentaries), but because they do have some marvelous insights into the Tanakh that come out of speaking the language and living the culture and keeping their traditions.

I would however argue that the reflexive hostility towards all things Christian does color the writings of the rabbis, and that they are not always correct. I would also argue that it's wrong to say automatically treat Christians as interlopers who "hijacked" aspects of Judaism from the outside, since the earliest Christians who wrote the New Testament were Jews, including lay teachers and ordained rabbis, largely from the Pharisee party. I think they knew their own culture and language at least as well as any Jew knows it today, and they continued worshipping at the Temple and synogogues (at least in cities where they weren't put out) for most of the first century.

None of this is meant to "win" a conversion here. I just want to take down some of the wall of hostility between our two faiths and keep the conversations and debates cordial.

82 posted on 11/24/2004 10:03:36 AM PST by Buggman (Your failure to be informed does not make me a kook.)
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