I can live with this. Unfortunately, your position is not that of all dispensationalists.
whether rejecting a false, anti-semetic image of Jesus is the same as rejecting the real Messiah--suffice to say I don't think so.
I'm not going to let that slide, however. (It's relevant to this post, so let's talk about it.) The Scriptures are clear that even those who reject a false parody of what they think Christ was are still responsible. Ghandi rejected Christianity because of what Christians did - that no more justifies his decision than it does any Jew or Gentile.
So because "some" Dispys hold to a form of dual-covenantism, you're going to claim that the system as a whole teaches that? .... Or do you agree that we should not judge a theological system by its abuses?
This is no abuse. When I was investigating Dallas Theological Seminary, I sat in on a class where the professor was arguing that we are not now in the New Covenant, since that's reserved to a future dispensation. Nope, we are in some grand parenthesis. This is rank-and-file dispensationalism.
Well, I'm not a Dispy, so that's not too surpising. I just get accused of it a lot.
However, my position isn't that far from mainline Dispensationalism either--we mostly disagree on the timing of the Rapture and that whole Age of Law/Age of Grace thing (to which I say that salvation has always been by Grace, and Yeshua affirmed the whole Law). And speaking as a (sorta) outsider on this, I can say that most of what you amillennial/post-millennial types accuse Dispensationalism of has absolutely zero to do with the system itself, but rather with the parody of it presented on TV. The reason I bother to get into it on these threads on the Dispy side is that I hate seeing a position misrepresented, and then made mean-spirited fun of.
The Scriptures are clear that even those who reject a false parody of what they think Christ was are still responsible.
Not really. The question didn't even come up in Apostolic times. In the first century, Yeshua dared the Pharisees to convict Him of sin (i.e., breaking Torah), the Apostles kept Torah, the Jerusalem Church was famous for their zealousness for the Torah, and all of them were Jews living within the Jewish traditional norms.
Since then, we've told the Jews that Jesus came to do away with the Torah, that the Apostles condemned those who kept Torah, and that it was heresy to live as a Jew while professing the Jewish Messiah. As I've pointed out before, the Jesus we've presented the Jews with is precisely the one that the Torah commanded them not to follow (cf. Deu. 12:32-13:5).
Suppose a man appeared and claimed to be Jesus Christ. He does miracles and makes prophecies, but he also commands his followers to engage in sexual immorality and to kill those Christians who refuse to follow him. Now, if we refuse to follow this false christ, have we therefore rejected the true Christ? Or by refusing to follow a person who breaks the commands of Scripture and tells others to do the same, have we not shown our fidelity to the true Messiah?
Suppose that we never see this "Jesus," but his followers describe him as a man who teaches us not to keep the Scriptures' commands against sexual immorality and tells them to kill any Christians who do not follow him? Does that change the fact that we know that he is not the Messiah described in Scripture, and that we are right to disobey his followers, even to the point of death?
That's been the situation since about the second century, when the Church rejected its Jewish root to avoid persecution (the Jews being public enemies of the Roman Empire since the two failed rebellions in 70 and 135 AD). We've told them that Jesus broke the Torah--which means that we've blasphemed Him for a sinner. We've told them moreover that He did away with the Torah in the New Covenant, while they could see in their Scriptures (Jer. 31:33) that the New Covenant would confirm the Torah. We've told them that He came to destroy the Jews as a people, where they could see in the Scriptures that the Messiah would come to establish Israel in the land. We've even killed them in His Name.
If we misrepresent the Yeshua the Messiah to someone, present Him as evil to them, and kill them in His Name, then who should God hold responsible for that?
Now, did the Church get everything wrong? No! We rejected Marcionism and retained the Tanakh (the OT) as part of our sacred Scriptures. We taught correctly that Yeshua died for our sins and that salvation is by trusting Him (though we've had some periods when that teaching was almost lost). We've faithfully preserved the NT--and because of that preservation, many Jews today are starting to see Yeshua as one of them! Many of them are even beginning to read His words and teachings and are recognizing a true Rabbi, one who has interpreted the Torah perfectly. And because of that, many are accepting Him as the Messiah--and staying Jewish.
Therefore, I'm not going to run around saying that all Jews who rejected our caricature of Yeshua but who held in their hearts the trust that God would bring the Messiah and who trusted Him to forgive their sins and provide an atonement are "God-haters" and going to hell. I just refuse to pass judgment either way--because if they deserve to go to hell for rejecting this false Jesus, how much more those who blasphemed Yeshua's Name to them? I'll let God figure that one out.
In the meantime, my role in this world is to call the Church to corporate repentence for the sins of the past, to teach about Yeshua correctly from the Scriptures, and to be His light in the world. My refusal to do a hard-sell has nothing to do with a lack of a heart for evangelism--I just find that a hard-sell doesn't work, particularly with those who have, as Sha'ul testified, a real zeal for God, but whose zeal is without knowledge because they have been "blinded in part until the fulness of the Gentiles is come in." I find that by showing respect, being as one circumcised to the circumcised, and speaking to them in their terms that many more doors have opened up to share the Gospel than by trying to convince them that they're going to hell.
And that's why I'm being so hard on OP. I want the Jewish people to know their Messiah-King. I am trying to tear down a wall that we have built up by our lack of love, and OP is putting the stones right back in place by his unbridled tongue. Putting a wall, any wall, between a person and the Messiah is not an act of Christian love, but the ultimate act of hatred.
And I hope that he repents of that soon, for one who hates his neighbor (defined by Yeshua to even include ancestral enemies, as Jews were to Samaritans) has broken every commandment all at once, and I don't want to see my old friend fall under judgment, even temporal judgment.
If you want to have last word on this particular subject, go on ahead, but I suggest that we not hijack this thread with this particular sub-topic, so I'll let it go here.
I cannot speak for all rank-and-file dispys, but FWIW Buggman's comments in #78 regarding "all Israel" are basically what I was taught in the Pentecostal church. I believe it's also the position of the Assemblies of God, though I couldn't find a definitive statement on their website.