Posted on 12/21/2008 5:22:47 PM PST by ROTB
Edited on 12/21/2008 9:23:40 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Merry Christmas!
Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago. In the days of the Kingdom of Israel, when David and Solomon reigned, a king who was named by God would have oil poured over their heads prior to ruling. This is called "Anointing". The Hebrew form of this word is Mashiach which is anglo-ized into "Messiah".
"Jesus" is the Greek form of "Je-ho-shua" which means "Savior of God".
Thus "Jesus Christ" means "Anointed Savior of God".
The whole premise of Judaism, is that God gave the Law, the Torah, to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai about 3000 years ago as a model of justice and for forgiveness of sins, and that a Messiah has been promised by God, and Jewish people wait for the fulfillment of this promise.
We know that the Bible, is the Word of God, because only it says what happens, thousands of years before it happens. To see the evidence for this, please visit http://www.direct.ca/trinity/y3nf.html. This is not Gematria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria), or Kabbalah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah). It is hard numbers, verifiable evidence for God being the author of the Tanakh. People and Devils can't do this. Only God can. He even boasts that only he can, and I have only seen this kind of evidence in the Bible. If Islam had this kind of evidence, the Muslims would shout it from the rooftops.
So what does the Word of God say about us? It says that we sin. All of the following verses are from the a Jewish Tanakh ...
And the Lord smelled the pleasing odor; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing, as I have done. Genesis 8:21 Soncino Tanakh
If they sin against you, for there is no man who does not sin, and you are angry with them, and deliver them over before their enemies, and they carry them away captives to a land far or near; II Chronicles 6:36 Soncino Tanakh
If they sin against you, for there is no man who does not sin, and you are angry with them, and deliver them to the enemy, so that they carry them away captive to the land of the enemy, far or near; 1 Kings 8:21 Soncino Tanakh
The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any who understand, and seek God. They have all gone astray, they have all become corrupted; there is none that does good, no, not one. Psalms 14:2-3 Soncino Tanakh
God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any who understand, who seek God. They have all fallen away; they have all become filthy; there is no one who does good, not even one. Psalms 53:3-4 Soncino Tanakh
If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, that you may be feared. Psalms 130:3 Soncino Tanakh
Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin? Proverbs 20:9 Soncino Tanakh
You struck down him who rejoiced and worked righteousness, who remembered you in your ways; behold, you are angry; for we have sinned; in those ways we have been always; how then shall we be saved? But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteous actions are as filthy rags; and we all fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. And there is none who calls upon your name, who stirs up himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have consumed us, because of our iniquities. Isaiah 64:4-6 Soncino Tanakh
For there is not a just man upon earth, that does good, and does not sin. Ecclesiastes 7:20 Soncino Tanakh
Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Ecclesiastes 8:11 Soncino Tanakh
This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event to all; also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. Ecclesiastes 9:3 Soncino Tanakh
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9 Soncino Tanakh
The good man has perished from the earth; and there is no one upright among men; they all lie in wait for blood; each man hunts his brother with a net. The hands are upon that which is evil, the prince asks, and the judge asks for payment; and the great man utters the evil desire of his soul; thus they weave the web. Soncino Tanakh Micah 7:2-3
How does God forgive sins? He is very clear ...
For the life of the flesh [is] in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it [is] the blood [that] maketh an atonement for the soul. Leviticus 17:11
Blood must be shed for forgiveness of sin. That's God talking in the above excerpt. Not a Rabbi, not a Christian, and certainly not me.
By now, you should be afraid of death. Nobody is without sin, and nobody is exempted from needing blood for atonement of their souls. Rabbis aren't God, so you should not believe them.
The Tanakh of Judaism gives over 300 hints at what the coming of the messiah would involve and entail. You can read them for yourself at http://messiahrevealed.org/category-index.html.
One of the most compelling is this verse from Isaiah ...
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:6 Soncino Tanakh
Is not that comforting? Despite the fact we are sinners, God has laid our sins, on this person!
No where in the Tanakh does it say the Messiah can't come twice, or The Messiah must accomplish all in one visit. Unlike your Rabbi, I have gone through the Tanakh at least four times, and have yet to find it.
Where are we?
1)God wrote the Bible 2)The Bible says we are sinners 3)Blood must make atonement for our sins
Let's go back to Isaiah 53 again ...
the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:6
Who is this person? It is the Messiah. Jesus Christ.
Christianity is nothing more than the fulfillment of Judaism's promise of a Messiah. What's that Cousin Philip? Yes, right on schedule, per http://www.direct.ca/trinity/y3nf.html as you have already read. Also the 300+ hints you visited at http://messiahrevealed.org/category-index.html all have fulfillments.
Jesus Christ, also known as Jehoshua Ha Mashiach among Israeli Christians, is the Messiah and HaShem, a.k.a. God.
Jehoshua Ha Mashiach, was executed on a cross in 32 A.D. for the crimes of ...
1)claiming to be God and Messiah
Pretty severe eh? When you believe in Jesus Christ, full blood payment per Leviticus 17:11 is applied to your account. God takes your sins per Isaiah 53:11, and you get the righteousness of God per Romans 3:23. From then on, you get to know God, just like in the good old days when Israel knew God.
If you have any objections or questions, please don't hesitate to ask me. I have never encountered a question that did not have a satisfactory or better answer in 9 years of being a Christian. Never, not once.
This is worth 100 hours of your life. Please, I'm begging you all. May all of you live to 120 years! But frankly, none of you know if you have another decade, year, month, week, or day more on this earth. Anything can happen, and eternal hellfire is a long, long, long time.
After 100 billion years, your punishment for your sins, will have just begun. This question of whether Jesus Christ is Messiah and God, is worth looking into.
God wants to know you, love you, forgive you, and strengthen you to stand boldly against evil for the name of Jehoshua Ha Mashiach, a.k.a. Jesus Christ.
Don't put this off.
Your loving cousin,
Well quoth.
Okay, then please show me where Paul says that the Torah is a temporary schoolmaster for the messiah. I am unaware of any such statement by Paul, but I'd be pleased to hear what you have to say.
What Paul and the rest of the Church always held from the time of Jesus until today was and is that Jesus was precisely the Torah. They quite literally equal each other. JESUS = TORAH. Using simple substitution of equal terms, for Christians you're suggesting that "Paul taught that Jesus was a temporary schoolmaster for Jesus," which is obviously absurd.
If you don't understand that much, you obviously misunderstand fundamentally Christian basic doctrine. I repeat that you should first comprehend what traditional Christians actually believe before you start opining on the subject.
I am unaware of any chr*stian teaching that J*sus=Torah. I do know that chr*stians believe that J*sus=the Logos.
Other than this, I'm sorry I can't satisfy you.
I was musing over our exchange yesterday, and I recalled a couple of images that illustrate the point of Torah = Jesus. Jesus is the "Word made flesh." For us traditional Christians, Jesus is quite literally "flesh" under the signs of the bread and wine of the Eucharist. JESUS = TORAH = EUCHARIST.
Anyway, one is the Yiddish folk story about the "golem", which was a little clay figure of a man that a rabbi made and whom he animated by placing a bit of a Torah into its mouth. This is precisely the Christian point of Jesus being the Word and the Word being our spiritual sustenance. The other is a scene from a Flannery O'Connor story where a Christian starts to tear pages from a Bible and begins eating them.
As we Christians celebrate Christmas, I reflect upon the fact that the Word was at birth laid in a manager and that the animals came and breathed upon Him. I love God for painting that beautiful picture of GOD AS FOOD FOR US ANIMALS and how we must literally eat the Word so that our mortal souls (in original sin, like that of the animals) may become immortal.
A very Merry Christmas to all.
My vanity was meant as a response to another thread. The purpose, whether or not accomplished, was to show that the differences between Judaism and chr*stianity are far more profound than a mere disagreement over whether or not the Messiah has come. The understanding of what the Messiah is, and indeed the whole worldview, profoundly different. Most sincere and philo-Semitic chr*stians (and I used to be one, so I speak with full respect) Think that merely by saying their prayers in Hebrew or adding a Jewish ritual or holiday here or there they have put humpty-dumpty back together. But the only thing the two religions have in common are a set of Scriptures relating history and prophecy. The spiritual worldviews are completely at odds (chr*stianity's coming from the "new testament" and Judaism's from the Oral Torah and esoteric teachings. The ancient Israelites were not "pre-incarnation chr*stians." Chr*stians cannot accept this, but I wish to at least get the message out there.
The whole point of whether or not J*sus is the Torah is missing one very important point--is it true. This may or may not be the chr*stian teaching, but that does not make it true. Chr*stians (especially the less Biblically inclined, liturgical variety) simply don't seem to be able to fathom the concept of a book that on some level literally contains the entire creation. I suppose it sounds too "protestant."
Chag sameach.
I wouldn't presume to discuss Jewish beliefs, as I said above, but I would agree that it would only stand to reason that the two religions and the larger cultures that derive from them (after all, "culture" is just a gross expression of "cult") are profoundly at odds with each other. One says that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Word of God made Flesh; that Jesus is a walking, talking "Torah with ears" who is comes to us and abides with us in the written Word and and literal human flesh and blood under the signs of bread and wine in the Eucharist. The other rejects Jesus of Nazareth as a deceiver and an idolator, and with Maimonides calls His worshippers idolators (something the Rambam wouldn't say about Islam and Muslims, by the way).
The two could not be more fundamentally at odds with each other.
And I say that with all respect to you and your fellow religionists. After all, St. Paul says exactly the same thing. If what we believe about Jesus being the Word of God - a Torah with ears - is wrong, then we are the pitiful of all men. Our belief in Christ is indeed a stumbling block for the rationalist Greek and a terrible scandal for the pious Jew (and Muslim, which is the main point of commonality between those two great systems), as St. Paul put it. And yet we believe in Christ, the Word of God, crucified.
The two really couldn't be more at odds, indeed that is true. "Judeo-Christianity" is obviously an oxymoron. And I point out that rather obvious (but very unpopular) truth with all love and respect to my Jewish friends and neighbors.
We worship the Torah nailed to the Tree of Good and Evil.
If we're wrong about Jesus, then He indeed was a sorcerer and deceiver, and we are the most pitiful of all men.
So we agree that we profoundly disagree.
So cheers. And I mean that.
It's interesting that you used to be a Protestant, I take it a Calvinist, before your conversion to Judaism. I say that because your understanding of Christianity seems to miss the implications of God Made Flesh in the Eucharist. This is the center of traditional Christianity, and I think it is the cause of no little confusion on your part. You see the Bible as a Book. Maybe a very special book, but nevertheless, a book. We see the Bible as a Man. The Word of God is alive, very literally. You seem to think that Christianity is all about drawing analogies and making things less tangibly real. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Christianity of the Gospels and of the Church Fathers is all about a Man made of flesh and blood Who was and is with us in ways that we can touch and feel in the pages of the Book and in the bread and wine of the Sacrament.
We traditional Christians are all about making abstractions tangible, not the other way around.
As the Torah contains within its letters all the mysteries of the universe, it's hardly a mere book in the conventional sense. But it does not relate myths (as many Catholics believe) but real historical episodes about real people (though more for moral instruction than as a mere record of history).
I was Catholic for six years.
Of course that's true. The Torah can be seen as a sort of genetic code of Jesus, Who Himself contains all of creation. As St. Paul tells us, the entire universe was created by, through and for Him. It only stand to reason that every bit of it is imbued with His Glory.
Blessed are you when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, falsely, for My sake.
I am so sorry for your loss.
We can go on playing "ping pong" forever, but the point is that the assumptions of chr*stianity are not true merely because they are the assumptions of chr*stianity. If the Torah does not authorize the "new testament" then it has no standing, however poetic its theology.
Be well.
The same can be said for your religion, and indeed of all religions, could it not? Your faith affects the truth of your religion as much as my faith affects the truth of mine. Which is to say, not at all.
If the Torah does not authorize the "new testament" then it has no standing, however poetic its theology.
You offer a circular argument here. You assert that the Torah must "authorize" the New Testament, implicitly (I suppose) because for you it would have to precede the NT. But as I've pointed out many times above, this simply isn't the case. That's because Jesus, as the Eternal Word of God, precedes the Torah, which in a sense was written to embody Him in tangible form here on Earth.
Therefore, the matter is quite to the contrary. Jesus is the Word of God and He therefore precedes and encompasses the Torah. It, along with the rest of the creation, was written by, through, and for Him and Him alone.
To the point: it is the Torah that derives any authority it might have from Jesus of Nazareth, and not the other way around.
Of course, one must already be a chr*stian in order to believe this.
Just as one must already be a Jew (or a Noachide) to believe that the Torah is preeminent.
You really insist on continuing this argument forever? That's your prerogative.
The Torah was given on Mt. Sinai and was recognized as the Word of G-d before chr*stianity ever existed. The claims of chr*stianity, and of any other alleged "higher" revelation, must be measured against the criteria (if any) set by previously recognized revelation. It can't come simply out of the air, however "poetic" it seems.
I have long observed that Catholics invariably attempt to prove the falsity of Protestantism by simply pointing out that Catholicism is older. If you're going to pull the chronological argument out with the Prots, it's inconsistent to suddenly shelve it with regard to Judaism. And if the chronological argument is fallacious when offered by Judaism, then Catholics are going to have to stop invoking it in their argument with Protesants.
Chodesh tov.
Again, you must have faith to believe this. Faith in the Torah is as much a leap of faith as is faith in Christ. Do you see this point?
The claims of chr*stianity, and of any other alleged "higher" revelation, must be measured against the criteria (if any) set by previously recognized revelation.
Christ is not a "higher" revelation. It is in fact precisely the same revelation, since Jesus = Torah. Do you see this point?
It can't come simply out of the air, however "poetic" it seems.
Faith in Torah is as ethereal as faith in Christ. The both are based purely on faith in a devine revelation. Neither can be either proved or disproved using deduction. They both arise out of thin air, as it were. Do you see this point?
I have long observed that Catholics invariably attempt to prove the falsity of Protestantism by simply pointing out that Catholicism is older.
You are again betraying your ignorance of traditional Christianity. Catholicism makes no such claim. "We are older, therefore we are right?" St. Thomas Aquinas would have sent you to the back of the class for that non sequitur.
One question: why do you put a "*" in place of the "i" in the word "christianity"?
Hello Everyone.
This is the author of the “Calling All Christians: Will Finally Witness to Jewish Family After 9 years” vanity.
I have responded to the Noachide claims of “Zionist Conspirator” at the following posting.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2152848/posts?page=35#35
Have a great day,
- ROTB
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