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When we speak about Jews, we mean those people that are descended from ancient Israel. While Gentiles simply means ‘the nations. The Hebrew/Yiddish word ‘Goyim or Goy,’ the people of the nations.
The reason firstly why the two people were separated from each other was because God desired to create a ‘holy/separate people,’ who were called to be holy and walk in his ways. In contrast, the nations/goyim worship pagan gods, idols made of wood and stone. Israel was forbidden by the Lord to follow these strange pagan deities, due to the corrupting influence that they had upon their followers – God not only wanted a holy nation, but he also desired that his ‘chosen people,’ would serve him and be a light to the Gentiles, so that they too could become the children of God.
Max and Roni take some what differing approaches when it comes to the question of the outworking of redemption and reconciliation that Yeshua made when he came and made peace between Jews and Gentiles through his saving power.
Max gives a very articulate explanation of his interpretation to answering the question at hand of how Gentile believers may approach living according to the Torah in the light of their New Covenant faith.
Max, please explain to the listeners your stand on what Yeshua particularly accomplished at his first advent, and how this effects Gentile believer in particular?
Roni, would you kindly give your response to what I have just said, and explain how your interpretation differs from that mine?
“Let us agree to disagree!” On the essentials for us to work together there needs to be considerable accord, i.e., The divinity of Yeshua; his atoning sacrifice; the nature and person of God; the nature of humankind and our fallenness; and the universal need for redemption, through the once only atoning sacrifice of Yeshua on the cursed tree; that there is salvation only through Yeshua; etc.
What can be done to create greater harmony and accord? What aids that? What hinders that?
And let it unfold as we do it!
Roni found this article published by Jews for Jesus that expresses an approach to understanding the dynamic of Jewish and Gentile approaches to faith and practice.He substantially concurs with Stephanie Hamman’s interpretation of this weighty subject.
Should Gentile Christians Keep Torah?
When Gentiles started following Jesus, his earliest followers had a big question to discern.
by Stephanie Hamman | September 14, 2020
The God of All Peoples
When God created human beings, the original language tells us He made them as His image, male and female. Adam and Eve were the parents of all humanity—Jewish and Gentile. The book of Genesis tells us that God maintained an intimate relationship with them, but our first ancestors severed that connection by their sin. It was then that God promised He would send a Messiah through one of their descendants who would defeat the enemy and reconcile humanity with their Creator (Genesis 3:15; Numbers 24:7; Isaiah 11:10).
The first step in reconciling the nations to Himself was setting apart a people for His name—the Jewish nation. This was accomplished when He selected Abraham and gave him a special blessing, saying, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Out of this lineage, the Messiah was promised to come into the world. We believe and know that Yeshua (Jesus) is that Messiah.
The Jewish Messiah is for all people, and those who follow Him are united in one faith in the God of Israel.
The teachings of Jesus were so compelling that they quickly spread throughout the world. It didn’t take long before there were far more Gentile followers of Jesus than Jewish ones. This should have been anticipated, as the Hebrew Scriptures teach that when the Messiah comes, the Gentiles will seek Him, too.
The Jewish Messiah is for all people, and those who follow Him are united in one faith in the God of Israel. Today, there continue to be more Gentile followers of Jesus than there are Jewish followers, which makes sense since the global Jewish population is only about 0.19% of the human race.1 But because of Jesus, people in remote corners of the world, as well as those in the highest halls of learning, know something about the Jewish people and our Scriptures.
Does the Bible Teach That All Christians Should Keep the Law of Moses?
Many Christians find value in understanding the Jewish context of their faith, and rightly so. The deeper they study, the more aware they become of how much Christianity has evolved. In an effort to reconcile this, many begin to wonder if they should be keeping the Torah (law of Moses). This is not just a recent issue; it’s one that came up even in the book of Acts.
Although the destiny for the inclusion of all nations in the worship of the God of Israel is written in the Hebrew Scriptures, it still took the Jewish believers like Peter, James, and Paul by surprise when so many Gentiles accepted Yeshua’s message. After all, “Christianity” at that time was fully Jewish. Within the first 20 years after Yeshua’s resurrection, they met together to discuss the phenomenon they were witnessing and to decide whether or not Gentile followers of the Jewish Messiah needed to become Jewish themselves.
The issue was that some Jewish believers were telling Gentile believers that they needed to convert to Judaism (i.e., get circumcised and keep the Torah) in order to truly be saved. Paul and Barnabas brought the issue to the elders and apostles in Jerusalem. After even more discussion, Peter spoke up. He, of course, had been the first to witness a Gentile coming to faith in the city of Yafo when he met Cornelius. During that encounter, God had taught him not to regard any other human being as “unclean” (Acts 10:28).
After Peter related his experience, James made the final call. He clearly delineated that the Torah was given to the Jewish people, and as of yet, no one had been able to follow it perfectly. Therefore, he decided they should not place the same burden on the Gentiles, but call them to the standard of morality laid out in the Torah (Acts 15:19–21). Subsequently, four main requirements were sent in a letter to Gentile believers across the known world: to abstain from (1) anything connected to idolatry, (2) sexual immorality, (3) eating an animal that had been strangled, and (4) blood (Acts 15:29). All ties to paganism were severed. If Gentile believers truly followed these rules, they could not participate in any pagan temple cults or rituals of that time. Such behavior would definitively set them apart.
The Jerusalem Council was concerned that Gentile Christians would observe God’s standard of morality.
Although this decision by the apostles was documented in the New Testament writings, some Gentiles still believe they must take on Jewish ritual obligations to follow Jesus. Others believe all of it is rendered obsolete and even Jewish people should abandon their holy calling. The apostles did not support either of these stances.
The New Testament clearly teaches that Gentile Christians are under no obligation to observe Jewish ritual law.
The Jerusalem Council was primarily concerned that Gentile Christians would observe God’s standards of morality; the only restrictions placed on Gentile Christians were likely intended to facilitate fellowship between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus in meal settings. Gentiles should not try to take on the role or identity of Jewish people, and vice versa. Jews and Gentiles remain distinct (1 Corinthians 7:18–20; Acts 15; Acts 21:25), but both peoples come into equal standing before God as we use our distinct roles to bring others into relationship with Him (2 Corinthians 5:18–20).
The Gentile Role
Even so, Paul encouraged the Gentile believers in Ephesus to take their connection to the Jewish people seriously.
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Messiah, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Messiah Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Messiah. (Ephesians 2:11–13) (bolding is author’s)
When you accept Jesus as your Saviour, you’re brought into the commonwealth of Israel, and it is through this inclusion that the nations have hope. God doesn’t require you to become Jewish to follow Him, and we cannot support any efforts by Gentile believers to convert to any type of Judaism. However, completely ignoring the Torah or not learning about the appointed times that God gave to Israel would be like relocating to another country, yet never taking the time to learn the language or the culture. If Christians want to voluntarily celebrate Jewish holidays and make room for Shabbat in their lives, there is much value to be found in that—in the world to come, all the nations will worship the God of Israel in Jerusalem and observe His feasts (Zechariah 14:16-19).
Jewish Gentile Couples
If a Gentile is married to a Jewish person, whether they follow Jesus or not, their calling as an individual may be different than their calling as a part of a Jewish family. Take Ruth for instance: although not Jewish herself, she was married to a Jewish man. Even after he died, she still recognized that her calling as part of his Jewish family was to support her mother-in-law. Ruth was always called a “Moabite,” but she has a very special place in Jewish history as the great-grandmother of King David.
Why the World Needs Gentiles
Your calling as a Gentile is every bit as vital and needed as the calling of a Jewish person. Paul writes that there is a special purpose in extending salvation to the Gentiles: “Through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean!” (Romans 11:11–12).
Your calling as a Gentile is every bit as vital and needed as the calling of a Jewish person.
This is demonstrated so well when Jeremy Gimpel, a Jewish educator and podcaster, expressed his feelings over watching a Christian minister recite the Shema (the creed of the Jewish faith taken from Deuteronomy 6) at President Obama’s inauguration.
I am not usually jealous of anyone or anything, but this was too much. Israel as a country models itself after America in almost every way possible, every way except for one. Israel would never start off a national ceremony in prayer. That would be too Jewish. And now a Christian Pastor named Rick Warren is calling out to the world, “Hear O Israel….” The man was calling out to the Jewish people and I don’t think he even knew it.2
There are some people who discover their Jewish heritage later in life, and may feel that they need to reconsider how they should live out their identity in Messiah in light of that. If you know for certain that you have Jewish heritage, how you choose to embrace and practice that is between you and God. But, if you identify as a Jew when you are not, the role you’re called to as a Gentile is ineffective. Only when we come together in our distinct roles does the true miracle take place (Galatians 3:28–29). What was once separated has been linked in a beautiful unity, and our shared purpose is to reconcile the rest of humanity with our Creator.
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Everywhere there appears to be a state of confusion. Truth mixed with falsehood appears as the new normal. Nothing appears as it is –– who can we believe and trust?
The Moral Maze…
The decade of the 1960s witnessed profound change in the established world order. The post-WWII global configuration was essentially bi-polar, with the United States-led West aligned against the Soviet-dominated East. In the 1960s, this split along ideological and economic lines divided the world into five centers of power: the Soviet Union and its satellites; Communist China and Southeast Asia; Europe and the United States; Africa; and Latin America. This article will look briefly at each of these regions and the general United States foreign policy strategy for each. The emphasis will be on Latin America, in particular Bolivia, and events such as Cuban-instigated insurgencies, affecting U.S. engagement in the southern hemisphere. In Latin America, Cuban-sponsored revolutionary fervor was a major factor in determining the U.S. strategy.
The Allied powers determined at the end of World War II the Security Council’s permanent membership in the newly formed United Nations (Chiang K’ai Shek’s Nationalist China, not Communist China, held a permanent seat). The power blocs of the Fifties began to erode in the Sixties. It was the Soviet Union that faced off against the West in the Cold War, and instigated such provocations as the erection of the Berlin Wall.1
Durer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
So, who can we trust?
It is a lot like being trapped in a maze –– how do we find the centre and once we have found it –– how do we get out? We all feel overwhelmed and trapped!
When we speak about the ‘moral maze,’ we mean our attempting to discover the correct way to navigate our way through life and its multitude of perplexities.
At the heart of the matter is the question of our moral and ethical response to life and the multitude of decisions that we face daily.
From the perspective of having a living faith, where are we to look to for help to determine how we should choose to respond to any given situation that presents itself to us? Let us remind ourselves that the Scriptures teach us that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the ‘world, the flesh, and the devil.’ There are powers and principalities of darkness seeking to control and influence our every decision.
Arm yourself! With a knife, gun, or bomb? NO! While I am not a pacifist, I do believe that it is important to defend ourselves, our families, communities, and and countries, notwithstanding, our weapons of warfare are not these things, but spiritual, the mighty pulling down of strongholds! In the power and mighty name of Yeshua our Messiah and Lord we can be victorious!
But we ask –– how does this apply and work out in the here and know? Not pie-in-the-sky-when-you die! Heaven on earth now!
Let’s be real and not find ourselves being delusional, with our living in the Moral Maze!
Let our yes, be YES, and our no, be a definitive NO! In Afrikaans there is an expression that says,
"Jy kan nie op twee stoele gelyk sit nie!"
‘You can’t sit on two stools at the same time.’
For in attempting to do so you will find yourself falling between the two and landing on your rear end on the floor.
Ouch!…
Similarly, as a believer, we can’t falter between two options – make up your mind? Whose side are you on? God or humankinds? Let’s face up to reality now!
So what’s at the heart of the matter? We discover that there are many different facets to the moral maze.
1/ For starters, God is no longer on the throne –– ‘God is dead, and humankind is alive,’ or at least they think so!
“God is dead” (German: Gott ist tot; also known as the death of God) is a statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s first use of this statement is his 1882 The Gay Science, where it appears three times. The phrase also appears in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The meaning of this statement is that since, as Nietzsche says, “the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”, everything that was “built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it”, including “the whole […] Europeanmorality“, is bound to “collapse”.[1]
Other philosophers had previously discussed the concept, including Philipp Mainländer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Proponents of the strongest form of the Death of God theology have used the phrase in a literal sense, meaning that the Christian God who had existed at one point has ceased to exist.
Death of God theology
Although theologians since Nietzsche had occasionally used the phrase “God is dead” to reflect increasing unbelief in God, the concept rose to prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, subsiding in the early 1970s.[23] The German-born theologian Paul Tillich, for instance, was influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, especially his phrase “God is dead.”[24]
For the most part Altizer prefers mystical to ethical language in solving the problem of the death of God, or, as he puts it, in mapping out the way from the profane to the sacred. This combination of Kierkegaard and Eliade makes a rather rough reading, but his position at the end is a relatively simple one. Here is an important summary statement of his views: If theology must now accept a dialectical vocation, it must learn the full meaning of Yes-saying and No-saying; it must sense the possibility of a Yes which can become a No, and of a No which can become a Yes; in short, it must look forward to a dialecticalcoincidentia oppositorum [i.e., a unity of the opposites]. Let theology rejoice that faith is once again a “scandal,” and not simply a moral scandal, an offense to man’s pride and righteousness, but, far more deeply, an ontological scandal; for eschatological faith is directed against the deepest reality of what we know as history and the cosmos. Through Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence we can sense the ecstatic liberation that can be occasioned by the collapse of the transcendence of Being, by the death of God […] and, from Nietzsche’s portrait of Jesus, theology must learn of the power of an eschatological faith that can liberate the believer from what to the contemporary sensibility is the inescapable reality of history. But liberation must finally be effected by affirmation.[25]
It is not enough that God is dead, for the vast majority of humankind in the West, he does not exist at all!
This has serious consequences, because the moral and ethical choices that we make are therefore rather arbitrary, with no moral absolutes. You can do what you please, whenever you want, and it really doesn’t matter how you behave.
To illustrate this, I must relate a recent brief and very unpleasant encounter that I had with someone, when I asked them not to park across an access gate – A tirade of abuse was hurled at me.
Did I deserve it? Was the response proportionate to the request I had made? I was direct in my request, but not impolite.
So, you tell me, is this normal behaviour that you would expect from someone who was a stranger?
Perhaps this woman was having a bad day, or maybe this is her normal default setting when things don’t go her way?
It is not surprising that relationships breakdown, that wars happen between people and different nations.
2/ Situational Ethics What is true for you does not therefore need to be true for me! Truth is relative, because there are no longer any moral absolutes! Believe whatever you like! Stealing is OK, what you must look out for is that you don’t get caught. Lying is also OK, just don’t get found out. And down the slippery slope we go…
Oops!
How does this modern world impact upon religion in general, and Messianic –– Yeshua/Jesus believing faith in particular? This is an important question to attempt to answer to help us find our way through the moral maze.
1/ Folk on the whole are confronted with a feeling of alienation and hopelessness as they are confronted with the present pressing realities and growing sense of foreboding. People used to like to sing, ‘Jesus is the answer for the world today!’ But the sceptic and disillusioned say, ‘really, where is the answers that he promised to make this world a better place?’ We are confronted with huge pressing problems, Covid, avian flue, the economic down turn, the Russian –– Ukraine war, the spiralling cost of energy, food, plus now food shortages –– Unpredictable weather caused through flooding, coupled with drought. And the list goes on…
Albert Durer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Is there any good news?
2/ However, when optimism and hope are in short supply, that is when true faith can be born in our lives!
Humankind’s extremity is God’s opportunity!
In our attempt to navigate our way through the moral maze we are confronted with having to make choices, particularly moral and ethical ones can bedifficult for us to make.
Sometimes the distinctions between them are unclear. Society constantly presents us with choices between what the world chooses and what we know as Messianic believers to be right. As follower of Yeshua in a secular world, we often worry about making unpopular choices. I think it’s a case of not wanting to be seen as different to others. But there will be occasions when we have to make a stand, maybe on ethical issues, yet when we do, we are sometimes ignored or even classed as even being fanatical. In all of this though we have a choice. Our choices can be God’s choices for us. We can choose not to participate in activities that we know to be detrimental to society. If we were to choose good over evil in each situation, how would our world change? And so that brings us to Jesus and the by three very human temptations. “You must be hungry,” Satan said to him. “Use your power to turn these stones into bread. Throw yourself down from this temple. You will not be harmed. Fall down and worship me and everything you see shall be yours.” Yeshua is confronted by three temptations that come to all of us. Food, religion and politics. What could be the harm of any of them? They are all ways for Yeshua to become an influence, to become known to the people. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
The problem with such temptations is that they all have a powerful meaning in our lives, so they can all be abused. With his strong connection to humankind, Yeshua resists the temptations. He lives by that great commandment, “Love God and your neighbour”. Times of temptation will occur in our lives. We may have a deep sense of loss because of the death of a loved one. We may lose our job or go through the pain of a broken relationship. We may suffer through sickness, or depression. We may be tempted by power or by wealth at the cost of integrity. How we allow such times in our lives to bring us into a relationship with God and with others is the measure of the temptation. Each of us has the power through our choices to shape and give meaning to life. Living as a follower of Yeshua is a response to a deliberate choice. It calls for a decision to place our faith in Messiah Yeshua. It is a call to commitment. When we go through a wilderness time, it is a time of commitment to spiritual growth. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and consequences of our choices. Our life is a series of choices. What has shaped your lives? What shape would we like it to take? How can the choice to follow Yeshua afford us an opportunity for us to reform our lives, to allow God’s Ruach HaKodesh/ Holy Spirit to re-shape us so that our whole community is re-created. I have heard it said that forty days is the optimal time in which to re-shape some aspect of one’s life. So, let us use every opportunity as a time to bring ourselves into a closer and more open relationship with our creator. May we experience a renewal of life in and through allowing God to guide us through the moral maze. Amen.” [With acknowledgement to the Revd Stephen Smith of St Paul’s, Newbridge, South Wales, for letting me use a section of recently preached sermon that I have adapted].
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