(#9 Session 4) Day 4 - Jesus Christ (The Unwelcomed Message)

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

In this and the next two sessions, we will look into greater detail at what Jesus said so as to understand God’s full Rhema for us today.

Jesus kicked off His ministry here on earth with the proclamation of the above words from Mk 1:15, which had great prophetic significance - “The time has come … The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” In other words, in God’s Kairos - which was being fulfilled then at the end of the Fourth Day of Creation - Jesus came to bring the good news or Gospel to God’s chosen people Israel about the soon arrival of God’s Kingdom. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is therefore not so much about us as it is about God and His Kingdom rule over Israel, His chosen people and lesser light, and the Church the ingrafted branch of Israel. Our salvation is the means through which God will establish His Kingdom here on earth in Jesus, and not the end goal or purpose.

In fact, the Jews in Jesus’ day understood what Jesus meant perfectly. Earlier, we saw how the Old Testament Prophets had comforted God’s people with the hope that a promised Messiah would come to restore the glory of David’s Kingdom to Israel. The day when this Kairos event would happen was also known as the Day of the Lord. The Jews believed that on this special Day, God would restore His rule over Israel in fulfilment of His promise to David. This promise can be found in 2 Samuel 7:11-13 - God would raise up an anointed one - the Messiah, a son of David - who would rule Israel forever even as Israel drew all the nations to God as His lesser light.

Now, although the Jews had returned to Jerusalem in 538 BC to rebuild the city and God’s Temple following their exile to Babylon, this promised kingdom never did come to pass. For the next 500 years, Israel was ruled and oppressed by a string of foreign powers - Medo-Persia, Greece and finally Rome in Jesus’ time. In fact, the voice of the Prophets would go silent for over 400 years after the Prophet Malachi. In his closing words however, Malachi reminded the people of God’s faithfulness and prophesied that He would send a messenger, the prophet Elijah, before the Day of the Lord comes when God would suddenly appear in His Temple (Mal 3:1, 4:5).

So, when John the Baptist suddenly came on the scene announcing that the Messiah was coming and later identifying Jesus to be the Anointed One, the Jews naturally had misplaced expectations that Jesus would rise up as a political leader to re-establish Israel as an independent kingdom. They remembered how a group of Jews had earlier led a revolt against the ruling Greek Seleucid Empire to establish what was known as the Hasmonean Dynasty. That kingdom lasted a century before being invaded by the Romans and replaced with the Herodian Dynasty just a generation earlier in 37 BC to act as their puppet rulers.

Other Jews, meanwhile, were more superficially drawn to the healings and various miracles that Jesus performed. Their misplaced values led them to seek after the gifts rather than the Giver.

On the other hand, the Jewish political and religious leaders reacted in hostility and rejection toward Jesus. King Herod, who was actually only half Jew, feared for his own position and would not tolerate another “King of the Jews.” The Sadducees, who were the elite of Jewish society then, did not want to see their comfortable lives shaken should the Romans come down hard on the Jewish nation for supporting this potential rebel King. Their misplaced allegiance to Rome revealed a heart that was far from God.

The Pharisees, meanwhile, hated Jesus for pointing out their hypocrisy. Theirs was a case of misplaced focus - they could not see the very God whom they claimed to worship because they majored in the minor, emphasizing slavish obedience to the smallest details of the Law but missing entirely God’s spirit and heart behind these regulations.

For all the above reasons, Jesus’ message would eventually be unwelcomed by the Jews. Let us not follow in their footsteps but instead ask God to correct our expectations, values, allegiance and focus, so that we truly understand Jesus’ message for us in this Kairos moment.

Link to presentation.

(#8 Session 4) Day 4 - Jesus Christ (The "Un-whole" Message)

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

So far, we have looked at Jesus the Man and His Mission.

Let us now consider His Message - what Jesus actually taught and proclaimed during His brief ministry here on earth.

For many Christians, the Gospel or Good News of Jesus Christ have often been summed up into this simple statement from Acts 16:31 - “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” Or in terms of the popular “Four Spiritual Laws”, which states the following - (1) God loves us and has a plan for our lives; (2) but due to sin, we are separated from God and cannot experience His plan for us; (3) Only through Jesus Christ can we know and experience God’s love and salvation; and (4) we must therefore receive Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord. When we present the Gospel and Christianity in this way, the Bible becomes mainly a devotional book or, to cite 2 Timothy 3:16-17 - “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” God’s Word is reduced to a collection of stories, principles and sayings teaching moral values just like any other religious books, aside from the truth of the simplified Gospel presented here.

While such an approach is in itself not entirely wrong or inaccurate, it is dangerously “un-whole” or incomplete. This is because the Gospel message has been taken out of its wider Biblical context, a context that cannot be separated from its Jewish roots in Israel. Unfortunately though, our largely Gentile Church has built itself on the shallow foundation of this simplified Gospel and as a result, faces the danger of forgetting its Jewish origin and parentage. The Church cannot tell the difference between the Israel as how God sees it in the Bible - the Israel that remains God’s chosen nation and royal priesthood into which the Gentile Church has been ingrafted - and the Israel and Judaism that rejected Jesus according to God’s wisdom and plan. So, by rejecting and cutting Israel off completely and seeing itself now as the only and true Lesser Light of God, the Church misunderstands its own identity and misses its real purpose and destiny.

The truth is, Jesus Himself did not see the Gospel the way many of us do now. For Him, the Gospel was a continuation of a central narrative running through the entire Bible concerning God’s Kingdom rule - first through Israel and now joined (and not replaced) by the Church. The simplified Gospel above may have been God’s Rhema for His people the past two thousand years - in God’s wisdom, it may have indeed been sufficient for the Church during God’s Kairos then to understand the Gospel in this simpler form for its task of evangelising the world; after all, it would have been difficult to understand the Gospel and the Church in relation to Israel, especially following Israel’s disappearance as a nation after the Roman exile in 70 AD. But with Israel’s rebirth in 1948 setting the stage for this final generation to witness the events that would befall Israel, the Church and the world leading up to Jesus’ return, God’s Kairos has come for us to hear His full Rhema and rediscover Jesus’ message as He would have understood it.

Link to presentation.

(#7 Session 4) Day 4 - Jesus Christ (The Mission)

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my bi-monthly blog!

Previously, we listed the many ways in which the Old Testament scriptures pointed us to the Only One who matters - Jesus Christ. As we turn now to the Gospels, we are given four unique perspectives of Jesus, each highlighting a particular role or mission of His.

The Gospel of Mark was the first to be written. Targeting Roman Gentile believers, Mark was a short, fast-paced, action and miracles-oriented account portraying Jesus as the Suffering Servant and Son of God. Although Mark highlighted Jesus’ divine authority as God’s Son, he did not touch on Jesus’ ancestry or family line because the Roman gentile readers then were unlikely to appreciate what it meant and why it was significant. You could say that Mark was written in a simple and engaging style to reach out to a wide audience of ordinary folks.

Next came the Gospel of Luke. Addressing the Greek Gentiles, Luke was a systematic account portraying Jesus as the Perfect Saviour of the World and Son of Man. In Luke, Jesus’ ancestry was traced all the way back to Adam - the first man. Luke probably did this to show the intellectually-minded Greek readers that Jesus was not just sent to the Jews but to all mankind as their Saviour. If Mark reads like a news tabloid, then Luke is like a lengthy research paper carefully laying out the details of Jesus’ life.

The Gospel of Matthew was written next and was aimed at the Jews, to show that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies as God’s Promised Messiah and King, the Son of David. In Matthew, Jesus’ family line was traced to Abraham and David as further proof to the Jews that Jesus was who they were waiting for. Matthew is therefore like the Jewish edition of the Gospels.

Last came the Gospel of John. Meant for everyone, John was a deeply intimate, reflective, and spiritual account of Jesus as the Divine “I AM” - God Himself. In John, Jesus was revealed to be the Word that was with God and was God. You see, by the time John wrote this Gospel, at least fifty years had passed since Jesus’ death and resurrection. As many believers by then would not have seen Jesus personally or even met the Apostles or others who had known Jesus in person, some began to question if Jesus could come as a man and yet be fully God. John wrote this Gospel partly to counter these false teachings that were emerging then.

Some scholars have noticed a correlation between the four faces of the cherubim found in the books of Ezekiel and Revelations and the four roles or missions of Jesus as seen in the four Gospels - here, the Ox represented Jesus’ Servanthood, the Man reflecting how Jesus was also the Son of Man, the Lion symbolizing Jesus as the Lion of Judah and King of Kings, and lastly the Eagle a depiction of Jesus as God Himself. Taken together, the four Gospels portrayed Jesus as both God and Man, Saviour of Jews and Gentiles, and finally as both Servant and King.

Turning back to our perspective of the Seven Days of Creation, we see that Jesus was the Greater Light that capped the end of the Fourth Day of Creation. If you recall, the completion of the Temple in AM 3000 marked the beginning of the Fourth Day of Creation, with Israel now fully equipped to act as God’s Lesser Light. But - as Paul had described in Galatians - when the set time or Kairos had fully come, which is a thousand years later in AM 3992, God sent His Son Jesus to redeem His people by dying for us on the Cross.

Now, the Gospel did not simply end here with all of us living happily ever after. We are, after all, only at the end of the Fourth Day of Creation with 3 more days to go. Instead, Jesus spoke of the need for Him to depart in order to herald in the New Life in the Spirit and Body of Christ and that there would be opposition culminating in the rule of the Antichrist before He returns again to finally establish His Millennial Reign.

Link to presentation.