Too late. . . or too soon?

It was no coincidence that Jesus died at Passover. The feasts that God instructed the Jews to keep each year ­– Passover was one of them – had a prophetic significance. Passover was a remembrance of how the blood of a lamb had protected them from judgment and enabled them to be delivered from slavery. It spoke prophetically of a far greater sacrifice and a far greater deliverance that was yet to come.

The story began in Egypt. God had sent nine plagues on the Egyptians – blood, frogs, lice, flies, a pestilence on livestock, boils, hail, locusts and thick darkness – but Pharaoh refused to let the Hebrews go. God told the Israelites to take a male lamb for each household and set it aside on the 10th day of the month Nisan, apparently to check that it was without blemish.

The lamb was to be killed at twilight on the 14th of Nisan and some of its blood placed on the doorposts and lintel of the house. It was to be roasted and eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. That night God would pass through the land of Egypt, and the firstborn in every house would die – except for the houses daubed with blood. “When I see the blood,” God said, “I will pass over you.”

The year that Jesus died, the 10th of Nisan fell on what Christians have come to know as Palm Sunday. As Jesus and His disciples walked towards Jerusalem, they came to Bethphage. Jesus sent two of His disciples into the village to bring the colt of a donkey that had never been ridden, that He might fulfil the prophecy: 

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your King is coming to you;
He is just and having salvation,
Lowly and riding on a donkey,
A colt, the foal of a donkey.
   Zechariah 9:9.

Word quickly spread that the Messiah was coming. A great multitude gathered and began to shout “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” These were messianic greetings. You might have thought Jesus would rejoice to hear the crowd greeting Him as Messiah. He did not. When He saw Jerusalem, He wept.

“If you had known,”  He said, “even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. . . because you did not know the time of your visitation.” The crowd shouting a welcome to their Messiah was too late. Jesus knew a decision about the Messiah had already been taken by the religious leaders. He understood judgment was on its way: He foresaw a ravaged Jerusalem, the Temple destroyed and the Jews scattered.

Or perhaps the crowd’s messianic welcome was too early, depending on how you look at it. God has not finally finished with the Jews. The time is coming when the Jews will turn to their Messiah and Israel will become a believing nation. “And so all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). Nothing is more certain. But that time was not yet.

          

The finger of blame

In the first and second centuries, Christians decided – without biblical backing, it must be said – that God had finished with the Jews. For centuries, Jews were despised, persecuted, herded into ghettos and expelled.

Thousands were massacred during the Crusades. Thousands were persecuted during the Inquisitions. When the Black Death ravaged Europe, the Jews were blamed, tortured and burned to death on bonfires.

 Six million were destroyed during the Holocaust. The United Nations has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other nations put together. Antisemitism is again on the increase.

We owe a great deal to the Jews. The Jews wrote the Bible. They wrote all the Old Testament, and all but two books of the New Testament. (They were written by Luke, who is said to have been a Gentile – but that’s not certain.) The patriarchs were all Jews. The prophets were all Jews. Jesus was a Jew. The New Testament apostles who not only risked their lives but gave their lives to bring the gospel to the Gentiles were all Jews. All the knowledge of God that I have has come to me directly or indirectly through Jews.

Gentiles blamed them for killing Christ. Christ-killers, they called them. True, the leaders of Israel did plot against Him. But He was sentenced to death by Pilate, who knew perfectly well He was innocent. Pilate was a Gentile. He was executed by Roman soldiers. They were Gentiles. And according to the Bible, it was my sin and your sin that sent Him to the cross.

So who can point the finger?
                 

Breaking down the middle wall

In a previous post, we talked about the law of Moses, given to the Jews to keep them until the promised Seed came. They were not justified by the law, for justification is only by faith. Until that faith was revealed, the law was their tutor, to bring them to the Messiah. After faith came, they would no longer be under a tutor.  

The Gentiles were without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. God loved them no less than He loved the Jew.

All the covenants that God made with Israel were sealed with blood. Animals were sacrificed for God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15:8 – 13). Moses sprinkled the people with blood to confirm God’s covenant at Sinai (Exodus 24:6 – 8). In the fullness of time, God’s one and only Son expired on a bloody tree. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). 

Some say it is impossible for someone born as a man to make himself God. Of course it is. That isn’t the question. The question is Can God, being God, appear in human form?

When Messiah died (“I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one takes it frombut I lay it down of myself”) Moses’ law ended. The New Testament explains it like this. In the Temple in Jerusalem was the Court of the Gentiles, where were the moneychangers and the sellers of animals. Then there was a barrier, known as the middle wall of partition. Only Jews were allowed to pass beyond that point.

Moses’ law was what separated Jew and Gentile. When Messiah died, Moses’ law became obsolete. “The middle wall of partition” was broken down. The distinction between Jew and Gentile was removed. Gentiles became able to partake in Jewish spiritual blessings; Jew and Gentile were able to become one new man in Christ.

The Jew is still a Jew; the Gentile is still a Gentile. The promises of material blessings – such as the land – still belong to the Jews. But the promises of God’s spiritual blessings belong to Jew and Gentile. Gentiles are fellow heirs, fellow partakers of the promise, through faith in the Jewish Messiah. 

I have a question to ask here. Why do Jews know so little about the new covenant promised to them in the book of Jeremiah in their Hebrew Scriptures?

             

Forgiven and remembered no more

As the years went by and God continued to reveal His purposes, “precept upon precept and line upon line,” as Isaiah puts it, He made further covenants with the Jewish nation. Perhaps the most important were His covenant with Moses at Sinai, described in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and the new covenant, promised, for instance, in the book of Jeremiah.

The covenant with Moses, unlike the Abrahamic covenant, was a conditional covenant.  God said “If you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant” (Exodus 19:5). The Jewish people replied “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). Sadly, the Jewish people found it too difficult to keep. They broke the covenant.

The covenant given to Moses at Sinai contained 613 laws. There were 248 positive commandments -  “thou shalt” – and 365 negative commandments – “thou shalt not.” It was made with the Jewish nation. Gentiles were never subject to Moses’ law. (A Jew is a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; a Gentile is someone who is not a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.)

Jsrael had become a nation, but not a nation like the other nations: Israel was a theocracy. This was a national covenant; a covenant to live by. It had a number of purposes. It was to demonstrate the holiness of God, and the standard of righteousness that God required of man. With the covenant’s food laws and its commandments concerning the Sabbath, it was to keep the Jews a distinct people. And it was to demonstrate the reality of sin and bring the Jew to saving faith in the Messiah.

It was also for a limited time period. When Messiah came, He would institute a new covenant, a better covenant.

So when the Jews broke the covenant, did God forsake them? He did not. He promised them something better. Here is the new covenant God promised in Jeremiah, written 600 years before the promised Messiah was born:

“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah –

“Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they brake, though I was a husband to them,” says the Lord.

“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: After those days, says the Lord, I will put my law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

“No more shall every man teach his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” says the Lord. “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

Jeremiah 31:31 – 34.

The new covenant was not made with the church, but with the house of Israel and the house of Judah – in other words, with the complete nation of Israel. It was not going to be the same as the covenant He had made with the Jews at Sinai when He brought them out of Egypt, which they had broken. That had given them an external law.

Now the law was going to be internalised. It was going to be in their minds and written on their hearts. It would no longer be necessary for one person to teach another to know the Lord. It looked forward to the day when all the Jews would know Him.

Under the Mosaic covenant, their sins had been covered by the sacrifice of bulls and goats. But only covered, because the sacrifices had needed to be repeated. Under the new covenant, there was going to be one last, great and perfect sacrifice. Their iniquity would be washed away. Their sin would be forgiven and remembered no more.

           

No conditions

We were talking about the provisions of the covenant God made with Abraham. God said that to the nation that came from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob He would give the land of Canaan forever – for “an everlasting possession” (Genesis 17:8). Israel were later scattered from the land because of their disobedience, but the land remained theirs. God always promised they would return.

According to the covenant, all the families of the earth would be blessed through this nation. Consider the number of medical and scientific discoveries, the number of Nobel prizewinners, the humanitarian efforts at national disasters. The Bible – both Old and New Testaments – was written by Jews. (The Old Testament was written by Jews. Of the writers of the 27 books of the New Testament, only Luke may have been a Gentile – and that’s not certain.) Above all, consider the blessing to the world brought by the Jewish Messiah. “Salvation,” He said, “is of the Jews” (John 4:22).

The covenant contains a wonderful promise, which apparently applies to all of the Jews: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you” (Genesis 12:3). The blessing appears to be a blessing in kind, and the curse a curse in kind.

Because Rahab saved the lives of the Jewish spies, God saved Rahab and her family. In Egypt, after Pharaoh ordered all the male Hebrew babies to be drowned in the Nile, the entire Egyptian army was drowned in the Red Sea. In the time of Esther, when the antisemite Haman built a gallows to hang Mordecai the Jew, he wound up being hanged on it himself. In more recent times, Hitler’s henchmen  formed ghettos in the major cities and built high walls around them so the Jews could not escape. After the war, the Berlin Wall divided the city which Hitler had chosen to be his pride and joy. And before the Nazis made Zyklon B gas readily available and built the gas chambers, they shot countless thousands of Jews and burned their bodies. How did Hitler die? He was shot and his body burned.

Abraham was promised that he would father a multitude of other nations, apart from Israel. He was also father of the Arab nations.

Finally, circumcision of male children on the eighth day was to be the sign of the covenant.

When you read how the covenant was ratified in Genesis chapter 15, you will notice something unusual. Abraham sacrificed a number of animals and placed them in two rows. When it was time for the parties to pass between the rows, only God passed between them. God had placed Abraham in a deep sleep. This was an unconditional covenant. God was unilaterally covenanting to do these things for the Jewish nation without corresponding obligations on Israel's part. 

The things particularly to remember about God’s covenant with Abraham are first, that it is unconditional, and second, that it is eternal and unchanging.