1428 - "Is God finished with the Jewish people?"

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp and this is Podcast 1428. We are looking at the place of the Jew and the place of the Gentile in God's great plan of redemption. This is so important because it is fundamental to how we look at the Scriptures. As I have said from the very beginning, if someone will give me their hermeneutic, that is, if they just have a very basic understanding of Scripture that you take historical narrative as historical narrative and allegory as allegory, symbolism as symbolism and other devices of language as they are given, and we interpret Scripture accordingly, then you are going to come out looking at Israel as God is not finished with them yet. Let me tell you a story. Some years ago I was in Africa and there were people there, leaders from all over Africa. Every country in Africa was represented. And as we gathered there, some five hundred for a week's time, and we taught two colleagues and I taught for ten hours or so every day we were with them and uh in prayer meetings, discipleship meetings, and on a given night I said to the people there, how many of you have studied from somebody from the West, from Europe, from America, or have studied under someone who has? About half of the audience raised their hand. The rest of them, I said, I assume that you have pretty much been self taught. Many of these were pastors of very large churches or multiple congregations. They had studied from various people in Africa or the Middle East, and maybe had been influenced some by people from the West. Another half or so raised their hand. And so I then asked the question of those of you who have studied from people in the West, especially from Europe, how many of you believe that God is finished with Israel? That you would believe in fulfillment theology or you would believe in replacement theology of some kind supersessionism, you're a covenant theologian, you would go much along the lines of Presbyterianism or something along those lines, and about half raised their hands of those who had studied under people, maybe a little bit more, maybe sixty percent. They raised their hands and said they believe that God was finished with Israel. And then I said, How many of you who have not studied under someone from the West, and you've read through the Bible, you've been pretty much self-taught, you've used reference books, you've used language books and so forth, but you've not read any major theologies like John Calvin's Institute of the Christian religion or some one like that. How many of you believe that God is finished with Israel? Not one hand went up. Now I know this is just a story, and I know this is not some scientific research problem, but what I am telling you is what I have found worldwide, anywhere I've been the world, it doesn't matter if it's North America, South America, it doesn't matter if it's Europe, it doesn't matter if it's um Africa, Middle East. What I have found out is that if you just read the Word of God and you read the Bible, and nobody messes with you and tells you that that doesn't mean what it says. It means what I say that it means. Unless someone's messed with you, the more you read the Word of God, the more you're going to love Israel, and the less you're going to think that God is finished with Israel. And I know that some of my colleagues are saying right now, yeah, I know that goes to show you they haven't read theology, so they're a bunch of dummies. Now you might not say it that bluntly, but that's the implication. Well, the fact of the matter is that I have seen enough educated, schooled idiots in my lifetime to sink a battleship. And I'm saying to you that if you just take the word of God and you read the word of God and you read it through and nobody messes with you, you're going to love Israel and you're not going to believe that God's finished with Israel. Why? Because it's the plain language of the Bible. You see, when the Bible talks about Israel, it means Israel. When the Bible talks about the church, it means church. There's a word for Israel, it's the word Israel. And there is a word for church, that's the word ecclesia. That's the word that's used most often to describe what we call the called out assembly, the the church of both Jew and Gentile. And I remind you, for uh the first decade of the church, it was all Jews. There wasn't any doubt about whether God was finished with the Jews or not finished with the Jews then. It was only when the Gentiles came in, and then it was later on that we decided that we didn't need the Jews anymore and that God was finished with them, so you came up with all of this deviant theology. But there's another reason, it's perspective. Not just the plain language of the book, but perspective. You see, the Bible is a Jewish book, it's written by Jews. It's written to Jews, primarily for Jews. And you can't get around that. Yes, I understand that there are wider applications to that, but the Bible is written from a Jewish perspective. And so this idea that you can read the book of Isaiah and all the promises that are given there about a literal king, Messiah, who's going to reign on a literal earth and have literal subjects, all of a sudden that's the church, and we're going to bring the kingdom, a spiritual kingdom, into the world through the preaching of the gospel. That is not what the Bible says. And so you get a perspective when you just read through the Bible and you just take it as it's written. And where it is historical narrative, it is historical narrative. Where it is obviously an allegory or symbolism or uh something's to be spiritualized, everyone would know that. And I'm not talking about types of speech, parables, this kind of thing. I'm just talking about if the plain sense makes sense, you let that be the sense, or it'll all become nonsense. Another reason why it's important that we take Israel seriously is because biblical prophecy does. If you strip away Israel as a nation and the promises of God and prophecy about Israel, then you're going to rob the Scripture of much of its meaning. As a matter of fact, you'll have to take a third to a fourth of the scriptures and totally change their meaning from something that's literal to something that's spiritual. Because promises were made to Israel. They were made to Abraham. They were made to Isaac and Jacob and David. They were made to the disciples. These are prophecies. Many of them are prophecies, but some are just outright promises that God said, I'm going to do this for you. I'm going to do this to you. I'm going to put you in this place in the future. And there's been no time in world history when those prophecies have come true. And so that means they're still going to come true because every prophecy that God made is true. Every promise that God made to the nation of Israel and to the Jewish people, God is going to fulfill. Now it doesn't matter whether it makes sense to you or makes sense to me, that's totally beside the point. Because there's a lot that God has said in his scripture to Israel and to the church that I cannot get my hands around. But after all, I've got a peanut brain. God is transcendent. He can tell us things that we won't know until we get to heaven. But 95% of the things that are in the Bible, we can understand. The Spirit of God will help us, but there's some things that the Bible says itself are sealed up to the end time. When that time comes about, we'll understand it better. All I'm saying to you is if you're going to read the scriptures and you're going to be consistent, then you're going to have to let the plain language of Scripture speak for itself. You need to always read the Bible with a Jewish perspective because it was a Jewish book and it was written by Jews, to Jews, primarily for Jews. You can't get around that. And unless you do a whole lot of verbal gymnastics and theological gymnastics, which none of us are interested in doing. Unless you've got an axe to grind or you've got a theological template that you want to place over the scriptures and make the scriptures fit into your theological template, but that's not the way that you would prefer the scripture yourself to be taught, but rather that your theology rise out of the scriptures. Does church history influence our interpretation of scripture? Of course it does, but it cannot dictate that. There's prophecies that we've got to deal with, prophecies that make no sense whatsoever, and they're just spiritual fluff unless they are taken literally because God meant them literal. He spoke it through literal people, to literal people. They have sometimes a priority fulfillment, a secondary fulfillment, and sometimes a tertiary fulfillment. And we all we all know that and we admit that when it suits us. And then the great promises of God. Either God is faithful and going to do what he said to Abraham, to Isaac, Jacob, and David, or God is not faithful to his promise. For instance, the promises concerning the kingdom when during the Messianic era, when Jesus will rule on the earth, when Messiah will rule on the earth. Now either that's so or it's not, and if not, then it's just all a big spiritual game, because there's more to the scriptures than just the spiritual kingdom. And if that were not the case, there's many scriptures I could cite, but in the book of Acts, chapter one, Jesus had been speaking to them for forty days pertaining to the kingdom of God. And the great preponderance of evidence of when the kingdom of God is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments has to do with a literal kingdom where there will be peace on earth, and we know from Revelation chapter 20 that that is going to be a thousand years, a millennium. Either that's so, or you're just going to have to do away with a lot of biblical prophecy and a lot of the promises of God. But Jesus spoke to them for forty days. There he was on the Mount of Olives, where the prophet Zechariah said the Messiah's feet will touch down. No wonder the disciples said, Lord, are you going to at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? Now why would they say that? There was the temple right in front of them. There they were on the Mount of Olives. There they were with the Messiah. He's now died and paid for men's sins. He's risen from the dead. Death cannot hurt him or harm him because he lives. Everyone's going to live who is in him and who are followers of Jesus. And so Jesus could have put an end to that all of a sudden and just said, Hey guys, there's not going to be a kingdom. It's a spiritual thing. It has nothing to do with me ruling on earth. And what Zachariah said, all of that, you just need to spiritualize, but he didn't. He says it's not for you to know the times or the place or the seasons that God has put within his own power. Until that happens, I've got a job for you to do. And that was evangelism, and he laid that out. Peter later in the book of Acts spoke about the time of restoration that's coming when Israel would be restored. That's what he's talking about. He's not talking about the church being restored. The church had just got started. It didn't need to be restored. It needed to be turned loose. And so all I'm saying to you is this let's take the word of God as it's written, and we won't have any problem with Israel. The only time we have a problem with Israel is when we in the West and we as Gentiles begin to believe that it's all about us. We accuse the Jews of that, but then we turn around and say no, it's all about him, it's all about us. It's all about us. It's just not. The Lord ha has the church on the earth right now, Jew and Gentile together. We all have to come the same way, and that's through Jesus. No Jew, no Gentile is saved through works, or any works of righteousness which we can do. And the Jew does not have any step ahead of us because they're Jews. The ground is level at the cross. But I do want to tell you this much. We would not have the Word of God if it were not for the Jews. We would not have a Savior if it were not for the Jews. And you say, wait just a minute, you're no, you wait just a minute. That's what God says. Because He made a promise and He's the one that decides what's important and what's not, what's priority and what's not. And God said to Abraham, It is going to be in your seed that I'm going to bless the earth. And I've chosen to do that because of who I am, not because of who you are, but I'm going to bless you and I'm going to make your name great. And he passed that on to his descendants, and he said that is an everlasting covenant. That is a forever covenant. Now you can change forever if you want to, but if that's the case, then your salvation and mine is not secure either. Think about it. We're on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's Questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.