Fact #1: The Book of Esther presented problems for the Protestant Reformers, and even the Jewish rabbis at one time. And for the same reasons for both groups!
 
Neither God nor prayer is mentioned at all in the book, at least not specifically. The book's very existence presented problems to Martin Luther (to name just one), at least for a while. He complained: "It hath too much of Judaism, and a great deal of heathenish naughtiness." [Luther's Works, Vol 3]. The book is written in a way unlike any other Bible text. There's a strong strain of patriotism and Jewish nationalism.  It also has a distinct element of humor. That's not humorous levity, however. It's still Word of God and it deals with serious topics as it depicts events that occurred in Persia about 475 years before Christ. But since biblical times it has been regarded as canonical by the rabbis. And, according to Maimonides (Judaism's most famous scholar), second only to the Torah in importance.
 
Fact #2: Esther's husband was likely the same king who fought the Greeks at Marathon, from which we get the Marathon foot-race.
 
This would've been during the reign of Xerxes the Great, (a.k.a "Ahashuerus" in the KJV translation). Xerxes ruled an enormous empire of 127 provinces "from India to Ethiopia" as Esther 1:1 says. He was intent on humbling the Greeks, but was defeated on the plains of Marathon by a combined force of Greek city-states in 490 BC. According to legend, the messenger Pheidippides ran the approximate 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to the Athenians. Then he dropped dead from exhaustion. 

Fact #3: Either Xerxes or his father Darius is the same king that Nehemiah received permission from to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem during the Babylonian Captivity. 
 
This was likely due to how impressed they were by the amazing acts of the Hebrew God that the Persians heard about during the events of the Babylonian Exile, even as far back as the humbling of Nebuchadnezzar and his conversion to faith in the God he thought his god had conquered. The Jews in Xerxes' time were slaves and exiles in Persia, "hold-overs" from their former slavery to the previous empire of Babylon, and its king, Nebuchadnezzar.

Fact #4: Though God is not mentioned in "Esther", it's evident that Esther's uncle Mordecai had faith in Him, and that Esther herself prayed to Him.

Why? Because of these two statements: the first by Mordecai, the second by Esther: 

"For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" [Esth. 4:14] 

Here it's evident that Mordecai had complete faith that God would deliver the Jews from certain genocide, either with Esther's help, or without her help. 

"Go, gather all the Jews who are present in Shushan, and fast for me; neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will fast likewise. And so I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish!" [Esth. 4:16]

Here it's evident that Esther and her maidens also prayed. The Bible prescribes fasting for two purposes, and they almost always go together: a) as a sign of deep grief and mourning, and b) as an aid to effective, importunate prayer: the kind of prayer reserved for extraordinary circumstances. When you are "importuning" God, when you are pleading with Him to intervene in a situation that's critical, you fast. The point? Both God and prayer are present in this book that mentions neither one specifically. 

Fact #5: The Haman-Mordecai animosity began with a blood feud 500 years before either one was born!
 
The Book of Esther makes a point of emphasizing the forebears of both Haman and Mordecai. Mordecai was a descendant of King Saul's father Kish. [I Sam. 9:1] [Esth. 2:5]. Haman was a descendant of Agag, King of the Amalekites. [Esth. 3:1]. 500 years before in Israel, King Saul was told by God to exterminate the race of Amalek for their great wickedness. This he refused to do. So 500 years later, Haman attempted to do this very same thing with the Jews! The national moral to the story? Obey God in history, or "history" will take its revenge on YOU.". 

Fact #6: Haman's death, which originally was planned for Mordecai, was by "hanging upon gallows" [Esth. 5:14, Esth. 7:10], but the execution wasn't by rope or strangulation. It was by impalement on a stake. 
 
That's right, Gentle Reader. Not "Western" style, but "Vlad the Impailer" style. The Persians were cruel, and the Romans equally so. Neither people practiced the kind of execution we're familiar with in the West. Death by dropping from a platform or even being strung up with a rope noose and asphyxiated is quick and comparatively merciful. But the pagans of antiquity preferred their lowest criminals to die by slow torture. That's what Haman had in mind for Mordecai. Both Persians and Romans also used more merciful methods but impalement upon a stake was reserved for the worst criminals. When the Bible speaks of Christ "hung upon a tree", what's in view here is piercing and slow death on a cross-tee. If Haman had succeeded in executing Mordecai, and then all the Jews of the known world [Esth. 3:13-15], then he would've wiped out the family line of Jesus, and prevented the only "impalement" that could've saved humanity! ​

​ 
[Poster: former Soviet Union propaganda artwork saying "NO GOD!", commemorating Russia's first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's 1961 trip to space. He was asked by Russian News if he had seen God in space.]
 
At least half of the Jewish People world-wide are agnostic or atheist, and that's especially true among Russian emigres to the USA. Here in Philadelphia with a Russian-speaking population of 70,000+, at least 70% of Russian speakers are Jews. Years ago, Communist Russia taught something called "Scientific Atheism" based on the presumption that atheism was the foundation for empirical science and that religious faith was simply superstition. If you wanted to get anywhere in Russian academia or be "upwardly mobile" in the Party or the institutes or the factories, you kept your religion to yourself. Many of these US emigres are still atheist/agnostic because they've never had a dialog with a Christian who knew what he was talking about. But even among Americans in general, agnosticism and atheism are widespread.
 
To counter "Scientific Atheism", here's a short list of the founders of various fields of physical science.  What these all have in common is a shared faith in the existence of the biblical God, and NOT in an agnostic/atheistic universe of random-chance. And their discoveries were based on that biblical view: 
 
. antiseptic surgery: Joseph Lister
. bacteriology: Louis Pasteur
. calculus: Isaac Newton
. celestial mechanics: Johannes Kepler
. chemistry: Robert Boyle
. comparative anatomy: Georges Culver
. computer science: Charles Babbage
. dimensional analysis: Lord Rayleigh
. dynamics: Isaac Newton
. electronics: John Ambrose Fleming
. electrodynamics: James Clerk Maxwell
. electromagnetics: Michael Faraday
. energetics: Lord Kelvin
. entomology of living insects: Henri Fabre
. field theory: Michael Faraday
. galactic astronomy: Sir William Herschel
. gas dynamics: Robert Boyle
. genetics: Gregor Mendel
. gynecology: Louis Agassiz
. hydrography: James Simpson
. hydrostatics: Blaise Pascal
. ichthyology: Louis Agassiz
. isotopic chemistry: William Ramsey
. model analysis: Lord Rayleigh
. natural history: John Ray
. non-Euclidean geometry: Bernard Riemann
. oceanography: Matthew Maury
. optical mineralogy: David Brewster *
 
[ The Biblical Basis For Modern Science by Henry Morris, p. 463-465, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 1984 as quoted in Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus: Vol. 2, by Michael L. Brown, p. 243, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 2000.]
 
There are MANY fine books written on how to share your faith with agnostic/atheistic people. But in case you don't have time for a book, here are some basic rebuttals condensed into a few talking points:
 
1) Reasoning with Agnostics: If they object to taking a blind "leap of faith" (as they think you've done!), then tell them they've already taken that leap by concluding that no conclusion can be reached about God. The point you should make with them? Their view itself is a religious faith commitment.
 
2) They assume agnosticism is open minded. Challenge that assumption on the basis of what you know about Romans 1:18-23. Ask them: "Wouldn't you be more inclined to be biased against faith in an all-powerful Judge of deeds and thoughts who brings mankind into a Day of Judgment? Ask: "How can you be sure that you wouldn't be prejudiced (and not open-minded) against such a conclusion, and therefore avoid giving it its due consideration?"
 
3) Show them John 3:19 and following verses. Even if they discount your use of the Bible, certain verses contain "cut-to-the-heart" timeless truths that even the unchurched can see. For example: "Light is come into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." Since that's evidently true in forensic science, or psychology, or criminal justice, why would it not be true in matters of religion?
 
4) Ask them if they're open-minded or narrow-minded. Agnostics/atheists believe they've arrived at their views because they're open-minded. They aren't, but what you're doing here is getting a commitment from them to keep an open mind. Ask: "Are you willing to change your mind if I could show you that belief in the biblical God is not only possible logically, but is in fact essential for a civilized society? (In other words, "Are you willing to change your mind if it can be shown that atheism/agnosticism cannot be the social basis for restraining societal evil?" To say this another way:  without the fear of God, what's left is only the fear of getting caught or the fear of the all-powerful State. Perfect example: since the Ten Commandments were removed from public schools, delinquency has increased.  Therefore, if the social need exists for genuine belief in the biblical God, does not this fact then testify that there probably IS one? 
 
5) Apart from there being a God (i.e., an ultimate Law-Giver), there is no basis for any appeal to morality, truth or ethics. Why? Because if ours is a world and universe of random-chance (as "A&A" people believe) then how can we appeal to a transcendent, permanent moral order, or use terms like "justice vs. injustice" or "evil vs. good", etc.? For example ... why is what ISIS is doing to its victims called "evil". Why isn't it simply called "painful" ?
 

Continue reading other blogs? Click http://www.scripturesdramatized.com/radio-blogs

​ 
 
"No religious or educated Jew would ever believe in Jesus!"

We at CHAIM Ministry (www.chaim.org) have heard this argument before. But the examples of history say differently. It's not "PC" to speak of such examples in Jewish circles today, but one example: Rabbi Daniel Zion of Bulgaria, is worth mentioning. For this reason, he'll receive our "Honorable Menshen" award this month.. ["Menshen" is plural for "mensh", which is German for "man"  but also Yiddish for "a person of integrity and honor".]: 

Last year, I was confronted at 16th and Chestnut Street  in Philadelphia by an irate Jewish man who told me that no religious or educated Jew could believe in Jesus as I was passing out Jewish-oriented gospel tracts on the street-corner. I asked him: "If you were wrong, would you even want to know about it?" Those are the only words I could manage to say to him because he didn't want to have a discussion. Instead, he just wanted to "vent". 

Most Jews are perfectly happy with Christians who are devout. But what they object to is Christians trying to make "Christians" out of Jews. The general belief in Jewish circles is that the kind of Jews who convert are those who are weak in their Jewish identity; either that, or they're highly suggestible or feeble-minded.

But consider the remarkable case of  Orthodox rabbi, Daniel Zion: born in Salonica, Greece in 1883, when Greece was ruled by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Ninety-six years later, he died in Jaffa, Israel. Daniel Zion lived through the Holocaust as a rabbi in Bulgaria. In World War II, Bulgaria was a military ally of Germany in that nation's invasion of the Soviet Union, and Bulgaria's king Boris, came under tremendous personal pressure from Hitler to cooperate in the Holocaust by sending Bulgaria's Jews to the death camps of Poland and Germany.

It's difficult to say when Rabbi Zion became a believer in Jesus, but it was before the Nazis occupied his country. Strangely enough, though he publicly confessed New Testament faith in the messiahship of Jesus, he continued to live a traditional Jewish life and continued to serve as one of the chief rabbis of Bulgaria all the while. He had a large following.

Rabbi Zion is reputed to have received a vision from God that he was to tell King Boris of Bulgaria to refuse Hitler's insistence to send the Bulgarian Jews to the camps. Through Zion's connection with Bishop Stefan of Sofia, head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, King Boris received this remarkable warning by letter on the day before he was due to meet with the Fuhrer. As a result, Boris did exactly that. He refused Hitler to his face, and significant numbers of Bulgarian Jews were spared.

On May 24th, 1943, Zion addressed a gathering in a Bulgarian synagogue, then joined a mass street demonstration against the so-called "Laws for the Protection of the Nation"; Bulgaria's version of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of Germany. Two days later, he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp himself. He survived the camp and after the war, emigrated to Jaffa in what was then British-ruled Palestine.

When Israel became a nation in 1949, Rabbi Zion, despite his belief in Christ,  was offered a position as judge on Jerusalem's rabbinic court, the "Beit Din", but only IF he agreed to keep his faith in Christ a personal and private secret. This he refused to do. The Beit Din therefore declared him insane and stripped him of his title of rabbi. Despite this, many Bulgarian Jews still considered him their rabbi, and between morning and evening Sabbath services in his synagogue, Rabbi Zion would hold teachings about Jesus and the New Testament in his home. Before he died, Zion served as President of the Union of Messianic Jews in Israel (Ichud Yehudim Meshihiim Be-Israel).

Understandably, Daniel Zion is not talked about within Jewish communities because they are ashamed of him, (if they've even heard of him at all!). But he was highly educated, and as the chief rabbi in Bulgaria during the war years, influenced the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, not only by his teaching but by his example of character and the active measures he took to rescue his countrymen from the gas chambers.

"When the roll is called up yonder" as the old hymn goes, there no doubt will be many obscure saints honored whom most of us have never heard of here on earth. Their fame will have to wait for that glorious day. And for that reason, Daniel Zion is one of the "Honorable Menshen"!
 
Continue reading other blogs? Click http://www.scripturesdramatized.com/radio-blogs

[sources:] 

1) Wikipedia
2) Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus - Vol. 1, Michael L. Brown, Baker Books, 2001
3) Mishkan 15, "Rabbi Daniel Zion: Chief Rabbi of Bulgarian Jews during WW II," Joseph Shulam (1991), pps. 53-57.
h Objections to Jesus - Vol. 1, Michael L. Brown, Baker Books, 2001
 

"The New Testament is full of Jew-hatred. From its negative depiction of the Pharisees to its charge of 'Christ-killing', it's been THE major cause anti-Semitism for 2000 years!" 
. 
 This is a view not usually stated openly, but unfortunately it's widely believed by many Jewish people, including Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein of 19th Century Hungary, who lived through one of Hungary's worst anti-Jewish riot in history. We at CHAIM Ministry (www.chaim.org) have heard this argument more than a few times. If someone said this to you and you were a Christian, how would you respond?
 
Your Jewish friend may like you as a person. He may even respect Christianity in general. But this view of the New Testament is still widespread: that the troubles between Church and Synagogue can largely be traced to the New Testament.
 
Now this isn't just a "Jewish" problem. This bias towards the New Testament and the gospel it contains is shared by many Muslims as well. But we need not go too far afield, here: I even speak to a lot of Roman Catholics who assure me that their years in Catholic school have given them "all the religion they need" for the rest of their lives. But when I ask them what the gospel is, what comes out of their mouths is "duty", "obligation", "going to Mass", "church attendance", "being good Catholics." I talk to enough Protestants,who grew up in a gospel culture, and for plenty of them their understanding of what the New Testament's gospel is, is pretty much the Protestant version of what the Catholics say:  the need for works, performance, duty, "my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds". For well over half of them, what they say has nothing to do with the essential message of the New Testament: what Christ did on the Cross. Rather, what they say has everything to do with them and their religious performance: in essence, a definite negative presumption about the New Testament and the message it contains. Historically, Jews have harbored those same negative presumptions, and their history in Europe helps us to understand why.
 
The Promised Land, published in 1912, was an autobiographical sketch of author Mary Antin's childhood life in Czarist Russia and her subsequent coming to America during one of the worst pogroms in history. A "pogrom" (Russian: "to wreak havoc") was a government-initiated riot against Jews in lands under Czarist rule. One of the worst pogrom was in 1881, the year Antin and many thousands of others emigrated to the United States. During the pogroms, both Britain and America issued formal protests to the Russian government. In Promised Land, Antin shares the terror she experienced as small girl, hiding with her parents in her own home while marauding bands of church-goers marched through the streets, stirred up by government-sponsored priests of the Orthodox church against the "Killers of Christ" living in their midst. The mobs believed they were expressing their love of Jesus by their hatred of Jews. What's significant here is that Czarist anti-Semitism was distinctly religious. Antin explains that Christmas and Easter were especial times of terror for the Jews in the Pale of Settlements: those areas especially designated for Jews to live. Consequently, these late 19th Century emigres passed on to their Americanized children and grand-children their trauma of what it was like when "Christians" left their Easter and Christmas church service and went out to riot.
 
No wonder the New Testament is not a favorite book among Jews today, not for what's actually written in it, but for what kind of people presumed to represent it!  Roughly half of today's American Jews had grandparents and great-grandparents who left Czarist Russia during that time, a time in history popularized by the play and then the movie "Fiddler on the Roof."
 
The first Czarist pogrom is usually dated from 1821, but Russia wasn't the only country that had anti-Jewish riots in the name of Christianity. In neighboring Tisza, Hungary, (across the border) the district rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein (1824-1908) ministered to his congregation during the infamous "Tisza Eslar Affair", when leading Jews there were falsely accused of murdering a Christian girl and using her blood in a ritual. This baseless slander was eventually exposed due in part to the efforts of famed Bible scholar Prof. Franz Delitzsch of the University of Leipzig. (Keil and Delitzsch's Commentary on the Old Testament: 10 Volumes), but the resulting anti-Jewish rioting so vexed Rabbi Lichtenstein that he decided to read a New Testament in order to discover a basis for all this hatred. This was the same New Testament copy he had read in anger 40 years before and hurled into a corner of his study where it remained untouched until the day he read it again after this riot. But what he found in it was the opposite of what he thought he'd find. He writes ...
 
"I had thought the New Testament to be impure, a source of pride, of selfishness, of hatred, and of the worst kind of violence, but as I opened it, I felt myself peculiarly and wonderfully taken possession of. A sudden glory, a light flashed through my soul. I looked for thorns and found roses; I discovered pearls instead of pebbles; instead of hatred, love ..."

"From every line in the New Testament, from every word, the Jewish spirit streamed forth light, life, power, endurance, faith, hope, love, charity, limitless and indestructible faith in God ..."
 
Lichtenstein started using the New Testament in his synagogue preaching until three years later, he confessed to his congregation that he had been doing this, and that he'd become convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was Lord and Messiah. His conversion became known, to the astonishment of all the Jewish communities of Hungary. Lichtenstein published three pamphlets telling of his new-found faith. When he was called before the Chief Rabbi of Budapest to recant his views, he refused. His fellow-rabbis asked him to resign and be baptized but he refused, replying that he would not join a church or be baptized, but that he only desired to stay with his congregation. His congregation voted to have him stay as their "Christian" rabbi. Finally however, he did resign and continued a writing and visitation ministry across Europe, hounded by his fellow-rabbis but supported by several missionary organizations.
 
"When the roll is called up yonder" as the old hymn goes, there no doubt will be many obscure saints honored whom most of us have never heard of here on earth. Their fame will have to wait for that glorious day. And for that reason, Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein is one of the "Honorable Menshen".
 
Continue reading other blogs? Click http://www.scripturesdramatized.com/radio-blogs
 
 ("Menshen": plural for "mensh": Yiddish for "a person deserving of honor".)

[sources:]
1) Wikipedia
2) The Promised Land, Mary Antin, 1912
3) The Anguish of the Jews, Edw. H. Flannery, Paulist Press
4) Famous Hebrew-Christians, Jacob Gartenhaus (as quoted by: Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus - Vol. 1, Michael L. Brown, Baker Books, 2001
5) "The Story of Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein", http://www.messianicassociation.org/bio-lichtenstein.htm
6) Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus - Vol. 1, Michael L. Brown, Baker Books, 2001

​ [Poem by Felicia Dorothea Dorothea Hemans: 1793-1835]

THE breaking waves dash'd high
 On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
 Their giant branches toss'd;

And the heavy night hung dark,
 The hills and waters o'er,
When a band of exiles moor'd their bark
 On the wild New-England shore.

Not as the conqueror comes,
 They, the true-hearted came;
Not with the roll of the stirring drums,
 And the trumpet that sings of fame:

Not as the flying come,
 In silence and in fear;–
They shook the depths of the desert gloom
 With their hymns of lofty cheer.

Amidst the storm they sang,
 And the stars heard and the sea!
And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang
 To the anthem of the free.

The ocean-eagle soar'd
 From his nest by the white wave's foam;
And the rocking pines of the forest roar'd–
 This was their welcome home!

There were men with hoary hair,
 Amidst that pilgrim band;–
Why had they come to wither there,
 Away from their childhood's land?

There was woman's fearless eye,
 Lit by her deep love's truth;
There was manhood's brow serenely high,
 And the fiery heart of youth.

What sought they thus afar?
 Bright jewels of the mine?
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?–
 They sought a faith's pure shrine!

Ay, call it holy ground,
 The soil where first they trod!
They have left unstain'd what there they found–
 Freedom to worship God.

The First Thanksgiving: the Rest of the Story

If you're like most Americans, you weren't told the whole story about the first Thanksgiving. It's not the one that kids hear in government schools or in popularized US culture:God and His wonderful providence are left out. But here's what really happened:

In 1620, 102 Pilgrims, Separatists from the Church of England sailed west across the Atlantic aboard the cramped 100 ft. "Mayflower" in a voyage that if compared with today, would be like a voyage to the moon. For 66 days they lived in an ill-lit, close-quartered, rolling, pitching, stinking, over-heated "below-decks"; the hatches battened down, the smell of the bilge in their nostrils, and the crew hostile towards Separatists. Cloistered in a space the size of a volleyball court, 102 people with their spiritual leader William Bradford endured the unendurable. Why? Because they wanted to worship God without the onerous legalistic restrictions imposed on them by England. Ten years before, they had left England for Holland, and would've been content to live there except for the fact that their children were becoming like perfect little Dutch kids, and losing their cultural identity.

On the voyage over, just two people died. One was a crew member who repeatedly mocked the Pilgrims until one day he died and that silenced the rest of the crew for the rest of the voyage; and the other, because he refused orders to drink lemon juice and so died of scurvy. They were enroute to the mouth of the Hudson River in a huge swath of territory extending from Virginia to New England called the "Virginia Plantation", uninhabited by Europeans, in near-absolute wilderness, but claimed and peopled by hostile Indian tribes. If they had landed where they were supposed to land, they would've certainly been slaughtered. But they were blown off course by hundreds of miles and forced to land in a place known today as Massachusetts, and in a region where, unknown to them, no tribe lived because all tribes feared that the land was cursed by a great Spirit who had wiped out all the former Patuxet inhabitants. The Patuxets were feared by their neighbors as one of the most ferocious and savage of tribes, who had also killed every white settler and explorer they had ever met. In the spring of that year a single Patuxet named Squanto arrived in the Pilgrim camp and said in perfect English: "Welcome Englishmen. Do you have any beer?"
 
Squanto's entire Patuxet tribe had been wiped out by disease while he was a prisoner on a ship bound for England years ago. From the English he had been rescued by Spanish friars who taught him the rudiments of Christianity. Then he somehow managed to return to his homeland intending to rejoin his tribe. But when he returned and found them all dead, he wandered into the region of the Wampanoags, who were hated the Patuxets. Yet the Wampanoag chief Massasoit decided to spare Squanto's life and let him live among them. When Chief Massasoit was told by Squanto of the Pilgrims' arrival, he sent him back to them with a man named Samoset, one of his own braves, in order to find out more about them and how they dared live in a region cursed by a dread and unknown Spirit. When both Squanto and Samoset reported back to the Wampanoag chief what they had seen and heard, Massasoit decided to show mercy to the Pilgrims, likely because he feared that the great and unknown Spirit was protecting them. Chief Massasoit instructed Squanto to help the Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims knew next to nothing about survival in the American wilderness. They didn't know how to plant or hunt or fish, except from their experience in Europe. They would've likely starved to death, but Squanto taught them how to refine maple syrup, make popcorn, trap and trade in beaver pelts with surrounding tribes, fertilize the soil. In short, he taught them to become economically successful. At the end of their second year there, by order of their governor, William Bradford, a day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the autumn, and Bradford invited Chief Massasoit to celebrate with them. When Massasoit came, he brought more than twice as many tribesmen with him as the remaining Pilgrims (some had died). But fortunately he brought his own food too. He arrived a day too early and stayed 3 days too late. He was the guest who wouldn't go home, and he enjoyed himself immensely. And so this day of thanksgiving was extended for 3 days more.

There were foot-races, games, shooting matches and sports, and the public giving of thanks to God, the Great Spirit that Massasoit so feared. And there they thanked God for Massasoit's kindness, too. And it was here that the Wampanoags heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the first time. 

[from: The Light and the Glory: Did God Have a Plan for America? by David Marshall & Peter Manuel, Fleming Revel]

​ 
If you say the words "October 31st" to most people, what comes to their minds right away? Halloween!  And again for most people, say the name "Martin Luther", and what comes to their minds?  "Martin Luther King", the civil rights leader. That's especially true for church people: they know everything about King, and next to nothing about Martin Luther. And most churches today, (including Protestant churches!) will promote some aspect of Halloween for October 31st, but nothing about Martin Luther. The life and work of Luther needs a second look, and it needs it in a hurry. 
 
On October 31st, 501 years ago (1517) an obscure monk, Martin Luther, nailed a manuscript of 95 statements (called "theses") to the door of Wittenberg Castle in Germany. He was responding to the claims of Johann Tetzel, another monk, who was raising money on behalf of Pope Lorenzo de'Medici.
 
"You should know," Tetzel said to the crowds, " ...that "whoever has confessed and is contrite and puts alms into the box, as his confessor counsels him, will have all of his sins forgiven ... so why are you standing about idly? Run, all of you, for the salvation of your souls ... Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and others, screaming [from Purgatory] and saying 'Have pity on me ... we are suffering severe punishment and pain, from which you could rescue us!' "  (1) 
 
That was the state of Christianity before the Protestant Reformation, before Martin Luther. 
 
His posting of his 95 theses on the castle door was in and of itself not a radical act at all. This was the public bulletin board of the day. And he never intended the whole nation to read what he posted. So he wrote it in Latin, to fellow-theologians like himself. As a good Roman Catholic, he simply wanted to debate theology with this misguided monk who he believed at the time was misrepresenting the Pope. But someone got a hold of the document and translated it into German, the language of the people. And then someone took the translation, and using a new invention called the printing press, made thousands of copies and passed them out all over the country. 
 
Tetzel responded to Luther, knowing he had the eyes of the nation upon him, saying: "I have the authority of the Pope in this matter."  (2) And Luther, still willing to contain this argument, sent a copy to Tetzel's superior, the Archbishop of Mainz. But the archbishop didn't respond to Luther directly. Instead, he sent the document on to the Pope. And that is how Luther, an obscure cloistered monk, became the most controversial man in Europe almost overnight. 
 
So why was it that so many bishops, cardinals and kings sought to destroy this man? What did Luther believe that upset half the continent of Europe? He believed that eternal salvation is by Christ alone, through faith alone, by God's grace alone: which is standard teaching in historically Reformed churches today, but at one time all Europe was in an uproar over this: with armies on the march over this, and battles in the field fought ... over THIS! 
 
The whole course of Luther's life flowed from a conversion experience he had in his monastery cell, an encounter with the Holy Spirit through the text of Romans 1:17: "The just shall live by faith."  "Night and day ... " he wrote, " ... I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement 'The just shall live by his faith.'  Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which , through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the 'justice of God' had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul's became to me a gate to heaven." (3)
 
The Roman Catholic Church, in ranging itself against the Reformation, insisted in the Council of Trent that justification before God was indeed by faith in Christ and through His grace, but not alone. Added to that faith and His grace were such things as the good works of the faithful, and the added merits of the departed saints; in essence, the kind of error that St. Paul had denounced in his Letter to the Galatians. Nevertheless, the Papacy condemned Luther as a heretic and sought to put him on trial, if only they could find him. But he escaped arrest and remained in seclusion in Wartburg castle for several months. And there he began what was arguably the greatest single contribution to the Protestant Reformation that any one man produced. We know it today as Luther's Bible. 
 
Luther's Bible was the first Bible translation into German from the original languages, and not a translation from a translation. At the time, German was the major language of central Europe. Church-goers did not own Bibles, however, and had to have a parish priest tell them what the Bible said; of course in line with Catholic dogma.. Luther's Bible put the Scriptures into the hands of the laity. .So popular was this translation (due in part to the printing press), that it took the indecipherable Latin, understood only by priests and scholars, and made it intelligible. The translation caused a widespread change in popular Christian thought throughout Europe all by itself. As much as Luther's 95 Theses, his Bible and its dissemination made the Protestant Reformation "go viral." 
 
End-notes: 

​1) The Reformation, Hans Hillebrand. From the original source: "Dokument zum Ablasstreit" by W. Kohler, 1517
 2) Ibid.
 3) Luther's Works, Volume 34
 

​  
A "Scriptures Dramatized!" live presentation
by Rev. Rick Anderson
 
A memorized dramatization of the Letter to the Hebrews
 
Performed in the "period dress" of the Temple priests
 
KJV is the base text, with appropriate paraphrasings & explanations.
 
Follow-along programs with chapter-by-chapter synopses are provided.
 
 All Westminster PCA members & families welcome

 
When: Friday, October 26th, 7 pm
 
Where: Camp Westminster, 2412 Lake Rockaway Rd.
Conyers, GA 30012-3431
 
Time Length: 50 minutes
 
Given as part of Westminster Presbyterian Church's Fall Retreat

 
THE SCRIPTURE PASSAGES
 
Chapter 1
 
 Early Jews who believed in Jesus came under huge pressure from family members and neighbors to return to Judaism. The priestly writer tells them that the Judaism of Temple service and animal sacrifice is over.  Given by the mediation of angels, it's been supplanted by Christ, Who gave it directly, no angelic mediation necessary! His point? Christ has greater claim to their obedience than mere angels.

Chapter 2

The priestly writer tells them that they must resist this "peer pressure" to defect back to their religious past. His point: if the sin of defecting from God's commands was so severe under Moses, how much more severe will it be from turning away from Christ's gospel. 
 
Chapter 3
 
Since Jewish pride was so strongly invested in their pride of the authority of Moses the Law-giver and Aaron the High Priest, the priestly writer makes the point that Christ, being God, fulfills both roles: Law-giver and High Priest: and both superior to the mere types and shadows of Moses and Aaron. 
 
Chapter 4
 
 The priestly writer now makes his point another way: he reminds the Hebrews that their Scriptures spoke of God's "rest" that their ancestors under Moses and Joshua never obtained. Therefore a heavenly rest remains yet to be fulfilled, and if these Hebrews were not careful, then they too would fall in the desert wilderness, en-route to this heavenly rest. 

Chapter 5

The writer takes his argument further: since 1st Century Judaism prided itself on it's Aaronic priestly order, the writer mentions the priestly order of Melchizedek. Melchizedek was greater than not only Aaron and Moses, but even Abraham himself, the father of the whole Jewish nation. Jesus, he says, was of that order, which makes Him superior to all other orders of priests, and Abraham as well.

Chapter 6
 
 Lack of progress in the Christian life is actually lapsing backwards, says the writer. If they turn back now, despite the persecutions and pressures from their peers, then no hope of salvation is left for them. They MUST press on, because what God has done for them is to confirm his promise of salvation through Christ by an oath in addition to a simple promise: both first given to Abraham.

Chapter 7
 
The writer now expands on the theme of Melchizedek's priestly line, first begun from Chapter Five. Christ was made a priest in that order which is superior over even that of the Aaronic line of High Priests. And because Abraham, the ancestor of both Levltes and High Priests deferred to Melchizedek by paying tithes to him, Christ then has the superior claim upon the Hebrews' allegiance in all ways
  
Chapter 8
 
The priestly writer now sums up all that he's said so far: that the entire Jewish religion had a single objective in God's mind: to herald the coming of the final High Priest and His heavenly kingdom, and to prepare a people to receive that kingdom. The chapter makes an unequivocal final statement: only the New Covenant has standing with God; no longer the Old!   
 
Chapter 9
 
In specific detail the writer explains how all the major vessels and implements of Temple worship were used to show a heavenly reality that had now found its fulfillment in Christ. Using the language of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the writer contrasts Old Testament frequency with New Testament finality, in the service the High Priest performed.
  
Chapter 10

 The writer again warns the Hebrew Christians not to defect from the faith despite the mockings and physical attacks on their property from their own countrymen. He holds before them Christ's example: the great and final High Priest who stands as intercessor for them in Heaven. He warns them with the example of the faithless Israelites under Moses, and tells them there's too much at stake turn back now. 

Chapter 11

 This famous and inspiring chapter, which lists the heroes of the faith throughout Biblical history, also illustrates what saving faith is, and says that these heroes will not be made complete without the saints on earth, soon to  join them in Heaven.
 
Chapter 12
 
A great cloud of witnesses watches over us as we contend for our faith, says the writer. He tells the Hebrews to bear patiently with God's correction, which only shows that He cares for them and loves them, and doesn't want the to be condemned with the world.
 
Chapter 13 
 
The writer uses the language of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) to compare Christ to the Day of Atonement scapegoat, led outside the camp of Israel, bearing the sins of others."Let us go forth unto Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach. For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come," says the writer. Within a few years, Jerusalem will be destroyed by Roman armies.

​ 
"The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto Me from the ground." (Gen. 4:10)
 
The story of Cain and Abel is the first instance in history of the shedding of innocent blood. God is not beyond using figurative language to drive a point home. Of course shed blood doesn't have a literal voice, but what this verse means is that the shed blood of the innocent gives loud testimony to God, testimony that He will not leave unpunished, not only in the life to come, but in this life, and not only with individuals, but with nations as well.
 
Now this is not just an ancient "Jewish" judgment confined to how God dealt with Old Testament Israel. For this same sin He punished gentile nations too. Notice Leviticus 18, where He warns Israel to refrain from certain sins, including the slaying of the innocent:
 
" ... for all these abominations the men of the land have done who were before you, and thus the land is defiled, lest the land vomit you out also when you defile it, as it vomited out the nations which were before you." (Lev. 18:28)
 
Nor is this vengeance confined to Old Testament judgments from a bygone era, having nothing to do with nations today. It's relevant to our own New Testament times: Consider Rev. 6:10:
 
"How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?"
 
Who's doing the speaking? The martyred saints in heaven. If you thought it was wrong for Christians to ask for revenge, or that this kind of language is inappropriate for saints to ask today, then explain this verse. The point? God avenges the shedding of innocent blood in all ages and with all nations. He punishes entire countries for slaying the innocent. And that includes the unborn, and those in "partial birth" status.
 
This past national election, we had two viable candidates running for office: one who was in favor of this and one who was against it. One presidential candidate vowed to continue the abominations of Planned Parenthood and its "harvesting" of living tissue from pre-born babies, and to continue partial-birth abortion. The other candidate vowed to oppose it.
 
According to Numbers 35:33, the shed blood of the innocents defiles a land in a way unique from other sins:
 
"So you shall not pollute the land where you are, for blood defiles the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it."
 
Repeatedly in Scripture God calls Himself the defender of the orphan and widow, the avenger of the poor and helpless and those who have none to speak for them. (Prov. 24:11,12) Among these victims are the aborted. Few political campaigns are decided by a single issue. But this "single issue" is among the most important. According to Scripture, a nation's punishment for innocent blood shed is war, famine, exile; or all three. What form that would take in modern America we should shudder to think.
 
But "doom and gloom" is not inevitable in our immediate time. God's wrath has been known to skip a generation, or several, if a country shows repentance, and "If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sins and heal their land." (II Chron. 7:14) He did exactly that in the days of good King Josiah, and reserved his wrath for a future time. (II Kings 22).
 
During Jeremiah's day, the worship of Baal was tolerated for many years alongside of the worship of the true God in Israel. Baal's worship required the regular mass deaths of infants who were burned alive before the idol's image, in ways just as horrific as has been done in abortion facilities since Roe v. Wade, the law of the land now for 45 years. During Jeremiah's time, there were at first gradational, measured judgments; all the while the prophets warned of the coming of national disasters if there wasn't national repentance. Israel refused to stop this process, and finally, the much heavier "nation-breaking" judgments came under Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.
 
If any politician, clergyman or public figure tells you "a woman's right to choose" is sanctioned by heaven or "enshrined in the Constitution", that person is ethically perverted and must be blocked from holding office, whether in the church or in politics.
.
When St. Paul penned his famous words about praying for national leaders in Romans 13:1-7 and I Tim. 2:1-3, roughly 10% of the populace were Roman citizens. Paul himself was a citizen (Acts 22:28). This was a rare privilege, and a citizen of Rome had certain rights that the other 90% didn't have. For example, he could appeal directly to Caesar for redress of grievances. Make no mistake, Paul used those rights. But what a Roman citizen could not do was vote for the election of his leaders. You, on the other hand, can.
 
The mid-term elections are fast coming upon us. There are two major parties in America. One of them will indeed perpetuate the slaughter of the unborn. The other party offers the best chance to oppose it. There are powerful forces that have mobilized to perpetuate Planned Parenthood's agenda. Keep this in mind as the mid-term elections approach, and use your God-given constitutional privilege! 
 
It could be argued that God is now bringing retribution upon America, but, as we know from biblical history, this retribution can come in measured steps, alongside of His favor and grace as well, OR it can come with major nation-destroying disasters and NO reprieve. We have gotten the former; we may yet get the latter if there is no change in our laws.
 
The slaughter of the unborn must be stopped. So do your part in this mid-term election.

​[Portrait of Christopher Columbus by Sebastiano del Plombo, 1519]
 
  Columbus landed in the New World on October 12th, 1492. (1)  Every grade school student knows that he sailed west because he wanted to find an easier trade route to the Indies. After all, weren't we all taught that? (2) Yet, according to the obscure and recently translated Voyages of Christopher Columbus, written by Bartolome de Las Casas, Columbus sailed west in 1492 primarily out of missionary zeal, and not because of economic considerations. De Las Casas, who accompanied Admiral Columbus to the New World, quotes a driven and deeply religious man who felt isolated from the society of his time.(3) 

"It was the Lord who put into my mind ... the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. For the execution of the journey ... I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah prophesied. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me ..." 

Indeed, for eight years prior to his voyage, the mapmaker Columbus was a laughingstock and a byword amongst the crowned heads of Europe.The man's scheme was itself more than enough for any monarch to bear, and Columbus' personality didn't make his ideas any more palatable. He was often overbearing, insistent and altogether too proud, even in the presence of kings. 

 With his idea ever in his mouth, and with a detailed balance sheet of the costs and requirements of such a voyage , Columbus in 1484 approached King John II of Portugal, seeking sponsorship for the voyage. A commission of the King's scholars studied his idea at length and made their recommendation: The scheme was outrageous and impossible. Columbus then sent his brother to the court of England to make the same request; and Henry VII replied in turn, and after a much briefer deliberation, that Columbus was insane.
 
Even Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain turned him down, though they admired the mapmaker's religious fervor. After four and a half years of deliberation, Columbus was told that his scheme "rested on weak foundations," that its success was "uncertain and impossible to any educated person." Columbus was nearly devastated. He was especially counting on Their Spanish Majesties, because all Europe regarded them as staunch defenders of the Christian faith. 

 In the spring of the fateful year 1492, as Columbus was preparing to present himself to the King of France in yet another attempt at sponsorship, he happened to stop by La Rabida, a Franciscan monastery where his son was staying. Here he spoke to Father Juan Perez, the prior of the monastery. Fr. Perez was a man of insight and compassion. He was also the former confessor to Queen Isabella and the man who changed Columbus' life. Though we have no record of the conversation that passed between these two, we do know the outcome. Fr. Perez became convinced that Columbus had divine guidance. He immediately sent a messenger to the Queen herself, urging her to reconsider the mapmaker's proposal. Just as immediately came the reply: Columbus was to return to the Spanish court to have an audience with Ferdinand and Isabella. With the letter of reply came a gift of money. 

 Never could Fr. Perez's messenger have arrived at a more fortuitous time! The Moslem army occupying Grenada was about to surrender. The forces of Islam were being swept from Catholic Spain once and for all, and the court of Their Spanish Majesties was ready to grant almost any favor that a religious visionary could have asked. But in the presence of the King and Queen, and flushed with his own victory, Columbus forgot himself. Proudly, foolishly, the mapmaker stipulated the following demands: a tenth of the riches found in any new lands he might discover, the positions of governor and viceroy of those lands, and the unheard-of title: "Admiral of the Ocean Sea". At this, Isabella became very grave. Who was this man who dared dictate terms to her? But hastily, Luis de Santangel, a member of the Spanish court and also a friend of Columbus, intervened. Skilled diplomat that he was, de Santangel managed to apologize for his friend and reassure Isabella. Columbus,who had been dismissed from the court for his impudence, was called back and granted all that he had asked, along with the Queen's own offer of her personal jewelry as collateral for the expense of the voyage! 

 Outfitted with three small ships and a crew of 90, Columbus set sail on the morning of August 3rd, 1492 with fair weather and promising winds. Sailing at first south by southwest to catch the northeasterly tailwinds blowing from the tropics, the journey could not have gone more smoothly -- if the sea and the weather were the only considerations. A following sea, and day upon day of clear skies graced the way of the three small sailing ships. 
 
But with increasing distance came the crews increasing discontent with the length of the voyage. None of the men, nor any mariner in Europe had been more than 300 miles from land. (4) Rumors of sea monsters and bottomless chasms in the midst of the ocean fueled the fear that gripped the tiny vessels. Despite the Admiral's encouragements and promises of reward, the crew began to murmur against him Finally, Martin and Vincent Pinzon, captains of the Nina and the Pinta, demanded an emergency meeting with the Admiral on the Santa Maria. The crew, Columbus was informed, wanted no more promises. If the Admiral did not turn the ships around, there would be mutiny. In a grim session with his captains that was purposely omitted from the ship's log, Columbus agreed to turn back and give up ... in three more days ... unless land was sighted. Now the crew members began to openly challenge the Admiral. In one such confrontation, Columbus, according to de Las Casas: 
 
"... reassured them as best he could, holding out to them bright hopes of the gains they would make, and adding that it was useless to complain, since he was going to the Indies and must pursue his course until, with the help of the Lord, he found them." 
 
In those last days Columbus stood alone against practically the entire crew. 
 
Scrawled in his diary is his own name it etymological divisions: "Christo-ferrens", which literally means "Christ-bearer". Included also is this passage from Isaiah the Prophet:
 
"Listen to me, O coastlands, and hearken, you people from afar. The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name ... I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." 
 
Now we have a more complete picture of the man. And, just as we were all taught, land was sighted on the 12th of October, the day before  the day he had agreed with his crew that he'd turn back. So began the endless convoys of galleon and conquistador, of missionary and mercenary, of the good and the evil, and of every facet of the Old World in quest of the New. 

(1) This article was originally written by me and published in 1986 by Catholic Twin Circle magazine. 
(2) His featured portrait is by Sebastiano del Plombo (1519)
(3) The reader is encouraged to view Liz Wheeler's video on Columbus. She debunks "politically correct" revisionist history about his supposed role in the deaths and abuse of the indigenous peoples of the New World.
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialLizWheeler/videos/575969132860781/UzpfSTU4NjM5Mzc5ODoxMDE1NjgyMzM5MzU1Mzc5OQ/
(4) This excludes the much earlier Vikings. The news of their journeys was kept obscure for hundreds of years.

 

 

 Thanksgiving and Sukkot have much in common. Here are 5 similarities.
 
The Jewish feast of Sukkot began September 23rd this year. It ends September 30th.

"Sukkot", a.k.a. "The Feast of Booths", a.k.a. "The Feast of Tabernacles" is a biblical harvest festival still celebrated by Jews today to commemorate God's provision for the Israelites in the Sinai desert enroute to the Promised Land. During this holiday, temporary open-air shelters ("sukkot") are constructed of branches and the fruits of the fall harvest to remind the Israelites of God's mercy shown to them in their trek through the desert wilderness and their entrance into a new land, prepared for them "flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 33:3]

1) Both Holidays Are October Harvest Festivals
 
At least the FIRST thanksgiving was! That one was in October, the one celebrated in 1621 and presided over by the Plymouth Plantation's first governor William Bradford. Sukkot, on the other hand, is almost always celebrated in late September/early October according to the Jewish lunar year of 360 days which differs from the Christian solar year of 365 days.The fruits and grains of the fall harvest were used in the Temple (and in synagogue worship later): the palm, the myrtle, the willow, all bound together into a sheaf called a "lulav"; and also the "etrog", a citrus fruit resembling a lemon in shape. The booths, or "sukkot" were made of the more regular items of the fall harvest.

2) Both Holidays Celebrated After a Great Sea Crossing

Sukkot was to commemorate the time when God caused the Israelites to dwell in booths: (temporary flimsy structures) after He had saved them from Egypt's pharaoh and after the Red Sea crossing. The first Thanksgiving commemorated another great sea crossing:

"What could sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: 'Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity.' " ["Thanksgiving Readings" from William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation]

3) Both Holidays Commemorate God's Protection in the Wilderness

Certainly Sukkot was! God humbled the Israelites and taught them that they could only depend upon HIM through this desert journey. (Deut. 8:3-5). The New Testament declares that it was the pre-incarnate Christ who sustained them in the wilderness, though most did not know Him. (I Cor. 10:1-5) Similarly, Governor Bradford acknowledged God's providential protection of the Pilgrims, even to the point of calling the Indian Squanto, who taught them how to hunt, fish, plant, and negotiate peace treaties with otherwise hostile Indian tribes "a special instrument sent of God, for their good."

"Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath deliver them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them." 'Let them confess before the Lord His lovingkindness and His wonderful works before the children of men.' " (Ps. 107:1-8) ["Thanksgiving Readings" from William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation]
 
4) In Both Holidays, They Sought Freedom From an Oppressor-King

The Puritan English who sailed to the New World in 1621 had been living in Holland for 10 years beforehand. They initially left England for Holland to escape persecution by the English state church. But they then left Holland to escape the  materialistic Dutch culture that they feared was turning their children away from their cultural and biblical roots. Still, according to Bradford, the religious reason was paramount. Here's William Bradford in his own words:

"Suppression of Religious Liberty in England -- First Cause of the Foundation of the New Plymouth Settlement: First I will unfold to you the causes that led to the foundation of the New Plymouth Settlement, and the motives of those concerned in it. ... As is well known, ever since the breaking out of the light of the gospel in England ... Satan has maintained various wars against the saints ... so that in England at this day the man or woman of God must resolve with himself to sustain mocks and injuries as though he lived among the enemies of religion."
[William Bradford, Bradford's History of the Plymouth Settlement, Book 1, Chapter 1, pp. 1-5]

Similarly, the root cause of the Exodus from Egypt and the "Sukkot" journey through the desert of Sinai was for religious freedom from a satanic oppressor-king.

"Then the Lord said unto Moses, 'Go in unto Pharaoh and tell him, 'Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, "Let My people go, that they may serve Me.'  And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also, neither would he let the people go." [Exodus 9:1, Exodus 8:32]

5) Both Holidays Were Kept With Reminders of the Frailty of the Human Body, and of a Home Beyond This World
 

The Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving was celebrated after a winter of death and of fifty or more Christian burials, so that the reality of this passing world and the frailty of the body was all-too real to them:

"But a most lamentable blow fell upon them. In two or three month's time half of their company died, partly owing to the severity of the winter, especially during January and February, and the want of houses and other comforts; partly of scurvy and other diseases, which their long voyage and their incommodious quarters had brought upon them. Of the hundred odd persons, scarcely fifty remained, and sometimes two or three persons died in a day."

[William Bradford, Bradford's History of the Plymouth Settlement, Book 2, Chapter 1, pp. 76,77]

In the New Testament, St. Paul refers to the Old Testament's Feast of Booths, and "spiritualizes" it to a New Testament lesson, comparing the wilderness "sukkot" to the human body, frail and susceptible to time and the wear and tear of the elements. He teaches that the body's very frailty reminds us that God has reserved for us a permanent dwelling beyond the grave.

"For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon by our house which is from heaven. If so be that being clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life." [II Corinthians 5:1-4]

 
1) The traditional synagogue greeting "May you be inscribed in the Book of Life") to Jews means "May you live another year." Yet the Bible treats this with eternal consequences.
 
 
 "L'Shanah Tovah Tikateyvu" is how you say it in Hebrew, and it's popularly said during this time of year.The concepts of a Book of Life and a Day of Judgment, both strong themes in the Judaism of Scripture, are obscure and inconsistently taught in most modern synagogues. Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, like the ancient Pharisees, take these themes more seriously. But they only comprise 12% of the Jewish population. Most modern Jews look upon born-again Christians as being obsessed with eternal life; Jews are more concerned with this life, and believe that the next life (if it exists at all), will take care of itself. 
 
What Moses only briefly referred to in Exodus 32, the New Testament majors on. Moses prayed that that God would not strike the Israelites dead for their rebellion, and prayed " 'Yet now, if you will forgive their sin -- and if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book which you have written.'  And the Lord said to Moses, 'Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot him out of My book.' "
 
St. Paul spoke of such a book to the Greeks at Philippi, and said that their "names were in the Book of Life". 
 
Jesus spoke of such a book: "He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life" (Rev. 4:3)  Also Rev. 13:8, 17:8, 20:12-15. 
 
Clearly then, faith in the Messiah as our Atonement (lit: our "Kippura") is key to "L'Shanah Tovah Tikateyvu"!  
 
 
2)  Jews have been unable, for 2000 years,  to keep these High Holy Days holidays as required by Scripture.
 
 
Post-Biblical Jewish practices have had to "make due" and adapt to the destruction of their religious system by the Romans 2000 years ago. Scripture required a sacrificial system, an atoning sacrifice, a High Priest, an altar, a Holy of Holies, and the Temple: all of which were necessary at Rosh Hashana (lit: "Head of the Year"; i.e. "New Year") and Yom Kippur (lit: "Day of Atonement"). The Jewish religion underwent a massive change since the destruction of the Temple and its service. 
 
Today, Jews attend synagogue services, pray for God's yearly blessing upon their lives and listen to the blowing of the shofar, and fast on Yom Kippur. But they have no atoning sacrifice, as their Scriptures do require! 
 
 
3) The Talmud teaches that at Yom Kippur,  40 years before the Temple's destruction, God stopped forgiving Israel of sins.
 
 
The Jewish Talmud is the authoritative rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures (which do not include the New Testament).  In 
"Seder Mo'ed: Rosh Hashana 31b", as well as in The Soncino Talmud, tractate ‘Yoma,’ 39b, mention is made of a yearly miracle that regularly occurred on the door of the Temple court over 2000 years ago. It was customary to fasten a thick scarlet thread on that door. After the High Priest performed his Yom Kippur service, the thread would turn white, which the rabbis interpreted as a sign that the High Priest had performed his duties correctly and that the sins of the nation had been forgiven for that year. On or about the year AD 30, the scarlet thread never turned white again. This caused the rabbis great concern, but they refused to connect that with the death of Jesus. Read Christian Witness to Israel's website inclusion  http://www.cwi.org.uk/library/articles/HAMOYK.htm
 
 
4) The commonly-used term "scapegoat" is taken from the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
 
 
.People today use the term "scapegoat" all the time. It's become part of common speech. But just as with the phrase "handwriting on the wall", they rarely connect it with the Bible. A "scapegoat" was used at Yom Kippur in a detailed ceremony where the High Priest laid his hands upon a male goat, transferred the sins of Israel to the animal victim, and had it led out into the wilderness, far away from the community of Israel to fend for itself. This symbolized the separation of Israel from its sin, and the vicarious "blaming" of the innocent goat for the guilt of the people.  Leviticus 16:8-26 details this ceremony. Hebrews 13:10-14 applies it to Jesus.
 
 
5) The N.T.'s Letter to the Hebrews devotes three entire chapters and 85 verses to "Yom Kippur" themes.
 
 
Yom Kippur is a major theme of Hebrews. We can't understand a large portion of the Bible without knowing something of this holy day. Hebrews 8 speaks of Jesus being a heavenly High Priest for Christians now; far better than the temporary high priests of the now-defunct Temple, whose priests had to yearly offer animal atonements for the nation's sins. Hebrews 9 and 10 details this intricate Temple service, emphasizing the once-and-final single sacrifice of Christ. Aside from Jews, this has ramifications for Roman Catholics, who are taught that the Mass is a needed and repeated sacrifice of Christ! Hebrews 9 refutes this. 
 
 
6) The three holidays: Feast of Trumpets, Rosh Hashana & Yom Kippur are all connected to "end of the world" events.
 
 
According to Jewish tradition, during the High Holy Days, (which include the entire ten days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, as well as the days in between) the Court of God is said to be in session, when God decides the fate of all Jews. Four series of blasts from the shofar (the ram's horn) are sounded in the synagogues, culminating with the "Tekiah Gedolah" (lit: the "Great Blast") which is the final trumpet sounding, when God renders His judgment. 

The sounding of the final trumpet figures heavily in the New Testament, which uses the language of the High Holy Days to speak of events at the end of the world. Notice: 
 
"For the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God. and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words." (I Thess. 4:16-18) 
 
"Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed -- in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible. and we shall be changed." (I Cor. 15:51,52) 

​1. Jews have a hard time agreeing about who they are, but the one thing they agree about is that they, AS Jews, must not believe in Jesus.

​
There is no Jewish world consensus as to what a Jew actually is. The State of Israel has one definition. Reform ("liberal") Judaism has another. Orthodox Judaism has a third. There are those within each group who think of their Judaism as a culture, or a race, or a religion, or a mixture of all. The closest thing to a statement of faith they have is Maimonides' Thirteen Points, and not even all agree to that. There are agnostic, communistic, and religious Jews. It's even permissible to not believe in God at all, but the one thing that they're in consensus about is that a Jew cannot be a Christian. For a Jew to call upon Jesus as Savior, Lord or Messiah, makes him a non-Jew in all the major Jewish communities and branches. "Messianic" Judaism is not accepted as an alternative form of their faith. At the time when the N.T. was written, this was not the problem that it is today. But in AD 90 the synagogues at the Council of Jamnia (or "Jabneh") in Roman Palestine declared all Jews who believed in Christ as heretics and "non-Jews". And this prejudice has remained until today. Yet if you read the rest of Romans 11 and Romans 1:16, the text anticipates this Jewish rejection of Jesus, yet it still puts a priority on Jewish mission work.


2. The rabbis teach that no Jew who accepts Christ has truly understood his own religion. Yet the history of Jewish conversions will refute this.


The facts of history negate it. Take Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein for example: a Hungarian Orthodox rabbi of the 19th Century who one day found a New Testament, took it home, read it in anger, and left it alone on his shelf for 30 years. But one day during a pogrom in his district (a government or church-organized riot against Jews), he wondered why Christians were so angry at his people. So then he read it. "I looked for thorns, and gathered roses," he said later. "The half has not been told to me of the greatness, power and glory of this book, which was sealed to me at one time." Gradually he began to use New Testament material in his pulpit preaching until one day he confessed his belief that Jesus was the Jewish messiah and astounded the Jews of Hungary. When called before the Chief Rabbi of Budapest to recant, he refused to do so. His fellow-rabbis demanded that he resign, but his own congregation allowed him to stay as their rabbi until he himself finally resigned. Yet he continued his writing and visitation gospel ministry across Europe.

And there were others: very knowledgeable in the faith of their birth: Joseph Wolff for example: his father a rabbi, born in Bavaria in 1795, ordained as an Anglican missionary, he preached the gospel in Palestine and throughout the Middle-East. And Samuel Schereschewski: one of the greatest Orientalist linguists of the 19th Century, Episcopal bishop to China, he translated the Hebrew Scriptures into two separate Chinese languages. And August Neander, called the "Father of Modern Church History", born in Germany in 1789, studied at the University of Halle and was encouraged by classmates to examine the messianic claims of Jesus including Isaiah 53, a student of Friedrich Schleiermacher (a.k.a. "The Father of Theological Modernism"), who refuted his former professor and showed the validity of Scripture against the tide of Schleiermacher's Higher Criticism.

 
3. Jewish religious schools teach their children an aspect of church history that Christian religious schools never teach their children.

By the time most Jewish boys and girls reach the age of Bar-Mitzah (or Bat-Mitzvah) they know about the pogroms, the Crusader massacres of Jewish communities, the blood libels, the Spanish Inquisition, the Church-sponsored expulsions of Jews from almost every country in Europe, and the Holocaust. And in each case, aside from the Holocaust, they're taught that the major persecutor was the Church. The irony is ... they're correct: The organized, visible Church with all its problems and bigotries, indeed did those things. But what they're not taught is that those same churches were persecutors of true Christians too. But while the persecuted continued to worship God more fervently, the Jews used that persecution as their excuse to continue to reject to Gospel.


4. Mission work among Jews yields small numbers of converts, yet Scripture promises a blessing to the Church for doing it.

If a church is solely focused on numbers of converts as a gauge to decide how to allocate resources, it misses the point of Jewish evangelism, Read Romans 11: 11 and 15. Regardless of what you think this text is saying, and granted, that text creates more questions than it answers, notice at least this: it's saying that since their rejection of Christ meant blessing for the nations, then their conversion to Him will yield blessings more abundant. Verse 15 is a parallel passage to verse 11. (It's saying the same thing.) And Paul wrote this after he had been commissioned as an apostle to the Gentles. He was saying that though the Jews were no longer his primary mission field; still, that blessing about their inclusion into the fold of Christ remains. Christians can debate the "whys" of this question endlessly, yet the statement still stands as true, according to Paul.

During George W. Bush's tenure as 43rd president, he stated publicly that America's war against terrorism was not a war against Islam. Bush said, in essence, what our current president Obama has said repeatedly: that true Islam is a religion of peace. "Islam means peace," Bush had said back in 2001, as if to prove his point. Presumably, he took his cue from the root word for Islam which is "Salaam". The Arabic "Salaam" is nearly same etymological origin as the Hebrew "Shalom". Both Semitic languages Hebrew and Arabic, use this word to mean peace. 
 
But according to the Qu'ran, Islam's "peace" actually means non-resistance to Islam. The Qu'ran envisions a worldwide caliphate where this is the sole permitted religion on earth. This "peace" is similar to the peace envisioned by Marxist-Leninist theory, where peace is indeed spoken of, but only in terms of non-resistance to Marxist-Leninism. And this is why during the Cold War the Soviet leadership in Moscow could indeed claim to the American negotiators that they were working for peace. "Peace" to the Americans meant "live and let live". To the Soviets, it meant something else. And the same is true with Islam today. 

 The Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) 04/09/15 Editorial Page carried a column by Sheikh Shawki Allam, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, entitled "Terrorists and Their Quranic Delusions". Allam is claiming that Islamic terrorism is a distortion of his faith. He writes, "The terrorists are totally ignorant and incapable of comprehending the Qu'ran and Hadith, or the objectives of Islamic law and its principles." The Qu'ran, he says " ... should fill hearts of believers with peace and mercy and reverence for religion.: The terrorists, he says " ... completely disregard the Quranic conception of human brotherhood and peaceful relations between Muslims and non-Muslims."  Allam continues: "The Qu'ran urges the embrace of people from different religious affiliations. 

 Now in all fairness to the majority of foreign-born Muslims in the United States today, most simply want to "live and let live." They tend to be moral business-minded people who want to practice their religion quietly, obey their five "surahs" (confession of faith, ritual prayer, obligatory alms, the fast of Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca), and enjoy what's left of the American Dream. But this is despite what their faith teaches, and not because of it. 

 Several days after Sheikh Allam's column was featured in the WSJ, two editorial responses appeared. One by Harold B. Reisman, a Ph.D. from Carsbad, CA, the other by a "Rev. Dr. David Trawick" of San Antonio, TX. In essence, they accused Sheikh Allam of being disingenuous about his Islamic faith. Between both Reisman and Trawick, they made three points which are important for Americans to be aware of whenever they hear Islam's "religion of peace" rhetoric, either from an uninformed American president like Bush, or one like Obama with a more harmful agenda, or a Muslim apologist like Sheikh Allam who's trying to paste a smiley face over top of 1400 years of an inherently violent religion:  

1) The Qu'ran teaches two standards of truth-telling; one for fellow-Muslims and one for the "kufar" (the unbeliever). To the unbeliever, a Muslim may use "kitman", i.e., an incomplete or partial communication that is religiously permissible when the full truth might be injurious to Islam. (Sura 5:32). In other words, no Muslim scholar or Imam need  tell a non-Muslim what he really believes if he feels it will hurt his cause.
​
 2) There's something called the "Quranic Law of Abrogation". In Islam, the belief is that later revelations in the Qu'ran negate or replace earlier revelations in the same book. (Surah 2:106). What this means is that all the peaceful "live and let live" passages that Barak Obama and Sheikh Allam like to refer to, are abrogated by later passages in the same book that call for violent war against the unbeliever until he is subdued and taxed; or killed. By that criteria, ISIS and other terrorists groups  are truer expressions of Islamic faith than the views of Egypt's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Allam. 3) Islam is not just the teachings of the Qu'ran itself. It also embodies much Islamic "sacred" tradition that interprets that book. Take for example the Pact of Umar, a legal ruling dating from the time the Qu'ran was written, which clearly describes the status of the "dhimmi". Dhimmi are non-Muslims living under Islamic rule. At the discretion of the caliph of a region, they may be permitted to live if they submit to a heavy tax. Or not, it's up to the caliph. That's why ISIS daubed the Arabic letter "N" on the homes of Christians in Iraq before they killed them: they were giving them the option of being taxed or fleeing. Or else.  So this is not quite the "embrac[ing] of peoples from different religious backgrounds" that the Grand Mufti of Egypt is claiming in the WSJ!
​

by Rev. Fred Klett, Director of CHAIM Ministry to the Jewish People www.chaim.org

Can one be Covenantal in theology, that is, believe the New Covenant community is spiritually Israel and as such is already experiencing in this age the promises of the prophets to Israel, and yet still maintain in some way ethnic Israel is unique? Let us consider how the term "Israel" is used.

The word is used in many ways in the Scriptures, yet all the uses are interrelated. It means "He who has struggled with God". Ultimately, God is the one who has the right to answer the question as to who or what is Israel. He determines who or what is Israel, not man or men's traditions. Here is a provisional list of some of the uses of the word in the Scriptures.

1. The man Jacob Genesis 32:28

2. Jacob's Physical Descendants Gen. 46:8; 48:28; Ex.1:7 (The Jewish People)

3. All Old Testament Believers Ex. 12:38,47-49; Dt. 23:8 (Both Jews and Gentiles) Nu. 15:13-16; Ruth 1:16

4. The Land Josh. 11:16; Jud.19:29 1 Sam. 13:19; Mt.2:20

5. The Northern Kingdom Is.7:1, 9:12

6. Citizens of the North Is. 9:14; Jer. 3:11,17

7. The Spiritual Remnant among the Jewish People. Rom. 9:6, 11:26.

8. All Who are in the Messiah Eph. 2:11-19; Rom. 4:12-17; (A continuation of #3, that Rom. 9:6,7,8,24-26 is, all believers, the Church) Rom. 11:17; Gal.3:29, 4:21-31

9. Modern Ethnic or Political Israel Is. 19:24-25; Acts 1:6 (maybe?) (Jews and Gentiles!?) (Israel is certainly one of the nations of Rev. 7:9!)

10. The Messiah Himself Mt. 2:15; Is. 49:3-6; Gal. 3:16

There are then a number of possible Scriptural meanings of "Israel". But, is there a most ultimate meaning of the word Israel? There is -- it is the Messiah Himself (#10), for all the promises of God have their `yes' in Him (2 Cor. 1:20). Jesus is the ultimate seed of Abraham, (Gal. 3:16)

And if Messiah has the supreme right to the name Israel, then all who are in Him also have that right, since we are joint heirs with Him (Rom. 8:17) Indeed this is what Jesus gained in Redemption, "that the blessings given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles" (see Gal. 3:14). God can raise up sons of Abraham from the stones, if He wills. (Mt. 3:9) What else can Ephesians 2:11-22 mean? We are clearly told that Gentile Christians formerly had been excluded from citizenship in Israel (v. 12) and now, through the Messiah, are now fellow citizens (v. 19). If Gentile believers are no longer excluded from citizenship in Israel, that means they are included in citizenship in Israel. It's that simple. How can anyone deny that this is the clear and obvious meaning of the text?

But what of the Jewish people? If all who are in Jesus Christ are spiritually Israel, does that mean God has replaced the Jewish people with the Church and is finished with them? Of course not! There can be several meanings to the word "Israel" which can exist simultaneously, and there can be some overlapping of these meanings. The Church has a right to one of the connotations of the word "Israel". The Church has become an enlargement of and progression from "All Old Testament Believers" (#3), and it includes now, as it even included then, all who share in Israel's faith, both Jews and Gentiles. In essence then, the Church doesn't replace Israel, rather it expands Israel, that is the Believing Israel of #3 above.

Remember, Old Testament Israel (#3) included the physical descendants of Jacob (#2), but went beyond it and also included Gentiles (such as Ruth) who were willing to join themselves to the people of God. Today Gentiles who believe in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, have in essence converted to New Testament Judaism. This is what Christianity really is, New Covenant Judaism. It is the same today, in a sense, as it was in the Old Testament. All who believe become, in a sense, part of Israel, the Holy Congregation of the people of God. Both Jews and Gentiles relate to God on the basis of the same New Covenant. (The denial of this truth leads to one of two errors: one which seeks to bind again Jewish believers to the particulars of Mosaic Law, rather than to the moral principals of the Law which bind all believers today and the second which sees a separate way of salvation for the Jewish people.)
We must see the unity of the purpose of God, to glorify the Son. I contend that the Jewish people, the Messianic Jewish believers, the Church, and perhaps even the Modern state of Israel too, (numbers 2,7,8, and 9) will all be brought together under the Messiah, together with the whole earth (Col. 1:20; 1 Cor. 15:24-28; Eph. 1:22; Isaiah 11:9). Until the Jewish people return to Messiah, there is yet a certain incompleteness to Spiritual Israel (#8), the Church. Therefore the Jewish people should be of great importance to the Church, as indeed should be the whole missionary enterprise. The mission of the church must always include the preaching of the gospel to the Jewish people, indeed it begins there.

Then what of the promises to the Jewish people? Does the Church take over the promises in such a way as to exclude the Jewish people from them? No! The promises of God are still valid for the Jewish people, yet only experienced by those who believe. The coming of the Messiah and the concomitant salvation he brings can only be received by faith. This is the most ultimate and most sacred Hope of Israel! Unbelief and rejection of God and His Covenant means forfeiture of the promises which are part of the Covenant. This was the case in the Old Testament, and this is still the same today. God does not change. The promises have been expanded to include the all in the Church, even Gentiles, but this does not mean they are no longer for the Jewish people. But the Jewish people must come to Messiah Jesus to have access to them, they must rejoin the faith community of Spiritual Israel.

What of the promise of the Land? This is a sticky issue. The land promises are also expanded to include all believers. Jesus promised that "the meek shall inherit the earth" (compare Ps. 37:11), and in doing so he expanded the promise that God's people would inherit the land of Israel. Paul says that the promise to Abraham should be understood as to inheriting "the earth" (Romans 4:13). Does this contradict the idea that the Jewish people should specifically inherit the land of Israel? God has changed the order of things and brought the fulfilment of the promises to Israel in a glorious expanded way. The Temple in Jerusalem is no longer the center of the worship of the true God in all the earth. And therefore Israel as a geopolitical-political entity is no longer the center of God's kingdom and blessing (John 4:21-24). Does this mean the Jewish people no longer have a right to the land? Does this aspect of the Abrahamic Covenant cease to be? The New Covenant promise is an expansion and fulfilment of the land promise, not a negation of it. Yet Israel is in the land in a state of unbelief, and belief and obedience were always the conditions for dwelling in the land. How can it be that the modern state of Israel exists, then? Perhaps God in His mercy has brought the people back in order to preserve them and also as a means of facilitating the hope of Romans 9-11 that the Jewish people should return to faith. The modern state of Israel can then be seen as part of the providential preservation of the Jewish people working toward the fulfillment of Romans 11. Certainly if the Jewish people are to be restored to faith as a people, one could argue that as a people they also need to dwell in a specific location.2 There are moral, historical, and political reasons arguing for Israel's right to exist, yet the Jewish people can in no way claim, while still in unbelief, any Biblical right to possession of the ancient borders. When they come to faith as a people again, so will the surrounding Gentile nations, and I believe in Messiah's peace all the current border issues can finally be settled. But most basically, the land promise is realized in the final state when all believers inherit the earth. If one fails to understand that the land Old Covenant land promises were the down payment on a renewed Earth, the restoration of Paradise lost, one is missing the most important meaning and purpose of the promised land. The ultimate experience of this promise certainly includes physical children of Abraham who believe, along with all other believers!

Is ethnic Israel still properly called Israel? Certainly no one would deny the name Israel to Jewish believers in Jesus. But what about those Jews who don't believe? Can they still truly be called Israel? Paul used this appellation of the Jewish people, even in unbelief. Romans 11:25 states, "Israel has experienced a hardening in part...", clearly using the name "Israel" to describe Jewish non-believers. Could it be that the continued existence of the Jewish people in spite of centuries of oppression and attempts at annihilation is a witness to God's faithfulness, sovereignty, and mercy?

We need to avoid errors in two extremes. Some would deny Gentile New Covenant believers the right given to Gentile Old Covenant believers (!), that is, the right to the name "Israel" and full and absolutely equal status as part of the people of God. These have claimed that the Church and Israel are two separate peoples of God and have nothing to do with each other. According to this view, God has two separate peoples and two separate plans.3 This view essentially denies full glory to Jesus and the gospel. In effect it says the salvation which has come in the Messiah is only a plan, not the plan and all who believe are not the recipients of all blessings, just some! (But see 1 Peter 1:3-12; Eph. 1:3!) Those of the other extreme have claimed that God is finished with the Jewish people as a people (though not as individuals) and say the Church has replaced the Jewish people and become the only true Israel.4  In such a theology the Jewish people themselves are denied any use of the name Israel!

Neither extreme is correct. The first extreme fails to see the centrality of Jesus in the meaning of Israel and the second fails to see the continuation of the Jewish people in the purpose of God as a people who are still heirs to the Covenants as taught by Romans 9:4 and 11:28-29. Good theology must be Biblical rather than a polemical overreaction to error.

We need to affirm the Biblical position that all believers are grafted in to the tree of Israel, whether they are natural or "wild" branches, and that God can, and will, graft in once again the natural branches, the Jewish people (Romans 11:11-24). Gentiles need to recognize that they have been grafted into Israel, and therefore have a certain kinship with the Jewish people. Jews are no less Jewish for believing in Jesus. Jews do not become Gentiles when they come to Jesus (quite the opposite!), rather all who trust in the Jewish Messiah and serve Him are part of that Spiritual tree rooted in the Patriarchs.

How do these "Israels" relate to one another? First, recognize there is a fundamental unity in the purpose of God. Spiritual Israel is the congregation of witness, the "Holy Priesthood and Royal Nation" (Compare Ex. 19:6 and 1 Peter 2:9) which brings the light of God and blessing of Abraham to the world. Those who follow the Messiah are part of this community, made up of both Jews and Gentiles. We must recognize that all glory goes to God and that all creation serves Him. This means that whatever our understanding of Israel, it must have the Glory of God at heart. Secondly, as the Rabbis have said, "the world was created for the sake of Messiah". Therefore Israel, too, is for the sake of Messiah. In the Messiah are found all who trust in Him, both in the Old and New Covenants (numbers 3, 7, and 8). The Israel of "All Believers" will only be fully realized when the fullness of both Jewish and Gentile believers comes and ethnic Israel is restored to faith. In order for God to be glorified the Messiah must be exalted. In order for Messiah to be exalted, His Body, All Believers, the Church, is being blessed and is prospering. In order for the church to fully prosper, the Jewish people must be restored to faith and join in the missionary enterprise (Romans 11:12). In order for them to be restored, they must, of course, be preserved. I would argue that in order for the Jewish people to be preserved, the Nation of Israel needed to be created and needs to exist. We must stand for the continued existence of the state of Israel and for a just expression of that existence.5

The fate of ethnic Israel and Spiritual Israel, the Church, are bound up together. The church is to make Jewish evangelism a priority and must stand by the Jewish people for the glory of God. We must look with hope and expectation for the glorious day when the natural branches are grafted in and "all Israel will be saved." In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and the place of his rest will be glorious (Isaiah 11:10).

Endnotes:

1 This is a provisional statement written as part of a process of theological development. It is tentative in nature and subject to further revision.

2 See John Owen's commentary on Hebrews, Volume 1, 443-455 (2nd edition, 1812).

3 This is the essence of the Dispensational teaching regarding Israel and the church.

4. I would accuse some of those in the Covenantal camp of this position, though they rarely put it quite this way. Older reformed theologians
are much more positive towards ethnic Israel because they were not reacting against the errors of dispensationalism mentioned above! See our section quoting Calvin, Hodge, Murray, Vos, etc.

5 An additional reason for Christians to be concerned for the Jewish people is that Christians have an ethical duty to uphold the cause of oppressed peoples (Amos 2:7). Historically, few have been so oppressed as Jesus' own ethnic group, the Jews. The Palestinian Arabs have also suffered injustices. They have been mistreated by their own Arab brothers and are not always treated fairly in Israel. They have also committed injustices themselves. The Messiah is the ultimate solution to this conflict.

40+%  of Jews world-wide are agnostic or atheist, and this is especially true among Russian emigres. Here in Philadelphia with a Russian-speaking population of about 70,000, at least 70% of Russian speakers are Jews. Years ago Communist Russia taught something called "Scientific Atheism" based on the presumption that atheism was the foundation for empirical science and that religious faith was simply superstition. If you wanted to get anywhere in Russian academia or be "upwardly mobile" in the Party or the Institute or the factories, you kept your religion to yourself. Many of these US emigres are still atheist/agnostic because they've never had a dialog with a Christian who knew what he was talking about. But even among Americans in general,  agnosticism and atheism are widespread.

There are MANY fine books written on how to share your faith with "A&A" people. But in case you don't have time for a book, here are some basic rebuttals condensed into a few talking points.

1) Reasoning with Agnostics: If they object to taking a blind "leap of faith" (as they think you've done!), then tell them they've already taken that leap by concluding that no conclusion can be reached about God. The point you should make with them?  Their view itself is a religious faith commitment.
 
2) They assume agnosticism is open minded. Challenge that assumption on the basis of Romans 1:18-23. Ask them: "Wouldn't you be more inclined to be biased against faith in an all-powerful Judge of deeds and thoughts who brings mankind to a Day of Judgment? Ask: "How can you be sure that you wouldn't be prejudiced (and not open-minded) against such a conclusion, and therefore avoid giving it due consideration?"
 
3) Show them John 3:19 and following verses. Even if they discount your use of the Bible, certain verses contain "cut-to-the-heart" timeless truths that even the unchurched can see. For example: "Light is come into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."

4) Ask them if they are open-minded or narrow-minded. Agnostics/atheists believe they've arrived at their views because they're open-minded. They aren't, but what you're doing here is getting a commitment from them to keep an open mind. Ask: "Are you willing to change your mind if I could show you that belief in the biblical God is not only possible logically, but is in fact essential for a civilized society? (In other words, "Are you willing to change your mind if it can be shown that atheism/agnosticism doesn't make logical sense?)  
 
5) Apart from there being a God (i.e., an ultimate Law-Giver),  there is no basis for any appeal to  morality, truth or ethics. Why? Because if ours is a world and universe of random-chance (as "A&A" people believe) then how can we appeal to a transcendent, permanent moral order, or use terms like "justice vs. injustice" or "evil vs. good", etc.? For example ... why is what ISIS doing to it's victims called "evil". Why isn't it simply called "painful" ? 

6) Listen for their use of words like "good/evil", "right/wrong" in their argument, then challenge them on that by asking: "How can you appeal to transcendent, ultimate moral law without presupposing an ultimate, transcendent Law-giver? If there isn't one, then there's only three reasons for morality: a) tradition b) survival of the fittest c) personal preference. (Give examples of where each of these leads.)
 
7) What if they say to you: "The existence of evil upon the innocent proves there is no God!"?  Answer this way: "If you don't presuppose God to begin with, then stop using the word "evil", because you have no grounds for appealing to a ultimate moral order in your agnostic/atheistic universe of random-chance." 
 
8) So then, if there is a God, what sort of God would permit evil upon the innocent? (Only three choices:) a) He's righteous but not all-powerful to stop it; b) He's all-powerful to stop it, but not righteous enough to do so; c)He's both, but you're not able to understand how he can be both.

9)  Ask this: "Will you assume with me that Jesus was an innocent man, subjected to unjust evil? If so, then hat explanation did He give for the existence of evil?  Would you like to see from Scripture?"
 

 

​ 
Between 30,000 and 70,000  Christians, "prisoners of conscience", exist day after day in the most extensive system of concentration camps on earth. Except for the use of gas chambers and ovens, these camps are as murderous as anything the Nazis invented.
 
But why does it take the threat of nuclear war to get Christians in America to pray for the situation in North Korea? Let's suppose Donald Trump's diplomatic posturing; his "carrot-and-stick" strategy with Kim Jung Un actually works? Then what? Suppose relationships normalize between North Korea and America?  What does "normalize" mean, in this context?

If all it means to you is that the Korean dictator stops playing "chicken" with his warheads, but that his internal regime stays the same, then please question the genuineness of your faith. "Remember the prisoners as if chained with them  -- those who are mistreated -- since you yourselves are in the body [of Christ] also," says the Divine Writer of Hebrews. (13:30)
 
 This regime of Kim Jong Un's is like nothing this earth has ever seen. More than a Communist dictatorship, it is an Orwellian nightmare that aims for total mind control, complete with its own religious ideology, called "Juche". Juche means "self-reliance".  On the surface, Juche aims to separate the North Korean people from manipulation and oppression from the capitalist West, especially the United States, through a state-controlled orchestration of thought and behavior modification. Under Juche, faith in God or personal prayer to God is a treasonable act, punishable by imprisonment in a labor camp. Citizens are instructed to literally worship Kim Jong Un, his father and his grandfather, and to publicly and privately thank the Kims for providing them their food, their homes and their lives. This worship is enforced by mandatory "self-criticism" meeting that the entire population attends weekly. Here, they sing from hymnbooks containing 600 songs of praise glorifying the Kim family, those both present and deceased. In private homes Kim photos are uses as religious icons and prayers are offered to them. The enormous Kim statues placed throughout the country are used as idols. North Koreans bow down to them and through them, literally worship the eternal spirits of the current dictator's father and grandfather. Clearly, this is something more than the Communism of Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao.
 
In order to enforce this religious ideology, the Kim regime uses a social system called "Songbun" (meaning "origin" and  "part of the whole"). Songbun is a caste system of reward/punishment based upon a citizen's ancestry as well as his/her personal level of loyalty to Kim. The first level is "core", second level is "wavering", third level is "hostile". All those suspected of being Christians are classed as "hostile", and they're only permitted $3-$5 per month. In other words, unless they steal or beg or barter illegally, they will starve to death eventually. If it can be proven that they have practiced their religion, even in private, they go to prison. 
 
Juche is also enforced by the civil and political police at every level of public life. The police employ a massive spy network of private citizens; ideally, members of one's own family, to report private acts of disloyalty of parents, spouses, and children. NOT to report an act of suspected disloyalty is itself an act of disloyalty. Consequently, the family structure and its circle of trust is compromised by the State. 
 
The third way Juche is enforced is by the labor camps. Loosely based upon Stalin's "gulag" system, prisoners are given massive workloads, starvation, isolation and daily sessions of sadistic physical torture by prison guards. This is designed to terrify the "hostile" and "wavering" populace outside the prison walls into obedience. 
 
Regardless of whether Mr. Trump can bring Kim Jong Il to heel through his carrot-and-stick letter-writing diplomacy, Christians in America need to be mindful, prayerful and aware of their brothers and sisters who live in this virtual hell-on-earth. 
 
Five Facts Western Christians Should Know About North Koreans
 
 
1) A Hard-Core Remnant Somehow Survives
 
Seoul USA https://issuu.com/seoulusa  , a non-profit NGO (non-governmental organization) in South Korea did an interview with a former North Korean couple, who must remain anonymous as  "Mr. and Mrs. Bae" on the condition of North Korean Christians in-country. What the Baes told Seoul USA is that despite the fact that most practicing Christians will eventually end up in concentration camps or prisons due to the regime's spy network, a small remnant continues to exist, and though this remnant is very small, the regime has been unable to stamp it out. According to the July 2017's edition of Persecution (International Christian Concern's monthly magazine: https://www.persecution.org)  this fact, along with the testimony of recent high-level defectors escaping the West, is a major frustration to Kim Jong Un, who, despite his recent actions and posturing, is surprisingly concerned about his nation's public image internationally.
 
[These Are the Generations, Mr. & Mrs. Bae, as told to Rev. Eric Foley, W. Publishing, Colorado Springs, CO, 2012]
 
 
2)  Scripture Knowledge is Limited, But They Cherish What They Know

Bibles are illegal in North Korea. Most North Koreans have never seen a Bible. If they've seen any Christian literature at all, it's been a tract or a pamphlet. Seminaries are illegal. House gatherings are illegal. Churches (except for a few "show" churches for Western visitors) are illegal. And the Internet is closely monitored by the political police. Unless a Korean has been to China and visited a church there (and few have), they have no experiential knowledge of church life. Consequently, their knowledge of what the Bible contains is so incomplete that it's a miracle there are Christians there at all! And yet, there are. But according to Mr. and Mrs. Bae (These Are the Generations) what little they do know is immensely cherished. The Baes' interviewer, Rev. Eric Foley, compares this stewardship to that of someone clutching a few pieces of a puzzle. He writes "What amazes and humbles me is the degree to which they have exhibited such costly and complete faithfulness despite having far fewer puzzle pieces that I, not to mention no picture-box lid by which to organize them. We [Christians in the West], may have all the puzzle pieces and even the puzzle box lid  but they, tightly clutching at time only a single-folded, faded puzzle piece inside a trembling yet reverently closed fist, know and worship and trust the Puzzle Maker in ways I have yet to, with my comparative wealth and power and freedom ..."
 
[These Are the Generations, p.14]
 
3)  Their Concept of Divine Guidance Pushes the Limits of Cessationism
 
In These Are the Generations, Mr. Bae [an alias name] gives the account of his devout Christian grandfather, Sung Do, being instructed by God to witness to hostile Japanese soldiers in Korea shortly before WWII (and before the rise of Communism there). His grandfather heard a loud and audible voice: " 'Sung Do! Sung Do! the voice thundered. 'The Japanese will not harm you. Get close to them.' " [p. 17] The soldiers came with sledgehammers and axes to destroy a Korean church. Sung Do calmly blocked the doorway with his body and called to them not to destroy the church. As he stood in their way, he explained to them the gospel and told them to repent. They were so stunned that they left him alone and did not destroy his church. And some of the Japanese became Christians that day. This kind of guidance flies in the face of how cessationism has typically been understood. 
 
"Cessationism" is the doctrine that spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues, prophesy, and the gift of miraculous healing ceased with the end of the Apostolic Age and the completion of  Scripture's canon. The Holy Spirit then withdrew not only his miraculous gifts, but withdrew His direct guidance in the lives of Christians other than and outside of the written word of God. Pentecostals, Charismatics and "Word of Faith" people (Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, etc., etc.) do not believe this. Neither do Christians in so-called "Apostolic" churches who teach that God continues to anoint modern-day apostles with an apostles' authority and infallible divine guidance; a kind of  Protestant version of the doctrine of papal infallibility.. Conservative, Reformed Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists are cessationists. The problem is, however, what happens when Christians under severe persecution have no Bible and no Biblical training. Does God guide them directly and supernaturally? According to Mr. and Mrs. Bae (aliases) and other North Korean Christians who've given testimony of such guidance, the answer is yes. This flies in the face of what most (but not all!) cessationists believe about divine guidance today.  
 
Prof. John Murray (deceased), a founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, gave a "flagship" statement of the hard-line cessationist view on divine guidance. His is a critique of those who think they are cessationists, but in his mind they are not. He writes:  "It is possible, however, to admit the validity and necessity of these foregoing premises and yet adopt a position which in reality undermines and defeats their implications. That is to say, we may still fall into the error of thinking that while the Holy Spirit does not provide us with special revelations in the form of words or visions or dreams, yet He may and does provide us with some direct feeling or impression or conviction which we are to regard as the Holy Spirit's intimation to us of what His mind and will is in a particular situation.  [ I maintain ] that this view  of the Holy Spirit's guidance amounts, in effect, to the same thing as to believe that the Holy Spirit gives special revelation." [Guidance of the Holy Spirit, John Murray, Chapter 26, p. 187] 
 
 But another Westminster Seminary cessationist, Prof. Vern Poythress, believes that divine guidance may indeed happen in just this way from time to time, as long as such guidance does not add new teaching to the completed Word of God and that it not be regarded as infallible or with apostolic authority. He gives examples of such in the lives of the Protestant Reformers in his "Modern Spiritual Gifts As Analogous to Apostolic Gifts: Affirming Extraordinary Works of the Spirit Within Cessationist Theology, The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 39/1 (1996) 
 
According to Mr. and Mrs. Bae (aliases) and Christian refugees from North Korea who have little or no Christian training and certainly no Bible, God guides them in extraordinary ways, sometimes to safety and sometimes to witnessing opportunities. 
 
​
4) Their Concept of Fellowship and Personal Trust Has Been Stunted By Kim's Regime
 
This isn't just true for North Korean Christians; it's true for North Koreans in general. If Kim's regime is so pervasive and insidious that trust between family members is often in doubt, what does that say for it's effect on Christian fellowship? The strength of a church gathering is its trust; in God and in each other. Kim's regime has sought to interpose itself between every form of relationship and intimacy, and has largely succeeded. Yet the underground church in North Korea continues to exist, sometimes within the walls of a gulag, sometimes outside of its walls. 

5) We in the West Are Commanded to Pray for North Korean Saints, and Their Rulers
 
 This is what Hebrews 13:2 says: "Remember the prisoners as if chained with them -- those who are mistreated -- since you yourselves are in the body [of Christ] also." 
 
I Timothy 2:1 says to pray for rulers. Remember that St. Paul, who was inspired to write that, lived under the reign of emperors Caligula and Nero, two of the most sadistic rulers Rome ever had. We're told to pray for the restraining hand of God to be upon those who exercise earthly rule. And for those they rule, we are to pray. Gospel literature is indeed getting into North Korea. It comes in by small balloons, by drones, by sending it via the rivers, and even (though limited) through social media. Many defectors have reported how they were reached through these methods. 
 
Most especially, we're told to pray for them.
 

"The New Testament is full of Jew-hatred. From its negative depiction of the Pharisees to its charge of 'Christ-killing', it's been THE major cause anti-Semitism for 2000 years!" 
 
This is a view usually not stated openly, but is unfortunately, widely believed by many Jewish people. We at CHAIM Ministry (www.chaim.org) have heard this argument more than a few times. If someone said this to you and you were a Christian, how would you respond?
 
Your Jewish friend may like you as a person. He may even respect Christianity in general. But this view of the New Testament is still widespread: that the troubles between Church and Synagogue can largely be traced to the New Testament.
 
Now this isn't just a "Jewish" problem. This bias towards the New Testament and the gospel it contains is shared by many Muslims too. But we need not go too far afield, here: I even speak to a lot of Roman Catholics who assure me that their years in Catholic school have given them "all the religion they need" for the rest of their lives. But when I ask them what the gospel is, what comes out of their mouths is "duty", "obligation", "going to Mass", "church attendance", "being good Catholics." I talk to enough African-Americans (and Caucasians!);  of people who grew up in a gospel culture, and for plenty of them, when they tell me what the New Testament's gospel is, what they say is pretty much the Protestant version of what the Catholics say:  the need for works, performance, duty, "my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds". For well over half of them, what they say has nothing to do with the essential message of the New Testament: what Christ did on the Cross. Rather, what they say has everything to do with them and their religious performance (or lack of it): in essence, a definite negative presumption about the New Testament and the message it contains. Historically, Jews have harbored those negative presumptions too, and their history in Europe helps us to understand why.
 
The Promised Land, published in 1912, was an autobiographical sketch of author Mary Antin's childhood life in Czarist Russia and her subsequent coming to America during one of the worst pogroms in history. A "pogrom" (Russian: "to wreak havoc") was a government-initiated riot against Jews in lands under Czarist rule. One of the worst pogrom was in 1881, the year Antin and many thousands of other Jews emigrated to the United States. During the pogroms, both Britain and America issued formal protests to the Russian government. In Promised Land, Antin shares the terror she experienced as small girl, hiding with her parents in her own home while marauding bands of churchgoers marched through the streets, stirred up by government-sponsored priests of the Orthodox church against the "Killers of Christ" living in their midst. The mobs believed they were expressing their love of Jesus by their hatred of the Jews. What's significant here is that Czarist anti-Semitism was distinctly religious. Antin explains that Christmas and Easter were especial times of terror for the Jews in the Pale of Settlements: those areas especially designated for Jews to live. Consequently, these late 19th Century emigres passed on to their children and grand-children their experiences of what it was like when "Christians" left their Easter and Christmas church services in Czarist Russia.
 
No wonder the New Testament is not a favorite book among Jews today, not for what's actually written in it, but for what kind of people presumed to represent its message!  Roughly half of today's American Jews had grandparents and great-grandparents who left Czarist Russia during that time, a time in history popularized by the play and then the movie "Fiddler on the Roof."
 
The first Czarist pogrom is usually dated from 1821, but Russia wasn't the only country that had anti-Jewish riots in the name of Christianity. In neighboring Tisza, Hungary, (across the border) the district rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein (1824-1908) ministered to his congregation during the infamous "Tisza Eslar Affair", when leading Jews there were falsely accused of murdering a Christian girl and using her blood in a ritual. This baseless slander was eventually exposed due in part to the efforts of famed Bible scholar Prof. Franz Delitzsch of the University of Leipzig. (Keil and Delitzsch's Commentary on the Old Testament: 10 Volumes), but the resulting anti-Jewish rioting so vexed Rabbi Lichtenstein that he decided to read a New Testament in order to discover a basis for all this hatred. This was the same New Testament copy he had read in anger 40 years before and hurled into a corner of his study where it remained untouched until the day he read it again after this riot. But what he found in it was the opposite of what he thought he'd find. He writes ...
 
"I had thought the New Testament to be impure, a source of pride, of selfishness, of hatred, and of the worst kind of violence, but as I opened it, I felt myself peculiarly and wonderfully taken possession of. A sudden glory, a light flashed through my soul. I looked for thorns and found roses; I discovered pearls instead of pebbles; instead of hatred, love ..."

"From every line in the New Testament, from every word, the Jewish spirit streamed forth light, life, power, endurance, faith, hope, love, charity, limitless and indestructible faith in God ..."

Lichtenstein started using the New Testament in his synagogue preaching until three years later, he confessed to his congregation that he had been doing this, and that he'd become convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was Lord and Messiah. His conversion became known, to the astonishment of all the Jewish communities of Hungary. Lichtenstein published three pamphlets telling of his new-found faith. When he was called before the Chief Rabbi of Budapest to recant his views, he refused. His fellow-rabbis asked him to resign and be baptized but he refused, replying that he would not join a church or be baptized, but that he only desired to stay with his congregation. His congregation voted to have him stay as their "Christian" rabbi. Finally however, he did resign and continued a writing and visitation ministry across Europe, hounded by his fellow-rabbis but supported by several missionary organizations.
 
"When the roll is called up yonder" as the old hymn goes, there no doubt will be many obscure saints honored whom most of us have never heard of here on earth. Their fame will have to wait for that glorious day. And for that reason, Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein is one of the "Honorable Menshen".
 
 ("Menshen": plural for "mensh", which is Yiddish for "a person deserving of honor".

[sources:]
1) Wikipedia
 2) The Promised Land, Mary Antin, 1912
3) The Anguish of the Jews, Edw. H. Flannery, Paulist Press
4) Famous Hebrew-Christians, Jacob Gartenhaus (as quoted by: Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus - Vol. 1, Michael L. Brown, Baker Books, 2001
 5) "The Story of Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein", http://www.messianicassociation.org/bio-lichtenstein.htm
6) Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus - Vol. 1, Michael L. Brown, Baker Books, 2001

​
Bibi Netanyahu's May 1st comments about Iran touch upon a key point of the Muslim faith that few non-Muslims understand or even want to believe. According to Islam, Muslims don't have to tell non-Muslims the truth. They don't have to tell them the truth about anything that, in their view, threatens Islam. This concept is called "Taqqiya", and it's the "elephant in the room" that the Obama Administration refused to recognize when it, with the compliance of Sen. John McCain, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made that past deal with Iran.Loyalty oaths by Muslims in the American Armed Services or in the Diplomatic Corps need not be honored either, according to the Qu'ran. 
 
One of the key differences between the Christian faith and that of Islam is that, while Christians certainly have been known to lie just as Muslims do, their faith teaches them not do so. On the other hand, the Islamic faith permits it, when dealing with non-Muslims. This puts in jeopardy everything from loyalty oaths to oaths of office to international diplomatic guarantees between nations.
 
Click on this link. or paste into your browser.. (original was released May 1st) 
 
As you probably know, the iranian leaders are not ashamed to publicly express their desire to destroy Israel. But Iran is also lying to the world about its nuclear weapons program, which greatly compromises the nuclear deal. Here is the speech delivered by Netanyahu yesterday night, after an amazing operation when Mossad secretly retrieved iranian nuclear archives on a cold january night 3 months ago ! 
 
Wikipedia's sources are instructive for us, here, as it deals particularly with Shia Islam, the state religion of Iran. 
 
qiya (تقیة taqiyyah/taqīyah, literally "fear, caution")[1] is a form of Islamic dissimulation or a legal dispensation whereby a believing individual can deny their faith or commit otherwise illegal or blasphemous acts while they are in fear or at risk of significant persecution.[2]
 
This practice is emphasized in Shia Islam, the official religion of Iran, whereby adherents are permitted to conceal their religion when under threat of persecution or compulsion.[3][4] However, it is also permitted in Sunni Islam under certain circumstances.[5][6] 
 
Taqiyya was initially practiced under duress by some of Muhammad's companions.[7] Later, it became particularly important for Shias due to their experience as a persecuted religious minority.[4][8] According to Shia doctrine, taqiyya is permissible in situations where there is overwhelming danger of loss of life or property and where no danger to religion would occur thereby.[4] Taqiyya has also been politically legitimised, particularly among Twelver Shias, in order to maintain unity among Muslims and fraternity among the Shia clerics.[9][10]
 
Yarden Mariuma writes: "Taqiyya is an Islamic juridical term whose shifting meaning relates to when a Muslim is allowed, under Sharia law, to lie. A concept whose meaning has varied significantly among Islamic sects, scholars, countries, and political regimes, it nevertheless is one of the key terms used by recent anti-Muslim polemicists."[11]
 
The term taqiyya (Arabic: تقیة‎ taqiyyah/taqīyah) is derived from the Arabic triliteral root wāw-qāf-yā, denoting "fear", or "prudence, guarding against (a danger)".[12] Term taqwa "piety" (lit. "fear [of God]") is from the same root.[13] The term is derived from the Quranic reference to religious dissimulation in Sura 3:28:
"Let not the believers take the unbelievers for protectors rather than believers; and whoever does this, he shall have nothing of (the guardianship of) Allah, but you should guard yourselves against them, guarding carefully (illā an tattaqū minhum tuqāt)."The two words tattaqū ("you fear") and tuqāt "in fear" are derived from this root, and the abstract noun taqiyyah refers to the general principle connected with the situation described here, first recorded in a Qur'anic gloss by Al-Bukhari (9th century).[14]
 
Regarding 3:28, Ibn Kathir writes, "meaning, except those believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers. In this case, such believers are allowed to show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly." He quotes Muhammad's companion, Abu Ad-Darda', who said "we smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them," and Al-Hasan who said "the Tuqyah is acceptable till the Day of Resurrection."[15]
 
A similar instance of the Qur'an permitting dissimulation under compulsion is found in Sura 16:106.[16] Sunni and Shia commentators alike observe that verse 16:106 refers to the case of 'Ammar b. Yasir, who was forced to renounce his beliefs under physical duress and torture.[17] The term for the related concept of kitman "secrecy, concealment" is derived from a root kāf-tā-mīm (ك ت م) "conceal".[18] The two terms taqiyyah and kitman may be used synonymously, although the former has the more inclusive meaning of "dissimulation" in general, while the later refers to the "concealment" of one's convictions by silence or omission.[17]

 Chag Same'ach!  Happy [Passover] Holiday!

So much of the Bible is written in "Passover language" If you don't know something about how Jews celebrated it in Bible times, as well as today, you're missing something! 

Check out these passages, and next year, if you want a Passover seder for your church that will elaborate on these connections, contact me either through www.scripturesdramatized.com, or send me an e-mail.
 
Passover Scripture Verses
 

Exodus 12:12 - Establishment of Passover, importance of Lamb's blood, reason for the name "Passover".

 Exodus 12:38 - The "mixed multitude" who left Egypt (not just ethnic Hebrews), heralding the nature of God's acceptance: not by ethnicity, but by adoption.
 
I Corinthians 5:6-8 - Paul's use of Passover language to illustrate the nature of New Testament fellowship.
 
Matthew 26:26,27/Luke 22:20 - "This is My body". Christ's fulfillment of the seder's ritual eating of the matzoth and the drinking of the four wine-glasses.
 
John 13 through 17 - The "Passover Discourse": Christ's fulfilling of the seder's "hagaddah" [the "telling"] when the master of the feast applied the Exodus lesson for all in attendance.
 
John 11:55 - The first century rabbinical schools with their pilgrims arrive in Jerusalem for the holiday.
 
Psalms 120 through 124 - The "Psalms of Ascents" [as in "to ascend"/to go up] sung by first century pilgrims during their climb up Mt. Zion to sacrifice the lambs in the Temple.
 
Matthew 26:18 - The Passover purification, including the removal of leaven from each dwelling.
 
Luke 12:1 - "Beware the leaven of the Pharisees": Christ's use of the earthly purification ritual to illustrate its ultimate spiritual significance.
 
Exodus 12:8/Numbers 9:11 - The Torah's requirement that the lamb be eaten with bitter herbs.
 
Acts 5:35/Acts 22:3 - NT reference to Paul's teacher Gamaliel, the rabbi who is quoted each year during the seder meal. 
 
John 13:21 & 26 - Jesus and Judas mostly likely "dipped the sop" in bitter herbs at this time. This is a ritual dipping ceremony illustrating the bitterness of slavery.

John 6:32-35 - Jesus declared Himself to be "bread", a fulfillment of the liturgical "This is the bread of affliction" statement made by the master of the feast.
 
Exodus 12:39 - The reason why matzoth [unleavened bread] was eaten - it was "the bread of haste". They were fleeing the Egyptian army, and they needed to hurry.
 
I Corinthians 11:25 - The "cup after supper", most likely the drinking of the 3rd of four cups of wine.

Matthew 28:29 - The cup that Jesus would not drink until his brethren were in heaven with him; most likely the 4th of the four cups.

Matthew 24:1,2 - The reason why Jews cannot sacrifice lambs anymore: the Temple's destruction and their world-wide dispersion ["Diaspora"].

John 13:3-5 - The foot-washing at Passover, Christ's application of the ceremonial washing ritual.

Mark 7:3 - a reference as to why Jews historically had so many needless washing rituals: their conscience was defiled due to the Law's effect on their hearts.

Matthew 15:3 - Christ argues with the Pharisees: grace vs. legalism; a confrontation between the traditions of the elders and the pure word of God.

John 21:20 - The "reclining at table" custom, reflected in John's reclining with Jesus.

Deuteronomy 28:58 - The plagues on the Egyptians, and a warning to the Covenant People, both Jews and Gentiles.

Leviticus 26:44/Romans 11:12 & 15 - a promise to regather the Remnant - both ethnic Jews and Gentiles in a "New" Jerusalem, despite former covenant disobedience.

Matthew 26:30 - The singing of the Great Hallel (Psalm 136) at the end of the Passover seder.

Matthew 11:7-15 - the seder's chair for Elijah the Prophet, a custom that finds its fulfillment in the coming of John the Baptist.

Ephesians 2:20/I Peter 2:5 - the rebuilding of the final temple; not of stones, but of human beings, and the fulfillment of the Seder's concluding prayer.

Fact #1: The Book of Esther presented problems for the Protestant Reformers, and even the Jewish rabbis at one time. And for the same reasons for both groups!
 
Neither God nor prayer is mentioned at all in the book, at least not specifically. The book's very existence presented problems to Martin Luther (to name just one), at least for a while. He complained: "It hath too much of Judaism, and a great deal of heathenish naughtiness." [Luther's Works, Vol 3]. The book is written in a way unlike any other Bible text. There's a strong strain of patriotism and Jewish nationalism.  It also has a distinct element of humor. That's not humorous levity, however. It's still Word of God and it deals with serious topics as it depicts events that occurred in Persia about 475 years before Christ. But since biblical times it has been regarded as canonical by the rabbis. And, according to Maimonides (Judaism's most famous scholar), second only to the Torah in importance.
 
Fact #2: Esther's husband was likely the same king who fought the Greeks at Marathon, from which we get the marathon foot-race.
 
This would've been during the reign of Xerxes the Great, (a.k.a "Ahashuerus" in the KJV translation). Xerxes ruled an enormous empire of 127 provinces "from India to Ethiopia" as Esther 1:1 says. He was intent on humbling the Greeks, but was defeated on the plains of Marathon by a combined force of Greek city-states in 490 BC. According to legend, the messenger Pheidippides ran the approximate 25 miles to announce the defeat of the Persians to the Athenians. Then he dropped dead from exhaustion.

Fact #3: Either Xerxes or his father Darius is the same king that Nehemiah received permission from to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
 
This was likely due to how impressed they were by the amazing acts of the Hebrew God that the Persians heard about during the events of the Babylonian Exile, even as far back as the humbling of Nebuchadnezzar and his conversion to faith in the God he thought his god had conquered at Jerusalem.. The Jews in Xerxes' time were slaves and exiles in Persia, "hold-overs" from their former slavery to the previous empire of Babylon, and its king, Nebuchadnezzar.

Fact #4: Though God is not mentioned in "Esther", it's evident that Esther's uncle Mordecai had faith in Him, and that Esther herself prayed to Him.

Why? Because of these two statements: the first by Mordecai, the second by Esther:

"For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" [Esth. 4:14]

Here it's evident that Mordecai had complete faith that God would deliver the Jews from certain genocide, either with Esther's help, or without her help.

"Go, gather all the Jews who are present in Shushan, and fast for me; neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will fast likewise. And so I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish!" [Esth. 4:16]

Here it's evident that Esther and her maidens also prayed. The Bible prescribes fasting for two purposes, and they almost always go together: a) as a sign of deep grief and mourning, and b) as an aid to effective, importunate prayer: the kind of prayer reserved for extraordinary circumstances. When you are "importuning" God, when you are pleading with Him to intervene in a situation that's critical, you fast. The point? Both God and prayer are present in this book that mentions neither one specifically.

Fact #5: The Haman-Mordecai animosity began with a blood feud 500 years before either one was born!
 
The Book of Esther makes a point of emphasizing the forebears of both Haman and Mordecai. Mordecai was a descendant of King Saul's father Kish. [I Sam. 9:1] [Esth. 2:5]. Haman was a descendant of Agag, King of the Amalekites. [Esth. 3:1]. 500 years before in Israel, King Saul was told by God to exterminate the race of Amalek for their great wickedness. This he refused to do. So 500 years later, Haman attempted to do this very same thing with the Jews! The national moral to the story? Obey God in history, or "history" will catch up with you.

Fact #6: Haman's death, which originally was planned for Mordecai, was by "hanging upon gallows" [Esth. 5:14, Esth. 7:10], but the execution wasn't by rope or strangulation. It was by impalement on a stake. 
 
That's right, Gentle Reader. Not "Western" style, but "Vlad the Impailer" style is the kind of  hanging in view here. The Persians were cruel, and the Romans equally so. Neither people practiced the kind of execution we're familiar with in the West. Death by dropping from a platform or even being strung up with a rope noose and asphyxiated is quick and comparatively merciful. But the pagans of antiquity preferred their lowest criminals to die by slow torture. That's what Haman had in mind for Mordecai. Both Persians and Romans also used more merciful methods but impalement upon a stake was reserved for the worst criminals. When the Bible speaks of Christ "hung upon a tree", what's in view here is piercing and slow death on a cross-tee. If Haman had succeeded in executing Mordecai and all the Jews of the known world [Esth. 3:13-15], he would've wiped out the family line of Jesus, and prevented the only "impalement" that could've saved humanity.

"The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto Me from the ground." (Gen. 4:10)
 
The story of Cain and Abel is the first instance in history of the shedding of innocent blood. God is not beyond using figurative language to drive a point home. Of course shed blood doesn't have a literal voice, but what this verse means is that the shed blood of the innocent gives loud testimony to God that He will not leave unpunished. And this is not just an ancient "Jewish" judgment confined to how God dealt with Old Testament Israel. For this same sin He punished Gentile nations too. Notice Leviticus 18, where He warns Israel to refrain from certain sins, including the slaying of the innocent:
 
" ... for all these abominations the men of the land have done who were before you, and thus the land is defiled, lest the land vomit you out also when you defile it, as it vomited out the nations which were before you." (Lev. 18:28)
 
Nor is this vengeance confined to Old Testament judgments from a bygone era, having nothing to do with nations today. It's relevant to our own New Testament times: Consider Rev. 6:10:
 
"How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?"
 
Who's doing the speaking? The martyred saints in heaven. If you thought it was wrong for Christians to ask for revenge, or that this kind of language is inappropriate for saints today, then explain this verse. The point? God avenges the shedding of innocent blood in all ages and with all nations. He punishes entire countries for slaying the innocent, the unborn, and those in "partial birth" status.
 
This past election, we had two viable candidates running for office: one who was in favor of this and one who was against it. One presidential candidate vowed to continue the abominations of Planned Parenthood and its "harvesting" of living tissue from persons in the womb, and to continue partial-birth abortions. The other candidate vowed to oppose it. 

According to Numbers 35:33, the shed blood of the innocents defiles a land in a way unique from other sins: 
 
"So you shall not pollute the land where you are, for blood defiles the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it."
 
Repeatedly in Scripture God calls Himself the defender of the orphan and widow, the avenger of the poor and helpless and those who have none to speak for them. (Prov. 24:11,12)  Among these victims are the aborted.  Few political campaigns are decided by a single isse. But this "single issue" is among the most important. According to Scripture, a nation's punishment for innocent blood is war or famine or exile; or all three. What form that wold take in our modern America I shudder to think.
 
But "doom and gloom" is not inevitable in our lifetimes. God's wrath has been known to skip a generation, or several, if a country shows repentance, and "If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sins and heal their land." (II Chron. 7:14) He did exactly this in the days of good King Josiah and reserved his wrath for a future time. (II Kings 22).
 
When St. Paul penned his famous words in Romans 13:1-7 and I Tim. 2:1-3, roughly 10% of the populace were Roman citizens. Paul himself was a citizen (Acts 22:28). This was a rare privilege, and a citizen of Rome had certain rights that the other 90% didn't have. For example, he could appeal directly to Caesar for redress of grievances. Make no mistake, Paul used those rights. But what a Roman citizen could not do was vote for the election of his leaders. You, on the other hand, can.

Americans have that privilege as a gift of God. As St. Paul did in his time, we're to use that privilege for all it's worth this next election season.

Just because a "Christian" ministry says that it's  "pro-Israel" doesn't mean it really is. There's nothing more "anti-Israel" than teaching Israelis that now is not the time to come to Christ as Lord and Messiah.Take for example, John Hagee, the founder of "Christians United For Israel" (CUFI)
 
Hagee is a Premillennial Dispensationalist, but he's one that even other "Dispy" groups have a problem with. In his controversial book In Defense of Israel, Hagee says:
 
. Christ did not come to earth to be the Messiah
. Christ by His words and deeds refused to be the Messiah
. Jews can't be blamed for rejecting Jesus, since He was never offered to them. (!)
 
CUFI is well-funded, and is seeking a college campus presence to counter the growing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel  sentiments at universities.
 
Even other "Dispy" groups have a problem with CUFI and its founder. Take the organization "One For Israel" as an example, which has an impressive social networking presence and often features Jews who came to gospel faith in the Messiah. Eitan Bar, an Israeli Messianic, recently wrote a public plea to John Hagee to stop teaching heresy. It's called "Let My People Know".

https://www.oneforisrael.org/bible-based-teaching-from-israel/a-plea-to-john-hagee-let-my- people-know/
 
But it isn't just that Hagee's wrong; the whole under-girding theology of Premillennial Dispensationalism that he's just the most extreme example of, is wrong. Here are two excellent articles on that:
 
https://www.chaim.org/confusion.htm
 
http://www.chaim.org/xpansion.htm

0 Comments

Most of the scientific/academic community in America reasons from an agnostic or atheistic worldview. In the whole history of science, this assumption is very, very new. It's also illogical.
 
If scientists reasoned from the vantage point of sheer statistical probability, they would have to jettison agnosticism and presuppose the existence of an Intelligent Designer. Instead, they presuppose a random-chance universe and then reason everything else from there.
 
Check out this chart and this website:
 
An Estimate of the Probability for Attaining the Necessary Parameters for Life Support

Probability that feature will fall in the required range (given in percentage fractions)

galaxy size.1
galaxy type.1
galaxy location.1
star location relative to galactic center.2
star distance from closest spiral arm.1
z-axis extremes of star's orbit.1
proximity of solar nebula to a supernova eruption.01
timing of solar nebula formation relative to supernova eruption.01
number of stars in system.2
star birth date.2
star age.4
star metallicity.05
star orbital eccentricity.1
star's distance from galactic plane.1
star mass.001
star luminosity relative to speciation.0001
star color.4
3H+ production.1
supernovae rates and locations.01
white dwarf binary types, rates, and locations.01
planetary distance from star.001
inclination of planetary orbit.5
planetary axis tilt.3
rate of change of axial tilt.01
planetary rotation period.1
rate of change in planetary rotation period.05
planetary orbit eccentricity.3
surface gravity (escape velocity).001
tidal force.1
magnetic field.01
albedo.1
density.1
planetary crust thickness.01
oceans-to-continents ratio.2
rate of change in oceans-to-continents ratio.1
global distribution of continents.3
frequency and extent of ice ages.1
asteroid and comet collision rate.1
change in asteroid and comet collision rates.1
mass of body colliding with primordial Earth.002
timing of collision with primordial Earth.05
rate of change in asteroid/comet collision rate.1
proximity and mass of Jupiter.01
major planet eccentricities.1
major planet orbital instabilities.1
drift rate and rate change of major planets.1
atmospheric transparency.01
atmospheric pressure.1
atmospheric electric discharge rate.1
atmospheric temperature gradient.01
carbon dioxide level in atmosphere.01
oxygen level in atmosphere.01
chlorine level in atmosphere.1
iron quantity in oceans.1
tropospheric ozone quantity.01
stratospheric ozone quantity.01
mesospheric ozone quantity.01
water vapor level in atmosphere.01
oxygen-to-nitrogen ratio in atmosphere.1
quantity of greenhouse gases in atmosphere.01
frequency and extent of forest and grass fires.01
soil mineralization.1
quantity of sea-salt aerosols.1
quantity of decomposer bacteria in soil.01
quantity of mycorrhizal fungi in soil.01
quantity of nitrifying microbes in soil.01
quantity of sulfur in soil.1
quantity of sulfur in planet's core.1
tectonic activity.1
volcanic activity.1
decline in volcanic activity.1
viscosity of Earth's core at core boundaries.01
biomass to comet-infall ratio.01
regularity of cometary infall.1
dependency factors (estimate)100,000,000,000
longevity requirements (estimate).00001
Probability for combined occurrence of all 75 parameters = 10-99
Maximum possible number of planets in universe = 1023

Taken from Ross, H. 1998. Big Bang Refined by Fire. Reasons To Believe, Pasadena, CA.

By putting together probabilities for each of these design features occurring by chance, we can calculate the probability of the existence of a planet like Earth. This probability is 1 chance in 1099. Since there are estimated to be a maximum of only 1023 planets in the universe (10 planets/star, see note below), by chance there shouldn't be any planets capable of supporting life in the universe. Our existence suggests divine intervention and design. The design and care with which the laws of physics, the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and the planet Earth were crafted suggests that God is caring and loving. He put in a lot of time in the design and creation of the universe so that we would have a nice place to live for such a short period of time.
Back to The Incredible Design of the Earth

Note: This is most likely a huge over estimate. In a recent survey of globular cluster 47 Tucanae, scientists found zero extrasolar planets out of 37,000 stars searched (Astronomers Ponder Lack of Planets in Globular Cluster from the Hubble Space Telescope).

References Cited literature for the estimates presented here can be found on the main design page, The Incredible Design of the Earth.

I spoke to a Saudi Muslim about the gospel this past Friday at the U. of Penn campus.
 
This past Friday, I visited the U. of Penn campus, 3400 Walnut St., Philadelphia, passing out gospel tracts and dialoguing with students and passers-by about the gospel.  I had to do this alone this time since my partner in ministry Dan Levy passed away suddenly from a stroke. He will be missed.

This "3400" location is a public access street across from the campus and has a lot of foot traffic. When classes change or lunchtime comes, there are mobs of students: many Chinese, many Indians, a fair number of Middle-Eastern and Pakistani Muslims, some Jewish students wearing yarmulkes (the skullcap: a sign of the observant or the Orthodox). They avoid me, but other Jewish students without the yarmulkes will sometimes stop and talk. This past Friday, I had the privilege of sharing the gospel with a young Chinese Buddhist and then a Saudi medical student (Muslim). Neither one had ever heard the Christian gospel and both spent a significant amount of time talking with me about it and showing real interest. The encounter with the Saudi is worth telling, so keep reading.

What I do at Penn Campus is to stand right there on the corner. Dan Levy used to stand caddy-corner from me across the street, doing the same thing, when he was here My technique is to pass out witnessing brochures, then ask each passer-by "Do you know what that is, that piece of paper?" Once in a while a student will stop, look at it, and say "No. What is it?"

"It's a gospel tract, a gospel brochure. Do you know what the gospel is?" I'll say. (What I'm looking for is a conversation.)
 
The Saudi student (Let's call him "N"), had no  clue what born-again Christians believe, but he told me he wanted to know. So I told him. He was friendly and though Muslim, wanted to learn. He told me that the Qu'ran speaks of Jesus as a great prophet, but that as a Muslim he cannot believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
 
"But Christians don't believe that God is the biological father of Jesus, if that's what you mean," I said. "And they certainly don't believe that God and Mary had sex to give birth to Him. There are two words in Arabic meaning 'son'. One word is 'walad', meaning  biological son. The other word is 'ibn', a more general use for 'son'. For example, a teacher can have disciples, and they may validly be called his sons. You even have this tradition in Islam."

"N" was impressed. I gave him some excellent Arabic-language literature which he promised to read right away. I told him that I came to believe in Jesus coming from a background of Judaism. "At least in Islam they revere Jesus as a great prophet, but I was taught growing up only three things about Jesus: 1) We don't know who He was. 2) He wasn't the Messiah, and 3) We didn't kill Him. I knew there had to be more to it than that." He agreed.

"You know," I said, "Where we are now is one of the few places on earth where someone like me can talk to someone like you about the Christian gospel and not be arrested." (or words to that effect). "N" agreed.

"Yes," he said. "You couldn't do this in my country, but I will read what you gave me." And we parted as friends.

So ... pray for this young man: "N". And I'll give you a progress report when I hear back from him.