1409 - Exodus 35:3. Understanding some of the background of Biblical & Jewish Traditions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

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

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1409. Today I want to pick up where we left off in our last podcast. I want us to get ready for Resurrection Day, known by almost all the world as Easter. I want the emphasis to be on Jesus and upon the reason that he came, and that is to pay for our sins. Now many have forgotten that the Lord's Supper, the place from which our Christian communion came from, was a Passover Seder. And I'm going to deal with that in the days ahead, but before we do that, I want to deal with the rituals that come with many of these Moadim, these festivals, these feasts, these fast days. Because there's great misunderstanding concerning that. For the last forty nine years, this year will be forty nine years. I have been traveling to Israel. Many years I have stayed up to 120 days in Israel, studying, teaching, researching, and God has given me a lot of opportunities to study with great men of God. I stand on the shoulders of giants, there's no doubt about that. But I want to continue to do what I've always done, and that is try to boil this down to the syrup. Because you see, I'm a common man. I grew up a common man. I'm even less than a common man. But I speak real simply, and that doesn't mean I'm dumb. Just because I talk slow doesn't mean that I'm ignorant. It just simply means that I in my lifetime have seen enough schooled fools and idiots that they could sink a battleship if they were on it. All I'm saying is I believe when a person is truly educated, they don't have to let everybody know that. They just tell the truth. They love people enough to tell the truth, and especially in regards to the word of God, we don't need to try to get smarter than God. We just need to understand how it all came about. And since I have been going to Israel so often and have begun over the last twenty-five years to help people to understand the Bible is a Jewish book written by Jews, to Jews, primarily for Jews, which just grates on the nerves of many non-Jews, which is amazing to me. It's just reality. Not only were the authors of the Old Testament, the law, the prophets, and the writings Jews, but the authors of the New Testament were also save Luke, who was an educated physician, who was one of the primary mentees, one of the primary students of the apostle Paul, who was a Jewish rabbi. It's hard for some non Jews to get a hold of, those of us who are Gentiles, that for the first decade, people who made up the Church of Jesus were primarily Jews until Cornelius, which I believe was nine to ten years after Pentecost, after the resurrection, ascension of Jesus, that you had Gentiles coming in at all. And that's why for the most part the Church of Jesus and evangelical churches, especially, and even some Orthodox churches follow pretty much the same pattern of worship that was in the Old Testament in the intertestamental period with the synagogue system where you have a call to worship, you have prayer, you have reading, you have exposition, you have more prayer, and all of those things are all part of worship in the Old and New Testaments. Now I believe the church is only in the New Testament, and it's made up of both Jew and Gentile. There is no difference, the ground is level at the cross. However, the national promises made to the Jews are still in effect today. And most of the prophecies concerning Messiah are not concerning his first coming, which happened two thousand years ago, but are concerning his second coming. And those promises that were made literal about the Lord Jesus, where he would be born, how he would grow up, to whom he would speak, what he would say, what he would do, the lame would walk, the blind would see, the deaf would hear, the mute would speak. All of those things, those were evidences that Jesus even used to convince John the Baptist when he was doubting at the close of his life that indeed he was the Messiah. All of that was literal. Even what he would say on the cross were literally fulfilled. What would be the circumstances around it? And indeed that he would be buried, and where he would be buried, he would make his grave with the rich. On and on and on. Now I'm telling you that to say if those promises concerning Messiah's first coming were literal, why wouldn't we take the other? That's just the natural reading or supernatural really reading of the scriptures because that's the way that God wrote it. But when you talk about the Jews and you give them the due that's given to them, all of a sudden you're a cult leader. I've been called a Jewish cult leader. I've been painted with all kinds of brushes. Quite honestly, that means very little to me one way or the other, because I rise or fall before the Lord God. The church and the churches that I've pastored, they have listened to me gladly. For the most part, has it been new to them? Yes. By that I mean when I talk about the Jews, most people in the rural towns of America, especially in the South, many of the people in the town that I live in now, the Tri-Cities area of Tennessee is about a half a million people. In the section of that Tri-Cities that I live in, there were many people in my own congregation that before I came and began to introduce them to Jewish people had never personally met a Jewish person. And so what we are ignorant of causes us fear and intrepidation. And so I'm telling you all that to say the things I'm going to tell you over the next few days are not something that's odd to the Word of God or a strange doctrine. They're just the truth of God's Word. And some of the things I have had to learn over the years from rabbis and brilliant Jewish scholars, many of them that I have studied with, they're not followers of Jesus, but they know Jewish law, they know Jewish traditions, and I've learned from them. It's been a blessing to me. And I pray that I've been able to help them and teach them something as well. For instance, when we talk about the Passover and the Passover Seder, people will say, Well, why did they do all of those things? I don't see those in the scriptures. Well, you might see them and recognize them if you knew what they were. But many times we in the West don't know the Jewish traditions and all of the ceremonies that surround these great Moadim, these great festivals and feasts and fast days, beginning with Shabbat. Shabbat is the first of the great Moadim. It's the first one mentioned in Leviticus 23. Why? Because it is the most important. That is, it is the one that is foremost in the heart of God. Now some people would uh fault me for saying that, but I want to remind you of something. It is the Shabbat that takes place every week, and God ordained that before the Jewish people ever were set aside as his people of redemption to bring the Messiah and bring the Word of God into the world. This was from the very beginning. God set aside Shabbat for six days, made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he set aside and said, Special, and I want you to remember that I am the creator. Now that's all the way through the Word of God. And the Jews who were followers of Jesus, the apostles and others, they were religious Jews. By and large, they were religious Jews. Certainly Peter was, James and John were, and so forth. And as you read their life story in the book of Acts and throughout the Gospels and in their epistles, you understand that. And it's very important that we understand the religiosity of Jesus himself. Jesus kept things that were not necessarily Levitical. For instance, the feast of dedication in the Gospel of John. Jesus was there in Jerusalem observing all of that. And he was following in the rituals. Hanukkah is not a Levitical feast. It's not one of the great Moedim of Leviticus. It is something that had happened a couple of hundred years only before the time of Jesus, less than that. And yet Jesus was observing that. Why? Because it was fruitful. Jesus did many traditions that were not mentioned necessarily in the Word of God, but they were Jewish traditions and they were helpful and profitable. And so Jesus observed them. There was nothing wrong about it, everything was right about it. How did these things come about? How was it that they formed all of these traditions? Well, I'm going to get into it in the next couple of days, but I just want to help you to pique your interest to begin with. First of all, ever since Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the commandments and the distinct commandment that you will remember the Sabbath day, you will remember Shabbat and keep it holy, and you'll do no work in it. From that time on, they've been trying to figure out what is work because in every generation some things are different than others. And still today and in recent years and recent decades and centuries laws have been made. For instance, in the book of Exodus, chapter thirty five and verse three, talking about Shabbat, it says, Don't kindle a fire. So what happens when you are living in a century with a stove like my wife has, which is a gas range and a gas stove and has burners on top, but we don't take a match or a lighter and light those. No, we just turn the handle and the convenience of technology today. You hear a tick, tick, tick, tick, and then all of a sudden there is a lighter that sparks, and all of a sudden you have a flame instantly. Is that work on Shabbat? You're kindling a flame. Well, you're not, but you're turning a handle or you're pressing a button or you're doing something. And so they have ruled that that is work on Shabbat. Now you say, well, that's ridiculous. Well, it's not up to you to decide. This is them. And they're not basing their salvation on that. If they are, they're wrong. You see, salvation is by trust in God's word alone and God's provision for salvation, which is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. Now, if any Jew or any Gentile is trusting in some work or good deed that they can do or keeping the Sabbath or keeping any other law, there's never been a law given that can save people. I don't say that. My goodness alive. People that know me and have listened to me through the years, that's the extreme of where I would be in any sense of the word. That's not what I believe. But there are some things that happen today that you and I don't get a vote on. These are the Jewish people, that's their business. And if they're trusting that for their salvation, then they're in trouble, not us, and so let them do what they do. But what I'm trying to tell you is there's a reason why they do those things. Tomorrow we'll look at that from the standpoint of the Passover. You see, God many times in the scriptures told people what to do, but he didn't tell them how to do it. He told them to remember and teach something to their children, but he did not give a uniform lesson on how to do it. And so the Jews down through the centuries remembered these are not Johnny come lately people. They've been doing this. Uh Exodus was 1,446 years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. So we're 3,500 years away from the giving of the law. These instructions, and the law is really instruction. The word Torah doesn't mean law, it means instruction. And so God told them what to do, he just didn't tell them how to do it. When he told them to remember about the Passover, he didn't give them a mechanism and a formula for doing that. They had to come up with that. And after all, God's given us a mind, we can do that, but they had to make it uniform to where everybody would be handed down the same lessons. And so tomorrow we're going to get into that. And that's where the Passover Seder comes from. And you say, well, how do you know all about that? Well, that's what uh studying the Word of God 50 years and spending so much time in Israel, being around Jewish people and studying the history of the Jews over and over again from a variety of ways, and just living life and kicking up dust. You see, there are some advantages to being around a while. And uh you can't learn it all in a little bit. And if you do learn it all, you don't know how to use it because then you'll be filled with pride. Well, we'll get into a lot of that in the days ahead. I hope you'll stick around for On the Way. This is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

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