1421 - "To the Jew first..." Jeremiah 31:31ff; Matthew 26:26-30; Romans 11:16-18

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

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

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1421. Well, today is our last day for this week together, and I pray that you have been blessed as you've listened to these podcasts over the last six or seven days. What I want to do today is concentrate on what happened the night that Jesus was betrayed, the night of his agony in the garden, the night of the Passover Seder, and what he said to his disciples and what he initiated. And so what I want to do is go back to Exodus chapter twelve and begin to go through the scriptures and show you exactly what that night was all about. Back in Exodus twelve, God said I am going to do something tonight that is going to change the way you look at life from this point on, and indeed it did. The death of the plague of the firstborn changed world history, and it changed the trajectory of God's people. Four hundred and some years earlier God in his great grace and mercy had made a covenant with Abraham, and he said, I'm going to give you this land, I'm going to give it to your descendants, and you will be blessed because of who I am, not because of who you are, but because of who I am and what I'm going to do. And he made an unconditional covenant with Abraham. In other words, it wasn't dependent upon Abraham, it was dependent upon God. And God was answering the prayers of his people as he brought them out of Egyptian bondage, and he said, I want you to remember what I'm doing tonight. And so from that time until now, they have remembered the Lord's deliverance from the bondage of Egyptian slavery through the Passover meal. Now in recent days I've talked to you about the means by which they did that through this meal and how they developed it over the centuries really to the point to where it is today. But much of what it is today is what it was two thousand years ago when Jesus had that last Passover meal with his disciples before he died. And so I want you to understand that when God brought the people out, he brought them to Mount Sinai. And at Mount Sinai, he made a covenant with them. Now that's called the covenant of Moses, that is the Mosaic covenant. Unlike Abraham's covenant, and unlike David's covenant later, which were unconditional covenants, this was a conditional covenant. God gave them throughout the Torah six hundred and thirteen laws or instructions about how to live in a way that he would have them to. These laws and instructions and regulations, these ceremonial and moral laws were never a means of salvation. As a matter of fact, God was showing them they could never keep his law, moral or ceremonially, because they were imperfect. And all of us are fallen creatures and the Jews are no different. In that regard, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, whether you're Hebrew or heathen. The Mosaic covenant was a conditional covenant. God said, If you live this way, I'll bless you. If you live this way, I'm going to curse you, and I'm not going to bless you in any wise. And he said, When you go into the land, if you don't keep what I tell you to do, I'll spit you out of the land, I'll spew you out of the land. It'll still be yours. And if you go out into all the earth, and if you'll look back to me and you'll turn back to me, I will bring you back into the land. But why? Because it's your land, I'm giving it to you now. God let them know that it was his land, but he had given it to Abraham and his descendants. And that was because of Abraham and the covenant that he made. But the Mosaic law was never given to save. It was given to show that indeed they are incapable of keeping his instruction. But God gave those instructions to help them to understand how to live, how to get along with one another, how to govern each other. But when it comes to the New Covenant, I want to remind you of something before we talk about the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31. Remember that the Bible is a Jewish book. Now you often hear me say that, but you've got to get this down in your mind. The Bible was not written by Gentiles. One non-Jew had a part in the New Testament. We talk about the Jewish Bible. We're not just talking about the Old Testament, the Tanakh, the law, the prophets, and the writings. We're talking about the New Testament, because all but one writer, Luke, who, by the way, was a disciple of a Jewish rabbi that became a follower of Jesus by the name of Saul of Tarsus. We know him as the Apostle Paul. And so the Apostle Paul personally discipled Luke, the physician that traveled with him everywhere that he went in the last half of his life. Now I'm telling you this because the Bible is a Jewish book, Old and New Testament. It's written by Jews, to Jews, primarily for Jews. And somehow we have gotten the idea in the West that we as the church that the entire Bible was written primarily for us. It's not. There are portions that we can apply to our lives, and of course, salvation is one of those. But the new covenant was made and promised to the Jews. You say, I don't believe that. Well, let me just read it to you out of Jeremiah 31. Now, by the way, Jeremiah was a Jew. He was writing to Jews. He was writing to Jews who were in exile, and he was still in Jerusalem, but he promised them that God's word was true, and that God promised he would bring them back into the land, and that's exactly what he did. After 70 years, God brought them back into the land, and they rebuilt the temple that had been destroyed in 586 BC, seventy years later, through a lot of different circumstances and happenings, both in Mesopotamia and in Jerusalem. The temple was dedicated in five hundred and sixteen BC. But while they were in exile, chapter thirty one of the book of Jeremiah. This is Jeremiah thirty one thirty one. Behold the days are coming, says the Lord. That's the personal name of God, all caps in our English Bibles, when I will make a new covenant with you, with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not one Gentile is mentioned here. Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt. Now the only covenant that he made with them when he took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt was when they came to Mount Sinai, and they swore to God that they would follow him, and that's called the Mosaic covenant. My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord, but this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they shall be my people. Who's he talking to? Israel and the house of Judah. That is what verse thirty one says. Now you can't change that. You have no authority to change that. You can't change it to the church. We'll get to that. Just hold on. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall know me from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. Now how can that be? For I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more. Who's he talking about? He's talking about the Jewish nation. He's talking about the sons of Israel and the house of Judah. And then verse thirty five of chapter thirty one says, Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for a light by day, the ordinance of the moon and the stars for a light by night, who disturbs the sea and its waves roar? Well, it's the Lord of hosts is his name. If those ordinances, that is, if the sun, the moon, the stars stop shining, if those ordinances depart from before me, says the Lord, then the seed of Israel will also cease from being a nation before me forever. God says, If the stars stop shining, the sun stops shining, the moon is not there, then Israel will not be my people before me. But verse thirty seven says, Thus says the Lord, if the heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath. Now listen, he says, If any of you are wise enough to figure all this out and measure out all that I have made, listen to this, I will cast off all of the seed of Israel for all that they have done, says the Lord. Have you never heard people say, Well now God's finished with Israel because what they've done? God just said in this verse, verse thirty seven, that He would never cast them off for what they have done. God knows what they've done better than you know. God knows why they did it, you don't know that. If heaven above can be measured, can you do that? And the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, if you can tell us everything that there is in the center of the earth and above and under and around the earth, then he says, I will also cast off Israel for what they've done. Now what that means is God is never going to cast them off, that's what he's trying to say. And God is not finished with Israel. And this covenant was not made to the Gentiles. Now when you turn to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 26, you will read there in verse 26 that Jesus took bread, that matzah, that unleavened bread, which represents a sinlessness, and he broke it and he said, Take eat, this is my body which is broken for you. Now he said, Who was he talking to? Was he talking to North Americans? Was he talking to Europeans, Africans? No, no, no, no. He was talking to his disciples who were all Jews. Remember, for the first ten years of the church, for the first decade, all that were saved and part of the church, the church, the called out ones, the ecclesia, were Jews. And here's what he said to the Jewish disciples that night. He said, Now I want you to take this cup, this third cup, the cup of redemption. And I'm changing the meaning of this now for you. Because every time you drink this cup, I want you to remember something. This cup represents the new covenant that I make with you, the same one that Jeremiah was talking about. And he cut the covenant with his own blood that he shed the next day. Now why am I telling you that? Because you and I are partakers of that new covenant. But we're partakers of that, not because of the fact that it was made to us first, but Paul dealt with this in Romans 9, 10, 11. And in Romans chapter eleven, verse 16, he said, For if the first fruit is holy, and he's in context talking about the Jews, then the lump is also holy, and if the root is holy, so are the branches. Now some of the branches, that is, he's talking about the nation of Israel, if some of the branches were broken off, and you being a wild olive tree, not groomed, not part of the original tree, if you were grafted in among them and with them became a partaker of the root and the fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, which is the Jewish people, the promises and the covenants and the word of God. But the root supports you. You see, we owe a great debt to the Jewish people, because to them were given the oracles of God, to them were given the scriptures, to them and through them and by them came the Messiah. You say, Well, God could have done it anyway. He didn't. He did it through the Jews. Now this is very important because we've got an entire theology in America and Western Europe, and that's where it came from, that says that God is finished with Israel, that God has abandoned his people because of what they've done. If that's the case, you and I may be in great trouble because the same God who made that covenant with the Jews has made that same covenant with us. And if he would abandon them for what they have done, what about you and I, who are undone without him, who have no chance without him, have no hope without him? You see, this is very, very important, and this idea that God is finished with the Jews and somehow the church has replaced the Jewish people and the promises that God made to the nation of Israel and to the sons of Abraham by the flesh, that somehow now He is going to abandon everything that He's ever said, you better hope He doesn't. Because if He does, how can we be sure that He would be faithful to us? Because you and I sin on a regular basis. Don't say you don't, you're a liar. And anybody that says they don't sin, even after they're saved and born again, they've deceived themselves or they're trying to deceive others, which is a lie. Now the reason that I'm bringing this up is because during this period of time many are going to take communion that do not take it on a regular basis, and we need to understand that that was part of a Seder meal. And out of that Seder meal came what we call communion, the Lord's table, the Lord's Supper, and it was a supper for the Jewish people, and it was to hearken back to the days that they were delivered from Egyptian slavery and bondage. And it was to show that this new covenant that he was making was going to deliver everyone who would come to him, starting with the Jew first and then the Gentile, that's all non Jews, that we do not deserve salvation, but because Jesus cut that new covenant, you and I are not delivered as the Jews were, and the Jews of the table of Jesus and those that were saved the tens of thousands over the first decade, and those tens of thousands who have been saved since that time, the tens of thousands who are being saved in the last fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, ten years, and then in the last year. This was a covenant that Jesus made in order to deliver us not from the bondage of Egyptian slavery, but to deliver us from the bondage of the slavery of sin. And he sets us free. And so in this day of rabid anti-Semitism and Jew hatred, and the idea that somehow the Church of Jesus has replaced the nation of Israel and God has forsaken his people, is foreign to the Bible. But we read the Old Testament like it's ours. We read the New Testament like it was written primarily to us. We are those who have been grafted in. It's not ours by nature. It's ours by supernature. It's not ours naturally, it's ours supernaturally. And the Jew and the Gentile have to come the same way. There is no other way for a Jew to be saved other than Jesus. Now I know my Jewish friends don't like that, but my Gentile friends don't like it either. Because you see, we all want to work it out. We all want to have some concept that we're worthy. We're not, no one is, Jew or Gentile. The ground is level at the cross. There's no special way for Jews to be saved, and then a different special way for Gentiles to be saved. Either Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, or he's the biggest liar and charlatan that ever walked the face of the earth. Or he's absolutely crazy. But indeed Jesus was declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection of the dead, Romans chapter one and verse four. And because of that, he can give us eternal life, not only forgive us of our sins, but give us and place on our account, impute to us, account to us the righteousness that he earned when he lived in perfect obedience to his father. I pray that God will bless you during this great resurrection season, and that you will remember this the Jew first, and then the Gentile. For on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

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.