1425 - Building a Biblical Foundation to answer fundamental questions.

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 0:20

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1425. Today we're talking about the Jew and the Gentile and looking at the Jew and the Gentile within the framework of God's redemption and his redemption plan. The Jew has a place, and thank God the Gentile has a place. The Jew has a purpose, and so does the Church of Jesus Christ, which I want to remind you is not just made up of Gentiles, but of Jew and Gentile. And it was the Jew first. Is God finished with his people? Paul asked that question more than once. And he answered it, God forbid. Now that's the old way of saying it, but it's probably better translated smoothly that could never happen. Or may that never be. Because the scripture over and over again tells us that God will never cast his people off. Now that's not talking about primarily the Gentile or the Jew and Gentile church. It's talking about in context his people, the Jews. God made an unconditional covenant with Abraham concerning lineage, that is, his descendants, and that from him all of the nations would be blessed. Now God has done that in a lot of ways through the Jewish people, but the primary purpose of that promise was to promise Abraham that the Messiah, the one who would come and redeem mankind that he promised to Adam in the book of Genesis chapter three and verse fifteen, would come through the loins of Abraham and through his descendants. Later God made a promise concerning a kingdom to David. He did not later change his mind and spiritualize that. And after the crucifixion of Jesus and his burial and subsequent resurrection for our sins and our redemption, God didn't kick in plan two. It's all the same plan. And God used the Jew and God has used the Jew and Gentile in the church. Why? Because the church has a place in redemptive history. But God will once again, when the church leaves this place, God will once again use the Jew primarily as his voice and his mouthpiece to preach Messiah Jesus to the entire world. And we are seeing a movement of God even now in this present day among the Jewish people all over the earth who are beginning to come to Jesus in ways and in means that were thought unbelievable before just recent years. I've seen it in my lifetime. One of the advantages of living for the greater part of a century is that you see how God works long term. I've talked with many who are in their twenties and thirties and forties that believed a certain thing, looked at a certain way a certain way until they got into their seventies, eighties, and even nineties, and all of a sudden they changed. And the reason was not that God changed, they just saw God's word in a different light. Because you see when you're young and you're in seminary and you've had a little bit of Greek and Hebrew and theology, maybe you even have a terminal degree, you're twenty five, thirty five years old, and you think you know everything there is to know about everything, and that you are the master in the subject, especially in soteriology, maybe in reform theology or in dispensationalism, and you think you know it all. Well, I can just tell you you better hold on to those positions because sooner or later you may change some of those. I'm not talking about the cardinal doctrines of whether Jesus is the way of salvation, the Bible is the Word of God, Jesus was virgin birth, Jesus died for our sins, was uh bodily raised from the dead, that he's coming again. I'm not talking about those fundamentals. I'm talking about things that's not going to make the difference in heaven or hell for us, but it is going to make the difference in whether we're obnoxious or not or whether we're open to listening to the word of God. You see, the Bible again has a way of interpretation that is plain for all. Historical narrative cannot be read as allegory. And allegory cannot be read as historical narrative. They're two different types of presentations. Context is always important, not just some of the time, but all of the time. What God says is what he means and he means what he says. It doesn't matter what you and I feel it says, or we would just believe well we just couldn't imagine that God would say something like that knowing that he's the kind of God that we say he is. Well he's not the kind of God that we say is. And again, read the last two thousand years of church history, and you'll see there was a long period when nobody believed except just a handful of God's word that he would bring his people back in the land. Because it was all spiritualized and all those promises had been transferred to the church in theological minds, but that's not what God did. And he said he would bring the people back, and he did. They came back in unbelief. You say, Well, yes, they might have cried out to God, but they didn't repent of their sin. Well, you don't know what they did, but I can tell you this much. There were enough of them that repented of their sin and cried out to God for deliverance to bring them back that he brought them back, the proof is in the puddin. And that's exactly what happened. And now people are being saved, and many Jews are coming to Christ. But one day, at the second coming of Jesus, at the close of the days of the great crushing, what we call the great tribulation, then the Bible says at that time all the Jews that are present when Jesus comes again, they will look upon him whom they've pierced, and they will wail because of him, and all Israel will be saved. Not all of those that turn their back on God, not all of those that the prophets said, You are a heathen and stiff necked people. Please understand that's not being anti Semitic to say that the Jews have to come the same way as everyone else. If that's the case, then the prophets were totally anti Semitic, because they were called a stiff necked people. They were called everything you can imagine by way of obstinates. But God in his great mercy did not withdraw his grace from them, but he manifested it in a different way and he opened up the door to the Gentiles to be saved. And just because Jesus came and lived every aspect of the law and fulfilled all of the law in the sense that he lived it out. He was absolutely perfect. That means he always thought what he should have thought just when he should have thought it. He always said what he should have said just when he should have said it in the way he should have said it. He always did what he should have done just when he should have done it. He never did think anything he shouldn't have thought. He never did say anything he shouldn't have said. He never did do anything that he shouldn't have done. He was absolutely perfect. Neither was any deceit whatsoever found in his mouth. Now why am I telling you this? Because Jesus lived what you and I could not. People say, well, they can't be saved by the law. The Jew can't be saved by the law. Well, of course they can't, and by the way, neither can you or I. It doesn't matter who we are, what our pedigree is, who our parents are, what our birth or economic or social status is, that doesn't matter. The ground is level at the cross and everybody must come through Jesus. Now my Jewish friends don't like that. Many of my lost friends who are moralists don't like that. Many who don't believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, but a way of salvation, just you know, a loving good way, but just a way. Well that's not what Jesus said. So you have to take Jesus as he is, or as C.S. Lewis said, you've got to choose that he was a Charlotte or a lunatic, or just an absolute liar and deceiver. No, Jesus is who he said he was, and what I want you to do is read through that Jeremiah thirty one passage, begin at verse thirty one, read the covenant and see to whom it's written. You can't get away from that. And God didn't take that away from them. What God did was by their rejection, and by the way, all the Jews didn't reject Jesus. They did, yes, as leaders of the nation, but don't the leaders of our nation spiritually, those who are out in the forefront and our political leaders? I mean, does any nation represent, do American presidents always represent what you believe or what the American people believe? Well, many times not, and it's certainly not unanimous. And so that's the way it was. I mean, think about it. Who were the apostles? They were Jews. Who were the thousands saved on Pentecost from all over the world? They were Jews. From every language and people group, they were Jews. For the first eight to ten years of the way, the followers of Jesus, they were all Jews. So you know, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater and saying they rejected Jesus, and so he's turned to the Gentiles, and now all the promises are ours. I believe that does great disrespect to the scriptures and it does great disrespect to the people of God called the Jews, and it leads people into belief systems that they shouldn't have. Read that new covenant again. To whom is it written? And that was never taken away from them. No, God grafted us into the promises he made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and to the Jewish people. And I'm so glad that he did. And right now he's using the Gentile church because all the church is not Gentile, but it is predominantly Gentile today, that is non Jew, just by sheer numbers. He is using the church of Jesus to drive the Jewish people to jealousy because they see our love for Jesus, they look see our love for the Word of God, that is, even the Tanakh, many of us. They see our love for the nation of Israel, they see our love for the Jewish people, and it blows them away, it blows their mind. And that's what God wants to do to drive them to jealousy so that they will see that we are more jealous and zealous for the things of God than they are. And God said that I will use to turn my people, the Jews that I made covenants with, I'm going to keep. God's not finished with the Jews. And all I'm trying to do right now before I start answering these one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight questions, is try to build some basis for why I'm answering like that I am, or otherwise they'll just say that's just what he thinks. Well, it is what I think, but it's based upon the truths of God's Word. May God bless you as you worship tomorrow on the way.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

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.