You might consider this blog post to be the "conclusion of conclusions" of my "What Did Jesus Teach" series. This is the summary of everything I've posted so far and what came out of my investigation. Before proceeding, some caveats.
This is what I've gleaned of Yeshua's teachings from the Book of Matthew. I can't say this is the totality of what Yeshua taught his Jewish disciples, therefore, I can't say this is the totality of what Yeshua expected the Gentile disciples to be taught to obey. This is the foundation on which to build our understanding of Yeshua's perspectives of Gentile Messianic discipleship. If we are proper disciples, Jewish and Gentile alike, we'll rightly conclude that we will be studying our Master's teachings for the rest of our lives. On the other hand, we have to come to know some things for certain.
Here is what I believe the Master taught. Some of these are commands to obey. Others are things he wanted us to understand about ourselves, about others, about the world around us, about him, and about God. Notice that, even though I've separated Yeshua's teachings into categories, much of what he taught seems to follow a select set of repeated themes.
General Teachings
There are a few large "buckets" or containers that hold a smaller set of categories. This first container holds Yeshua's teachings about a few different and apparently unrelated topics.
About GentilesLeadership and Servanthood
Gentiles are not second class citizens in the Kingdom of Heaven. We have equal access to God as adopted sons and daughters. In Messianic days, we will take our place at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We are every bit as much saved by faith as the Jewish disciples. The Good News will be and already has been taught to all the nations so that we may put our hope in Yeshua and that justice will come to the Gentiles as the Prophet Isaiah writes. Gentiles, in order to understand the teachings of the Messiah are expected to study all the holy scriptures, including the Torah and the Prophets.
About Following the Messiah
When we are called to follow the Messiah, we are expected to immediately respond to him, making our discipleship the highest priority of our lives and acknowledging our faithfulness to the Messiah and to God before men. We won't have trouble-free lives, but we can depend on God to take care of our needs and to enable us to stay the course, as long as we keep our eyes on the Master.
About Response and Acceptance of the Messiah
When we hear the Good News, we need to put it into practice on our lives, building on the foundation of the Rock. Rather than keeping it to ourselves, we are to be like farmers, sowing good seed to yield a large crop. We can expect to exist in a world, not just of good fruit, but of bad. As previously taught, life will be difficult sometimes but it's how we grow in adversity that shows our fruit. What we do speaks more about us than what we say. Even if we initially rejected the Good News, we can repent, go out into the field and get to work.
About the Beatitudes
This is similar to the previous teachings about perseverance in the face of trials and that there are great rewards for those who stay the course. We are praiseworthy when we suffer, when we desire to make peace, when we mourn, and when we hunger for righteousness.
About the Shabbat
The Shabbat can be said to have a dual application to the Jews and Gentiles. God made the Sabbath holy at the end of Creation and by observing the Sabbath, all mankind can acknowledge that God is the God of all. For the Jews, Shabbat observance is also a commemoration of the release from Egyptian slavery. Those two meanings overlap and co-exist, so that all who believe can have a Sabbath rest now, and in the life of the World to Come.
Yeshua taught a great deal on the topic of being good leaders and good servants. In fact, in order to be considered a good leader, you need to learn to be a good follower. This is a tough lesson for humans, since we all have the want and "need" to be exalted by others, called by titles, and given the best seats in the house. I wrote several blog posts on this topic. Here are the conclusions.
About Being Salt and LightAbout the Torah
This is a very simple lesson. It comes down to sharing. Once you have received the Good News, share it with others, just as a light in your house lights a whole room or a lighthouse uses its light to guide those in darkness to safety. Don't horde it for just you and your friends and family. This also has applications on Messianic Jews discipling Gentiles, which I'll address a bit later.
About Being Servants
Serve others in his name and not in yours. Don't seek the limelight. Feed the hungry and visit the sick, but don't draw attention to yourself for your own sake. Pray in secret, serve the great and small equally, and realize that not everyone will understand or accept what you do, not even members of your family.
About Humility and Mercy
This is similar to the previous message. Don't exalt yourself. Be humble. It doesn't matter how much authority you wield in human terms, you are serving the great King who didn't think it was too lowly a thing to die for the rest of us, even though he didn't deserve it. There is no person who is too low for you to serve in his name. Show the same forgiveness to those who have sinned against you as Yeshua showed when you sinned against him. Be merciful if you expect to receive mercy.
About Being Good and Bad Fruit
Arrogance, hypocrisy, bad teachings are all examples of bad fruit. So are putting material things such as outward signs of your "holiness" before your own acts of generosity and kindness. If you are full of sin, anger, and greed inside, it doesn't matter how whitewashed you appear on the outside. You are not more holy than anyone else. Fear not. Even though you have made big mistakes, God desires to comfort you and to return you to Him. Practice justice and mercy to others before you get tied up in a knot over how to tie your tzitzit.
About Patience and Stewardship
Being a leader isn't being a big shot. It isn't having a title, a fancy education, or being an ethnic type. That stuff only works in the secular world, not in God's world. In God's world, people are leaders when they're servants. People are greatest only when they're least. People are the strongest when they comfort the weakest. Invest whatever gifts God has given you. Invest in people.
This last large section contains the conclusions of four different blog posts on what Yeshua taught specifically about Torah obedience that was to be passed to the Gentile disciples.
Part One: Gentiles are supposed to learn and obey everything Yeshua taught, including the fact that the Torah will be with us for a long time. We learned that God called each of us as the person He made us to be, so Jews don't have to turn into Gentiles, and Gentiles don't have to turn into Jews in order to be disciples of the Messiah and in fact, deliberately turning ourselves into something we're not just because we think it will justify us before God, makes Yeshua valueless to us. Loving God and loving others is the totality of the Torah and the Prophets and we should do both, not neglecting one for the other. In order to find out what comes next, we can't neglect what the Torah teaches, because that's what Yeshua teaches.Notice what Yeshua apparently didn't teach. He didn't specifically teach about the Kosher laws, about praying in Hebrew, about wearing tzitzit, or about laying tefillin. Of course, for his original Jewish audience, those behaviors and commandments would be considered a "given". If the Jews were rightly keeping those commandments, there's no reason Yeshua would have addressed them. The question is, because he didn't teach those commandments, does that mean Gentile disciples aren't meant to learn them or obey them?
Part Two: The Torah commandments "Do not murder", "Do not commit adultery", "Do not divorce" unless under extreme circumstances, "Do not take oaths", "Do not sue" if you can avoid it, and loving those who do not love you are equally applied to the Gentile as to the Jew. To understand the depth of Yeshua's Torah teachings, the Gentile disciples must study Torah. Otherwise, we study the Messiah in vain.
Part Three: The decision of James and the Jerusalem Council cannot be interpreted as a replacement for the teachings of the Messiah about the Gentiles and the Torah and is likely a response to a very specific set of events relative to some Jewish people telling the Gentiles they must convert in order to be accepted. While Gentiles don't have to convert and keep the Torah commandments in a manner identical to Jews, they don't appear exempt from Torah observance either, at least as far as what Yeshua taught about the Torah.
Part Four: The Torah doesn't save anyone. We are all saved by grace through faith. There is a balance between our internal spiritual life and our lived experience. The Torah is the map to that lived experience and when we realize that it's not a straight jacket of rules and regulations, and that it's not the behaviors themselves that save us, the yoke of the Messiah is light.
If we're using Matthew 28:18-20 as our guide for what Gentiles are supposed to obey, the answer must be "yes". This may not the the final answer or the absolute conclusion in relation to the total body of Scripture, but in terms of the book of Matthew, I can see no other conclusion since Yeshua didn't literally teach each and every Torah commandment. However, I do see things that aren't presupposed by the traditional Bilateral Ecclesiology viewpoint.
I've been told in the past by BE proponents that, although it's not forbidden for Gentiles to study the Torah, the vast majority is irrelevant, including the Ten Commandments (Ten Words), because the majority of Torah was addressed to a Jewish audience. However, to the degree that Yeshua taught many of those Torah commandments in Matthew (as opposed to referencing Noahide laws found in Genesis), we have no choice but to conclude that Gentile study of Yeshua's source material is a must. In other words, Torah study is proper and required for Gentile disciples.
There's also the fact that, in a sense, Yeshua taught all of the Torah and the Prophets in one fell swoop when he taught the two greatest commandments (Matthew 22:37-40) and, if you connect that with what James declared in Acts 15:21 when he said, "Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath", then there is an open door to the question of how much more of the Torah Gentiles are supposed to learn and obey.
I did come to one conclusion I didn't make explicit. The original Matthew 28 mandate specifically directs the Jewish followers of Yeshua to disciple the Gentiles, yet Bilateral Ecclesiology, by definition, inhibits and maybe even obstructs that process. Obviously each Messianic Jewish group has to come to their own conclusions and make their own independent decisions about their duties to the Gentile disciples as well as to the commands of the Messiah, but "herding" us into two separate pens makes Jewish discipleship of the Gentiles all but impossible.
This is an area that needs a lot of work before the Messiah returns and, if done well, would probably solve a lot of the MJ/BE complaints about Gentile Messianic congregations shooting from the hip, making up our own rules, and pretty much caricaturing Judaism. If MJ/BE accuses Gentile Messianics of not knowing what we're doing, maybe they don't have far to look for the reason. Of course, the key would be for Messianic Jews and Gentiles to come to an agreement on exactly what he wants the Jews to teach the Gentiles and thereby hangs the tale.
Even if the ultimate conclusion of Yeshua's commandments and teachings says that Gentiles don't wear tzitzit or tefillin in prayer and don't try to look outwardly Jewish, I strongly suspect that all of the lifestyle commandments that have to do with performing acts of kindness, mercy, justice, and righteousness on a day to day basis are just as applicable to the Gentile disciple as to the Jewish disciple. There may be specific "identity markers" that distinguish the Jew from the Gentile, but once we became part of the Master's flock, we were also expected to be light to the lost and a guide to the blind.
If we obey that Torah, we are doing well.
11 comments:
James,
A hearty yasher koach on completing the series. A few thoughts:
"The original Matthew 28 mandate specifically directs the Jewish followers of Yeshua to disciple the Gentiles, yet Bilateral Ecclesiology, by definition, inhibits and maybe even obstructs that process."
I don't think the communal distinctions proposed by Bilateral Ecclesiology are so extensive/pervasive as this. However, I can understand how it sounds exactly like that, especially the way some people talk about it.
"I've been told in the past by BE proponents that, although it's not forbidden for Gentiles to study the Torah, the vast majority is irrelevant, including the Ten Commandments (Ten Words), because the majority of Torah was addressed to a Jewish audience."
Ugh, who says this stuff!?! To paraphrase Eddie Murphy's character in the movie Bowfinger: "it's people like you who give [bilateral ecclesiology] a bad name!"
"I strongly suspect that all of the lifestyle commandments that have to do with performing acts of kindness, mercy, justice, and righteousness on a day to day basis are just as applicable to the Gentile disciple as to the Jewish disciple. There may be specific "identity markers" that distinguish the Jew from the Gentile, but once we became part of the Master's flock, we were also expected to be light to the lost and a guide to the blind.
"If we obey that Torah, we are doing well."
Amen.
Thanks for your response, Yahnatan,
I agree, Bilateral Ecclesiology is probably explained in a way in the Messianic blogosphere, that doesn't do it justice. I have seen blog posts that definitely give me the impression that Gentile sheep aren't terribly welcome in the Messianic sheep pen. If this impression needs to be corrected, then it's important that the people who see that need, such as you, speak out, lest others give the wrong presentation.
I understand that the whole concept of Jewish Messianics discipling Messianic Gentiles is full of trapdoors, but it does seem to be what Yeshua originally intended and in fact, it's what was happening during Paul's and Peter's ministries. Putting that paradigm back together again might be a little like trying to reconstruct Humpty Dumpty, but it's also a compelling thought.
The really hard part would be getting to a place between Messianic Jews and believing Gentiles, where the discipling process and content could be mutually agreed upon. The reason there's so much "strife" between Messianic Jews and Gentiles in the blogosphere is exactly because that agreement doesn't exist.
The only way to build a bridge and reconnect the two sheep pens is to establish and maintain conversations like this one.
"If this impression needs to be corrected,"
It does.
"...then it's important that the people who see that need, such as you, speak out, lest others give the wrong presentation."
Exhortation received. Likewise, I appreciate the way you've already been speaking out in humble opposition to replacement tendencies in the way people express themselves in the blogosphere. This kind of mutuality and (e-)partnership is a core value of Bilateral Ecclesiology...at least as I understand it.
"the whole concept of Jewish Messianics discipling Messianic Gentiles"
I definitely have vision for this but on a corporate and also on a personal level. At the same time, I think the command to "teach them all I have commanded you" is itself one of the commands that we're supposed to teach. Discipled messianic Gentiles should be fully equipped to go on discipling more (and so they have--hence, the church!). However, I do still see a continued responsibility of Jewish followers of Messiah to disciple non-Jews. (I just don't want to make it sound like someone's discipleship is invalid unless they've been discipled by a Jewish person.)
"The only way to build a bridge and reconnect the two sheep pens is to establish and maintain conversations like this one."
Right on. And, in non-virtual reality, I think fostering relationships of mutuality between Messianic Jewish communities and churches and between their leaders is a vital part of this too. I sometimes wonder whether church leaders automatically see us as in competition with them--i.e. looking to draw their members to join our Torah communities. I'd like to change this, to tell those leaders that we want to support and bless them and their members, and to build bridges to do so. If anything, this means getting outside our four walls much more--something which to me sounds a lot like what Yeshua told his Jewish disciples to do.
I think Messianic Jewish rabbis like Derek Leman speak regularly in churches. While "guest speakers" could be treated as a varietal/flavor of the week, I hope that those communities see it more and more as availing themselves of a Jewish discipler to help them grow further in their walk with the Jewish Messiah.
I just figured why there are so many Gentiles in MJ UMJC style...
They get all the privileges, but don't have to do all the duties of a native-born....LOL!
They get to have the cake and eat it too.....Where can I sign in?.....
Fantastic series of posts, James. This is one I'll be pointing folks to for years to come.
"If we're using Matthew 28:18-20 as our guide for what Gentiles are supposed to obey, the answer must be 'yes'."
I suppose One Law folks might be upset at that statement or its implications.
But for me, you know, if gentile disciples of Messiah were keeping even the commandment subset in Matthew, I think we'd be in great shape. Maybe that is the place to start focusing.
Thanks, Judah. I think that especially the Gentiles in the movement get hung up on the outward trappings of being "Messianic" and neglect what the church tends to emphasize (at least in an ideal sense), which is to do good. Frankly, I think if we all started with practicing the essence of the two greatest commandments, the rest would take care of itself.
[To differentiate,]The historical Messiah was a Ribi named Yehoshua.
His authentic teachings were written down by his apprentice student Matityahu and were later redacted into the “gospel of Matthew”. In his true teachings one finds that he taught – just that which is written in the Tank’’h) – that humankind is required to do their utmost to keep the directives in Torah non-selectively. The followers of Ribi Yehoshua were called the Netzarim and their message was always antithetical to Christianity [note 1].
Furthermore, the historical Ribi Yehoshua – ha-Mashiakh (the Messiah) was not an “incarnate man-god”. [2] The Netzarim never accepted the “NT”, because its teachings contradict Torah. [3]
The teachings of Ribi Yehoshua is the antithesis to the teachings of the “NT”. Thus following the teachings of Paul, is the antithesis to follow the historical Ribi Yehoshua.
Relating to the Creator exactly in the same way Ribi Yehoshua did – i.e. observing the Creators directives in the Torah – leads oneself into an intimate relationship with the Creator, which is very meaningful!
1.These statements are proved in the website of Netzarims website [the only legitimate Netzarim, located in Ra’anana]
2. Read more in the website in note 1; History Museum; Mashiakh-section (top menu)
3. Proof in this link on my blog: Link
I labor until Messiah is formed in you. --Paul to the Nations in Galatia
[you] are chosen ...to obey Jesus Christ--Peter to the Nations of Asia Minor
He who overcomes, and he who keeps My deeds until the end, To Him I will give authority over the Nations. --Jesus (recorded by John) to the church in Thyatira AD 90
I think these passages are unambiguous as to our responsibility to be conformed to the likeness of Messiah. It is not about ethnic identity it is about being like Messiah. Full Stop.
We know he kept all of Torah perfectly. Therefore we follow his example for what to obey and how to obey it. Those who approach him through ethnic filters have missed the point. Messiah is King over the all nations. He has one Law for those nations. He who does his deeds will rule with him over the nations. When the focus comes off of messiah and into ethnicity we have lost the focus of the apostles and Messiah. It is about the person Messiah. Adore him, Obey him, become like him.
Additionally, the Torah that he or the apostles did not repeat are many fold. If we assume they did not mention them so as to allow us to do them we would be free to kidnap, rape, and commit other atrocities. They constantly build on the assumption that Torah is defining there teaching. The "abrogated by non-repetition" argument does not hold water if taken literally. We cannot selectively apply it to Kosher law, and not to rape or kidnapping. To repeat it all Torah Commands, to be precises they would have to literally quote the whole Torah. To follow this literally we have groups like FFOZ implying we can only eat kosher slaughter pork because only the no blood in slaughter was repeated by the apostles but not the pork part.
Simply put, being like Messiah should be our default position. People should look at me and say there goes a Messiah-like-one (ie. Christian).
Greetings, Randal.
If you've taken a look at some of the other posts on this blog, you'll notice that the One Law vs. Bilateral Ecclesiology question is one I address a lot and discuss, sometimes at length, with other interested parties in the Messianic movement. While we might not always agree on how the teachings of Yeshua and his First Century disciples are interpreted, it's important to keep an open dialog in order to promote connection and bridge-building between the different parts of the body of Messiah.
You might be interested in my latest blog post on this topic. I published it just this morning.
Blessings.
Yes you seem to be exploring things and promoting a good dialog. Interesting writing. I have not read your entire blog, just a few articles. Have you discussed the relevance of the "repetition argument"; meaning does Messiah or the Apostles need to repeat Torah commands for them to be relevant to the Nations. We do have general statements from Messiah that his disciples should embrace the smallest point and not negate even one aspect. Is that not a general principal that would apply to this question as to what his disciple should do? He therefore does not need to repeat each detail of Law to say i.e. that we should not eat rabbit.
The "repetition argument" is one way of looking at Bible interpretation Randal, but there's no way to know for certain that's how Yeshua taught. Remember, he was primarily teaching Jews so a lot of matters of observance (wearing tzitzit, for example) would have been a "given". In other words, you don't teach the "A B C's" to a bunch of college kids who already know how to read.
If that is true though, does that make what Yeshua *didn't* say a "given" for Gentile disciples if we apply what Yeshua said in Matthew 28:18-20? I don't think we have a definite answer to that so, as we experience, opinions vary.
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