The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
This is from the LORD and is His doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. Psalm 118:22,23
Zola Levitt once said in a broadcast: “When God chooses a people, Satan chooses them too.” Dr. Brown has detailed the history of anti-Semitism, pointing out that it has had longer tenure and more depraved manifestations than any other prejudice in the world.
Yeshua invited every one of us to “become one with” Him, which He presented in the parable or paradigm of the ancient Jewish wedding tradition. The beauty of the language He chose slowly dawns on us as we become acquainted with the unique features of this tradition. It is a tradition that is well worth looking into — because throughout the New Testament His most reassuring promises are framed in an analogy to this wedding paradigm.
But Jesus issued to Israel — to His Jewish brethren — a unique opportunity. He told them that only when they invite Him to return will He return! “You [Israel] will not see me again until you say ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ”
Rabbi Jonathan Bernis recently mentioned that Satan knows all too well that Jesus’ return will wait for this unique invitation from Israel. Jonathan explained that this is why some of the most vicious recent hate crimes and harassment have been directed toward Messianic Jews. We have seen reports of these incidents — one particularly barbaric, all deeply disturbing. They have occurred in recent months in Israel.
We’ve seen reports of young Messianic Jewish children being tormented about their faith by other children. They’re mockingly called “Christians” — as if this were a deplorable thing to be. But Messianic Jews are certain that they are Jewish. They’ve realized that recognizing the Jewish Messiah doesn’t detract from being Jewish — this recognition completes and fulfills Judaism. This is what the Orthodox don’t want Jews to know.
This is why some among the Orthodox try so desperately to keep other Jews from reading the New Testament — the B’rit Hadashah. Some among the Orthodox will even use listeners’ memories of the Holocaust, pogroms, and other terrible suffering at the hands of people who pretended to be Christians to remind Jewish hearts or minds that are beginning to open that “the New Testament is for Christians.” The Orthodox persuade other Jews that reading it is “disloyal” to all the Jews who suffered and died over the centuries at the hands of people who posed as Christians — “disloyal” to being Jewish.
Scripture is full of such amazing and beautiful “pictures” and reversals. In a picture of Jesus’ return, David refused to return as king of Israel after Saul finally died until David’s (and Yeshua’s!) own tribe — Judah — invited him to return. Ultimately the people of Judah not only invited David to return — they went out “to conduct him over the Jordan.”
Peter was so broken and remorseful after having denied knowing Jesus three times before the crucifixion that he thought he would just go back to fishing — he thought he might be “good enough” to do this. But Jesus restored him to his higher calling by extending a single question to him three times — a question that allowed Peter to affirm three times the very bond that he had three times denied — and to receive his personal commission as well.
Apparently the ultimate “Playwright” wants the same people who, through their “representatives” who were in power at the time, “did not know the time of their visitation” when He lived on earth — to be the very ones to call Him back to all of us. This is the world’s Story; and no person could have written it.
Yeshua said that when Jews at long last look up in recognition to invite Him back He will come. The One who “alone knows the end from the beginning” indicated that this will happen! We can be in prayer to strengthen His beloved Israel — the Jewish people — against all the slings and arrows of Israel’s — and God’s — outrageous enemies. And to strengthen the Jewish people toward “the scales falling from their eyes” and the recognition’s dawning.
© ccolbert for Voice of Revolution, 2012. | Permalink