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Transcript 317A
The Jewish Misunderstanding Concerning Salvation
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Hello. I was talking with a Rabbi the other day, a Jewish Rabbi. He is not a Christian. And we got to talking about the Old Testament. And one of the things that he mentioned, well, I mentioned blood atonement and the centrality of blood atonement in the Old Testament, but he pointed out that in the Book of Leviticus the statement that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins in Leviticus 17:11 is a mere detail in a whole worship system that is taught in the Old Testament. In other words, the sacrifice is important, but it's part of a whole cluster of things that are necessary for Old Testament worship.
Now I didn't have a ready answer for this. The only thing I could think of was that Jesus Himself was crucified outside the city of Jerusalem, outside the camp, just as the Old Testament sacrifice. And in that wonderful, astonishing way, He fulfilled the very thing that this Rabbi is pointing out. But of course that doesn't constitute valid evidence for him, from his own presupposition. And I was wondering if you have any further insight into the objection to this Christian understanding of the Bible that he's mentioning.
HC: You see, the fundamental question that must be faced by anyone, whether he's a Jew or a Greek or Italian, or whatever, regardless of the religion we belong to or the gospel we hold, the fundamental question is, what is the basis of our salvation? Now the Jews of Jesus' day to a high degree, not all the way, we must remember that the first believers we read about in the New Testament were Jews, just as Jewish as any Jewish person today. The disciples were Jews, Mary Magdalene was a Jew, and Mary and Martha and Lazarus were Jews. So when we talk about the Jewish people we're not talking about the last man. We're talking about a major part, who held one position and a minor part, a remnant chosen by grace, who did hold the Biblical truth.
The problem was that the major part of the Jewish nation believed that because they engaged in these Old Testament worship activities very faithfully, which included the offering of sacrifices and the circumcision, and all of these things, that in this act they received remission of their sins. They were God's chosen people, they had been taken in a great and marvelous way out of the land of Egypt and brought into the land of Canaan by great signs and wonders. And whatever was required to make them right before God was abundantly taken care of in the act of the sacrifices and offerings. They were not understanding at all that these sacrifices were merely types or shadows pointing to a Messiah who Would come.
Isaiah 53, for example, speaks about the coming of the Messiah. He is despised and rejected of men, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief. Now this is talking about a person, you notice. "And we hid as it were our faces from Him. He was despised and we esteemed Him not." Notice what the Bible says about this Messiah. "Surely He hath borne our grief's and carried our sorrows. Yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." And it goes on to describe in this kind of detail the coming Messiah.
But this was foreign to the major Jewish position that their sins were already taken care of by virtue of the fact that they had offered their sacrifices, they had engaged in this Old Testament worship. And therefore this passage made no impact on them.
Or again, they failed to read a passage like Ezekiel 34, where God is speaking in verse 11, "For thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I even I will both search My sheep and seek them out. As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered, so will I seek out My sheep and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloud and dark day. I will bring them out from the people and gather them from the countries and will bring them to their own land, and feed them upon the mountains of Israel by the rivers and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them in a good pasture and upon the high mountains of Israel shall their fold be. There shall they lie in a good fold and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel. I will feed My flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord. I will seek that which was lost and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken and will strengthen that which was sick," and so on.
In other words, God is going to be the Shepherd. And tying that back to Isaiah 53, we immediately see that God is going to come as a man, as the Redeemer. Now the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled these passages dramatically. He says of Himself in John 10, "I am the Good Shepherd. I lay down My life for the sheep." He identified with Ezekiel 34. He is the one who did make His grave with the wicked. He is the one who was not esteemed. He was rejected by men, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief. He is the one that God did pour His wrath out upon. And therefore Christ is, in a beautiful way and in a marvelous way, the fulfillment of all of these passages.
But we have to begin with the point that we are not saved by what we do. We are saved by what the Messiah would do in bearing our sins. The Jewish religion as it was practiced by the major part of the Jews of Jesus' day was a religion of good works. It was a religion based upon partaking in the Old Testament worship. Thereby they decided they became worthy before God. And that will never save anyone.
That same idea holds through right to today. It's exactly the problem today with those who are not Christians.
CALLER: It seems, as I talked to this Rabbi, he did have what seemed to me far to light a view of sin as it works itself out in the individual and in the national life of the Jewish community. And I have here with me a book by a Rabbi named Morris Adler, called "The World of the Talmud." And Morris Adler is a Jew, writing for Jews. And he makes the statement in this, "A Christian scholar, Dr. James Parker, summarizes the contrast between Judaism and Christianity in this respect, when he writes, 'In Judaism God says to man, Fulfill My plan for creation. And man replies, I will. In Christianity man returns to God to say, Fulfill Thy part in creation, which I cannot, because I am foolish and sinful. And God replies, I will.'"
HC: That's a very excellent statement. It puts it exactly where it is. Now you mentioned the Talmud, and that of course is what happened to Judaism. They started out with the Bible, and then they added the commentaries of their holy men down through the ages to the Bible, so that the whole mass of writings became sacred writings. And thus the Bible no longer was the final authority. It was the Bible plus what others had said.
Incidentally, the Christian church to some degree is guilty of the very same thing. We start with the Bible and then we add to it the writings of certain theologians. And before we read the Bible or understand the Bible, we first see what our friendly theologian says, and that's it In other words, we actually inadvertently place the authority of that theologian on a par with the Bible. And we must not do this.
CALLER: Another thing I wanted to ask you, which may or may not be exactly related to what we're talking about now. What is, very simply, dispensationalism? I have a somewhat imprecise notion of what this is. In other words, I've come across an author this last week who does say that, for instance, there are certain things in the Old Testament which are not applicable to the children of God today, such things as exterminating the Canaanites or going to war at all. He feels that this is part of an Old Testament dispensation. And the New Testament dispensation is one where, for instance, Jesus says to Peter, "Put up thy sword into thy sheath." And for instance, James and John wanted to call down thunder on one of the cities that would not accept Christ, and they appealed to Elias and said, "Shall we do it even as Elias did?" And this author was at pains to indicate that it was appropriate for Elias to have done that, but it was not appropriate for James and John to have done that.
Now my concern is not with these specific issues, namely war or militancy, or anything of that nature. That's not what I'm asking, but simply, as these indicate some kind of difference between an Old Testament economy and a New Testament economy. Do you see it this way? And if you do, what are the difference strata of scripture that you see?
HC: Actually, I see only one program that God has set forth, the program for the redemption of all whom He elected from before the foundations of the earth. Now in the development of this program, there are states in it. In the Old Testament God particularly focused attention on the nation of Israel, because it was out of the nation of Israel that the Christ was to come. It was the nation of Israel that would become effectively a historical parable of the nature of salvation. Israel and Jerusalem and many of the historical experiences that we read about in connection with the nation of Israel were really figures or types of aspects of salvation, even as when Christ came doing miracles the miracles effectively became historical parables of what salvation is.
Finally, in the course of time God actually became man and went to the cross. This had to happen at some point in history. The precise point made no impact at all on the nature of salvation. The Old Testament believer was saved exactly as the New Testament believer. But it did signal the time when salvation would be aggressively made available to the whole world, because immediately following the cross comes Pentecost, when God began His program to evangelize the whole world. This was always anticipated by God. It is spoken of in hundreds of ways in the Old Testament, that the time would come when the world would be evangelized. And then this would be followed by the end, or Judgment Day itself.
It's all one plan. There are various steps and stages in the development of the plan, but there is only one plan. Noah, for example, who lived 7000 years ago, we read of him in Genesis 6 that he found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Now that's New Testament language. Abraham, who lived 4000 years ago (and who is really in actuality the beginning of the nation of Israel, and because they were blood descendants of Abraham they called themselves Jews and prided themselves that they are Jews), he is spoken of in the New Testament as being the father of all believers, both Gentiles and Jews. And his faith is set forth as the example of the faith of the believers Abraham's faith was reckoned unto him as righteousness.
There is a cohesiveness, you see, in the Bible that sets aside altogether any possibility that God has two kinds of salvation, or two programs, or whatever. It just happens that in the Old Testament there were only a small number who were being saved, because God had not begun His plan to evangelize the whole world, and He was dealing particularly through the nation of Israel because through them the Bible was being developed, through them we have all of these historical parables that are set forth in the Bible, and through their blood line Christ would actually come forth.
But once all this was done, the Bible was completed, the Bible was ended, now this marvelous salvation is made available to the whole world.
CALLER: You yourself are at pains often to indicate that the gift of tongues is limited to a particular historical period.
HC: Yes.
CALLER: Now again, my concern is not with that particular issue in this discussion, but simply as an illustration that although there's this unifying principle, yet there are these ways in which the Christian life, the behavioral pattern of the believers differs from one phase to another.
HC: Not the behavioral pattern. The difference is in the revelation of God. God did not reveal Himself, for example, in an articulated way so that it could be part of the written Word before the time of Moses. Moses is described in the Bible as the one who has given us the first five books. That doesn't mean that some of that which we find in Genesis might not have been in certain written places, but it did not officially become a part of the Bible until Moses wrote it.
When Jesus was on earth He made reference to Moses and the prophets and the writings. Now the Bible had been expanded to that point. Finally, the Bible is completed. God's revelation is completed, and that's the end. When Jesus was on earth, He had certain things to say, and then the Holy Spirit was poured out, and certain things happened. There were changes in God's plan as He is developing His program to evangelize the world.
This does not change the behavioral pattern of the believer, however, in any sense. The only thing it changes is God's revelation. There were 400 years, for example, between the last of the minor prophets and the birth of John the Baptist, when there was no statement from God at all. There was no penetration of the world from the supernatural to the natural. There was complete silence. This happened to be God's program for that time.
CALLER: Well, perhaps I'm not using the correct term. But don't you see a difference in behavior between, say, circumcision and the lack of circumcision, or let's say, blood sacrifice in the Old Testament and a bloodless sacrifice that we're supposed to offer every day, in our own lives as Christians? In what sense how would you term these differences?
HC: I see the differences only in that in the Old Testament they did not have the written Word. So God gave them certain additional assists, to begin to get an idea of the nature of the Messiah. And so God talked about blood sacrifices and burnt offerings, and what have you. In the New Testament we have the advantage of having the historical record of the coming of the Messiah. We can read in black and white exactly what happened. And so these assists no longer are necessary.
But God does give us a little bit of assistance in that He still leaves with us two signs that we follow, namely, the Lord's Supper and water baptism, which are reminiscent of the Passover and circumcision of the Old Testament, or the Passover and the water ablutions of the Old Testament, if you will. But most of them He has taken away, because we have the historical record of Christ.
CALLER: The Sermon on the Mount is to be obeyed, or to be realized in our life today? Or do you believe that's something that is yet future, the ethics for a full Kingdom of God on earth? Or is that something that truly could be lived out by the believers in the midst of a world that is crooked and perverse?
HC: Now that's a good question. Is the Sermon on the Mount, which we find in Matthew 5, 6 and 7, relevant today? You see, the Bible is the revealed Word of God. When I say the Bible, I mean the whole Bible – Genesis, Matthew 5, 6 and 7, Revelation, Ezekiel, Leviticus – wherever we find it. The Bible is God's revelation to mankind. It is the law of God. It is the statement of the command of God.
Now insofar as mankind is concerned, any place where they violate the law of God, anything they do that violates anything that is stated in the Bible, they stand guilty of judgment and hell. For the believer of course that penalty has been taken care of by Christ. And therefore we're not under the threat of hell. But the Bible still remains as the law-book of the Kingdom. It remains the book that we are to trust in and follow and be obedient to.
So the Sermon on the Mount is absolutely relevant for us today, just as much as it was relevant to the Jews that Jesus was talking to when He was on earth. Every part of the Bible is relevant. However, if there were a statement in the Sermon on the Mount that was later negated by something in Revelation or Ephesians or wherever, then we know that that particular command was neutralized, even as the Old Testament ceremonial laws, which were commanded in Leviticus, were neutralized by the statements of Galatians 5 and the Book of Hebrews, where God teaches that the ceremonial laws were completed in Christ.
We examine any part of the Bible, and check everything that the Bible offers concerning that, and then we know that we have what is left to be obedient to. That is, when we synthesize all that God gives, we know what we have to be obedient to. And this of course sets aside the ceremonial law, because that is set aside by the Bible itself. This sets aside the possibility of revelation coming today in visions and dreams and tongues, because God indicates that we aren't to add to the words of this book, and so on.
CALLER: Thank you very much.
HC: Thank you for calling. Good night.