1Tim 1:1-7 not to allow another doctrine (torah; teaching) but gospel truth promoting love from a sincere heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith
Shavuot is nearing, which marks the beginning of the new phase in God’s plan of redemption to bring the Gentiles into His covenant promises to Israel and the Jewish people. It was difficult for the Israeli Jewish believers of the early church to accept that God wanted to — could! – relate to the non-Jews/Israelis in the same way as to them who also believed in Yeshua as the Christ, the Anointed One of YHVH. Then, through the centuries, the situation became reversed: the Gentile majority of the Body of Messiah could not understand how a Jewish believer in Jesus could be a Christian and still a Jew. Praise God! His foolishness is wiser than men!
Today – for some years already – there is movement, a tendency, on both “sides” to separate what God has united. This is one – and a big one! – of those “other doctrines” which the Apostle Paul was writing to Timothy about, that such a teaching should not be embraced within the Kehila/Ekklesia/Church of God.
On the Jewish side there are those who teach that Messianic Jews should practice Orthodox Judaism in order to be ‘legitimate’ in our witness to our own people while yet believing in Yeshua as Messiah. They forget or ignore that, despite the Apostle Paul’s orthodox credentials, he was still rejected by even those who had known his upbringing and way of life within Judaism.
On the Gentile side there are those whose sense of guilt for Gentile Christian anti-semitism over the generations brings them to teach that there is no credibility to evangelize the Jewish people anymore; God has His own separate plan for them. These well-meaning people forget or ignore that this “separate” plan for the Jews is the same one God has preached to them, the Gentiles: salvation is through no other name than through Yeshua the Messiah/Jesus Christ. Praise God for His power and grace towards all of us in His wisdom and love!
God planted the seed of faith into humanity when He said to the serpent devil – with Adam and Eve as eye-witnesses who heard – that the Seed of the woman would defeat him and his seed.
Later YHVH God chose a man – Abram/Abraham – in whom to confirm this hope and promise, and who would become the father of all who would afterwards believe in the same word of life. That seed sown into Abraham’s heart was tried and proven to where he believed that God would raise the dead in order to fulfill His promises.
The seed opened up in Isaac, who by faith passed on the glorious truth to his son Jacob. The roots of this plant spread out in this soil of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel.
At the Passover of YHVH, God gave His Son – the Seed of the woman, the seed of faith planted into mortal humanity in the Garden of Eden, who came to His people and to the world He had made…and the Seed died. He was buried, and this “bread of affliction” was brought forth from the earth as Living Bread in resurrection power! His roots are no longer in this ground of “Mother Earth” but rooted in Heaven, in the New Jerusalem, the mother of all those born-again from above.
Shavuot/Pentecost is a proclamation of this Seed, the Plant of God (Tzemach), the Bread of Life to all who are hungry and who hear and believe the promise of God – not for this life only, but also for the world to come. The former promises remain, to be fulfilled in every detail. They are sovereign choices which have necessarily brought conflict, affliction, separate entities. The new proclamation – enclosed and embedded in the seed of the old – brings peace, joy, reconciliation of all things in a new and living way in Messiah: the Root and Offspring of David; who before Abraham was, He Is; the Living Bread who gives eternal life to all who eat it.
Both the Jewish people and the Gentiles stand before God equally, each with their own identities, each hearing the same good news. Every believer, whether among the Jews or from the Gentiles, is called into a new and vital relationship – not merely a position of faith – with this one true God and with His Son, to become together one new man in Messiah. This is the true unity for which Jesus prayed. Whatever we were before our own death, burial, resurrection with Yeshua, that is, our “old plant”, is put off, and our “new plant” in Christ is put on: a new creation with the word of God planted within us of the promise of the perfect new heavens and new Earth in which righteousness dwells.
Where are you? Are we still focusing on that which is passing away, or in the vision of that which is eternal? By the authority of the Lord Jesus the Messiah, the Apostle Paul through Timothy commands us to teach those things which are of faith for godly edification: that we love from out of a pure heart, with a clear conscience, and true faith. With God’s help, it is this we hope to do for we are His people, His flock, called to be Messiah’s Body, His Woman/Bride.
Blessed is the name of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
