| The Dangers of the "Movement." The national continuity of Israel as the "Everlasting Nation," and their restoration to their own land and future blessing among the nations of the earth, are guaranteed by the covenants and promises of God, which can never fail. But what these Judaising brethren forget is—first, that during the period of Israel's national unbelief a new thing is being formed. Out of Jew and Gentile—yea, from all kindreds and tribes of the earth—God is gathering out "a people for His Name." This new people, whose calling is heavenly, whose inheritance is incorruptible, fills also the position and fulfils the mission of Israel during the interval of this present parenthetical dispensation. It is the Kehillah—the ecclesia—the Church, or "congregation" of God; it is His "holy nation," because every essential element of what constitutes "nationality" is to be found in this new brotherhood, which has one common origin, one fatherland, one language, one common hope and destiny, through which, and not through Israel nationally, He is during the present time carrying out His purpose of grace on the earth. Secondly: Christ being rejected by Israel, and despised by the world in general, those who profess allegiance to Him, and become members of the body of which He is the Head, must be ready to take up the cross and follow Him. And one very heavy part of the cross is the separation which it often involves to disciples, even from among Gentiles, and almost invariably to Jewish believers, from those near and dear to them. To the Jew and to the Gentile who would follow Christ and exchange the friendship of the world for friendship with God—though perhaps in a more literal sense to the Jew—the same call and the same holy requirements are addressed as to our father Abraham: "Get thee out from thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, into a land which I will show thee." Oh! it is hard to bear suffering and reproach; to be misunderstood and misjudged; to be called "Meshumed"; to be regarded as an "outlaw" by one's own kindred; and to suffer, it may be, the loss of all things for His dear Name's sake; but the conditions of discipleship are not different now than they ever were. "He that taketh not his cross and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me he that loveth his life shall lose it and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve Me let him follow Me; and where I am there shall also My servant be." As far as the Jewish believer is concerned, and his relationship to the nation, the present condition of things may be likened to that which existed after the great sin of Israel in the matter of the golden calf, when "Moses took the Tabernacle and pitched it without the camp, and called it the Tabernacle of the congregation (or 'the tent of meeting,' i.e., between God and man). And it came to pass that every one which sought the Lord went out unto the tent of meeting which was without the camp" (Ex. xxxiii. 7). So also during this much longer period of national apostasy God's Tabernacle is removed from the camp of corporate official Judaism, and every one from among Israel who in truth seeks the Lord must be prepared "to go forth unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach" (Heb. xiii. 13). Or, to use the figure of John x., during the period of Israel's national rejection of Christ when the "sheepfold" is given over to "thieves and robbers," the Good Shepherd calleth His own sheep by name, and leadeth them out" so that together with those "other sheep" of His from among the Gentiles, who were "not of this fold," they may form "one flock," even as He is their one Shepherd. Thirdly: If there is one truth more emphasized than another in the New Testament it is the unity, inter-relation, and interdependence of Jews and Gentiles in the one true Church of Christ, in which "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female," but all are one in Christ Jesus. To use only two or three of the figures in the New Testament, they are parts of one Building, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief Corner Stone, in whom every part, "fitly framed together, groweth into an holy Temple in the Lord"; they are members of one Household, in which all are equally "children" in relation to their heavenly Father, and "brethren" in relation to one another; they are members of one Living Body, the Head of which is Christ, "from whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building-up of itself in love" (Eph. iv. 16, R.V.). Now, to say that in the One Church of Christ one set of rules, one attitude in relation to certain rites and observances enjoined in the law, and certain earthly or "national" hopes and expectations befit and are incumbent on its Jewish members, which do not befit and are not incumbent on its Gentile members, is nothing less than to try to raise up again the middle wall of partition which Christ by His death bath broken down, and to introduce confusion into the one "House of the Living God." it is very kind of one of the Gentile champions of these Judaising views to issue a manifesto to Hebrew Christians to assure them that "this is the liberty in the Gospel of Christ that the Gentile need not take upon him the law, and the Jew need not forsake the law"; and again, "the Jew in Christ is as free to retain all that is possible for him to retain of the law, as the Gentile in Christ is free to keep aloof from all that savours of laws and ordinances,1 but the New Testament nowhere tells "the Gentile in Christ" that he is "free" from anything from which "the Jew in Christ" is also not freed; and to quote, as this writer does, the cases of "Moses and David and Isaiah," or even of "Zacharias and Elisabeth, the parents of John the Baptist," who walked in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless—as proof "that there is a law observance which is not unto spiritual bondage"—only betrays great confusion of thought, and forgetfulness of the sad religious development of the Jews, which is, perhaps, the most tragic element in the history of Christless Israel these past nineteen centuries. But let it suffice here to say, in reply to the above statements, that "all the law and the prophets prophecied unto John"; that the "new covenant," into the blessings of which we have now been brought by the grace of Christ, is "not according to the covenant which God made with our fathers in the day when He took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt"; and that since the advent of our Redeemer, Who by the rending of His flesh on Calvary's cross "abolished the enmity, even the law of commandments, contained in ordinances, that He might create in Himself of the twain (i.e., of Jew and Gentile) one new man, so making peace"—we live in a different dispensation, when those who are children of God are put in a different position and relation to the law than "Moses and David and Isaiah," or even than "Zacharias and Elisabeth." It was most certainly primarily to the Jewish believers in the churches of Galatia that the Apostle addressed himself in Galatians iv. and v., in order to instruct them in this very thing. "But I say that so long as the heir is a child he differeth nothing from a bondservant, though he is lord of all; but is under guardians and stewards until the term appointed of the father. So we also, when we were children, were held in bondage under the rudiments of the world; but when the fulness of the time came God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that He might redeem them which were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. . . . But now that ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God, how turn ye back again to the weak and beggarly rudiments (or 'elements') whereunto ye desire to be in bondage over again? Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years; I am afraid of you, lest by any means I have bestowed labour upon you in vain. . . . With (or 'for') freedom did Christ set us free; stand fast, therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage." Not that either the Jewish or the Gentile believer is lawless, "but under law to Christ" (1 Cor. ix. 21); and since the moral law of God is written on our hearts, and put in our inward parts, the righteousness and purity which the law aimed at, but which could never be attained by mere "observances," is fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. FootNotes 1 Professor Stroeter, in No. 1 of The Messianic Jew. |
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