Living Like Jesus: What Role Should Jewish Traditions Play in Christianity? – With Nic Lesmeister & David Blease

*This transcript was generated by AI, and may contain transcription errors. Please refer to the video, or contact us with any questions or discrepancies.*

I always think about Ephesians, when God brings two into one Jew and Gentile, I’ve performed marriage ceremonies, and you don’t sit down and map out a 50 year plan. Do you not think that they’re going to be married 50 years? No. I hope that’s the goal for sure. But to sit here and map out within the next 50 years, we’re not going to be able to do that. But here’s what we can do. Just make sure to keep coming back to each other. Keep coming to the table. So
True.
And I think that’s the desire that God had in his heart was not to give us the next 2000 year playbook, but to just ensure that we come to the table. And I think that’s what our mission is, is as Gentiles, we want to come back to the table alongside the Jewish community, not just do the things that were a part of the Jewish community. All right, well, welcome back to another episode of the Covenant and Conflict podcast. With us, we have the one, the only Nick Les Meister. This is the most reoccurring segment is just me and you talking about God knows what, and I’m excited to do it again. The question I have for you today, or the question we’re going to launch into is really an argument. And this is an argument that is made by many Christians who have a propensity to be involved in the Jewish world, or as we would say, the Jewish stuff, which brings it all together. If we follow a Jewish messiah, we live like he lived. Right? That makes
Sense.
Lemme give you another one.
Be like Jesus.
If we’ve been adopted into a Jewish family, then we do the practices of our new family, right? Explain, please. Oh, I thought you were. I’m all ears. Let me
Answer yes or no, and then we
Can just get done. No, no, this is
Yes. And next episode. Shortest episode ever. Yeah. Should we do that? Okay, so I was literally just thinking about this, so I hate to always do this, but everything has to go back to the foundation. And so before you get to Jesus, a lot of the Bible happens, and a lot of people don’t even realize that the narrative that most Christians, especially most evangelical Christians, when they approach the Bible, they’re approaching it from a position of what is called structural. We’re going deep right away. We we’re big words Here we’ve arrived. Yeah. So structural supersessionism is this. It’s the idea that God created man, man falls into sin like two chapters later, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Jesus comes on the scene,
Ding, ding, ding, ding,
Right, redeems. And then Jesus comes back and restores. So I’ve heard this said even I’m not going to name wear, but a private Christian school that my children, Hey, I get it. It’s a
Quick Google search and you can find
Out where that, but it’s very common. It’s like this whole idea of created, fallen, redeemed, restored. And it’s wonderful in the sense that it does tell the whole of the biblical narrative. But the problem is, is that you literally essentially for people, you unintentionally erase everything from essentially Genesis three 15 to Matthew one.
Yeah. And it’s the gospel pitch when we’re taught how to give the gospel pitch. God created man, man fell. Everything sucked. Then Jesus came and he died for your sins. And if you accept him, then you can have eternal life. And what we’ve erased is God’s covenantal faithful relationship with Israel that he came through pretty big part of the story, probably most of the story if we’re looking at it just strictly in page amount, but we cut that out because it doesn’t necessarily apply to us. And I think what you’re saying is we’re doing it unintentionally. We’re not like get Israel out of this story. It’s just like, well, that’s just the bad part, the hard part, the sin part, the part before Jesus where everything was, I don’t know, awaiting
Something. And the reason for that’s natural is because we’re big on Jesus. We are really big on Jesus. Jesus radically changed our lives. Jesus is the crescendo of the covenantal story. This was God’s masterpiece plan obviously to redeem mankind.
So when we just naturally kind of develop into that type of a framework, but I was sitting here just thinking it would be like if you’re 25 years old and you meet your future spouse, then how weird would it be if you told them, you don’t really need to tell me anything that happened before we met. I love who you are right now. Let’s just talk about everything going forward and we’ll use this as a marker. So if we’ve been married 10 years and when you were 25, now we’re 35, I don’t want to know about the pre 25
Years.
I mean, that’s just really backwards. Nobody would think like that. So that’s ultimately what we do to God is if we just fast forward to Jesus, then we kind of quote scriptures, maybe Paul does, where all things are kind of wrapped up in Jesus or he is the image of the unknown God or the invisible God. And so we take some of these scriptures and we basically say, once you see Jesus, you see everything. And unfortunately that’s not actually true because Jesus himself says, I only do the things the Father, I see the Father doing. Well then what has the Father done? You have to look at the history from Genesis three until Matthew one.
Jesus says, I came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. And we would need to know what he’s filled up, not just
Him. And that’s a good example in Matthew five, people say, fulfilling is essentially like it’s done. That task is completed. Put it away. I completed the task.
So fulfillment is abolish,
Abolish, which is I came not to
Abolish, I came to abolish
Versus giving it the fullness. He is, I think Marty Waldman, who I know you’ve interviewed on this podcast says He is the living Torah. Jesus is the living Torah. And that correlates to John one where it says the word became flesh. So he is the embodiment of the promises that God made to the Jewish people, the covenantal promises. Now there’s this whole other side that you have to wrestle through, which is there are specific geographic, terra firma, earth-based promises about where people should live, how the people should live there, what God’s kingdom is going to look like in that geographic location in the future, which wrinkles our brains. Everything’s spiritual, right? And it’s spiritual because Jesus spiritualizes everything for everybody. Everything is universally subsumed in him. So we don’t have to get practical. So all of that to say that, to answer your beginning question about how Jewish should we be, you have to go back and say there was a particular way that God dealt with a particular group of people. His hope was to always reach every person through the particular people. But his hope wasn’t a universal family.
His
Hope was to have a particular family that was joined to families from the nations that also had particularity. They were also different ethnic families because
He desires diversity. He doesn’t desire uniformity
Is what you’re saying. And even when we think of the nations, there’s this temptation for us to think, oh, anybody from around the world?
And so we just flash all these different ethnicities in our minds. But every one of those ethnicities was, I believe God granted them the freedom to become those ethnic groups of people based on where they lived, based on how they talked, based on how they looked, how they developed in response to where they lived, et cetera. So you go backwards and say, okay, if there was a particular way that God wanted he fashioned and shaped the Jewish family, then by the time Jesus comes, that’s pretty hardened. It’s actually hardened so much that Jesus goes to war against it. In a way, he basically is combating the Pharisees because he’s saying you have made such a idol out of the particularity of your faith that you’re being exclusive even to people within your own family. You’re basically saying, we were particular and then we got more and more and more and more and more. And so now the only way to come to God is to essentially be a Pharisee and do everything we do. So Jesus was trying to reset that. He wasn’t trying to say the Pharisees are wrong necessarily, but just that they maybe had an impure motive.
So when you approach it like that, you have to think, okay, then if I’m not Jewish, number one, it doesn’t make me worse or less valuable than a Jewish person. Number two, widen your understanding of God. The biblical narrative, as we’ve said many times is Jew and Gentile united together in Jesus. That’s the whole point of Ephesians two and three.
So
If that’s the case, then we should clearly be okay with not falling into just doing Jewish things. I mean, it’s really not that hard when you take it at face value, but I think we read scripture and we do all these different things to try to emulate Jesus, and we just default to what’s kind of a little bit easier to understand. So it’s like, well, Jesus celebrated the feasts. I should celebrate the feasts because it’s kind of hard to work out your own identity if you’re not Jewish. The part about that that’s funny to me, David, is that in a way it’s sort of cheap for the Gentiles to just try to do feast because the Jewish people have had to for 3000 years work out their relationship with covenantal faithfulness. I mean, even to this day, right? You ask a Jewish person on the street in America, do you celebrate Passover? Yeah, I celebrate Passover. What are you talking about? Of course, I go to my grandma’s or my mom’s and whatever, we do this or we do that, and then you’ve got some people that are religiously celebrating the Passover. So we haven’t had to walk through that. Instead, we kind of just get this on-ramp to wherever we want to,
And we’re like, yeah, I celebrate Passover, which means I get together, I have a Seder, I serve some ham and potatoes. And you’re like, ah, okay. So I think this is why these questions need to be asked and we need to refine them further.
And so to kind of ground it in scripture, the two kind of main scriptures that I hear you referencing, one’s Genesis 12 where God tells Abraham, I’m picking you and your descendants after you making an everlasting covenant with you and your descendants and through you all nations, or I think the actual word is mish Baha, which would be families of the earth, will be blessed. So it’s this idea of there’s going to be diversity. I want everyone to be blessed and essentially to be in my family, but not to conform to being the Abraham family. Then you fast forward Acts 10, Cornelius comes, he’s the first Gentile to essentially be filled with the Holy Spirit and essentially be grafted in to this family and the disciples, the apostles are having to work this out, which leads us to Acts 15. They decide. The question is, do Gentiles need to be circumcised and obey Torah? Their answer is no. So they write to the Gentiles, you don’t have to obey Torah. You don’t have to carry the burden is what it says that the Jewish people can’t even carry. We’re struggling with it. We’re not going to let you who are new to it. We’ve been trying to carry this for thousands of years. You’re going to come day one. God is saying he’s accepting you as Gentiles.
So you can do these four things, which I would interpret because if you do these four things, we’ll still have relationship together and we’ll be able to figure it out. So that’s the scripture. Acts 15 would be foundation for why biblically Gentiles don’t need to obey Torah, do all the feasts live Jewish lives. It’s very clear that Gentiles remain gentile. But then there’s still this argument of, well, maybe you don’t have to, but you should,
But you should. Oh, totally. That’s where it falls. There’s like point A, point B, and there is a whole movement on this that is collectively called the one law movement, and that’s essentially their argument is that there’s sort of hard one law, soft one
Law
Where the hard one law people are like, no, legitimately we’re all supposed to be doing, you should the Jewish things. That is the intention. God’s intention, and Jesus’ Paul’s intention and all the apostle’s intention was for us to join ourselves up to the Jewish family and become full participants in Jewish covenant of life. And then you’ve got soft one law, which is what you just said. That’s like, yeah, you don’t have to, but dude, if you’re not, what is wrong with you?
If
You just not like the Bible,
If you’re still celebrating Christmas, I mean, whatever that pagan holiday is, that’s cool, but you should be celebrating the holier things, which we just did a class on this and talking about how it’s ideal versus mandatory. The sense that it’s ideal is it’s a biblical feast, right?
Yeah.
So why would you not do something biblical?
That’s the language. Exactly. People say biblical, and it’s like, okay, well who in the Bible did God give it to?
Which we would err on the side of calling it the Jewish feast or the feast of Israel. Now there’s clarity in who it was given to. So I think the issue that I have with the ideal is then Acts 15 is kind of null and void because we’re saying you don’t have to, but if you really want to be closer to God, you should. And that’s saying that all those gentiles that received that message and rejoiced is what Acts 15 says. They were at this bottom tier of intimacy with God, bottom tier of being in this family, bottom tier of being accepted by God, and they need to climb up this, all these rungs in this ladder to really get to intimacy. And I don’t think that’s how that works. I don’t think the more Jewish your faithfulness is, the more observant to Jewish things you are means closer to God. I think that’s as bad as the other end of the spectrum, which is don’t do anything, don’t even care about the Jewish context. But what about those that just say understanding Passover, understanding the Jewish stuff, whatever that stuff is, has impacted me.
So is it wrong that I am doing it just me and my, I’m not telling Gentiles to do this. I’m not telling the church to do it. I haven’t sent 10 emails to my senior pastor telling him to wake up, but I get enriched by it.
Yeah.
Is that cool?
Yeah. I mean, hey, I get enriched by a lot of things. I mean, who hasn’t at 1130 at night when you pull out your phone to check on something that you’re watching on Netflix, and next thing you know you’re three hours down in Wikipedia rabbit hole, right? You’re learning about Irish folk dancing in the 18 hundreds. You’re like, what am I doing? Everybody has something that they’re personally interested in because they think there’s a feedback to them understanding the world or themselves better. And this is absolutely, I mean, every single person should be able to participate in something like this. The healthiest way to do that is through a relationship with somebody else who is ally participating in that. So the short term for that is do it with a Jewish person, whether they’re a believer ideally, or if they’re not a believer that’s okay in Jesus, but there is so much to learn
Because
You are trying to learn the character and nature of God. So it goes back to structural supersessionism is that participating in or learning about the feasts does teach you a lot about God because it teaches you a lot about God’s particularity and that God is a God who says, do this, and not that go here and not there. So there is something to learn. But if we get enamored with the end goal is that God sets a marker out ahead of us and it says basically like, okay, you’re going to come through this maze that I call the feast of the Lord, and at the end of the maze, my ideal for you is to be Jewish people.
Then
I think we’re starting from the wrong point. So I think we get to the end and we say, what did I learn about God? And it’s not like, what did I learn about what God demands of me, but what did I learn about him? And part of what you have to keep on in four view is that God is a God of particularity and that he asks a particular group of people to be a certain way. And there’s all these promises and scriptures about the law going forth from Zion in the book of Isaiah. And there is something about the law of God that in the Psalm says, right, revise the soul. So it’s a way of learning who God is. And I think that does enrich us, and we should step into that. And I feel like for Gentiles, the most kind of rewarding part about the feasts is there’s seven feasts of the Lord in the Bible, in Leviticus that are marked out. And then there’s the weekly feast or the festival, which is Shabbat or the Sabbath. And in every one of those things, God calls them the Modi. And that is just literally the appointed times,
The times of the Lord. So even from that, what am I learning about God? Oh, God wants to convene with people multiple times a year. We get it in our head like, go to church. No, it is an interruption of your life. It isn’t just like three of those seven times that were requirements for the Jewish people, for males to go to Jerusalem. That’s not a small thing, especially if you’re in the time of Jesus, you’re living out in what is now Italy in the Roman Empire. You got to schlep it all the way to Jerusalem, and you got to start two or three weeks ahead of time. So it’s basically orienting yourselves around the fact that God is going to intervene in my life. My life is going to take on a rhythm of serving him and giving him space to have a time that he appoints with me. So there’s something to draw out of that for gentiles. And I think that we as Gentiles, the beauty of it is like you see this reiterated in Paul’s gospels. Look in the epistles, sorry, like Galatians, it is for freedom that Christ sets you free
Freedom from sin, but also freedom from the demands of religious requirement. Even good religious requirement like Jewish religious requirement. Paul’s telling the Gentiles in Galatia, you’re free from that stuff,
Guys.
So I think him as a Pharisee, he’s probably like, why are you trying to do this? That’s not a responsibility that God gave you. And lemme say one more thing. I was talking to somebody about this morning about a person that I love very much, but that they’re kind of stepping into doing something and they have a lot of capacity, like professional proficiencies to do a certain job. But I’m watching them do that job and I’m like, this isn’t bringing out them. There’s a side of them that’s emerging when they’re trying to do this job that actually is hard for everybody else. And when I look at that, I think, okay, this isn’t a good fit for that person. This isn’t a yoke that God wanted to put on them. And I think all of us should have the freedom to raise our hand and say, I’ve tried this and it’s not working for me. And the reason I know it’s not working is I’m stressed out. It’s causing friction with other people. It’s not bearing fruit in my life. I have to work hard for the best part of me to come out in this.
And it’s sort of the same thing with the Jew Gentile distinction. If we’re going to try to do Jewish things, we’re kind of putting a yoke on ourselves that maybe God didn’t in his grace give for us to wear.
It’s literally Acts 15, right?
Yes.
Why would we put a yoke on them? That’s
Literally what they said. And then it says, and the churches, when this message was read in the churches, there was great joy.
Yeah, great. Rejoice.
So that’s the opposite sometimes about one law people or Judaizers or whatever you want to call ’em. I’m relieved when I don’t. We were just joking before we pushed record that why would you ever eat kosher if you didn’t have to
Tell
Seriously,
It’s hard.
Go live in Israel and eat kosher food. And this is no disrespect to anybody that’s orthodox and eats kosher. It’s like saying that coffee tastes amazing, an acquired taste, eating kosher, an acquired taste, and there’s a lot more flavor that I can fit into my palate with cheese and meat at the same time. So if I don’t have to do that and God’s not requiring me to, then I’m happy. But I’m not upset that anybody else wants to take that upon themselves to say,
This
Is the covenantal responsibility of me and my people. And I think there’s something beautiful in that.
Yeah. Well, I think what we’ve had many conversations with people who feel personally called to be a bridge between the Jewish, Christian world, Gentile relationships. They feel individually called to do things alongside the Jewish community, whether that’s to participate in a Messianic service or whether that’s to do the feasts alongside the Jewish community. And we say, that’s great
If
You feel personally called by God, which is not the majority but the minority, same with marriage. If you don’t feel called to be married just like Paul, which we would say is the minority, not the majority, that’s great. As long as you understand that that is not the ideal and push that upon other gentiles because that’s typically where it goes. They feel so enriched. They’re like, everybody would feel so enriched. And it’s kind of like what you’re saying. Well, that wasn’t a yoke that God put on the Gentiles as a whole, maybe individually. And I think that reminds me of kind of the step-by-step process. Typically when diving into the Jewish stuff, I taught the class the, what was it? The three pools of the Jewish plunge. So as you’re diving into the Jewish stuff, you’re going to end in one of these three pools. But typically you have the revelation, you have identity, and then you have practice. I think most of the time we go from revelation to practice. You start reading something, the Jewish Jesus something, our father Abraham, something that’s like, check out the stuff that you missed this whole time. You didn’t know the Jewish stuff.
Your mind is blown. And then you go to start practicing these things, which is not an unnatural next step, but we skip over identity and identity is what you’re talking about. What is the yoke that God has given me? Because if we don’t know who we are, we won’t know what to do. And I think you have a lot of people on one side of the spectrum, this kind of the one law Hebrew root side, that they don’t want to be Gentile. They don’t like Gentile. Gentile is second class citizen, and it eventually leads to confusion. I think the church will be confused. The congregation’s confused for sure. The Orthodox Jewish community is confused if they see a bunch of Gentiles being Jewish, pretend pretending to be Jewish. So it really creates confusion. I’m reminded of the scripture, God’s not the God of chaos, but the God of
Peace.
He’s not the author of confusion, but I think it creates confusion. I think we skip over that step of identity. I want to talk about in Acts 15, one, I think the most maybe misunderstood aspects of that chapter are the four abstentions, the whole council of Jerusalem, which is an all Jewish room asking, do the Gentiles need to be circumcised? Which the obvious implication of that is we still do or else we’re not even. Why are we having this conversation? So we still do, do they need to? Answer is no, but right to the Gentiles to only abstain from these four things. What’s crazy is if you ask 99% of Gentiles, what are the four
Abstentions
That we’re not supposed to do? You be hard pressed to get anyone to be like, oh, here we go, 1, 2, 3, 4. We don’t even talk about ’em probably because they’re confusing. Also, if you told any Christian, Hey, if a bunch of people that have never known God just got saved and you were going to give four rules, what would your four rules be? They would not be the four abstentions. That
Would not start there.
No.
Yeah. Especially today.
But it’s not eating food that’s been strangled. Not eating or drinking blood, not eating food that’s been sacrificed to idols. You’re like, top three are food. And then four is sexual morality, which we’re like, that’s a good one. Praise God for that one. That would’ve made my top four, right? Why the four abstentions? What is that? That’s such an interesting list. If you’re going to give your top four list to these gentiles.
I know.
So can you help explain
That? Well, I was just rereading one Corinthians the other day, and there’s a lot in the New Testament about food, and I think we look at that in a western individualistic mindset and we’re like, what the heck is all this stuff about food? But food was the source of community. I mean, that’s where people gathered around. They came together to eat, to share meals because first of all, food wasn’t the most common thing and was somewhat scarce in that period of time. It’s not just like, where do you want to go to dinner tonight? You’re like sitting there on your phone. Where do you want to eat tonight? Yeah, endless. Endless options. Yeah. All these options. And then it takes you seven. What part of the world do you want to eat from? Yeah. It’s like, oh, what are you in the mood for? Oh no, not salads. I’m just so tired of salads. What about burgers? I’ve had burgers so much this week.
I
Mean, this was not a conversation they were having. It was like, we have a loaf of bread, we have olive oil, we have a little bit of wine. Maybe we can kill a lamb if we really want to go crazy
If we’re rich.
So the whole idea of the four abstentions, when you think about that in context, it’s all about community. It’s all about, what’s the word I’m fetching for here?
Relationship.
Relationship, yeah. Socializing. So how could a Jewish person fellowship with a Gentile and actually be the person that teaches them, essentially disciples them about who God is if they can’t eat, when are they going to meet? They’re working all the time. They work and then they eat. It’s not like, let’s go to Starbucks and have coffee and then I’ll just sit down and walk you through the scripture. It’s so different.
But
We come to scripture with this crazy preloaded cultural context. So we have to just unravel that. And when you look at that list, that’s what it’s about, is that Paul is coming to them and saying, what do we do with these gentiles that come to faith? They’re all idolaters. That’s the other
Thing. Former pagans,
We’ve talked to you about this before, that these aren’t just people that they grew up in church, they bachelor, but now they’re really giving their life. Yeah, they’re really giving. They came down to the altar for the third time. They’re really sorry this time. These are people that maybe the previous week we’re living in an extramarital affair. We’re literally praying to different idols in our home, all over the house. We’re doing obscene things, drinking blood for rituals sake. Absolutely. Trying to appease all these Greek and Roman gods. As Paul says, you were once far off. Yeah, far off. Far off. Yeah. Right. Yeah. He probably underlined that in the original manuscript,
Not even close, all
Far off. So you look at that and you think, okay, what they’re trying to solve here is how do we fellowship together? The other thing you have to remember is they are a minority. I mean, the followers of the way of Jesus at the time are crazy minority. So it’s not like they even have the freedom to say, well, let’s just phone each other or call each other and
Then
We’ll start a long distance relationship. It’s like I need to learn about God because a revelation of Jesus changed my life or being touched by the Holy Spirit changed my life, but now I have no knowledge at all. I’m at ground zero
And I don’t have a personal Bible or a personal tour in the back
Pocket. So they’re saying, what do we do with all these gentiles that come to faith? Okay, well, the first thing we have to do is create a path for them to fellowship with Jewish people that doesn’t and make the Jewish people have to give up their covenantal faithful values. So
Good.
So it’s really Paul’s idea of being all things to all people, but within limits. And even when you look at what he says there, I was rereading this the other morning. He doesn’t just say no boundaries. I become all things to all men. I mean, it’s within some clear boundaries. When he says that to the Jew, I became a Jew to the Gentile, I became a gentile. And I think he even says something to the extent of not violating the Jewish law. So it’s all about relationship and isn’t that what God’s all about? Anyway, so what they were trying to do is to say, we need to teach you guys some things, and we’re not trying to teach you this so that you can become like us, but we want to teach you who God is, and then we want to walk you through how you walk this out. And just the fact that they were monotheists was radical. I mean, set aside the messiahship of Jesus, putting their faith in the one God, the one true God of Israel. That was radical. Totally. That’s the biggest conversion. And then there’s Jesus on top of that. So then after that, they’re like, white paper, we don’t have anything written here. Help us fill in the
Blanks.
So it’s just so easy for us to look at that today and not understand the deep context of what’s going on there. And let’s be honest, they weren’t trying to create a 300 year timeline here. They were meeting in Jerusalem. Not to say 2000 years from now, two Huns in Texas are going to be meeting to talk about this. Let’s make sure we write down exactly what we mean so that everybody that listens to their cool podcast that everyone should subscribe to are going to know what we mean. They’re like, this is a problem. Jesus is coming back
So
Soon. You think he’d use soon and not come back in this generation. In the meantime, what are we going to do here? It was solving a real world issue. So it was like an orthos issue, not an orthodoxy issue. So these are just all layers. I think that when you approach like, okay, I’m a Christian. I love Jesus. Should I be like Jesus? The last thing on that is that Jesus wasn’t really telling anybody else to be like him that wasn’t Jewish. There is a tiny amount of people that he even interacted with that were Gentile.
And the text will specify that if he is,
Yeah, it does. Exactly.
But we think sometimes because it doesn’t say, he said this to the Jews or the Jewish people. We don’t learn about the Jewish disciples. He found his 12 Jewish disciples, or he healed the 10 Jewish
Lepers.
All these things. It’s like, no, his audience is Jewish.
It’s true. So you get to Paul, and Paul is the one who kind of begins to universalize Jesus’s message. He was the one whose life was changed, and Jesus does appear to him and tells him, I’m sending you to the Gentiles. Gentiles,
Yeah.
So Paul was the one who had to wrestle through. He was the real world practitioner. Yeah. How
Do we do this?
In some ways, Jesus was like, I came to the LA House of Israel, Paul, you got to figure out the Gentile thing. So even that, it’s like, yes, we want to be like Jesus, but actually in a way, could we start by trying to be like Paul, you know what I mean? And then Paul in the proper context obviously,
And
Then work our way towards, maybe through Paul, we understand what were Jesus’ teachings to the Gentiles. And I think that if we can start there, we’re working our way up to ultimately what does God require of us? I mean, it’s very simple and we complicate it too much.
Well says you’re saying what it says about the geo gentile relationship and the Jewish people teaching the Gentiles about God. It also says a lot about God that his desires for us to come together. As Paul says, these two groups he has now brought near, he has made one from these two. He’s made. He’s made male and female. He made one flesh, Jew and Gentile. He made one new man, which we’ve talked about all the time. His desire is for us to come to the table with each other in relationship. And that goes back to why we encourage Gentile believers in Jesus Christians, that if you want to celebrate the feast, do so alongside the Jewish people. Why? Because that was the whole plan was do this in relationship with each other Again. If we really want to split hairs, is it okay if I do this by myself in my own home? Okay. Yeah. But we would encourage you to do it alongside the Jewish people because that was like God’s end game was you guys come together. And if we’re thinking of this like a marriage, I always think about Ephesians when God brings two into one Jew, Gentile, I’ve performed marriage ceremonies, and you don’t sit down and map out a 50 year plan.
Do you not think that they’re going to be married 50 years? No. I hope that’s the goal for sure. But to sit here and map out within the next 50 years, we’re not going to be able to do that. But here’s what we can do. Just make sure to keep coming back to each other. Keep coming to the table.
So true.
And I think that’s the desire that God had in his heart was not to give us the next 2000 year playbook, but to just ensure that we come to the table. And I think that’s what our mission is, is as Gentiles, we want to come back to the table alongside the Jewish community, not just do the things that were a part of the Jewish community.
Yeah, I was thinking about this that when you said, yeah, if you want to celebrate the feast by yourself, go for it. And I had this thought in my own mind of, and if you want to do a Seder at your church to some degree, I’m not going to tell you not to do that. I think that it’s good to understand what the ramifications, if you will, of that. But I had this thought that let’s say you have a church of two to 500 people, and there’s a guy in your church who just, or a gal, they’ve been really great with their money, great stewards, and they’ve just figured out a way in their own life how to get out of debt, save money, apply biblical principles to finance. Then you have a seminar, you let them teach it. So you’re like, Hey, they’re going to teach you our church how to do this. Well, that’s very different than having Dave Ramsey come in and teach you how to go through personal
Finance.
This is a person who has extreme expertise, has walked it out, has gotten input from so many other people. It’s kind of like the same thing with a Seder. If you’re going to do a Seder, you just need to understand in humility, you don’t know what you’re doing. I mean, really, I don’t care how much you’ve studied it or you watched a bunch of videos online or whatever. I mean, to a degree, you’re going to be able to understand, to pick up the pieces and figure out, this is how we do it,
Guys.
When you have a Jewish person come in and do a Seder for you,
It
Takes it to a whole nother level.
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Because number one, there’s a relational connection.
Number
Two, you’re living their own real time reality out with them. So when they’re saying, this is what we do, this is what our family history is like, that’s powerful. So it’s just that kind of framework change. And that to me is the ultimate danger of Christians trying to become Jewish or do Jewish things, is that you literally are essentially sticking your finger in the Jewish people’s face and saying, we figured out how to do this. We don’t need you. It’s a version of replacement theology. So instead of now there’s the one new Gentile, which is the one new man where all Jews become gentile. Now it’s like the one new Jew where the Christians are actually the Jews.
It’s
Reverse replacement theology, and it’s so insensitive because who are we to say, oh, I got adopted into the family, so
We don’t need you anymore.
Yeah. It’s like if an adopted kid shows up and starts wagging their finger at the original children or the grandparents, he is like, look, grandpa, thanks for the pouring story about our family history, but I’ve been here. I get it. I know all about all this. And the grandpa’s just like, dude, you have not been through anything.
And I think a good place to end is at the end of the day, we have to be led by the spirit, and we were talking to Jen Rosner about Jewish life. I
Actually call the
Spirit Ruach. Ruach. Yes. So I’m just kidding. That’s the other wrong. That’s where
I close, just I did everything I just said. I like to use Jewish names for David. Actually, I appreciate that. Only issue in Ruakaka
Word. Got it. What was I saying?
Sorry.
No, you’re good. Oh, yeah, just being led by the Holy Spirit because she’s talking about living a Jewish life. Well, we walked to Shabbat. Well, the closest synagogue is a five hour walk. So what does that mean for me? So I think in the same way, it’s like we can be in Dallas and be like, do it alongside ham. It’s 20 minutes away. That might not be possible for some people. So you really have to pray. Okay, then what does this look like for me?
Yeah, totally.
How can I do this alongside Jewish people, even though I might not know a Jewish person? So again, we’re not saying that this is a restriction if you don’t have a Jewish person present and you can’t interact with any of the Jewish things. It’s just knowing that God’s design is for us to come to the table together to have a relationship, and now we have the ability to do FaceTime and to do phone calls and zooms, and so we’re in a pretty good spot to keep that relational element.
It’s the whole mutual interdependence. It’s being able to humble yourself to admit you have something that I need and I have something you need. So when you do that, then you’re opening yourself up for God to bless you, because it’s humbling. It’s like humility. It’s the superpower of the life of a believer or someone that walks with God. It’s the upside downness of the kingdom is to say God raises the humble up. And if we basically tell the Jewish people, I got the whole Jewish thing figured out. I do Shabbat, I keep kosher, whatever, then we don’t need them for anything other than, the only thing they need us for is, well, you only need me to tell you about Jesus. Even that is kind of cheap. There’s something deeper here that we have to mine out together.
Yeah. That’s so good. Well, that’s
All we need to end this podcast.
That’s true. We are out of time, but we are so thankful that you have come to join us again on the Covenant and Conflict podcast. We can’t wait to see you again. View our website and our YouTube channel for more teachings, more information. We’d love to connect with you, pray with you. So we’ll see you next time. Have a great day.