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Pharisees and wanting to pronounce judg- ment upon them for their Jewishly under- stood beliefs and practices. Nothing could be further from reality here. The Pharisees were Yeshua’s own kinsmen for whom He was about to be voluntarily offered up as a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of “All Israel” (and all mankind), including the sins of the Pharisees. No one was taking Yeshua’s life from Him, but He was laying it down for His friends. Yeshua’s “woes” upon the Pharisees were His authentic prophetic call to repen- tance that they may escape the chasm of error they were falling into. He was warning them out of His deep love and commitment to their present and eternal well being. He was not scouring or screaming. He was not over-the-top with wild emotion. He was surely protesting their misguided steps in holy prophetic aspiration that their repen- tance and faith would be immediately forth- coming. Rather than grinding His teeth in rage, as Yeshua was often depicted, He was more probably clutching the sides of His head in heart-aching love for the Pharisees. The power-broking Sanhedrin, of course, consisted almost entirely of Sadducees. Apparently both Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were Pharisees and members of the Sanhedrin. But these Pharisees protested poor treatment of Yeshua and were not afraid to publicly cast their lots with Him. Ultimate- ly, the book of Acts records that many Phari- sees and even priests (Sadducees) came to faith in Yeshua. These would then bring their Jewish sensibilities into their Messianic Jew- ish faith experience and seek sound applica- tion of biblical passages to their contempo- rary Jewish lives in light of the Holy Spirit’s revelation in Yeshua.
Yeshua: All God, All Man, All Jewish Yeshua’s coming provided the Jewish
world and all mankind a more perfect under- standing of who God is and what God is like. Yeshua said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” as well as, “I and the Father are One.” By gazing upon Yeshua long and hard, by “learning of” Him, we come to the richest understanding of God’s Person, His glory, His holiness, and His love. Yeshua is the capstone of God’s Self-Revelation. The Scriptures depict God’s original intentions for man in the early chapters of the Genesis account. The original Adam failed God and thus proving unable to per- fectly reflect God’s glory and holy character, was deposed. The Second Adam, Yeshua, perfectly performed His divine mission and exquisitely conveyed the glories of God.
www.JewishVoiceToday.org
Anyone wanting to know what God wants or expects in a human being today simply needs to take a good, long, hard look at Yeshua. Yeshua is everything God ever wanted any man to be. When God raised up seed from Abra-
ham to fashion an apostolic nation of Israel and assigned to them the ministry of recon- ciliation, they recognized their purpose to include “being a blessing to all the peoples of the earth.” At Sinai they were told they were to be a “kingdom of priests” and a “holy nation.” Throughout the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature and the Hebrew prophets, the Jewish People are seen to be God’s missions agency, to bring all nations and peoples back to the One True God. Yeshua came to not only perfectly exhibit God to mankind and not only to be the Second Adam, one that would succeed where the first Adam had failed, but Yeshua came as the Chief Son of Israel. He is the King of Israel, the One who will lead Israel into the fulfillment of her divine mission of reconciling the nations to God. As the Great High Priest, He governs the true worship of God and distributes portfolios to all the ranks of priests. Yeshua is the greatest Jew who ever lived. He demonstrated the very greatest of Jewish piety, fidelity to God and God’s revelation, and co-labored with the Father to accomplish the entire agenda of the Father’s revealed will. Yeshua is God, yet He “tabernacled” among us to fully manifest the glories of the Majestic One on high. He successfully accomplished this divine objective while liv- ing within the confines of a Jewish man. He did this within the framework of Jewish reli- gion and tradition as it was in the first cen- tury.
If anyone should wonder what God
wants of a Jewish Person today, he should know that Yeshua is the pious Jew God longs for all Jewish People to emulate.
DR. RAYMOND GANNON, Ph.D., is the Director of Jewish Voice Messianic Studies at The King’s University. For more than 40 years Dr. Gannon has been in the forefront of the Messianic Movement. He pioneered and led three Messianic Jewish congregations in Los Angeles and New York from 1973-1989, before heading to minister in Israel.
In
Israel, he pioneered the King of Kings College (now Israel College of the Bible) with campuses in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv.
Today he is
equipping tomorrow’s leaders to reach the unbelieving Jewish world with the Good News of Yeshua the Messiah. On the web:
www.thekingsjewishvoice.org
BILL KOENIG is the president of Koenig’s International News (
http://watch.org). The daily news service has readers in 50 states and 79 countries. Bill co-authored Israel: The Blessing or the Curse in 2001 and Eye to Eye: Facing the Consequences of Dividing Israel in 2007. He is a graduate of Arizona State University with a B.S. in Communications. Bill and his wife, Claudia, reside in the Washington, D.C. area where he is a White House correspondent. He writes a weekly 12-page news report called “Koenig’s Eye View from the White House” that focuses on world news that is biblically relevant and White House news from a Christian perspective. Bill plans to release a new book soon.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 Jewish Voice Today | 23
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cial order, and one-world religious order are evolving rapidly.
• Ecumenical calls for reconciliation between Christians, Jews, and Mus- lims for the sake of peace will increase and yet fail.
• Famine and pestilence will grow expo- nentially.
• Hearts will fail out of fear for what is happening on earth.
• The immoral climate of these days is as in the days of Noah.
• Men’s hearts are waxing cold. • God will intervene for Israel and defeat the armies that come against it, both large and small.
You will miss the significance of these
events if you aren’t aware of the biblical signs, as most people in the “replacement theology” churches are. Finally, by selecting Scriptures out of
context for their own agenda and purpose, they and their church members have been deceived. The Bible is very clear about the consequences of these actions: Revelation 22:18-19 (KJV) states: “I
warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.”
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