These People Are S-I-C-K But I Was Just As Bad

 DOUBTLESS, THERE ARE JEWS FOR JESUS WITH MORE RIGHTEOUS BACKGROUNDS THAN I, BUT THIS IS MY STORY

 

I trusted Jesus as my Messiah back in 1971.  It wasn’t because I’d done extensive study concluding that he was, indeed the Messiah.  It wasn’t because I’d delved deeply into the depths of the Talmud, Kabbala and other Jewish literature.  It was because I’d failed in my attempt to justify a life of self-indulgence, drugs and debauchery encouraged and reinforced by the “hippie” movement with which I’d come to identify myself.   I’d found myself trapped by addictions from which I had neither the motivation nor the ability to extricate myself and, assuming if there ever was a God, I concluded that He would be (pardon my French) very pissed with me.  I needed a lifeline by which I could be pulled out of my self-induced quagmire, and Jesus, out of great compassion, threw Himself to me.  He was my life-line.

When I announced what had happened in my life, my Father said “you’re no longer Jewish”.  My mother hung-up on me and my sister sent me a four-page letter castigating me.  The last sentence in her letter was “GO TO HELL”.

My new found faith was attacked on more than just familial fronts as well.  “Certainly, the rabbis, at least the orthodox ones, know more than I do,” was a mantra continually playing in my head.  “You were utterly depraved and you hurt many people along the way.  You don’t deserve salvation.  In fact, you’re just, believing in a fairy tale”, was another mantra.  “There are a lot of Jews who don’t believe in Jesus out there who are far more accomplished and righteous than you”, was another thought that kept reverberating through my brain (though I knew nothing of their personal life), “and they don’t profess to know Jesus” my thoughts continued.

Rabbis, expounding their great sagacity, labeled me as an ignoramus and certainly, an uneducated one.  What I found interesting was many Rabbis and Jewish scholars went on and on about how the New Testament was anti-Semitic yet many, after investigation, admitted that Jesus was, in fact, a remarkably righteous individual, and a lover of His people.  Still, they’d back track and say “well Paul was an anti-Semite and told people to not practice the law.”  Interestingly, in the course of my “Christian” studies, I’d noticed that Augustine of Hippo, in his dialogue with Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin, observed that Paul himself, had “kept the law.” However, Augustine went on to lump Jews into the same category as the rest of humanity and began a succession of historical assumptions that the negative term called “legalism” meant observance of the Jewish laws.  Sadly, unbeknownst to the likes of Augustine, a new form of “Christian” legalism took root which might be summarized by the phrase, “Thou shalt not keep the law.”  As an aside, If I might paint a broad stroke of Paul’s writings, I would argue that Paul’s audience was primarily Gentiles who were erroneously being told that they had to keep the Law in order to receive salvation.  But I digress.

I’ve read the entire Bible through multiple times, but given my reading habits, according to my tendency to “get on towards the end” I’ve seldom stopped to examine texts in the detail that they deserved. I finally decided to study certain texts in depth and with a fine-tooth comb. 

Let me preface what I am about to say next by stating that I can think of no book to be more fundamentally Jewish than the Tanakch (Old Testament).  Some might say “well what about the Talmud?”  That’s not an invalid question, but, in my humble opinion the Tanakch is foundational to even the writings of the Talmud, and I can only surmise that there would be few if any Jewish scholars who would disagree.  And so, I’ve taken it upon myself to evaluate every nook and cranny of the Tanakch with an admission that I will nevertheless still fail to scratch through its remarkable depths.  That being the case, I would argue that those Rabbis who posit that Paul was an anti-Semite don’t know what they’re talking about.  And those who would say that the New Testament is anti-Semitic, in general, don’t know what anti-Semitic is.

In fact, I would hold that those rabbis who would make such claims, coupled with their accusation that I hadn’t studied enough, have, themselves, not studied enough and, in fact, don’t know their own literature.  If they would care to find anti-Semitic literature, they should look no further than the writings of their own prophet, Ezekiel, in chapter 16 of the book named after him.  I can think of no greater indictment of the Jewish people than that chapter.  The language is vivid and I do it injustice by summarily saying that Ezekiel had placed the people of Judah and Jerusalem on a par with Sodom and Gomorrah whom the world has commonly regarded as the pinnacle of depravity.  A second text which comes a close second, in my mind, might be found in chapter 23 of the same book, in which Ezekiel likens the kingdoms of Israel and Judah to twin girls who grew up to become whores!

So, it seems to me that the rabbis and most of the Jewish community have, as a whole, glanced past the book of Ezekiel.  I’m sure there is much in the rabbinic literature on Ezekiel and I plead ignorance on how it is treated.   However, I can safely say that at least 95% of Jews know nothing about its content and a fraction of the remaining 5% have studied it in depth, yet not without viewing it through a rabbinic prism of interpretation.  In summary, if the Rabbis want to call Paul an anti-Semite, they might consider looking first at the writings of those individuals of whom they have no dispute concerning their qualifications as Jews.  As a caveat, Ezekiel does indicate an amazingly wonderful future for the Jewish people, however, he gives no indication that this glorious future is the product of a “pick-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps” mechanism but rather by the providential working of God.

So, for the sake of argument, I’d like to accuse the prophet Ezekiel of being an anti-Semite, and, to be honest, I think that that was characteristic of most of the Jewish prophets.  They spoke for God, denouncing the depravity of their own people.  They are revered today but they weren’t very popular among their contemporaries.

And so, I rhetorically ask the question, “why is it that people would say that I’m no longer a Jew while the cross-dressing pervert, Rachel Levine, or the Lesbian Attorney General Dana Nessel are still Jewish?  I’ve read the Tanakch.  In fact, the Torah specifically speaks against male homosexuality and although it may be silent on lesbianism (‘though perhaps implied), surely their stances supporting male homosexuality are quite evident.  Why is it that the promiscuous Harvey Weinstein, or Al Franken or Woody Allen are still Jews and I’m not?  I was easily as bad as they were, but Jesus rescued me.  Why is it that the consummate liars Adam Schiff or Jerrold Nadler or the atheist Michael Bloomberg or Bernie Sanders are still Jewish but I’m not?  I was certainly equal in my depravity to any of them, but the Jew, Jesus, rescued me.

The prophet Ezekiel told Judah and Jerusalem their sin.  His contemporaries labeled him a “teller of parables”.  The prophet Jeremiah told Jerusalem her sin and told them to willingly go into exile.  They called him a conspirator.  In fact, the prophets, in general, confronted their audiences with their sin.  That seems to have been one of their major roles.  And the people resisted them because they liked their lives the way that they were and were unwilling to face the truth about themselves.

As ye ole’ cliché goes, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”  Jewish believers in Jesus are marginalized as irrelevant non-Jews.  I can’t testify regarding some of the Jewish community, but certainly a sizeable percentage are happy with the assumption that they’re “cool” and the book that declared them to be Jews in the first place (The Tanakch) is irrelevant and the admonitions against their behavior, philosophies, and thought patterns are outdated.  Certainly “If God does exist, He doesn’t see what I do.  He’s too busy with other stuff” I would, based on my own experience, speculate to be among their thought processes.

I think that everyone, in one way or another, seeks justification.  I believe that the above-mentioned types of people are in the process of trying to change the mores of the society so as to make their behavior, philosophies and thought patterns normative and therefore, assumed to be acceptable.  These people cheer on aberrant behavior in total keeping with the words of that renown “anti-Semite”, the Apostle Paul who wrote “…although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also approve of those who practice them” (Romans 1:26)

On the contrary, there is no justification for behavior and thinking that run contrary to the laws of God.  There is only one alternative to the unchecked downward spiral of personal and national depravity and that is to put a stop to it by confessing personal guilt before God and repenting on both, a personal and national level.

The Jewish people have their own prophets, in their own literature, if only they’d pay attention to what they wrote.  The words of these prophets have been made available to everyone however.  For the most part, they’re universally applicable message has been dismissed as “religion”.

I believe that there are prophets alive today.  Many of them are not Jewish.  They don’t necessarily identify as “Christians.”  Although, I believe that The Bible is the final authority in all things these folks don’t go about thumping on their Bibles, but I would argue that they speak the truth.  They can be found among any people group, but the people who most predominantly come to my mind are black.  Even as people like me are labeled as a “Gentile”, these black prophets are labeled “Uncle Toms”.  I have the deepest respect for these “prophets”.

In the news, we keep hearing about incidences of police brutality against blacks.  Without question, unarmed Black victims ofpolice shootings are disproportionately higher than White victims.  However, aside from many factors that likely account for this disparity, police shootings are a relative pittance compared to the number of homicides that there are in general.  In light of the fact that around 90% of blacks murdered in the United States are murdered by other blacks and a similar percentage (a little less) of whites are killed by other whites, in spite of those who would say otherwise, there is a noticeably more serious intra racial problem of violence within the black community than there is in the white community.  I say that because this article, which gives the year 2015 as an example, states that 52.3% of homicide victims in the United States that year were black and yet blacks comprise only 13.3% of the population. 

Just like the Jews who blame their woes on anti-Semites (and history admittedly does have plenty of unjustified evil anti-Semites for sure), the black community, with the help of liberal whites, blames its woes on “white supremacists” and “racists”.  Yes, such bigots do exist and, indeed, they are motivated by evil, but I’ve observed that the people whom I call the humble “black prophets of today”, would argue that it’s not the fault of “whitey” as much as it is the fault which lies within the black community itself.  These “prophets” are trying to challenge the black community to look inward and attribute its problems more as a function of a prevalence of broken homes and poor role models.  I would hold that whites within the media who accuse other whites of not being “woke” and therefore “racist” are themselves, promoting the “gangsta rappers” and athletes who happen to be poor role models as the people whom the black youth should seek to emulate.  On the contrary, these controllers of public opinion squelch the predominance of positive alternatives such as Fredrick Douglas and Thurgood Marshall of history and others of today including the likes of Clarence Thomas and Dr. Ben Carson.

Jews and blacks are not the only people groups within American society which ignores their prophets.  The problem is universal.  So, what, in my humble opinion, is the answer to America’s woes?  I would say, it’s Jesus.  Rather than ignoring our faults and blaming our woes on everyone but ourselves (which happens to be divisive), He would have us look inward, confess the ugliness that exists in each of us, otherwise known as sin, and ask Him to enable us to change and become the people that He wants us to be.  And what kind of people does He want us to be?  He wants us to be people who know what gender God made us to be, act and dress accordingly and not try to force others to condone an aberrant  lifestyle.  He wants us to be faithful wives, husbands and fathers who will instill good values in our children.  He wants us to be compassionate employers and faithful employees.  He wants us to shun greed and give up the idolatry of being dissatisfied with what we have, yet should we desire more, we know to achieve our goals honestly and acknowledge that some work may be required.  We should love people and not lust after people and think of them as objects.

The genuine follower of Jesus may not be perfect, but he is a good citizen.  He’s a good citizen because he’s ceased to attempt to justify himself.  On the contrary, he honestly recognizes his faults, confesses them to God and asks God to help him change.  He stops demanding things from others and begins demanding things from himself.