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"I don't need Jesus
because I'm
Jewish"
Jewish friends sometimes say
to me, “If you believe in Jesus, fine! He’s the Messiah for you but not
for me because I’m Jewish. We Jewish people are already with God, so we
don’t need Jesus”. These friends might not be aware of the
“two-covenant” theology of various Jewish and Christian writers of the
20th and 21st centuries, but this is what underlies their thinking. The
approach owes much to the writings of the German-Jewish thinker Franz
Rosenweig (1886-1929) who said:
What Christ and his Church
mean within the world—on this point we are agreed. No one comes to the
Father except through him ... but the situation is different when one
need no longer come to the Father because he is already with him. That
is the case with the nation of Israel (cited in H J Schoeps, The
Jewish-Christian Argument, New York, 1963).
There are various things to be
said in response to the claim that Jewish people don’t need Jesus.
I point out that the Hebrew
prophets make it clear that the Jewish people were never automatically
saved simply by being Jewish. To the contrary, the prophets call their
Jewish brethren again and again to repent and turn back to God, with
warnings of judgment if they should fail to do so.
I highlight that the Torah of
Moses also makes it clear that it is not enough simply to be Jewish.
Whilst God gave many special promises to the Jewish people, there was
no promise of automatic salvation for each individual member of the
covenant nation. To the contrary, Jewish people, like all of us, have
broken God’s commandments and so come under the curse of a broken law:
“Cursed is he who does not confirm all the words of this law by doing
them” (Deuteronomy 27:26). This being the case, the Torah makes it
clear that there is no way of approach to God except through the
God-appointed atonement for sin: “For the life of the flesh is in the
blood, and I have given the blood upon the altar to make atonement for
the soul” (Leviticus 17:11). However, the Temple and altar of atonement
have gone and the only way of salvation is in the atoning death of
Jesus: “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned, everyone,
to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all”
(Isaiah 53:6).
Finally, I emphasise that if
Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible, he
is clearly the Jewish Messiah, and God therefore wants all Jewish
people to believe in him. I then draw attention to some of the key
prophecies of the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible, such as Isaiah 7:14;
9:6-7; 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Micah 5:2 and Zechariah 9:9.
Jesus made the point very
clearly. For when he stated, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No
one comes to the Father except through me,” He was undoubtedly
declaring the only way to the Father for those Jewish people to whom he
addressed his words.
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