David Lazarus – Restoring Our Heritage
I want to talk about the relationship between the Church and Israel; how it is that we got to a situation today where we are so separate one from another, and what we can do to heal and restore it. I’m going to talk about history from the Early Church, things that were happening, and mistakes that were made. I believe this will help put the events into context, give us understanding of why things are the way they are today, and what we can do to heal them.
I come as one who loves the Church. I hear too many people speak negatively about the Church. There’s a difference between being prophetic and confronting the Church, and criticizing the Church. The Church is the bride of our Lord and she has spots and wrinkles, but we should speak well of her and never criticize her; even if the wrinkle on the church next door is different than the spot on your church.
The Church was born in Jerusalem. That was the proper place for the Church to be born, because Jerusalem was the culmination, the epitome, the climax of the entire biblical revelation up until that point. Yeshua was crucified in Jerusalem, celebrated the Passover, and was risen in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit was poured out in Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem we had what I call a kind of “mothering” church. In Jerusalem we had the Apostles. They were the Fathers of the Church. The reason that they were the Fathers of the Church was because they had a heritage of 2,000 years of life with God. These men came out of a heritage of experiencing God’s presence; having made great mistakes, also having great successes. Having seen Him in war and peace, they saw His glory and majesty. This apostolic church, this mother church in Jerusalem, had authority. The Apostles carried authority because of 2,000 years of heritage. That was the reason that the Lord chose to pour His Spirit on the men and women in Jerusalem.
The Apostles had this heritage with Him, which gave them a context to put this glory into. It was not separate from everything that had gone before them, and that is a very important concept. Most Christians today think that the only thing that’s going on is what’s happening in their little area. We are part of something that has been going on for 4,000 years. It’s very important to see ourselves in context, in a progressive, historical revelation of God’s plan through the ages. You’re not just some local believer. We are a link in a chain and if we are broken or fall, it’s not just you or me that suffers, it’s a whole heritage that suffers.
To give an example of this, in Acts 15 – you remember when all of these gentiles were coming to the Lord – the Holy Spirit was being poured out. They weren’t sure exactly what to do with these gentiles. They were a bit wild really. The gentiles didn’t have a context to put this power into, this presence into. They didn’t have 2,000 years of discovering the character and the nature of God. I want to say this, too. Too many people think that the God of the Mosaic covenant was some God of anger and warfare. There’s this tendency in New Testament Christianity to separate ourselves away from part of the revelation of the Mosaic covenant and the Abrahamic covenant, that God is a God of judgement and justice, and He can get angry. Even in the new covenant, God can get angry. It’s part of who He is. But the greater revelation of the Mosaic covenant is the nature and the character of God. It’s a revelation of our Father.
Yeshua came to bring us that character, that nature, and make it part of us. Was His Father this angry, cruel kind of person? No. The way I see it, these people for 2,000 years from Abraham and so on, were having a relationship. It was a rocky relationship sometimes. Sometimes God got angry with them. In fact, a lot of the history of Israel is a revelation of the character of God. What does the scripture say? His goodness and His kindness, as well as His severity. That’s why I believe God chose Jerusalem and chose these men. He chose to pour the Holy Spirit on them because they had a heritage, so that when all these gentiles were also getting filled up, there was authority that could help them channel this thing.
That’s what Paul did. Paul went back to the Apostles in Jerusalem and said, “Hey guys, what are we going to do, how are we going to handle all this?” And they didn’t say, “Well, let them do whatever they want; they’re having a good time.” No, they said, “Well, they don’t have to keep all the laws of Moses; they don’t have to be circumcised.” But they gave four different laws or regulations and said that they have to at least abide by these. There’s got to be purity. There’s got to be holiness. This is the God that we know. And, these were our roots – the Apostles. They were our connection to 2,000 years of experience with God so that we would not be left orphaned in our understanding.
Now very early on, the gospel began to spread and it went from Jerusalem. Paul, of course, was the apostle to the gentiles and he moved out of Jerusalem. His home church was in Antioch. Antioch very early became the missionary church of the early believers. Paul was sent out from a local church. He had a home church that he was being sent out from, and this home church was very much connected with Jerusalem. There are many examples in Acts. When Paul and the church in Antioch had questions on what to do, they would go back to Jerusalem. There was a very close link here to ensure that the gospel being preached was the gospel, and really about our Lord Yeshua and not some other gospel.
What was going on in Jerusalem that forced them to push out towards Antioch? There were persecutions in Jerusalem, so we had this moving away from Jerusalem to Antioch. Rome became the center for Christianity very early on. The letter to the Romans was written in 50 AD, and that was Paul’s attempt to provide this important church of Rome with an understanding of the gospel. That’s why Romans is so doctrinally oriented, because the Roman church became very quickly the biggest church. That was the revival center. That’s where things were really happening. They were able to reach the whole world from Rome.
Rome was the center of civilization at that time. This was a wonderful thing that was happening, and it was really God’s will; but, there was a teeny little mistake that they made on this pilgrimage from Jerusalem to the world. This mistake was seen beforehand by Paul in his letter to the Romans. In the 11th chapter of Romans, Paul says, “Please be careful. This is wonderful. This is what we have been waiting for since Abraham, that we would be a light to the nations, that the Messiah would come and everybody would understand the truth. Wonderful, great, but I want you to be careful. I want you to understand that the falling away of Israel does not mean that you can cut yourselves off from Jerusalem. I want you to understand, they’ve fallen away, but it’s only for a time until the fullness of the gentiles come in. And I don’t want you to be ignorant of this mystery of Jerusalem, of Israel and your rootedness, the whole thing of the olive tree. I don’t want you to be ignorant of that mystery so that you do not become wise in your eyes.” In other words, don’t be arrogant. Yes, they were cut off, but it’s only for a season. Don’t become arrogant about that and think that, hey, we’re the people of God; we don’t need those old Apostles anymore. We don’t’ have to go by those Old Testament stuff anymore. We’re the new Israel. Maybe you’re familiar with it, a doctrine that says we’re the people of God now.
Paul sees that in 50 AD when he’s writing to the Roman church. There was already this belief in seed form. He calls it arrogance and pride, this thinking that we’re better than someone else. I remember my kids, my boys especially when they were four or five years old, they thought that I was so great. I could do anything and everything. By the time they became about eight or nine years old, they began to think that, “Yeah Abba’s pretty strong and he can do a lot of things, but there’s something’s that Abba can’t do.” By the time they were eleven, twelve years old, I couldn’t do anything and they know everything. It’s so funny to watch this, by the time they become about fifteen, sixteen, they start coming back the other way.
It was this kind of an attitude the Church had, that Paul was talking about. The attitude that says “Hey, we got the Spirit, we got everything going on here, let’s just go for it.” They didn’t realize that they needed to be connected in order to achieve what God had for them. We know the history of the Church. It didn’t go as we might have hoped that it would have.
Brothers and sisters, in our attempt to reconcile ourselves to Jerusalem and Israel, we can’t throw out the Church. It separates us from our own history. The blessings of God go from generation to generation. We are what we are and we do what we do because of our past. The freedom of the spirit links together with the human predicament. And that is the glory and the beauty of God, that He is not just spirit alone, but that He is spirit related, spirit fellowshipping, working in us and through us in who we are.
I want to show you another historical thing that happened early on. In the year 168 AD, the bishop of Antioch, Policart, was having an argument with Victor, the bishop of Rome, over an issue that might seem unimportant to us today, but it was important to them back then. Victor was saying that Christians should no longer use the Jewish lunar calendar to determine their holidays.
The Jewish calendar goes by the moon, and we celebrate our holidays by a lunar calendar. The Festival of Trumpets, which we just celebrated, comes on a new moon. All of the Jewish holidays, the Feast of Tabernacles, Passover, Pentecost, all of them are determined by a new moon, or by a half moon, or by a full moon.
Victor is saying something which doesn’t seem like that big a deal really, but it was the beginning of something that I’m trying to show you here. He said we should not use the lunar calendar. He instituted the whole Roman calendar into the Christian Church, and they started determining Christian holidays (and we need to talk about that, what about these holidays, what are those Christian holidays) by a solar calendar.
Policart argues with Victor and he’s angry with Victor. He says, “Okay, we want to have new things in Christ, yes. But how can we forbid the very things the Apostles and the Lord Yeshua practiced? How can we say it’s forbidden to use the Jewish calendar?”
Victor’s argument gained credence because he was the bishop of Rome. Antioch lost credence and lost authority. Before we know it, we have people like St. Augustine, many of you have heard of him, a very important Church Father. He was in the 300s. This is later, but I’m just trying to show you a progression of things. St. Augustine taught that the Apostles, and the Fathers in fact, practiced and lived a Jewish lifestyle, but that it was a terrible sin to do so.
At the first Nicene Council, which was in 325 AD, the determination was made that it was now forbidden to practice Passover in the Church, and the celebration of Easter was instituted. Okay, you might say well, big deal! So what? Well, I want to show you how far this went. I have literal translations from Latin texts. These are professions, confessions, proclamations that became required of Jewish people who wanted to become Christian. Here is one example from Spain.
Back in the 600s when the Church was growing there, a Jew who wanted to be baptized into this church in Toledo Spain, had to make this confession. He had to stand before the church fathers, the church pastors, and bishops, learn his catechism, prepare himself for baptism, and was required to say, “We will not on any pretext choose wives from our own race. We will not practice carnal circumcisions. We will not celebrate the Passovers, or the Sabbath, or any other feast days connected with the Jewish the religion. We will not keep to our old habit of discriminating in the manners of foods. But every custom of the holy Christian religion, the feast days, marriage, what is lawful to eat and what is lawful not to eat. Indeed every ceremony of the holy Christian religion we will faithfully hold and embrace with all of our hearts.”
Here is an example from the church of Constantinople. Constantinople was a very important church in our history. Constantinople stands right on the bridge between east and the west. In those days, Constantinople was a crucial meeting place. The expression of Christianity there was profoundly significant. It impacted both sides of the world. I have a profession of faith from the church in Constantinople that a Jew was required to make that wanted to be baptized. He would stand in front of the church fathers and the bishops and the congregation, and he would make this pronouncement. “I renounce all customs, all rights, unleavened bread and all the other feasts of the Hebrew’s. The prayers, sanctification’s, fasts, new moons, Sabbaths, hymns and chants, observances, food and drink of the Hebrews.”
In one word, I renounce absolutely every Jewish law, rite and custom.”
You can begin to understand how it is that Christianity became so separate from Israel and from the Jewish heritage. What I want you to understand is that as Christianity grew up, much of her identify was a reaction to Judaism. She said, well this is the way we are going to worship Christ; this is the way we are going to love God. As we define how we do that, what we do know is that it’s not Jewish. We’re not sure exactly how to do that, maybe we can incorporate December 25th, which was of course a pagan holiday, the shortest day of the year. It was a pagan sun holiday. Maybe we can use that and celebrate Christmas. Maybe we can use Easter. Do you know why you have bunny rabbits and eggs on Easter? Because Easter was a pagan fertility festival.
What is so painful was that there was this deliberate renunciation and cutting ourselves off from our own roots. I feel quite funny as a Jew teaching you about Church history. I found that this is part of my heritage as well.
Clement was also a very important Church Father. He wrote a lot of the catechisms and the understandings about how we needed to be trained, how we needed to understand what it means to be baptized, and how to be prepared for baptism. It was the old discipleship teachings. He wrote a profession of his catechism. There was a special category for Jewish people who wanted to be baptized. They had to sit and listen to sermons for hours. Here was their required profession. “I renounce the whole worship of the Hebrews.” Isn’t that interesting? I thought to myself, after I read that, how worship had in a way been lost to the Christian Church for so long. Maybe it has to do with our having renounced something, cut ourselves off from something. God’s restoring it, and this is exciting, you know.
I believe that it has to do with what Paul says, “the fullness of the gentiles coming in.” It has to do with the restoration of Israel coming back to the Land. You will see a direct parallel between what happens in Israel and what happens in the Church. We can’t get away from that. Our destinies are intertwined, whether we like each other or not. We are going to have to learn to like each other. This is God’s plan. This is God’s Word. This is what He is doing. My experience with God is, He gives you a LOT of freedom to make a LOT of mistakes, but eventually He kind of gets you where He wants you.
So, we renounced the worship of the Hebrews. Let’s give ourselves a round of applause, Church of God. “I renounce the Passover, the Feast of Weeks”. (You call it Pentecost. It means 50 weeks.) “I renounce Jubilees.” Hah, there’s a good one. I mean Jubilee is a wonderful thing. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a Jubilee in the Church and ALL the rich people in the Church would sit beside ALL the poor people and they would make an account and they would say “Okay brothers, this is your share now. I’ve got this extra put away and we’re all gonna get back to square one”. What a wonderful concept! So much richness, so much heritage, and we have been so meager and poor because of it. We love the Church and we want to see her restored. She is going to be restored to her former and latter glory, in the fullness of who she was intended to be.
These Jews had to say, “I renounce all the worship of the Hebrews, Passover, Feast of Weeks, Jubilees, Trumpets, Atonements, Tabernacles, the Feast of Tabernacles.” And in case you didn’t understand and there was any questions in your mind. ” … and all the other Hebrew Feasts, their prayers, traditions, the Sabbaths, new moons, etc., foods and drinks. I absolutely renounce every custom and institution of the Jewish people.”
These were the confessions that were made. This helps us understand something I hope. How are we going to resolve all of this? I’m reeling from the side of the Jewish people who, looking at Christianity, and say, hey that is not it. It seems to me that something is bound out in the fact that all Israel will be saved when the Church comes into her fullness. I’m convinced that part of that fullness is the restoration of these things, so that the Jews will look at it and they’ll be able to recognize it. I’m not saying it is disassociated from the Power of God or the revelation of His love. I am saying that something happened to us, that for some reason the Lord has waited all this time to reveal to us. He brought Israel back and is saying, “Let’s get this right.” Then I think we’ll be there. I really believe that. I believe this is so important.
I don’t know how to really approach you about this, or the Church at large, because it’s so big. I’m not saying, let’s all get together now and celebrate Passover. To me, that’s not what it’s about at all. Brother and sisters, it’s an attitude. There was an attitude way back there that produced this kind of a feeling that we’re better on our own, and we don’t really need to be connected with somebody who maybe we don’t like, or is a humble people, is not accepted in the world. This was actually the first division in Christianity. Here you had the making of a wall. The very thing, interestingly enough, that the scripture says the Messiah came to tear down; here you had them putting it up. Seems to me that the very DNA of division entered into the life of the Church. We just divide ourselves without even wanting to.
So what are we going to do? There’s this thing here about honoring your mothers and fathers. Taking with you the blessing, taking with you something to carry on. The scriptures say, “Honour your mothers and fathers, and it will be a blessing, long life to you.” And so we’ve inherited the opposite of that.
I’d like to give you two of things that we lost – a sense of people-hood, a sense of being one people, being together; and leadership. You see in the Jewish mindset, these guys, they were called Fathers. They nurtured people in the Lord. Leadership in Christianity took on a more of an administrative style and we lost this sense of fathering and mothering.
Those are just some examples. I just want to try to bring some kind of closure to this. We feel that we need help to work this thing out. We’re saying can we look at this and can we together somehow find a way to heal ourselves? Your people and my people, my people are your people. Your people are my people. Together we can find a way forward.
Let me just say, in my small brain I thought about three thing that maybe need to be done, which will help hasten the restoration of the Church and the fullness of her.
Number one. There needs to be a repenting and a renunciation of rejecting our own humble roots. God has intertwined our destinies, Israel and the Church. We will never fulfill our destinies without each other. We need to acknowledge that, recognize that.
We’ve been going all around the world. The Lord has been sending us to many nations with this message, and we’ve seen remarkable responses in churches. God has come and met with churches as we shared these things and said, “Will you just think about this and will you look at this?” And they would say, “Wow”. And we’ve had entire churches, just people repenting and falling at our feet and just weeping when they recognized how they have really felt, and how they have really thought as a church and as a people. We’ve seen God bring great blessing.
Number two. It’s just so sad to me to see how the body of Christ cannot recognize…we’re crying out, “God give us fathers”, but I tell you we need to be able to recognize fathers. A father is not the kind of guy who’s gonna bang you on the head. It’s going to be a humble and a meek man or woman of God. If we don’t have the ability to recognize that and to desire that and to want that, we will never experience it. It’s a sad thing to me. We need to acknowledge and recognize God’s authority, God’s heritage, because otherwise, we’re just going to make the same mistakes over and over again.
There should be a restoring/repenting, number one. Number two, a restoring of our heritage into the Church. We have to learn about these things. I believe that God is bringing Messianic Jews into the Church to help us with part of this restoration and restoring our heritage. And I think about the verses from Malachi, we talked about that last night, where God is restoring the hearts of the fathers to the sons and the sons to the fathers, and I think that’s what’s happening is a part of that.
Then finally, I believe Israel should be reinstated into the central mission statement of every local church, that this is the father’s mandate for this time. As Sid Roth was saying last night, “to the Jew first”, and I believe that if the people of God will understand that and take a hold of that, we will experience His blessing, perhaps in ways yet unknown. God bless you. We love you and thank you.
| Dr. Michael L. Brown | Our Hands are Stained with Blood |
| Don Finto | Your People Shall Be My People |
| Jim W. Goll | Exodus Cry |
| Sid Roth | The Last Lap |
| Historical writings of the Early Church Fathers i.e. Clement, John Chrysotom, Eusebius, Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Justin Martyr |