We can't know all God was waiting for when He decided the time had come for His Son to be born. What we can know is something of the conditions in which Jesus was born. There are numerous scholarly surveys, but the easiest to find on the Internet is Edersheim's The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. Specifically, I would invite your attention to Book I, Chapters 2-4 for an examination of the influence of Hellenism. This one factor is our greatest aid in seeing just how vast was the gap between the mind of Christ and the Jewish leadership regarding the Law of Moses in particular and the Old Testament in general. One cannot embrace the joys of Grecian logical inquiry of the Word without giving up the spiritual grasp, because the differences in the very process of knowing are irreconcilable. Because His Spirit unfailingly guided His intellect, Jesus expressed the view of His Father on this conflict, which made Him an alien among His own people.
Perhaps most devastating of all was the complete absence of spiritual awareness. While the rabbinical professors surely knew the word "heaven" did not point to a literal place up on the sky, they had a very poor concept of what it meant, limited as they were to what rational logic could define. They saw Eternity as simply time without end, rather than living on a wholly different plane where time would be as variable there as space is here. Having words and concrete concepts for a variable fourth dimension is a poor substitute for spiritual awareness of things which cannot be spoken. While they would acknowledge the existence of unspeakable things, their actual practices utterly ignored it. This was the key to their failure before God. It won't much matter what you can grasp with your mind if you can't fulfill God's desire for you. God had always granted prophets and leaders with a living spirit to guide the understanding and obedience of those without that faculty. Their embrace of Hellenism closed their hearts to hearing from such voices, so God left them a few centuries with no such voice. They had reached the ultimate end of their purpose on earth, and it was time for Israel to die.
Jesus was born to replace, to fulfill all that Israel failed to do. When He died, what Israel should have been died. The veil in the Temple was torn in two by divine means, and the Temple ritual was terminated. It was symbolic of the end of the Covenant of Moses. Yet, in the hearts and minds of Jews, it had been dead for several centuries. The Shekinah Glory of God's presence in the Temple had been long gone. Now it rested in the soul of His Son, who with every breath clearly revealed what God had intended.
More than once during His ministry, Jesus warned God was about to take away the last vestige of sponsorship of Israel. They had rejected His favor, and He was about to withdraw it one final time. Their refusal to be the conduit from fallen sinfulness, into Lawful behavior, and ultimately to spiritual birth, had borne fruit of wrath. Within a generation of rejecting their Messiah, the Temple and City were destroyed, the people scattered and no longer a nation in God's eyes. Not only had they failed Moses, but they failed Noah. By casting aside all truth, and replacing it with a false image of God, they had become a bigger tool of Satan than those who simply denied the truth. The demons now ruled what was left of the people of Israel. As God had surely cast down other nations, all lost in the sands of time, so now was their time for such an end come.
What we see today in Judaism is nothing more than a continued rejection of God, in that they cling to something He rejected. Jesus had warned their Talmud was but a pile of human nonsense burying the Word of God. He called the Traditions of the Elders the traditions of mere men, at conflict with God's revelation. Having corrupted and defiled the treasure of God's truth, there is now nothing more than a mere sub-cultural ethnic identity. It reflects precious little of ancient Israel, and a mere parody at that.
We sin mightily in participating in this fraud. We sin all the more when we adopt the error of Pharisaism in rejecting the ancient Hebraic perspective of Scripture itself. If we leave rational pursuit to the things it can handle, we are safe, but it has no place in spiritual matters. The faculty of faith, of loyalty and commitment to God, outstrips reason and demands things reason cannot grasp. Demanding Bible teaching pass the test of reason is cutting out God's Spirit, because it means man's reason. There is a separate spiritual logic revealed from Heaven. Embracing the Hebraic pattern of learning and knowing, we can prepare an intellectual foundation to receive God's Truth. But typical rationalism rejects that. Modern Christianity is too often a modern Pharisaism, truth corrupted and defiled by the same Hellenism, with it's rational analysis closing off the voice of God's Spirit.
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By Ed Hurst
15 May 2009
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