Posted on 01/18/2011 10:47:30 AM PST by wmfights
Two thousand years of history have shown the Jewish people that Christians are their worst enemies, a Messianic rabbi pointed out.
“Jews were told you must convert or be killed. If we ignore the history, we’ll never really understand why it’s so difficult to reach the Jewish people with the Gospel,” Jeff Friedman emphasized.
Friedman himself grew up hating Christians. While attending an Orthodox Jewish synagogue regularly in Brooklyn, N.Y., he said he had some brief encounters with Christians and found them offensive, according to Pentecostal Evangel, a publication of the Assemblies of God.
It wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that he began to understand Yeshua, or Jesus. And it was at the most unlikely of places – his hair salon.
After moving to Miami as part of his job as a government pharmacist, Friedman went to get a haircut one day in 1980 where he met Mitzi, his hairstylist. She was a Jewish woman who attended an Assemblies of God church.
“She saw an emptiness in me, and understood that,” Friedman recalled. “I didn’t understand it, so I tried to fill up the empty places with everything that the world had; all that did was leave me more hungry.”
Mitzi was able to tap into that, he explained to The Christian Post. She challenged me to read from the Scriptures – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Psalms – and she showed me the Messiah. For the first time in my life, I was challenged with this question, ‘Who is this Messiah?’”
A week later, Friedman came to faith in Yeshua after accepting an invitation to a Christmas party at the church.
“When I started to read the prophecies of God, it was inescapable. I discovered in the older covenant scriptures that this man that the gentiles call Jesus must be the Messiah,” Friedman said.
Now a founder of Jacob’s Hope, an outreach ministry for the Assemblies of God, and a licensed AG minister and Messianic rabbi, Friedman aims to bring this same hope to Jewish people around the world by providing humanitarian and medical aid, and sharing the Good News of the Messiah.
Friedman noted that although many people are supporting Jewish ministries that provide humanitarian aid – the Gospel is not shared, so people aren’t being evangelized. Jacob’s Hope is working to change this.
Jacob’s Hope currently serves in Belarus, Germany, Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Israel, providing humanitarian aid, food, and medical care; training and equipping local pastors and Messianic rabbis to minister more effectively to their communities; distributing Bibles, books, and equipment; building worship and job training centers; and lastly sharing the Gospel of the Jewish Messiah Yeshua to the Jewish people.
“Gentile Christians live in poverty all over the world, but at least they have faith – something to cling on to. But most Jewish people scattered all over the world have nothing and no one. They are spiritually and physically in poverty,” Friedman said.
Hundreds of Jews enter the centers of Jacob’s Hope every month, and a percentage of those people ask questions about why the missionaries are here and why they’re doing what they’re doing. The volunteers and workers have a simple response.
We’re here because of the Messiah, he declared.
Friedman also explained, “We tell them and have a sign that says that all the material they receive comes from Christians from America who love the people of Israel, the Jewish people.”
Over ninety percent of Jews have not heard a culturally relevant presentation of the Gospel. The hopeful Friedman, joining a growing number of modern Messianic Jews today, is seeking to help the Jewish people understand that the terrible things done to them “in the name of Jesus” were not done by true believers and the Messiah who loved them.
“It’s important that we put the Gospel back into its original Jewish context. This Jewish man Jesus, the greatest Jew who ever lived, who kept the law of Moses perfectly, who said 'I come to seek and save the lost sheep of Israel;' he loved the Jewish people.”
He shared his personal convictions from Romans 10 – “Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.”
Friedman works alongside his wife, Vixie, as well as three other AG missionary couples including Chris and Shawna, Jeff and Tammy, and Michael and Judith.
The enthusiastic rabbi soon plans to take 20 health care professionals with him into Ethiopia for eight days in order to minister to thousands of lost Jews with hope for salvation.
I had enough of it, too. A few months ago, I encountered an aggressive one and nearly had him in tears. I got right back in his face and told him that it's Jews OR Jesus, not both.
The very fact that you refer to the Jews as “jack booted thugs” tells me plenty about your attitude and, frankly, I’m a little shocked at seeing something like this on FR. I may disagree with my FRiends here who are Jewish about matters of faith and theology, but I never forget that even if we disagree on this matter, the State of Israel is still founded on the same principles that our United States were founded upon. After all, they’re called Judeao-Christian ideals for a reason.
What you posted has no place on FR, belonging more on such “toleratant” sites as DU or the HuffPo. Furthermore, if you honestly believe that modern day Jews are truly as repressive and reprehensible as you seem to indicate, then I seriously begin to wonder about the condition of your own salvation, as this attitude is decidedly unChristian in nature.
Modern Judaism may discourage it, but that’s not what the Torah teaches. While the Torah is extremely strict in it’s conditions, it actually encourages those Gentiles who live among the Jews and who follow YHWH to keep the Law.
—from ¨The Pentateuch and Haftorahs¨, Dr JH Hertz, CH, Late Chief Rabbi Of The British Empire....
¨God had suffered the heathens to worship the sun, moon and stars as a stepping stone to a higher stage of religious belief. That worship of the heathen nations thus forms part of God´s guidance for humanity.
But as for the Israelites, God had given them first hand knowledge of Him through the medium of Revelation. It is for this reason that idolatry was for them an unpardonable offence; and everything that might seduce them from that Divine Revelation was to be ruthlessly destroyed.
Hence the amazing tolerance shown by Judaism of all ages towards the followers of other cults, so long as these were not steeped in immorality and crime. Thus the prophet Malachi declares even the sacrificial offering of heathens to be a glorification of God (Mal 1:11).
Equally striking is the attitude of the Rabbis toward the heathen world. War had been declared against the Canaanites not because of matters of dogma or ritual, but because of the savage cruelty and foul licentiousness of their lives and cult.
But the Rabbis never regarded the heathens of their own day as on the same moral level with the Canaanites. Their contemporary heathens in the Roman and Persian Empires obeyed the laws of conduct which the Rabbis deemed vital to the existence of human society, the so-called ´seven commandments given to the children of Noah´. They wisely held that in their religious life these heathens merely followed the traditional worship which they had inherited from their fathers before them, and they could not therefore be held responsible for failure to reach a true notion of the Unity of God. Such followers of other faiths – they taught – were judged by God purely by their moral life. ´The righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,´ and are heirs of immortality, alongside the righteous in Israel.
A later midrash proclaimed: ´I call heaven and earth to witness that, whether it be Jew or heathen, man or woman, freeman or bondman – only according to their acts does the Divine spirit rest upon them. And in the darkest days of the Middle Ages, Solomon ibn Gabirol, the great philosopher and Synagogue hymn writer, sang
´Thou art the Lord,
And all beings are thy servants, Thy domain;
And through those who serve idols vain
Thine honor is not detracted from,
For they all aim to Thee to come.´
This is probably the earliest enunciation of religious tolerance in Western Europe.¨
That is incredibly interesting, but one thing that I noticed that I have a problem with is that it seems certain Rabbis down through the ages have shifted their focus away from what the Torah actually says and more towards what other Rabbis have said that it means. Perhaps you or some of the others here who are knowledgable of such things could help me with this.
For example, I know that the Priests, as descendants of Levi, have authority to weigh matters pertaining to the Law, much like the Judges did, and I have heard that Rabbis, as a sort of subset of the Levitical tribe, were to be teachers of the Law, but no where have I seen in the Torah where Priests or Rabbis have authority to add to or take away from the Law.
Or, more bluntly put, if the Rabbis are exercising their authority correctly, why do they say that the Jews do not need to sacrifice for the remission of sin when the Torah is explicit in this regard? I understand that there is no Temple currently, and that in the past the Jews had to deal with not having a Temple, such as when they returned from their exile in Babylon to Jerusalem and found the Temple destroyed, but their reaction was always similar. They immediately set about rebuilding the Temple so they could perform the required sacrifices. Why has that changed now and, more importantly, by what authority did the Rabbis and/or Priests change it?
Can you help me with this?
THX THX
PRAISE GOD!
Worth reading the OP (Original Post)
God used another AoG person—a hair stylist—to knock the ball outta the park.
I’ll give an Amen to that.
Thanks for the ping!
May I suggest, instead of focusing on the denomination of the person, focus on the outcome.
I don't think God is keeping a score card of how many souls each denomination brings in. He's keeping a score card of those saved. Humility celebrates the one being saved, arrogance celebrates the one "doing" the saving. (Of course, only the Holy Spirit can save one)
My interest in this thread is not that one denomination is accomplishing something over others. I'm neither Pentecostal or AoG. I celebrate that God is using people to reach others for his kingdom. I celebrate those people allowing God to use them.
While Quix can certainly defend his own remarks, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that his remarks were not actually meant as a means of keeping score for his denomination so much as excitement at seeing others that he identifies with being productive and preaching the Gospel.
It’s much the same way that I feel when I see a Free Will Baptist mentioned; more of an “attaboy” than a “Go us”.
Of course.
However,
the A of G gets a lot of flack on FR and elsewhere as the Pentecostal forerunner, standard bearer, more visible, Jimmy Swagart etc. etc. etc.
The Bible says
HONOR TO WHOM HONOR IS DUE.
It is fitting, on occasion, to give credit to the A of G when they get it right.
I stand by that post. It’s fitting to applaud, on occasion.
INDEED!
Luther was actually somewhat philosemitic when the reformation began but turned viciously anti-jew in his later years. On the Jews and their lies was written only 3 years before his death.
Luthers anti-jew writings were often quoted by the Nazi's during their rise to power....from wiki:
....the Nazis displayed On the Jews and Their Lies during Nuremberg rallies, and the city of Nuremberg presented a first edition to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, the newspaper describing it as the most radically antisemitic tract ever published.
Luthers protestant church was deaply anti-jew and played a role in the run-up to the holocaust. It is documented fact.
So? That’s far from forcing conversion, or even annoying to death via proselytizing.
If she read to him from a Christian bible and it doesnt sound like he was an observant Jew, I could see how he would be duped.
Just pointing out that your Rabbis have no problem changing their interpretation of the Torah when it suits them. Just like they think that Temple sacrifice is no longer required. Sorry, but did YHWH speak and change His Law when we weren’t paying attention or something? If you’re going to keep the Law, He says to keep all of it. To break one part of the Law is to break all of it, remember?
So a “Christian” Bible is different than a “Jewish” one?
How’s that so, considering that our Old Testament is a direct translation of the Septuagint, which was YOUR Bible before it was added to ours. That dog just won’t hunt hoss.
That said: Just like they think that Temple sacrifice is no longer required.
Really? Where is the Temple these days?
We also don't do animal sacrifices anymore.
In any case, I don't need you lecturing me about my religion.
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