Posted by: admin in Uncategorized
Soon — this week, actually — I have to turn in my first paper for messianic ordination training. The theme of the paper is, “What practical use does rabbinics hold for today’s believer?” With most of the reading out of the way, I’m finally zeroing in on a thesis statement.
It comes to this, and since I’ve already begun study in the second course of study, focusing on the [Christian] church and the Jews, I can say it safely applies to both Jews and Christians alike: Reading about church history is no way to inspire yourself toward obedience to haShem, primarily because so many failed to live up to that commitment … even the most pious figures one can imagine.
Rabbi Akiba? He comes off as a rather brutal, intolerant man. Constantine? A murderer of those faithful to the messianic faith he co-opted into a state religion and hardly the sort one could imagine as being remotely holy, let alone a pope. Martin Luther? Violently antisemitic.
To be honest, a bit of church history can kill one’s appetite for religion about as effective as a solid dose of Phentermine can kill one’s desire for a thick, juicy steak. Of course, it only goes to prove what the Brit haDashah teaches through Messiah Y’shua: “He who says he is without sin deceives himself and the truth is not in him.”
Certainly the history of both Christianity and Judaism is rife with examples of this particular truth.
Posted by: admin in Torah
The more I learn about the origins of rabbinic authority, the more cautious I become with how much of the truth non-messianic rabbis hold. The tension comes from a political struggle in the first and second centuries, especially following the fall of Jerusalem. Without the temple of the Lord to serve as the centerpiece of Judaic life, several groups battled for the hearts and minds of the Jewish people and it was the descendants of the Pharisaic movement who won the power struggle and formed modern rabbinic Judaism.
The disturbing part about this struggle is how grounded in earthly lust for power this battle became. The rabbis, who actually had no Torah basis for exerting control over Israeli religion and life, backed a big transfer tank up to the Torah and filled it up to overflowing, in an attempt to establish a basis for their authority.
They did this by means of taking their oral traditions and asserting them as not only equal in authority to the Torah, but greater, since they claimed that their oral traditions, which came to be known as the Oral Law, could contradict Torah, but that Torah could not overpower Oral Law in such a struggle. What was their basis for such a claim? Their own claims.
It’s kind of ridiculous, once you understand it. But then, the Christian church is no better; in fact, the Catholic religion basically has established nearly the same thing. According to the Vatican, Catholic tradition is co-equal in authority to Scripture itself.
When will mankind ever learn to worship the things of G-d and only the things of G-d? To respect His Word more than their own?
