GETTING OUR PRIORITIES
RIGHT
From Herald, the magazine to
By Mike Moore.
Dear Fellow Worker
I may be in danger of preaching to the
converted, but there are times when it is good to remind ourselves of our
basics. I was recently asked to
contribute an article for a Church magazine to explain why Christians should be
interested in reaching Jewish people with the gospel. I was, of course, more than happy to write
the piece but my problem was limiting the article to 500 words. Anyway, this is what I wrote and I hope its helpful to you too.
There are almost seven billion people in the
world, and less than one in five hundred of them is
Jewish. Why should the Jewish people
command our special attention in evangelism?
First of all, God has special love for the
Jewish people. The Hebrew Scriptures
testify so clearly to the closeness of the Jews but the New Testament is also
clear on the subject: Concerning the gospel they are
enemies for your sake, but concerning the election they are beloved for the
sake of their fathers (Romans 11: 28).
Speaking to a crowd of thousands in
Secondly, the Jewish people are in graver
spiritual danger than others. In Amos 6: 2 God declares: You
only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you
for all your iniquities. Paul
reminds his readers in Romans 2: 9 that
there will be tribulation and anguish, on every soul
of man who does evil, of the Jew first.
In an 1893 sermon, Our Duty to Israel, Robert
Murray Mc Chyne reasoned: The kind Physician runs first to the bed where the sick man
lies who is nearest to die. When a ship
is sinking, [do not] the gallant sailors
stretch out
the arm of help first to those that are readiest to perish beneath the
waves? And shall we not do the same for Israel?
Thirdly, a fundamental principle in New
Testament mission-logy is that the gospel is to the
Jew first. Galatians 2, the Apostle Paul reveals that two
decades after the great commission was issued by the Lord Jesus, he alone of
the apostles was reaching out to the Gentiles: James, Cephas, and John
gave me and Barnabas the right hand of
fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they
to the circumcised. Even though
Paul alone was entrusted with the mission to the uncircumcised,
his invariable practice was to preach the gospel to
the Jew first (see Acts 13: 5, 14, 46; 14:
1; 17: 1, 10, 16f; 18: 4, 19, etc.)
Lastly, the
world will benefit from
A few months ago, in a letter to the Evangelical
Times, a lady drew attention to an article on the Christian Witness to Israel
website (www.cwi.org.uk/library/articles/HAFJ,html)
by D M Lloyd-Jones, in which the
Doctor expresses the hope that
there shall be a
tremendous conversion of the mass of the nation of Israel and when it happens
the church will be so amazed and astonished that it will veritably be like life
from the dead!
Why, she asked, do we not hear that preached
from our pulpits more frequently?
Why indeed!
Yours for the salvation
of
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HEBREW CHRISTIANS
By J. STUART CONNING, D.D.
It
has been my privilege through a long lifetime to become acquainted with many
Jews who have become Christians. With
some of these Christian Jews I have been closely associated, and they have
become cherished and highly esteemed friends. With hundreds of others I have had those
occasional contacts which enable one to share some of their experiences and
form a just estimate of their character and worth. Most of them live in the
It
is in my heart to say a few things about these friends of mine that may be of
general interest, and about the things we may learn from them as we journey
together through the years.
Every
Jew I have known has had to make a real sacrifice in becoming a follower of
Christ. The adherent of no other faith
has to encounter greater difficulties in becoming a Christian. Expulsion from the synagogue, ostracism by the
community, loss of employment, scorn and abuse from ones own family and
friends, the charge of being renegades from their faith and traitors to their
people are often the price a Jew must pay in taking upon himself the name of
Christ, the greatest Jew of history. Yet
for love of Christ they have sincerely accepted all the hardships, and gladly
confess Jesus Christ to be their Messiah and Lord. And never have I found one who has counted the
cost too great to pay for the blessings that have come to him from his new-found
faith.
It
is interesting to note that those Jews who respond to the appeal of the Gospel
are, as far as my knowledge goes, those who have been loyal to the faith of
their fathers. In these days many Jews
have become thoroughly secularized. They
have given up most of the ritual observances of Judaism, and rarely set foot in
a synagogue. The only worship they render is to the gods of pleasure and gain. They belong to the godless multitude of our
time who must be won, just as other pagans, to a
belief in God, and as sinners to repentance and pardon through the Divine
Redeemer. But Jews who are sincerely
religious, who believe in the God of Israel, and in the scriptures of the Old
Testament as the Word of God, are open
to the appeal of Christ as the promised Messiah, when wisely and
sympathetically approached. They find
that He fulfils the ancient prophecies, and answers the cry of their hearts for
pardon and peace and fellowship with God. He provides the key that fits every ward of
the Old Testaments complicated lock.
I
have been greatly impressed with the fact that Jews almost universally testify
that the main factor which led to their acceptance of the Christian faith was
the friendly interest of some sincere and warm-hearted Christian. Other
impressions may have been received from Christian literature, occasional
contacts with individual Christians, or messages through radio or press, but the winning factor has been the friendship
of some earnest Christian whose love for Christ has led him to share with his
Jewish friend the treasures he had found in Christ. Friendship
is the alembic that can dissolve suspicion and prejudice and open the way for
the Divine Spirit to work His miracle of grace. It is here that Christians have so miserably
failed to take advantage of their contacts with Jews, and it is here that churches
having Jewish neighbours can render a service of incalculable worth by
establishing with them friendly relations and exhibiting to them the spirit of
Christ.
It
is a striking fact that it is Christ Himself who makes the mightiest appeal to
Jews. To the average Jew He is entirely
unknown. Knowing the special attraction
that Jesus has always had for His own people, Jewish leaders have diligently
sought by every means to immunize their people from His influence. Any reference to Him was deprecated. The very use of His name was banned. The New Testament was a forbidden book.
Attendance at any place of Christian worship was condemned as a sin. When any reference was made to Jesus, it was
as the hanged one or as the troubler of
What
is also characteristic of Jewish Christians is the ardour and intensity which
the new faith inspires. Jews are a warm-hearted,
demonstrative, and active people. What
they believe they believe intensely, and what they do they do intensely. And when they become followers of Christ they
display an ardour and zeal that distinguishes them from their more formal and
less enthusiastic Aryan brethren. They
become active church members and are zealous in their efforts to advance the
cause of Christ. Out of all proportion
to their numbers they furnish the Church with officers, teachers, pastors, and
missionaries. The names of Neander, Pascal,
‑The Hebrew
Christian Quarterly.
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JEW HATRED
The population of the
world (says The Prophetic News) is said to have doubled in the last
century, but the number of Jews has been multiplied by five. Think of the influence of this little nation. Only, those who do not know, act as if the Jew stopped thinking 2,000 years ago. The list of world names is long, but take
these well known to us: in art, Mendelssohn
for music, Heine
for poetry, Sarah Bernhardt for the
stage; in philosophy, Spinoza, whom Renan called the greatest Jew of modern times, and Bergson; in
psychology, Freud, the psychoanalyst;
in science, Albert Einstein, the
incomprehensible; in politics, Disraeli,
Queen Victorias favourite minister, Earl
Rufus Daniel Isaacs Reading, Chief justice of Britain during World War I,
Viceroy of India from 1921-26, and Henry
Morgenthau, the efficient U.S. ambassador at
Constantinople during the last war; in Christian scholarship, Neander and Edersheim.
Fairly recent figures
gave more than seventy per cent. of the Jewish people
as engaged in trade and industry, almost seven per cent. in
professional and governmental occupations, and about five per cent. in agriculture. Had Jews no special ability in finance, they
would have learned nothing from history, yet their control of money makes them
all Shylocks to the Gentiles. It was
foretold. As Isaiah says:‑Ye shall eat the riches of
the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves (Is. 61: 6). Zephaniah adds his testimony:‑I will get them praise and fame in every land where they have
been put to shame (Zeph. 3: 19).
But with all their
influence
The Jewish Missionary
Magazine
says:‑According to the Survey
Graphic, there are about eight hundred organizations in the
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