The Gift of Passover: One Body of Messiah for All Believers

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Written by Mitch Glaser

Shalom from New York City! We are rapidly approaching the Passover/Easter season, and I pray that this will be a great time of spiritual enrichment for you and your family!

During this time of year, I am often asked if I still celebrate the Jewish holidays now that I am a follower of Jesus. Since I grew up in a fairly traditional Jewish home in New York City, this is a deeply personal question for me and for many Jewish believers in Jesus.

The answer is an unequivocal yes! Zhava and I continue to celebrate the Jewish festivals as fulfilled in Yeshua (Jesus) the Jewish Messiah. But beneath the question of our continued commemoration of the feasts of Israel, there is another underlying issue. It is the question of whether a Jewish person who receives Jesus is still Jewish—and if so, whether this makes a Jewish believer different from a Gentile believer. I recently had a dialogue with a Jewish believer on this subject, and I would like to share some of the ideas I wrote to her in a letter. We must begin with Scripture, as this is the basis for the answers to all our spiritual questions.

The Meaning of Passover

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Jesus celebrated the Seder with His disciples. Join us as we take a quick tour through parts of a traditional Passover Seder and highlight those points that are especially meaningful to believers in Jesus.

The removal of leaven

Before the beginning of the Passover, all leaven, which is a symbol of sin (1 Cor. 5:6-8), must be removed from the Jewish home. The house is cleaned from top to bottom and anything containing leaven is removed. Then, the evening before the Passover, the father of the house takes the traditional cleaning implements: a feather, a wooden spoon, and a bag, and searches the house for any specks of leaven which might have been missed (my mother used to leave it on top of the refrigerator so my father shouldn’t spend all night hunting!).

The Abrahamic Covenant

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By Olivier Melnick

One can learn much about God’s character by studying His various names. One of these names is “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Early in the Scriptures, we realize that God is a God of people – a God of relationships. This is one of the most reassuring aspects of our Creator.

Another way to look at the God of relationships is achieved by studying the different agreements that He made with humankind in general and with the Jewish people in particular. These agreements, celebrating relationship and commitment, are also known as covenants. Understanding God’s covenants is critical to understanding God’s plan for humankind and for Israel.

Messianic Congregations and the Modern Messianic Movement

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By David Sedaca
Vice President of Chosen People Ministries
President of the Union of Messianic Jewish Believers of America

Over the past three decades, a new form of congregation has arisen on the scene: the Messianic Jewish congregation. A Messianic Jewish congregation is a New Testament church that is fashioned after traditional Jewish worship styles. Messianic Jewish congregations represent followers of Jesus who wish to worship, make disciples and witness within a Jewish framework.

The modern-day Messianic movement is the heir to the early Hebrew Christian movement. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were many Jewish people who came to faith in Jesus and joined traditional evangelical churches. Many Jewish missions in Europe established works throughout Europe, North America, Argentina and Israel. In those days, Jewish believers in Jesus identified themselves as “Hebrew Christians.”

Antisemitism: God’s Response and Ours

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Written by Olivier Melnick

Psalm 83:1-5 says in part:

O God!…Your enemies make a tumult….They have said, “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more”…. For they have consulted together with one consent; they form a confederacy against You…

Thus, the Bible draws an unmistakable parallel between hatred of Israel and hatred of the God of Israel.

In the Scroll of Esther, we find the most detailed, dramatic picture of an antisemitic attack in all of Scripture. The villain Haman hated the Jewish people because they were different-an example of ludicrous antisemitism that would be repeated endless times in history:

Secrets of Jewish Survival

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Written by Ben Volman

Why are the Jewish people persecuted, and why do we always survive?

The secret of Jewish survival is buried among many secrets and many questions. Let me begin with a secret that took me more than thirty years to uncover.

After our son was born, my aunt, a Holocaust survivor, came to visit. Seeing the little boy reminded her of another child, the infant son of an older brother, Carchi. The child and his mother had been with her in Auschwitz. They had not survived, and she could only speak about them briefly because it was too painful to recall. I had never even heard of this child before.

The Church and Jewish Evangelism

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By Dr. Mitch Glaser

Introduction

As the leader of a traditional mission to the Jewish people, I believe that all Jewish people need to accept Jesus in order to have a place in the age to come (John 14:6, Acts 4:12). I do not believe that a Jewish person is capable of keeping the Law to the extent that their human efforts would in some way satisfy God’s demands for righteousness, enabling the individual Jewish person to enter heaven on their own merit (Gal. 2:15-16, 3:23-25, Romans 10:2-4 ff.).  This is true of non-Jews as well, who are judged on a different basis than the Jewish people according to the argument of the Apostle Paul in the early chapters of Romans (Romans 2:12-16, 3:9-20), but non-Jews are also made acceptable before God by the same act of conscious faith in the Son of God who died and rose for our sins (Romans 10:9-12).

Can you be Jewish and believe that God became flesh?

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The following article draws upon the book by Dr. Michael Brown, The Real Kosher Jesus, and has been adapted for this use with his permission by Scott Nassau of Chosen People Ministries. The words “God” and “Lord” include the letter “o,” which is counter to the practice of some religious Jewish people. If this applies to you, please forgive us, as we are writing to a very mixed audience. Thanks for your understanding, and we hope you appreciate the article.

Traditional Judaism rejects Yeshua’s deity. Some rabbis have even argued that faith in Yeshua as God is more objectionable than idolatry. However, the deity of Messiah is not simply an inconsequential belief; it is an indispensable component of the New Testament message.