Allen Jackson - Christianity and Antisemitism - Part 1
No, I’m grateful you’re here. I wanna extend the invitation from the video personally to read the gospels with us. I’m really inviting you to read the Bible, but I wanna ask you to begin the year, if you’ve never done the Bible reading with us before, how about if we just read the gospels together? It’s about 60 days, depends on how you read, ten to 15 minutes a day, and we’ll be through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John before Easter. I’m gonna continue that recruitment through the month of January. And just, spoiler alert, if you read the gospels with me I’m gonna ask you to read the rest of the New Testament. We’ll be done with that before Memorial Day.
And if you’ve read the whole New Testament, you might as well read the of books of Moses with me, but let’s just start with the gospels, and if it doesn’t mean anything to you and it isn’t helpful, I’m good. I like to start with the gospels for a variety of reasons. It’s the story of Jesus’s life on earth. Many of the names and characters are familiar to us. Even people who are just marginally aware of Christianity probably know about Mary and Joseph and some of the apostles' names and some of the cities. You’ve probably heard of Jerusalem or Bethlehem or Nazareth, and so it isn’t nearly as unfamiliar as some segments of the scripture, and that helps, and it’s a narrative and it’s very engaging, just the story. Read it like you read the newspaper.
What’s the message of the chapters? What’s the point the author was making? What did they want me to know? You don’t have to look for spiritual significance or don’t try to unpack the deep secrets of the universe, just read this narrative. And if you use the website or the apps, the apps will read it to you, but this is what’s different. I wanna ask you to do something more than read it yourself. I wanna ask you to invite somebody to read it with you or some bodies to read it with you. It’s not enough, we have to change our focus a bit away from the personal nature of our faith and recognize that we’ve been called to be a light. And Jesus said a light that’s under a basket is of no use, and a personal, private faith is a light under a basket.
And so, please don’t settle for just reading the gospels or starting your Bible reading again with us, I’m grateful that you would do that, but invite somebody to read it with you or multiple people, maybe your whole small group. Start with the most likely people, the people that you think will do it. The stories are already coming back. One man said to me this weekend he’d asked 16 people and they’d said yes. A woman said to me her sister lives in another state, and when her sister drives to work she’s reading the passages to her, so they’re reading the Bible together every morning.
So, you can be as creative as you are, but there are people around you… now, I have a motive, I have this notion that if we could engage whatever the number is, I hope it’s a number that exceeds anything I could imagine. If we could get thousands of people reading their Bible on a daily basis, that it will bring the blessing of God. I’m not a complicated guy, I grew up in a barn in Tennessee, and I don’t believe that sending a new set of leadership team to Washington D.C. will resolve all of our problems if we don’t have meaningful heart change in amongst us. And rather than just provide commentary and complaints about what other people are doing, let’s become something. Let’s become a people in pursuit of God and a people that are opening doorways for other people to do that.
So, will you at least consider asking somebody? Not everybody will say yes, I can tell you that. I’ve been inviting the congregation to do this for a number of years and there are people that have been here every year and have never said yes, all right? I still smile at them, so please don’t take it personally. Everybody didn’t respond positively to Jesus’s message and they’re not all going to respond positively to your invitation but they won’t forget it and you don’t know when that seed will germinate. They may come back to you in six months and say, you know, you asked me back in January to read the gospels, I’d like to do that. Please don’t tell them to wait till January, make ten minutes more in your day and say I would love to do that for the next 60 days, let’s go. Will you at least pray about it?
Yes, that’s the word, yes, good, okay, good. There’s interactive portions to this church thing, okay? I’m gonna continue a study we began in some earlier sessions talking about stormproof foundations. Jesus said that storms come to every life, that you can’t avoid them. There are some streams in contemporary Christianity that would suggest that if you do certain things you can avoid the storms of life, and I don’t believe that’s biblical. I’m not making a negative confession, I’m simply acknowledging the reality of scripture. Our heroes, our Lord faced temptation from Satan himself. The people he recruited to take the message of his life and his redemptive work to the world faced very real challenges themselves, and they were trained by the Lord.
So, I think to imagine that because you’re a Christ follower and a person of faith and doing your best to walk in obedience, I don’t believe you should imagine that it just completely removes you from the arena. We are here and we are called to live out the redemptive work of Jesus, so we want to learn to stormproof the foundations of our lives. When the storms come, Jesus said you can stand, that they don’t have to bring destruction, but if that your foundation is incomplete or inadequate, that destruction will come. So, we’re gonna spend a few sessions trying to understand this, and in this session we’re gonna talk specifically about Christianity and antisemitism, which is a fancy word for hating the Jewish people.
And I want to go back to where we were on our previous session in Matthew chapter 10. When I did that, it was the reading for the day and I simply took the chapter reading and unpacked it with you hoping to add a bit of momentum to your read through the gospels. I’m not gonna persist in this pattern through the whole series, but I wanted to pick this topic back up. I’m of the opinion that God is shaking the earth, and in the same way when there’s an earthquake, there may be a shock, but in reality there’s typically multiple shocks, tremors, some are more powerful than others, but it’s very seldom just a single event.
Well, I don’t believe what we’re witnessing is just a single event. The one that awakened me in a significant way and caused me to pay attention was the COVID virus. I watched things I never thought I would see. I never thought I would see in a broad way the quarantining of healthy people. I never thought I would see the closures of churches and that we would quietly say okay. I mean, there’s a long list of things, but COVID began an awakening for me and it wasn’t just a theological awakening, it was an awakening to what was happening in the world around us. I got clarity. I had trusted the CDC implicitly up until that point. Never occurred to me to do anything other than that. It occurred to me during that season, and it took God to bring that awakening to our lives.
I pray that we see some of those institutions returned to places of being trustworthy. That’s my prayer. I think we should pray and intercede until we see that happen. They are essential to our well-being as a people, and we forfeit something of great significance if we forfeit the trustworthiness of essential institutions in our society. I would put the church in that list. We need churches to be advocates for the truth, boldly and courageously holding out the light in the midst of the darkness, amen. I think there was another tremor of shaking on October the 7th a year ago when Hamas attacked that music festival in southern Israel and the villages that were in that neighborhood and hundreds of Israelis were brutally murdered. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I didn’t watch the news that day and think, oh, God is shaking the earth. It took a bit for it to capture my attention.
What really brought it forward to me was on America’s most elite university campuses it exposed that they were propaganda centers and not educational institutions. There were loud, bold, brazen, persistent, repetitive demonstrations against the Jewish people on behalf of Hamas and the administrations of those universities supported them. That was an awakening to me. I understood some of the currents in academia, but I didn’t understand the degree to which antisemitism had flourished and gained authority in those places.
In November this last year, I think we had another shaking. I mean, there were billions of dollars spent by politicians all over the spectrum, but the unanticipated part of that election was the people all over the middle part of our nation, people who live in flyover country, the despicable people, the trash, my people. That’s the part of the country where I live and where I have grown up and that group of people inexplicably, really without precedent, raised their hands and went and said we believe we need to go a different direction. I want to be clear, I think the outcome of that vote is very unclear at this point.
I think it’s foolish to imagine that a political class of people are going to rectify the problems of our nation, and I think it will very much be dependent on the hearts of the people of faith and our willingness to seek the Lord, thus initiatives like let’s read our gospels. Nevertheless, I’m grateful for those men and women who will disrupt their lives in order to go stand for something. I’m very appreciative that Mike Huckabee would agree to go to Israel. He had a very busy life here. He had a family here and grandchildren here and a daughter enjoying some very unique seasons in her own life as the governor of Arkansas, and to leave our nation and go to Israel is a sacrifice. I mean, I understand it’s an honor, but it’s an honor that comes with a sacrifice.
And so, I’m grateful for the men and women that are taking those roles and willing to do it, I just understand that alone they are powerless to stand against evil. They need the faithful support, a heart change amongst the people of God. I wasn’t particularly comforted when Mark Zuckerberg came out recently this week to announce that on Meta they’re no longer going to practice censorship, and there was kind of a celebration. To be completely candid, I thought he should be prosecuted for admitting he’s been infringing on our First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, perhaps we have a season of freedom to preach the gospel. I believe we should do everything we can to do that while we have the freedom.
So, having said that let’s go back to Matthew 10. We looked at the beginning of this in a previous session, I’ll start there, but we’re gonna go beyond it. «Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and he gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness, and these are the names of the twelve apostles. Simon and Andrew and James and John and Philip and Bartholomew and Thomas and Matthew,» you know the crew. It’s that initial sentence that I think is noteworthy. They’d been watching Jesus do ministry, raise the dead, heal the sick, speak to storms, open blind eyes, and by Matthew chapter 10 Jesus calls the disciples to him and he says now I’m gonna give you authority. I want you to go do this.
Now, spoiler alert, I’m gonna give you my opinion, I don’t think that has ever been rescinded. In Acts chapter 1 Jesus called his disciples together just before his ascension and he said you’ll be empowered to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, to the outermost parts of the earth and I’ll be with you to the end of the age. I don’t understand that direction to have ever been amended. Now, I tell you that because there is a school of thought, and it’s more than a school of thought, it’s entrenched in whole denominations. So, it’s not just a thin line of people who believe that when the last of the apostles died, that commissioning for supernatural activity in the miraculous died with them.
Now, I don’t believe that is an accurate interpretation of scripture. I don’t like to argue scripture, I’m very difficult to engage in a biblical argument. If you believe that, I’m happy for you, I’ll tell you what I believe and I’ll tell you why, and I don’t think you’re probably gonna change my mind so I’ll just bless you. Stubborn is probably the word you’re searching for. Cessationism is the fancier term for that. It just makes no sense to me to give us a Bible that is filled with the supernatural activity of God and then say to us God’s not doing that anymore. You know, I’m grateful for hospitals and modern medicine and modern science, but there are times when God’s supernatural involvement in our lives is necessary for us to have health, and I don’t think it’s an either/or discussion, I very much believe in both/and but I trust God to keep us whole.
So, I put in your notes one verse, forgot I slipped that in there. Well, in Acts chapter 10 Peter was sent to Cornelius’s home. Peter was not supposed to be there, he’s an observant Jewish man at this point in his life. Peter keeps kosher, he’s keeping all the Jewish rules, he believes Jesus is the Messiah but he’s still adhering to the rules of Moses and God sends him to the home of a Roman centurion supernaturally. There’s angels involved and visions involved, I mean, it’s a supernatural event. And when Peter arrives at Cornelius’s home and begins to tell his Jesus story, the Holy Spirit is poured out in an almost identical way to the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. And Peter’s response, after helping the people be baptized, is the statement in Acts 10:34 and 35. He said, «I now realize how true it is that God doesn’t show favoritism».
Some of the older translations say that God is no respecter of persons, «But he accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right». I don’t think it’s possible for us to understand the seismic shift that that statement represents. Up until this point, from the exodus until this point in time, the Jewish people understood themselves to be the covenant people of God, and the word «Gentile» means everybody else. There’s us and there’s them, and now Peter says them have been welcomed. I mean, it is the point of division throughout the rest of the New Testament. It’s a very important statement that God is not a respecter of persons, that he doesn’t show favoritism. I can say it another way, you’re not special.
You know, we like to say the ground at the foot of the cross is level, that every person is welcome regardless of our IQ, our social status, our financial resources, our genetics, the color of our hair, the color of our skin, the accent with which we speak. We are all welcome at the foot of the cross, which is really good news. And I don’t mean it as a negative or a critical term when I say you’re not special, you’re special in that God loves you. He loves us all. We have to choose to accept that and to cooperate with that. But this has been turned a bit, let’s read on.
I’m back to Matthew 10 now verse 5, «These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions, 'Do not go among the Gentiles or any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel, and as you go preach this message, 'The kingdom of heaven is near.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. Don’t take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts. Take no bag for the journey or extra tunic or sandals or staff, for the worker is worth his keep. Whatever town or village you enter, search for some worthy person, stay at the house until you leave, and as you enter the home, give it your greeting. If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it. If not, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.'»
So, God’s commissioning these apostles with this authority to send them out, and he basically says if you’re welcomed, minister in that place, if you’re not welcome, move along. Not dissimilar to the suggestion I made to you a while ago, that invite someone to join you on a bit of a discipleship journey, some will say yes and some won’t. Keep going, we will not stop. But that passage has been taken and the idea has found pretty significant root in the heart of the Christian community over many decades and centuries that the Jewish people failed at their opportunity. And there’s some other passages in Matthew that I thought while we were here, Matthew 10 kind of opens the door.
In Matthew 21 Jesus is speaking to leaders in Jerusalem very near the end of his life. His words are going to cause him to be arrested and ultimately his death orchestrated. He said, «'Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.' When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’s parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet».
Now, Jesus has spoken something over the people of Jerusalem, over the religious leaders. There’s a bit of a fancy word for it, he placed them under interdict. He said something is being taken away from you. You were assigned a place in the purposes of God and because you didn’t value it, it’s being removed from you. He doesn’t stop there.
Same gospel, very next chapter, it’s Matthew 22. «Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. And he sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused. And he sent some more servants and said, 'Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner. My oxen and my fattened cattle have been butchered and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.' But they paid no attention and went off, one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants and mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged and he sent his army and he destroyed those murderers and burned their city».
Those are the verses that immediately follow Matthew 21. There was no break in the original text, we added the numbers and the chapters to help us reference spaces. So, Jesus says to the leaders in Jerusalem that the kingdom of God is going to be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit, and then he tells them this parable. And the heart of the parable is they were given an invitation, they recognized the invitation, they understood the invitation, they chose not to pay attention to it.
Now, throughout history the Christian community, because the divide came between the Jewish believers and the Christian believers pretty early, before the New Testament is finished, that divide is already firmly entrenched. I’m gonna show you some passages. And the Christian community has interpreted those passages to say the Jewish people were rejected, that God took the kingdom away from them and they lost their place and they lost their purposes. I’m gonna address that in a moment. For the moment, I want to draw your attention back to verse 5 in chapter 22 when Jesus in the parable said they paid no attention to the invitation. I’m concerned for contemporary Christianity.
We have more freedom, more liberty, more access to the Word of God, more tools to communicate the gospel, more freedom to travel. We have more of everything. We cannot afford to not pay attention. I don’t want you… don’t think it’s inappropriate to enjoy life and to take advantage of all those blessings that God gives to us, but I believe it is essential that he stays at the center of it. Now, the next chapter in Matthew, Jesus on the same topic, «Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who killed the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I’ve longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her checks under her wings, but you were not willing. Your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'»
Now, those passages, and they’re parallel passages in the other gospels, have been used along with some others to create a great deal of theological hostility towards the Jewish people, and there are some attitudes that have become entrenched in Christendom that state what I have already suggested to you, that the Jewish people forfeited their opportunity. They’ve been accused of being Christ killers. It’s only been in recent decades where the Catholic Church changed their language. For hundreds and hundreds of years, they had formal language, and they weren’t unique or alone in that, in accusing the Jewish people of killing the Messiah. Folks, technically the Romans nailed him to the cross. I understand the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem was complicit and the people stood in the streets, but if you’re really gonna carve it carefully, the Romans were the ones who nailed Jesus to the cross.
More than seven times God told Joshua to be strong and courageous. That was his commissioning. Not go to theology school or read your Bible more or do a Greek word study, be strong and courageous. I think strength and courage are more necessary for you and me as Christ followers today than any other set of attributes I can think of. I wanna pray.
Father, I thank you that we have Bibles and churches and fellowship and community, but we need your help to be men and women of strength and courage. Holy Spirit, we ask you, let a boldness for God grow in us, in Jesus’s name, amen.