Sid Roth - Traditional Judaism VS Traditional Christianity
Look, I want to think for myself. I know you want to think for yourself. So the question is which religion is better, traditional Judaism or traditional Christianity? My guest says both have been supernaturally tampered with and there's something more. I mean, there's something better. Next on this edition of it's supernatural.
Sid Roth: Hello. Sid Roth your investigative reporter here with John Garr who is a specialist on what the first church was like and I really put it to you. So which is better? Traditional Judaism, traditional Christianity? Where did traditional Judaism go astray? Where did it go wrong?
John Garr: I think traditional Judaism went astray when it separated itself from the Christian community in the end of the first century, beginning of the second century.
Sid Roth: Okay. So where did...
John Garr: Traditional Christianity, where it began to go wrong was when it separated itself from the Jewish community and from its connection with the Jewish people.
Sid Roth: Well that begs the question. Do you think God intended to have two different religions?
John Garr: It's impossible for one God, and we believe there's only one God, to have more than one religion for mankind. And I think it's interesting that David Flusser, one of the great professors of our time in Jerusalem said that original Judaism and original Christianity as they were manifested in the first century were could be confirmed one and the same thing. So pure Judaism and pure Christianity is the same thing. It's a profound concept.
Sid Roth: You know, the thing is that here we have today in the Middle East where it seems like the prophet Zachariah's words are coming to past, 'all nations will turn against Jerusalem'. And you look what's going on throughout Europe and all these countries are upset with Israel. And the only people that are standing up for the Jew in Israel today are Christians. There's almost, there is a kinship between Christians and Jews, but you're saying there's something way beyond that.
John Garr: Well I think there is and it's in the dimension of the power of the Holy Spirit because it's interesting that the largest segment that's identifiable today that's supporting the nation of Israel, not only the international Jewish community, but the nation of Israel is the evangelical Christian. The traditional mainline denominational churches within Christianity tend to be in opposition to Israel and pro-Palestinian.
Sid Roth: Yes, but I don't even count them as Christians.
John Garr: Well okay.
Sid Roth: I'm entitled.
John Garr: Okay. But you know, when you begin to think about that, the part of the Christian church that has an emphasis on an experiential relationship with God and that is empowered with the Holy Spirit tends to be supportive of Israel. Why is that? I think it's because the Holy Spirit quickens within the Christian mind that is in tune with God the fact that we are connected, that the Jewish people and Christians are connected, that the land of Israel is the land of the Bible. And I've often made the statement, you can't claim the love of the God of the Bible if you don't love the land of the Bible, and you can't claim the God of the Bible if you don't love the people of the Bible, and that happens to be the Jewish people. So the Christian church, and especially evangelical church tends to be supportive Israel. I think it's a work of the Holy Spirit that God by his spirit is bringing out of the consciousness of experiential Christians the need to support what God is doing on the earth. And part of what God is doing on the earth, prophetically, is bringing about the supernatural restoration of the nation of Israel, a nation that was born in a day, as the prophet said, and the nation that will continue to exist until the Messiah comes and the kingdom is established by him on the earth.
Sid Roth: Now you make the point that when the church made a decided decision to distance itself from its Jewish heritage, that's almost like a child not honoring his father, and what does the Bible say? There will be a curse. It's the same thing the church did. But when they made that calculated deliberate decision to distance themselves from anything Jewish, you make the point that the power diminished. Explain.
John Garr: Well you can see it exactly contemporaneous. The church ceased to be, to emphasize the charismatic, the moving and manifestation of the Holy Spirit at exactly the same time in its history when it began to distant itself from Jews and from Judaism. And part of the reason for the distancing from Jews and Judaism was the fact that the church was seeking to gain acceptance within the Greco-Roman world and particularly within the Roman world where the power was, and they were trying to get away from the persecution that was had been part of the Christian experience from the time of Jesus onward. And as the church became more and more gentile or Greek and Roman in its demographics and in its leadership, the church tended then to try to get rid of the Jewish influence within the church and replace it with gentile traditions, traditions that come from the Philosophies of Greek Philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, and that come from Latin systems, which was the power structure in the system that was adopted by the church. Totally different from the synagogue model in which Jesus and the apostles lived their lives and practiced their faith and worship toward God.
Sid Roth: And when they walked away from their own heritage they walked away from the power of God. And when the church walked away, oh yes, there's been power eruptions over the centuries, but I mean the least Christian could lay hands on the sick and they would recover. I don't mean the superstar mentality. The whole thing is about ready to change and I'm so glad we're having this discussion, and I'm so glad that you're part of this discussion because you're important. We're not in the era of the superstars any more. We're in the time of every man, every woman a worker and I have a vision. I have a dream and it's God's vision, and it's God's dream. It's called the glorious congregation. Why? Because the congregation will be filled with the presence, the manifest presence of God. I'll do it quickly and don't go away. We're going to discuss what it's going to look like and how to be part of it. Don't you want to be part of it? Stay tuned. Be right back after this.
Sid Roth: Hello. Sid Roth your investigative reporter here with John Garr. He's a specialist on what the first church looked like, and before the Messiah returns it will look more like that than what it looks like today. What are some of the things that snuck in, John Garr?
John Garr: Well Sid, some of the things that happened, I think one of the most tragic things is that the church began to adopt from the Greco-Roman world into which it was sent the theatrical approach of the worship system that was a part of that scene then. The temples were very massive structures and they had all of these programs going on that were very demonstrative and very theatrical, and people came to worship the Gods by seeing all these performances. And so the church began to imitate that.
Sid Roth: So it became theater essentially.
John Garr: So it became theater-centered and performance-based rather than being participating as it should have been all along.
Sid Roth: Which today it's gone to the zenith now where the pastor is the superstar and the congregants are the audience, and we buy tickets with our tithe.
John Garr: That's about the bottom line because it is more audience-based and performance-based. But in original Christianity, in the first century, it was very much a participative exercise in which everybody was involved in the worship experience. The synagogue model was one in which every person could come to the bema and read the scriptures and comment on the scriptures, and explicate the scriptures as he understood them, and that was something that was lost. So we had this basic replacement of the idea of our being a community and being in relationship with one another as an extended family with a far different provision of what the church was all about. It became more or less this political structure, this monolithic structure in which things were performance-based again, and we lost the power. We lost the power.
Sid Roth: What about something like that I notice, there's a degree of control over the people. Did they have that in the first church?
John Garr: I don't believe they did. I think there was a very collegial environment there. There was an effort of working together and that even when Paul talks about the ministry gifts, he says that those ministry gifts in Ephesians 4 were given to equip the saints for works of ministry, not for power, not to control people, but merely as facilitators. So those who are gifted in ministry should view themselves as facilitators, not as controllers or dictators over God's people, as Paul called it, Lords over God's heritage. And certainly we've seen that example all through the history of the Christian church and even to the present day. But I think the Holy Spirit is doing something phenomenal today in that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the charismatic renewal that began in the 1960s and has continued to our time has begun to equip people with the understanding of the pure power of the Holy Spirit, the moving of the Holy Spirit and is leading people back into truth so that people are coming to understand that everybody in the church is a minister. Everybody in the church is called with a ministry and a work to do with God, and that really those of us who are called to teach and to preach are merely there to equip everyone so that he or she can be doing that work of ministry to which she has been called or he has been called.
Sid Roth: Let's talk about some of these other changes. How did things like Easter, Christmas, Halloween, if you will, slip into the church?
John Garr: Well Easter, I guess, is probably one of the easiest ones to talk about because the earliest church was all Jewish. For the first ten years of its existence it was almost totally Jewish, so they continued to observe passover. And it's interesting that Jesus didn't destroy the passover, but rather gave a new method for observing the passover so that it would be done in remembrance of him to remember his death. As a matter of fact, that's the only day that Jesus has actually commanded us to remember. He said remember his death until he comes. And so the church continued to celebrate passover.
Sid Roth: But wait a second. In the King James Bible, you open it up today, it doesn't say passover, it says Easter.
John Garr: And it's a total mistranslation. All you have to do is go back to the Greek text and the Greek text does not say Easter. It's mistranslated. Easter is placed in there as a convenience for the church in that time, which had come to understand that passover was Easter, but.
Sid Roth: So why was it switched from passover, which it actually says in the text.
John Garr: Right.
Sid Roth: And even mistranslated intentionally in the King James Bible. I mean, this thing is pretty diabolical. Why?
John Garr: Well it simply, again, I think on the part of the translators, it was an attempt to relate what the text was saying to the experience of the church as it existed in that timeframe.
Sid Roth: Where did Easter come from?
John Garr: The real truth is that we can discuss that. The problem is that the church began to drift away from passover observance, and the reason they did is because they didn't want to have anything to do with the Jewish people. And the problem was the leadership of the church had to consult with the rabbis and with the Jewish calendar to determine when the day of passover was so that they can then celebrate the communion, the passover celebration, remembering the death of Jesus until he came. Well this became a controversy in the church by the time of the third century and certainly on into the fourth century. And the church began to find a way to get away from that, and they didn't want to have anything to do in common with the Jewish people and certainly not to console with them. So there was a large group of people, though, within the church, all the way into the fourth century in the western church and all the way until the eleventh century in the Eastern church that insisted that passover should be observed every year by the Christian community with communion, remembering the death of Jesus and his burial and resurrection. And these people did it on the 14th day of the Jewish month nisan or abib, as it is in scripture, the first month of the religious calendar, the Jewish calendar, and they did it on the 14th. Well these people even became derisively called by other elements within the church, fourteeners, forto decimens, as they were called, which means fourteen in latin. They were called fourteeners as a way of deeming them.
Sid Roth: So there was a substitution of something Greco-Roman pagan for something biblical. What does all this mean? Where are we headed? What about the other feasts? We'll be right back after this word. I know you're not going to go away.
Sid Roth: Hello. Sid Roth your investigative reporter here with John Garr and we're finding out how things were pulled out of the church to distance the church from Judaism. The same time Judaism backed off of Christianity something diabolical was going on and instead of the rich Jewish heritage there were substituted pagan things, such as Easter.
John Garr: Easter was the result of this timeframe that we were talking about, in the fourth century when the church decided that the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus should be celebrated not according to the Jewish calendar on passover, but should be celebrated on the first Sunday following the vernal equinox, the spring equinox. This opened the door for the substitution of this festival that comes out of the worship of astara, the Goddess of fertility and eventually the eostre Goddess of the Germanic origins and the Eastern, western European origins, that was the Goddess of fertility as well, the Goddess of spring.
Sid Roth: So that's where we got the Easter bunny, the fertility.
John Garr: Yes, right, the fertility cult.
Sid Roth: Easter eggs.
John Garr: That's right, absolutely. All that's tied up in the fertility cult.
Sid Roth: What about Christmas?
John Garr: Well Christmas basically was arbitrarily assigned by the church as a day for the birth of Jesus, but it was interestingly enough, again, it wasn't assigned to a Jewish festival time, but rather it was assigned to the Roman Saturnalia, the actual day of the Roman Saturnalia, which celebrated the rebirth of the unconquered sun. So it was a worship of the sun God.
Sid Roth: Okay. And then Constantine legislated for the first time the Sunday worship.
John Garr: That's right.
Sid Roth: And you know what I have to explain to you. I think that if the heart is right and you're celebrating wonderful events such as the resurrection of Jesus, the birth of Jesus, I'm not going to condemn you in any way, shape or form. But I tell you something. These biblical festivals, when the fullness is realized, you know what I'm saying, because we're on the same page. Will you look in the camera and tell them how important these biblical festivals are, not as legalism, not as salvation, but freedom.
John Garr: Absolutely. Well I think the festivals are very important to Christians and it's unfortunate that we've been robbed of this part of our Christian heritage by the 19 centuries of Greco-Roman influence into the church. But again, these festivals are vitally important for us to understand the whole process of the bringing of Jesus into the world, of the birth of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the outpouring of the power of the Holy Spirit and even talking about the events that are wrapped up in the second coming of Jesus. All this has to do with the festivals and they're basically a chronology that makes it so powerful and so invigorating to us as Christians. It doesn't limit us. It doesn't bind us with legalism. It doesn't bring us under any kind of bondage. It expands and dramatically causes us to see more gloriously what our heritage is all about.
Sid Roth: You know what I believe? I believe that unity that all true believers are saying we want, we need, we're desperate for somehow the race relations between black and white Christians, between the Hispanic community, the, all of these walls, the native American problems within the church, the white problems, all the problems that we have, when we go after those roots we can all agree in biblical festivals. And I believe it will be so unlike what people think.
John Garr: Absolutely.
Sid Roth: It's the only time that God promises to show up. He literally says in his word, 'these are my appointments' in the book of Leviticus.
John Garr: That's right.
Sid Roth: And I know you and I have participated. I can see coliseums filled with people, charismatic, non-charismatic, black, white, Hispanic, asian, native American, all of us arm in arm. I mean, if these groups from men can do it, how much more for the whole mishpucha, the whole family?
John Garr: Absolutely. And you know, it's interesting that the fact of this whole idea of unity, if we come to recognize the hebraic roots of our Christian faith in all the faith communities of the Christian church, we're going to realize we have far more in common than we ever dared to think we had. The problem is we've been gentilized, we have been nationalized by various national approaches to religion, various cultural approaches to Christianity and a result of that, we have divisions among ourselves. But when we go back to our roots, which just happen to be Jewish because Jesus was a Jewish man living on this planet, then we come to find out that we have so much more in common.
Sid Roth: Give me one Jewish principle from your book, for instance, a Jewish principle on prayer.
John Garr: Well prayer is very important in our experience. But unfortunately for most of us as Christians we've come to think of prayer as being sort of coming to God and trying to get God to in some way bend him to do what we want. But in reality, prayer from a Jewish perspective is an action in which we come before God and through communication with him we bend ourselves to do what he wants. Now it's a totally different perspective. It's not the gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme as much Christian prayer has been. But instead it's how can I find myself being formed according to the Word of God to do God's will and God's pleasure in my life. That's what prayers are all about.
Sid Roth: Whether you're Jewish or gentile, we all have to come to God on God's terms. That's the Jewish way, not my terms, not my truth, but the truth. Isaiah 53 says, 'who will believe the report of the Jewish prophets to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? He should grow up as a tender plant and a root out of dry ground. He'll have no form nor comeliness'. And when we Jewish people see him 'there will be no beauty that we should even desire him. He'll be wounded, rejected by man, a man of pains and diseases because he'll bare all of our pains and diseases'. That's what it says in the Hebrew, but it says, 'by his stripes he's not going to bear his iniquities'. He won't have any. He'll bear our iniquities and 'by his stripes we were healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray everyone to his own way and the Lord has put upon him your sins and my sins, your diseases and my diseases'. Repent of your sins. Make Jesus your Lord now. Do it now. Now.