Praying in the synagogue on Yom Kippur
The Good News of salvation is the Good News of Israel and Her Messiah or it is nothing at all, yet this good news was not at the first received by Israel and therefore became good news to those individuals, both Jews and Gentiles who did receive it. It was good news that "I", the individual, was in Christ, that is to say, in the Messiah of Israel, even though Israel did not know him.
Eventually, it became forgotten among the nations that the Good News was promised and given as good news to Israel and the idea developed that the Good News was only, always was only, that the Good News was given to the individual person as an individual. It was as if God had given up His attempt to bless Israel, and, by blessing Israel, bring about a corporate redemption of Adam, even before Israel failed to recognize Messiah and that He had created a new plan to bless people with salvation only one at a time, separately, if they believed in Him. Only a worldview that was strange to the Bible could lead to such a reading of the Biblical events.
In the Good News that was promised to Israel it was promised that the great mystery of God making Himself known to and available to Israel and not the other nations would be solved. Why did God do this? Why did He seem to cut Adam as the corporate head of his own family off from being the head of the family that God claimed as His own? When the Good News would come to Israel, it was promised that this question would be answered for all and all the nations would rejoice with Israel. Therefore Messiah, speaking one time in private to a ruler in Israel said to him, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Adam be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life." Messiah indicated to that Jewish teacher that he would be lifted up for the forgiveness and redemption of Israel in order that whoever, Jew or Gentile, might believe and have access to God. However, it has come in these latter days to be the tradition among the nations that when the Bible says Messiah was given so that whoever believes might be saved, the meaning of "whoever" is not simply that the way of acceptance by God is opened up to the nations because the redemption of Israel has been accomplished. Instead, the meaning of "whoever" has been taken to mean that whatever individual person who believes will not perish but have eternal life.
What is the problem with understanding "whoever" in these passages from the Bible as "whatever individual person"? If someone reads or hears these passages who is not educated in the whole Bible and the history of the word of God to Israel, there is no real problem with this interpretation. If this interpretation is made after educated deliberation in accordance with the worldview of the primacy of the individual, then it does pose a problem. Primarily the problem is that such an interpretation obscures the manner of God's own revelation of Himself to the fallen and rebellious world by representing the Good News in a different way than God promised it and gave it to Israel. This is only possible because Israel has not yet recognized and accepted the Good News that has been given to her. As certain as is the existence of the heavens, so certain is it that God has kept and will keep His covenant with Israel and that the day will come when Israel will receive her Good News. When she does, it will be as a nation, as God chose and formed her, to be the corporate representation of Adam, whom God made as one, as male and female, to become a family. And He chose Israel to be the corporate representation of Adam for redemption through a new head, the Son of Adam. Therefore Israel will know her salvation. For the purpose of God to redeem the world as He made it has not failed.
Because Israel will receive her Good News, the days of the tradition of interpreting the Good News on the basis of a world view of the primacy of the individual are numbered. We who have received and perpetuated that interpretation may choose even now to begin to think about how to turn our tradition back to its true source. We may choose even now to think about how to redeem our experience and our testimony by seeking to revitalize ourselves from our root, which is Israel's Messiah, Jesus, who was called Yehoshua because he would be the salvation of Israel promised by the God of Israel.
If we know that we are in the Messiah of Israel and our life is hid with him in God, we may ask ourselves, Why, what is our calling? Why is the Messiah of Israel now hidden from Israel in the heavenly places, so that our life is hid with him in God? Why did he come to his own and his own did not receive him? It is written that Israel's stumbling in faith, in their not recognizing their Messiah, was only in order that a way of entrance might be made for the nations and that the reconciliation between Israel and her Messiah will bring life from the dead. Must the answer to why Israel did not recognize her Messiah not be, then, that just as Messiah had to experience alienation from God in the experience of death, in order that the sentence of death upon Adam be fulfilled, so his people Israel had also to partake as a nation in the experience of his alienation from God, in order that the nation might share with him also in the glory of God's grace?
If I have learned in my heart that this is the Good News of God, how can I cease from the way of my tradition as I have received it, of setting my personal salvation over against the thought of Israel's salvation, and reframe the mystery of my gain and Israel's temporary loss as the mystery of the hope of the power of the resurrection of Israel's Messiah being revealed fully in all things? For if I understand Israel's present blindness and suffering as a testimony to the sufferings of her Messiah, how do I give this testimony as a witness to Israel and the world as the certain hope of his resurrection? How do I find the answers to these questions, which are Above hidden with Israel's Messiah in God?
Here is a place, indeed, where God emphasizes the question and not the answer. By moving away from a misleading answer based on a worldview of the primacy of the individual, I can return more clearly to an emphasis upon the question which God in His wisdom has presented, the question of the present hiddenness of Christ in God, the hiddenness of the Messiah of Israel from Israel through the wisdom of God in His long-suffering toward His people. For surely it is this very grace of God toward Israel that has allowed me, as a gentile, to receive God's Holy Spirit!
I see, therefore, how great the mystery is of the wall of partition between Jew and Gentile that it could only be broken down by the death of Israel's Messiah for the nation, and I do not want to give any testimony before God or other people that takes away from this wall except one that confesses Messiah's death for Israel. For in this alone is the promise of his resurrection life for the world.
A Silver Breast plate used to decorate a Torah Scroll.
