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POSTED
01 AUGUST, 2006
The Role of History in Messianic Biblical Interpretation
by
J.K. McKee
editor@tnnonline.net
In the Messianic community today, we often hear a high emphasis
placed on the need for us to follow the Hebraic
lifestyle practices of our Messiah Yeshua.
However, for many generations of Believers which
have preceded us, this has not always been the
case. Many who have gone before us in the faith
have not seen the same things that we have. This
has been for a variety of reasons, but most
notably it has been because we have access to
information today that the Reformers and some of
the early Christians who settled America did not
have. They did not have the benefit of
archaeology, renewed contact with the lands of
the Bible and the Middle East, and especially
the excellent Jewish-Christian relations that we
have today in the world of Biblical Studies. At
most, what these people had access to were the
classical works of Greece and Rome and the
writings of the early Church. Today we have a
much larger information base, including not only
the classics and early Christian works, but also
Jewish works.
Our call as Believers is to have an as accurate as possible view of
the Bible and the world in which its events took
place. The Prophet Jeremiah admonished those of
his generation, “Thus
says the
Lord, ‘Stand by the ways and see and ask
for the ancient paths, where the good way is,
and walk in it; and you will find rest for your
souls. But they said, “We will not walk
in it”’”
(Jeremiah 6:16). God wanted His people to
remember the way things were before sin crept
into the camp of Israel, and return to His
blessings. The same is largely true for us
today. The Lord wants us to remember how our
goal as individuals is to be conformed to the
likeness of His Son, and follow Him as the
Apostles did. The challenge is that in order to
do this we must “ask about the various paths of
history” (ATS), and deal with a diverse array of
Biblical and extra-Biblical literature spanning
across three millennia or more. We have to put
ourselves back into societies and cultures,
which are largely foreign to us, and then be
able to apply what we learn to our modern
societies and cultures today.
These things are admittedly challenging to us as human beings. When
we come to faith in Messiah Yeshua, we turn to
Him because we know that we are sinners and are
in need of reconciliation with God. We know that
we need a heart change that will cause us to
love Him and love others like never before. But
once we receive a heart change we need to begin
a life of consistently studying the Bible, God’s
Instruction for us. As we study the Bible our
minds are transformed, and hopefully we can
begin to see the world from God’s point of view.
As we continue in our study of the Bible, then
God should supernaturally give us the ability to
deal with increasingly more difficult ideas and
concepts.
The existence of the Messianic movement today demonstrates that at
least some people want to deal with some
difficult theological concepts. Because we live
in a time when Jewish-Christian relations and
Christian support of Israel is at an all time
high, we have a responsibility not just to
ourselves, but also to posterity, to truly
consider the historical context of the
Scriptures. This presents many obstacles, not
just in our understanding of the Apostolic
Scriptures (New Testament), but also of the
Tanach (Old Testament). We have to come to grips
with the fact that things may not be as
simplistic as we want them to be, and not only
will we have to deal with new information, but
we will also have to, in the words of Hercule
Poirot, “use our little gray cells.” This
article will explore some of the key facets of
examining the historical context of Scripture,
and how it affects our emerging Messianic
theology.
End of sample excerpt.
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J.K. McKee
(B.A., University of Oklahoma; M.A., Asbury
Theological Seminary) is the editor of TNN
Online (www.tnnonline.net) and is a Messianic
apologist.
He is a 2009 recipient of the Zondervan Biblical
Languages Award for Greek.
He
is author of
numerous books, dealing with a wide range of
topics that are important for today’s
Messianic Believers. He has also written many articles on
theological issues,
and is presently focusing his attention on Messianic commentaries
of various books of the Bible.
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