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POSTED
01 JANUARY, 2008
How Are We to Live as Modern Messianics?
by
J.K. McKee
editor@tnnonline.net
A shift has started to take place in today’s Messianic community.
Many attribute the year 1967 and the recapturing
of Jerusalem by Israel as also being the year
that the Messianic movement really got started.
If this is truly the case, then last year we
turned forty (2007), and this year (2008) we
turn forty-one. As a movement that is
preparing to become middle aged, it is certainly
time for us to be a mature people who are
empowered by God to perform His tasks in the
Earth. Yet how we are going to actually do this
as Messianic members of modern society is
another story and another issue altogether.
Over the past few years, I have become consciously aware that some
serious challenges and tension are in store for
the Messianic movement. We are going through
some growing pains, and issues are on the
horizon that too many are unprepared for. The
world at large is certainly not getting any less
complicated, and globalization and the mass
market mean that old ways of doing things may
not necessarily work any more in the
Twenty-First Century. Both the Jewish Synagogue
and Christian Church are beginning to recognize
this—which means the responsibility for
Messianics is twice as high as it
is for your average Jew or Christian. We need to
be a people stirred to action, and guided by the
Holy Spirit as we prepare to enter into a new
chapter of our development.
The most obvious element that has been missing in the emerging
Messianic movement is a well-reasoned and
well-considered theology. This is a theology of
the Scriptures that will empower us to fulfill
the mission of God’s people as presented in the
Torah, further explained in the Prophets and
Writings, ultimately embodied in the saving work
of Yeshua in the Gospels, and then declared to
the world as seen in the letters of His
Apostles. This theology will not only
not
avoid the issues that have been discussed in
both the Synagogue and Church for
centuries—appropriating the best that each has
to offer—but will also be able to tackle the
current challenges of Planet Earth today, making
a difference for the Lord via the transforming
power of the gospel.[1]
A great deal of work lies ahead for this to become a reality. Too
much of the Messianic theology of the past has
just been cosmetically “Hebraic,” with
not
enough engagement of the actual issues of
the Biblical text. Much of what we have all
witnessed is people reading their English
Bibles, marking out words like “Moses” or “Law,”
and then replacing them with “Moshe” or “Torah.”
While it is certainly not unimportant to know
those Hebrew terms, if this is the extent of our
discussion with the Scriptures—and we jump over
or avoid the questions that the Bible actually
asks us—how have we been able to achieve God’s
assignments to His people? When He brought
Ancient Israel to Mount Sinai, He told them,
“‘Now
then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep
My covenant, then you shall be My own possession
among all the peoples, for all the earth is
Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of
priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words
that you shall speak to the sons of Israel”
(Exodus 19:5-6).
Whether you realize it or not, these are very missional words. They
do state God’s requirement of Israel to obey Him
and be in covenant relationship with Him. But
they also state that as His “treasured
possession” (NIV) they are to be a “kingdom of
priests and a holy nation.” While we have
certainly been told many times from Messianic
pulpits that we are part of a kingdom of
priests—what does that mean?
Priests serve as
intermediaries. God told Ancient Israel that
they were a nation of priests because
ki-li
kol-ha’eretz (#rah-lK
yl-yK),
“because for Me (is) all the Earth” (my
translation). The mission of God’s people
following the Exodus was that
they were to
serve as intermediaries between Him and the rest
of the world.
While today’s Messianic world currently sorts out critical issues
such as the Divinity and Messiahship of Yeshua,
the reliability and historicity of the
Scriptures, and the doctrine of salvation—once
smoothed over another set of challenges will be
presented to us. These challenges, in no
uncertain terms, regard
Messianics and
modernity. They regard the Messianic
community truly moving forward and being molded
into a group of people that can fully accomplish
the mandate that the Lord gave to Ancient
Israel, of testifying of His goodness to the
world and serving as His representatives. These
are not new themes by any means—as they are
firmly embodied in the worldview of Yeshua and
the Apostles—yet the Torah itself, believe it or
not, also lays out the mission that we are to
fulfill.[2]
We have to be prepared to meet the challenges
of the world head on.
God wants the emerging Messianic movement to be transformed into a
missional community—an “Israel” if you will—that
will be a holy people who fulfill priestly
duties in our fallen world, by living lives
changed by the power of the gospel and who
follow a Torah ethic. We will be what Paul calls
“ambassadors for Messiah,” urging the people of
the world to “be reconciled to God” (2
Corinthians 5:20). But in order to do this, it
is undeniable that we have to know a few things
about the world, and we need to consider some of
the issues being forced by modernity upon us
that have probably gone unaddressed for far too
long.
Today’s Messianic community (including, Messianic Judaism,
Messianic Two-House, Messianic One Law,
Messianic independents, etc.) has been largely
sustained by too much of a fundamentalist
approach to human life for the past two decades
(at least as my family and I have witnessed it
since 1995). This approach, however, is
beginning to show some considerable cracks,
especially as we consider our future and the
general course of our world. The extremism and
Puritanism that many sectors of today’s
Messianic movement often demonstrate will not be
able to sustain us indefinitely.
It will come
to an end, and it is time for us to change.
The Puritan movement in England ultimately died
off after Oliver Cromwell’s English republic
ended, and in fact stifled religion in much of
Britain until the Eighteenth Century with the
Wesleyan revivals.
In order to be a movement that can sustain a viable future, we have
to shift ourselves to focusing much more highly
on the personal and corporate piety of
Believers. We need to focus on personal
holiness, sanctification, and impacting society
around us. We need to learn how to find common
ground and areas of agreement among all who
claim Yeshua (Jesus) as Savior, so we can affect
spiritual solutions. We need to learn how to
demonstrate ways to others that a life of Torah
observance truly does bring great spiritual
growth and positive change. History has borne
out the fact that piety movements survive long
after their founders pass on; puritanical
movements pass away after the death of their
founders.
As we turn forty-one this year (2008), a new kind of Messianic
community is preparing to emerge. It is a more
moderate and considerate Messianic movement than
what we have seen in the past, even though it
has a very high regard for the Tanach
Scriptures. It will be a movement that highly
values Jewish tradition, even though it may not
necessarily be Orthodox. It will be a movement
that is very evangelical as it is concerned with
the salvation of all human beings. It will be a
movement engaged with the issues of Jewish and
Christian Biblical scholarship. And it will even
be prepared to meet the challenges of the
modern, or even post-modern, world—with a firm
Biblical ethic beginning with God’s commandments
in the Torah.
End of sample excerpt.
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Confronting Critical Issues
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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.
NOTES
[1]
Consult the author’s
article “Some
Thoughts On Our Messianic Future.”
[2]
One area of Torah study
that absolutely must open up to
Messianics is interpreting the text
against its Ancient Near Eastern
setting. When this is actually
considered as a factor, one will see
that the Torah’s message and
commandments did
directly counter and
subvert many of the pagan religions
of the day—making the God of Israel
unique among the other deities
worshipped at the time.
Including
such factors will truly help in how we
approach our world today. How we
will accomplish this in our Biblical
Studies, however, is not a question
easily answered at present. Many
Messianics still significantly struggle
with the factor of Greco-Roman
classicism for interpreting parts of the
Apostolic Scriptures.
For a further discussion,
consult the author’s article “The
Role of History in Messianic Biblical
Interpretation.”
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