Sunday, July 11, 2010

Having Hebrew Heritage

Christianity was birthed from a Jewish womb.  Jesus himself was fully Jewish, not only by birth but also by practice. He said in Matthew 5:17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them".  This is crucial for Christians, who rely upon Jesus' complete fulfillment of the Law in order to inherit the covenantal promises--of blessing in our earthly lives and eternal life with God--which God himself gave to Abraham in Genesis 15.  In a sense, a Christian gains access, through Jesus, to a Hebrew heritage.  And without this Hebrew root, there would be no Christianity.  

In this light--the connection between Old and New Testaments, Jews and Jesus, I find myself needing to retract something I wrote in a previous blog when I deemed Judaism a graceless religion.  Judaism springs from the Old Testament, where God made promises on account of his mercy: Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David etc...were all saved by mercy and not by their works.  In fact, the concept of mercy and grace in Christianity originates from God's interaction with his people in the Old Testament.

By the same token, since Jesus was the only one who perfectly fulfilled the Law - without Jesus, there would be no fulfillment of God's Old Testament promise.  As the apostle Peter puts it, the prophets of old were looking forward to the arrival of Christ and his fulfillment of their prophecy (1 Peter 1:10).

Christians do well to delve into the Old Testament and read the Bible as a whole in order to understand the context from which Jesus and the apostles established our faith and to grow us in it.  

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