Even Mormons Can do This

I just watched an interesting video from a Youtube channel called “SO BE IT!” It’s a Messianic channel from Israel. The people who run it go around trying to convince Jews to accept Yeshua. It’s a nice channel, but I have not seen them win anyone over.

Their low rate of success is not surprising to me, because they rely on a natural tool, not supernatural ones. They rely on debate.

Debate does not bring people to Yeshua unless it is accompanied by action from the Holy Spirit. We know from the Bible that our faith in God is a supernatural gift. The Bible also says no man can please God in the flesh. You can’t decide to be a Christian your own and pull it off without supernatural help. To be an actual Christian, you have to receive faith and revelation from the Holy Spirit.

Yeshua said something interesting about the Jews of his time, and it applies to Gentiles as well. He told the story of a beggar named Lazarus, who lived outside a rich man’s house. Both men died. Lazarus went to be with Abraham in the underworld to wait for Yeshua to free them, and the rich man went to be tormented. The rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus to talk to his brothers to keep them out of hell, and Abraham said, that if they didn’t believe Moses and the prophets, they wouldn’t be convinced if a man came back from the dead.

Abraham was talking about Yeshua and another man named Lazarus, not to mention the people who rose from the grave in Jerusalem on the day of the crucifixion. Yeshua raised the second Lazarus from the dead (John 11), and the religious Jews plotted to kill Lazarus, even though Yeshua was the one who raised him, and he pretty clearly did it by God’s power. Yeshua himself was raised from the dead later. Most Jews didn’t believe either of them, and the people who arrested and beat the Messiah and had him tortured to death were Jews. As Yeshua said, they were like their fathers, who murdered the prophets.

Yeshua worked all sorts of miracles, prophesied, and proved religious leaders woefully (literally woefully, because woe followed) wrong about doctrine, but most Jews didn’t listen, because they did not receive supernatural illumination. They let their natural minds and emotions–the flesh–rule them, and the flesh isn’t equipped to believe in Yeshua. It is, however, equipped to believe in rules that turn religion into a game where the goal is to score the most points.

In the video I saw, a Messianic was talking to a chassid about Yeshua, and it started to be obvious that the chassid followed the Lubavitcher Rebbe, a famous rabbi who died a long time ago and was believed by many to be a “candidate” (odd term) for Messiah. The Messianic asked the chassid if he was part of Chabad, the Rebbe’s organization, and he said he was.

Chabad is interesting, because part of its mission is to prevent Jews from accepting Yeshua. They have a sort of script they follow, composed of arguments “proving” he can’t be the one. It’s all argument, not divine revelation and not miracles or prophecy, so it’s very much like the things the video’s creators say to Jews they want to reach. Flesh against flesh.

The Rebbe was mythologized while he lived. There were a lot of stories about his genius. Some people who have looked into it claim he was just a very smart guy, not the Einstein-level intellect some would say he was.

He was a civil engineer, and skeptics say he didn’t accomplish anything out of the ordinary before he quit to become a rabbi. Civil engineers design parking lots and overpasses. They’re not Tesla-grade engineers whose accomplishments rival those of great scientists. How brilliant can an overpass be?

When I was in school, electrical engineers were at the top of the engineering heap in terms of brains, but maybe that has changed as computer science has evolved. Anyway, you’re never going to see a civil engineer win a Fields Medal or Nobel in any field.

Christianity doesn’t tout Yeshua’s secular accomplishments, because there probably weren’t any. We believe he was a handyman, or tekton. Amos was a vinedresser. David was a shepherd. You don’t have to be Isaac Newton to be a great man of God.

The Rebbe was Chabad’s Great Jewish Hope RE Messiahhood, but he died, and his body rotted. This should have ended his candidacy, because Jews are very firm in their believe that the Messiah can’t die before he fulfills his mission. They also say the Messiah can’t be divine, because that would be idolatry. Mainstream Orthodox Jews say Yeshua can’t be the Messiah and that anyone who accepts him is a “Christian of Jewish birth.” No longer Jewish. “Canceled.”

A big problem arose when some Chabadniks started worshiping the dead Rebbe, davening at his burial site. Some said he was going to be resurrected, but that didn’t happen. Now, some Chabadniks are claiming he’s not in the tomb. They say he is alive, and his father-in-law is buried there. So he is about to turn 123, presumably in good health. And for some reason, he is hiding himself like Howard Hughes.

In any case, a little Googling suggests that a big percentage of Chabadniks now think Schneerson is the Messiah. And some believe this even though they also admit he’s dead. They think he will come back to life to resume his mission, bringing about the Messianic Age.

This is all problematic for religious Jews who insist Yeshua is not the Messiah because he died without completing his mission. If this rules out Yeshua, it rules Schneerson out, too.

What about praying to a dead man? Catholics do that, and it’s clearly idolatry. It attributes divinity to human beings other than the Messiah. Isn’t praying to Schneerson a confession of his divinity? If so, isn’t it idolatry by accepted Jewish beliefs? See Saul and Samuel.

If Schneerson can come back, why can’t Yeshua?

I’m sure defensive arguments have been constructed since Schneerson’s deification. I know that much about human nature. I promise you, they exist. I don’t know what they are.

So now, for some people, the argument isn’t over whether the Messiah is divine or has died or can be resurrected; it’s over which divine, deceased Messiah can be resurrected to fulfill his mission. Very strange.

The book of Daniel appears to predict that the Messiah will come before the destruction of the Second Temple, which was wiped out by the Romans quite a while before Schneerson was born in 1902. I’m sure there is an argument to the contrary.

Yeshua worked a lot more miracles than Schneerson is claimed to have worked. Yes, they say Schneerson worked and is working miracles. People say he appears to them. Like Mary among the Catholics. Mary isn’t the Messiah or co-Messiah or God. She sinned. She had sex. The Bible shows she had at least 5 children, because Yeshua had at least two brothers and at least two sisters. People aren’t supposed to worship her or listen to spirits that appear and pretend to be her. A spirit appeared to Mohammed, and look how that worked out.

A claim that Schneerson appeared and did something miraculous certainly seems like a claim of divinity.

Anyway, I’m a lot more impressed by the miracles of Yeshua. He created enough wine for several people to bathe in. He healed every kind of illness, openly before crowds. The apostles healed lots of people in public, and some still do.

It’s all pretty interesting, but no one will pay any attention to what I say unless the Holy Spirit comes to them and opens their eyes. God could kill me, raise me from the dead, and have me tap dance in their living rooms, and it wouldn’t matter.

Often I have wondered why preachers and other Christians prevented me from getting anywhere when I tried to be helpful in churches, and I have wondered why God didn’t clear a path for me to reach people after giving me so much to tell them. Today it occurred to me that there comes a time when God’s big priority is saving the people he has instead of adding to their numbers.

I thought of the ark. God didn’t give Noah a powerful ministry and send hundreds of thousands of people to hear him and be converted. He told Noah to save his family while he drowned everyone else. Methuselah and Lamech died the year the flood came, so they didn’t drown. It was as if God waited until they were gone.

In any case, Noah probably could not have had a great ministry, because the people of his time were like today’s people. Arrogant, cruel, idolatrous, greedy, libidinous, and so forth. There was no way to reach them. Had their been, the flood would have been canceled.

People are very angry and cruel now, and that leads to provocation. Provocation is a form of temptation, and the Bible calls the tribulation (not the entire apocalypse) the hour of temptation that will come on the whole world. Surely God will take his people out of here before we are pushed so hard we become as vindictive and cruel as the people around us. We are already considerably more like them than we used to be.