No Thanks

I quit reading Larry Huch’s The Torah Blessing. I wanted to give it a chance, but the more I read, the more I felt it was not for me.

These days, charismatics are very interested in Christianity’s debt to Judaism, so we love learning about it from any source that will teach us. We are obsessively supporting Israel, and we worry that the US is going to be punished for the way it has betrayed her. And we want to know where our faith came from.

The danger here is that we will end up Judaizing the church. This is something Paul fought. Certain Jews in the early church tried to force circumcision and other parts of the law on non-Jewish believers, and Paul made it clear that this was wrong. The Mosaic law has never been imposed on Gentiles. To this day, Orthodox Jews think it’s absurd to talk about Gentiles observing halaka. Judaism is not like Islam, which is so intolerant its adherents in the Middle East and other parts of Asia feel entitled to sponsor murder in non-Muslim countries because far-off infidels have disobeyed Mohammed.

There are Messianics all over the US, and like the Orthodox, they don’t believe in Judaizing the rest of us. It makes no sense to take laws that God clearly intended to set Jews apart, and apply them to people who are not Jews.

I had a funny experience a couple of weeks back. The word “tikkun” kept rolling around in my head, and I could not remember what it meant. I Googled it, and I came across a Messianic website which belongs to Tikkun Ministries. The rabbi who runs it is named Dan Juster. I didn’t look closely at the site. I just wanted to find out what “tikkun” meant, and once I had accomplished that, I moved on.

I have a new friend; she works for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. She sometimes sends me interesting links about Israel and Christianity. A few days after my Googling experience, she emailed me an article written by Dan Juster! Very odd. Here is an excerpt:

First I want to firmly counter a false theology that has grown up, mostly among Gentile Yeshua believers who believe that the recovery of Jewish roots requires that they embrace the Jewish dimensions of calling rooted in the Torah and reject Christian tradition. They attack the Church because they worship on Sunday and celebrate the resurrection on the “wrong” day of the year. As I argued in a past article (see, Calendar Confusion, March 2009), finding the exact right day for celebration was much harder than most suspected, even within ancient Judaism. The point here is that while God has ordained specific days of rest and celebration for the Jewish people, He has not required any specific days of rest for the nations: neither the seventh day Sabbath nor the Feast days.

You can find the rest here. What he says makes perfect sense to me.

Larry Huch recommends that Gentiles pray wearing Jewish shawls. He says we are to observe the Jewish (Saturday) Sabbath, including a traditional Sabbath dinner. We’re supposed to light candles and put an alms box on the table and do a lot of other things Jews do on Friday night. I don’t know what else he recommends; when I got to the stuff about the Sabbath, I felt I was not going to benefit from reading further, so I stopped. I think he’s wrong, and I think his interpretation of “supporting” scriptures is erroneous.

What he’s asking is way too much. Judaism and its practices and observances are eternal, and every Christian should learn about these things, but I’m not about to buy tefillen, give up pork, invest in an eruv, stop wearing shorts in public, wear a yarmulke, grow sidecurls, observe a yeast-free Passover week, build a booth on Succoth, or learn and observe the 613 commandments. I am not a Jew. Being a Jew is a lot of work; I have enough on my plate. Pork included.

What Huch teaches seems like legalism to me. He gets around this by saying we’re not “required” to do all these things, but that they please God and provide “points of contact” and such so our faith can be turned into results. I don’t buy that. The difference between saying something is mandatory and saying it’s something God likes us to do is nearly meaningless to a Christian. We don’t live under the law; many things we do for God could be described as discretionary, but we do them as though they were commanded. When you tell a Christian God likes it when he does something, it’s nearly the same thing as making it a commandment.

Here are the things that seem important to me: get salvation, get baptized in the Spirit, pray in tongues long and often, study the Bible, give offerings and alms, repent every chance you get, fast, take authority over evil spirits in order to overcome your chronic sins, do good things for others, pray with your understanding (including simple conversation with God), and support your church. That’s most of it. Don’t worry about finding a red heifer or avoiding shrimp. I can’t speak for Messianic Jews, but if you’re a Gentile, God could not care less about those things. Why keep sending checks to the bank when someone else has paid off your mortgage?

I’m afraid Judaizers will fall into disfavor, as they should, and that the fallout will splatter on non-Judaizers who provide beneficial teachings about the Old Testament and Judaism. Perry Stone is such a teacher.

People are not all that bright; that’s a fact of life. Most human beings will have a hard time seeing the distinction.

Last night I watched a wonderful Perry Stone video about depriving Satan of the authority to enter your “temple,” or your body, mind, and spirit. He presented it at a conference in Dalton, Georgia a few years ago. He had large models of items from Solomon’s Temple on the stage, and he explained the symbolic significance of each. I loved it. I would recommend it to anyone. He didn’t say we had to sacrifice bulls or burn incense or bake shewbread, however. He wasn’t wearing a prayer shawl or a yarmulke, and he didn’t dip hyssop in a bowl of blood. I am one hundred percent behind this kind of teaching. The Judaizing stuff…not so much.