One Son.

"I am honored to love a Jewish King."

“The only thing that gave me strength was knowing that everything done to me was simply because I’m a Jew. It made me realize that we are truly different. We must return to being a united people, to keeping mitzvot, to understanding what it means to be Jewish.” – Rom Braslavski (Survivor)

WE WILL stare in His eyes one day and all these petty things will stand before us, so much junk. All the hate, the name-calling, the cursing of lives, of children, will become so much fire. That a man survived a horrifying ordeal has faded for some beneath car horns and politics and Christian-ese. Men and women, for there are others like him.

Most surprising to me is the comment one made about keeping shabbat. They would save some of their meal to honor it. Another would stand and imagine he wore the proper headgear, believing G-d would see and honor him. And He does. Jesus is a Jew, the King of the Jews, and He loves His people.

Meanwhile, we in the church have either stripped Him of His heritage in honor of Christianity, something so very, very wrong, or we’ve used His commandment to “love one another” to draw boundary lines in the sand. The only lines Jesus drew in the sand was to rescue a woman caught in sin, and when He looked up, no one who accused her remained. They’d all left.

John chapters 1 through 4 draws a picture. We have the Father and the Son, the Word of God which was at the beginning with God and as God. Then there’s a Jewish wedding, with a bride and a groom, and Jesus creating new wine. Next chapter there’s Christ as the Bridegroom awaiting the church, His bride. When we come to chapter 4, though, we see the Samaritan woman who’s been married five times and now is living unmarried with number six.

Chapter 1 – One Father & One Son
Chapter 2 – One Man & One Wife (Jewish wedding)
Chapter 3 – One Bridegroom & One Bride
Chapter 4 – Five ex-husbands and now, One man, and one woman, unmarried

What to make of this? For the Jews there was Covenant and blessing and the promise of Messiah. The Gentiles, on the other hand, had fallen apart.

It is interesting to me, and slightly amusing, that the Hebrew word for Gentiles, “goy”, also means “swarms of locusts.” I laughed, more than once. But looking at it from this angle, Jews and Gentiles hung Jesus on the cross. Gentiles have now tried to erase Jews from the map. But God the Father and the Spirit wanted neither to withdraw covenant with Israel nor to replace them with the church. That is a mistaken ideology, which has crept into much of Jewish thinking. Watch any Jewish testimony of salvation through Jesus Christ and before they saw the cross and Resurrection, they believed the New Testament was Gentile. But as one man said, “This was the most Jewish thing I could have done.”

I am honored to love a Jewish King. I am honored to pray for His people and to love them for who they are. I am honored to write these articles on His behalf. For whomever will read them, know this, the Spirit is in them 100% or I would not publish them. I can say this because I’m not desperate to write. I love writing, but I learned in the process that anything that goes up can also come down because unless Jesus is at the heart of it, they are so much empty paper.

Our preaching must be Jesus, not argument, opinion, or criticism. We cannot use Scripture to justify hate. We cannot be the authors of strife and confusion because the One who died for us, commanded us to love all men, then He died for those who mocked Him, for the thief who deserved to die, and for a woman in Auburndale, who would need Him thousands of years later.

“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.” (Psalms 1:1)

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” (John 13:34)


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com