by Avram Yehoshua
I was in Rueben’s office the other day. He’s a very famous lawyer. He’s been to the Supreme Court many times and hasn’t lost yet. I was seeking legal advice and was impressed by his knowledge and expertise in the law, and also by his confidence. He was very sure of himself. He said a case like mine would cost $10,000 to $17,000, and then he offered me a proposition, ‘If I take your case and lose, you owe me nothing, but if I win, you pay me double’ he said with a smile. I told him I respected his accomplishments and would pray about it.I had begun my day in prayer, specifically seeking something I could tell Rueben about Messiah. I realized he was busy and so I had to have something ‘short and sweet’ concerning Messiah. Ever faithful, Yeshua granted my request. Before I left his office that day I said Rueben,
"I’d like to give you four simple points that will prove that Yeshua is our Messiah. Do you have a Tanach1 at home so you can look some things up tonight?"
He said he did, and that his grandfather was ‘a great rabbi’ but because of the Holocaust, his father and he were both secular. Not an uncommon position for us Jews after the Holocaust.
In Jeremiah 31:31-34, God speaks of giving us Jews a New Covenant. This is extremely shocking for most of us to hear because obviously, it directly links the great Prophet Jeremiah with Jesus! The shock effect is what the Lord wants though. It’s meant to wake us up from our deep slumber2 where we accept the false and worn-out cliché, ‘We Jews don’t believe in Jesus.’
Based on a survey by the Council of Jewish Federations in the U.S. there are two million Jews in the world who believe in Yeshua as our Messiah.3 This is not just a passing fad or a fringe group. God is opening our eyes to His Pearl of great price; their sins have been forgiven (Jer. 31:34) and they have real life with God, in the blessed Name of Messiah Yeshua.
In Daniel 9:24-26, the angel Gabriel speaks of the Temple being rebuilt, the Messiah coming to bring eternal righteous and to deal with our sins. He would be ‘cut off’ (die) and another ‘prince’ (the Roman General Titus), would destroy the Second Temple. There are many arguments and interpretations about the ‘weeks’ in those verses that our Rabbis love to entangle themselves and us in, to prove the prophecy doesn’t point to Jesus, but the essence of what is written is very plain: the Messiah would have to come before that Temple was destroyed. The Temple was completely demolished in 70 AD. The Messiah was supposed to come before that.
Alfred Edersheim (1834-1893), a Viennese Jew thoroughly versed in Talmud, Midrash, Yalkut4 and other Jewish literature, became a distinguished Jewish believer in Jesus, having been convinced that he had found the Jewish Messiah. Among other things, he wrote the classic, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. He notes that the ancient Jewish Sages expressly spoke of Daniel’s passage occurring for Messianic times.5
The Jewish Sage known simply as “Rabbi” (Rabbi Yehuda haNasi), whose greatest achievement was to compile the Mishnah6 into written form about 220 AD, confirms the prophecy in Daniel. Rabbi said, ‘all limits of time for Messiah are past.’7 He realized that our Messiah should have come before the Temple was destroyed, but he too unfortunately, like Rueben, was blind to what God had done in sending Messiah Yeshua 200 years earlier, to make atonement for his sins.
The entire passage of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 has been taken by our ancient Jewish Sages as referring to the Messiah, even though they realized that it spoke of him taking our sins upon himself as a guilt sacrifice.8 Its opening verse speaks only of the Servant of Yahveh, but this Servant is specifically written as ‘the Messiah’ in Targum Isaiah:9 ‘Behold, my servant, the Anointed One (or, the Messiah) shall prosper’.10
In Yalkut 2 the Sages say that this Servant Messiah would be greater than Father Abraham, higher than Moses, and more glorious than even the ministering angels around God.11 Who could this Messiah really be? Who is greater than the greatest godly men of Israel, and greater than even the angels of God? Is there any creature ‘between’ God and the angels in terms of stature and nature? If the ancient Sages were right, Messiah has to be like God Himself in nature, and He is.
The term ‘the Leprous Messiah’ is entirely based on Is. 53.12 It speaks of the Messiah being stricken by God. The term used, ‘to smite or strike’ (53:4), is similar to the word used for leprosy and that’s why our Sages named Him such.
According to another authoritative Jewish source, the Midrash, Isaiah 53:5 speaks of the Messiah suffering for us13 and being a substitute for us. The ancient sacrifices of Moses were substitutionary sacrifices (Lev. 1-6), the animal taking the place of the Israeli, so too with Messiah Yeshua. He has taken our place.
We have sinned against the God of Israel in turning our backs to Him and not our faces. Our just punishment is Hell on Judgment Day but our God has intervened on our behalf. We Jews might say, ‘How can a man offer himself up to God as a sacrifice for us?’ This might seem a logical question but it’s not biblical. In the Midrash, Rabbi Berachaya spoke of Messiah making ‘expiation for the sins of Israel’ and this
‘expiation bears reference to the transgressions and evil deeds of the children of Abraham, for which God provides this Man as the Atonement.’14
The idea of Messiah being a sacrifice for Israel isn’t as foreign as many of our Rabbis would like us to think. Isaiah 53:7 specifically says that Messiah would be a sacrifice for us:
‘But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed’ (Is. 53:5).
‘But the LORD was pleased To crush Him, putting Him to grief; If He would render Himself as a guilt offering’ (Is. 53:10a).
‘He poured out Himself to death, And was numbered with the transgressors; Yet He Himself bore the sin of many’ (Is 53:12b).
Does God have a Son? Psalm Two and Proverbs 30:4 tell us that He does.15 Shocking? The Prophet Isaiah says, ‘Who has believed our message?’ (Is. 53:1) Have you?
The last simple point is my own living testimony. Thirty-three years ago I saw Yeshua was our Messiah. I asked Him to forgive me of my sins and to come into my heart to live. To my utter amazement He did! The power of the Holy Spirit came upon me and I felt Shalom (Peace) from the Heavens for the first time in my life. I have walked with Yeshua, by His Spirit, for all that time. I know He’s our Messiah. And yes, I’m still a Jew.
That initial experience wasn’t the last one. The Holy Spirit would manifest within me and through me many thousands of times since then. Whenever I turn to God in prayer, and other times, the Holy Spirit is there to confirm that God is still with me. That’s why I say to you that I don’t just believe that Yeshua is our Messiah…I really know that He is.
I call it the Spirit of Assurance. Just as any young child needs to be held and told he’s loved by his father, so too we with our God. Not just ‘one time’ in the distant past but every day. Because of this experiential love and assurance, I know that my God loves me and I truly know Him. Isn’t this exactly what our God means when He says in that first simple point of Jeremiah 31:34 that we shall all know Him, ‘from the least of us to the greatest of us’?
Over the years I’ve grown strong in this confidence and assurance of His love, as any child would who was continually loved by his father. This is exactly what the prophets Joel and Ezekiel speak of. God would pour out His Spirit upon us.16 This only happens in the glorious Name of Yeshua. This is how we truly get to know our God and King. Please don’t buy the dead horse that Jesus is not for us Jews.
Rueben wasn’t effected by all this. He was too busy with his life, too caught up in his own little world. I didn’t take Rueben as my lawyer because the God of Israel warns us in Scripture,
‘How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked’ (Psalm 1:1).
Even though Rueben ‘knew his stuff’, when it came to God he was in utter darkness. I saw it all over him. A darkness with its foundation in both great pride and enormous ignorance of God Almighty. Rueben knew nothing of eternal life. Neither his legal expertise nor his stocks and bonds will do him any good on Yom HaDin.17
Being Jewish means more than just saying ‘No’ to Jesus, eating bagels and cream cheese, doing good deeds for humanity, and supporting Israel against the onslaught of Arab terrorism and media propaganda.
Being Jewish means that our hearts are fully surrendered to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and that we believe and walk in what He says in the Tanach. What He says in the Tanach about Messiah points directly to Yeshua of Nazareth.18
I bear witness of that to you this day… four simple points that prove Yeshua is our long awaited Messiah, come to give you life.
ENDNOTES
1 Tanach is a Hebrew acronym for the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Prophets and Writings).
2 “For Yahveh has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep. He has shut the eyes of your prophets, and covered the heads of your seers” (Isaiah 29:10). “Israel’s watchmen (the Rabbis) are blind. They are all without knowledge. They are all silent dogs that cannot bark; dreaming, lying down, and loving to slumber” (Isaiah 56:10).
3 Sandra Teplinsky, Why Care About Israel? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Chosen Books, 2004), p. 141 and note 2.
4 Talmud is a ‘collection of Jewish law and tradition that was compiled over a number of centuries and completed in the 5th century’ AD. Midrash are ‘exegetical commentaries on the law and aggadic collections of writings.’ Yalkut is a ‘medieval anthology.’ Rachmiel Frydland, Author, Elliot Klayman, Editor, What the Rabbis Know About the Messiah (Cincinnati, OH: Messianic Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 94-96.
5 Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus The Messiah (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000), p. 1004 for v. 27. Bemidbar Rabbah 11.
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_haNasi. The Mishnah consists of 63 tractates codifying Jewish law and is the basis of the Talmud. The juridical traditions of the Mishnah go back to about 450 BC. Yehuda haNasi means Judah the Prince. He was of King David’s lineage, hence the title prince.
7 Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus The Messiah, p. 1009. Risto Santala, The Messiah in the Old Testament in the Light of Rabbinical Writings (Jerusalem: Keren Ahvah Meshihit, 1992), p. 101. Sanhedrin 98b, 97a; ‘These times were over long ago.’
8 Isaiah 53:4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12.
9 Targum Isaiah is ‘an Aramaic translation of the book of Isaiah’. Frydland, What the Rabbis Know About the Messiah, p. 96.
10 Ibid., p. 97. The Hebrew word Messiah is mah-she-ach and literally means ‘anointed or anointed one.’ The Aramaic of Is. 52:13 means, the Messiah. The Messiah is the Anointed One of God, come to set us free from the slavery to our carnal passions in the Kingdom of Satan, that we might live with God forever.
11 Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus The Messiah, p. 997. The Messiah shall be ‘higher than Abraham, to whom applies Gen. 14:22; higher than Moses, of whom Num. 11:12 is predicated; higher than the ministering angels, of whom Ezek. 1:18 is said.’ Yalkut goes on to say, quoting from Is. 53:5, that the Messiah would be ‘wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities’.
12 Ibid., p. 1004. The term is used in Sanhedrin 98b which is a book within the Babylonian Talmud.
13 Ibid., p. 998. Midrash on Samuel (ed. Lemberg, p. 45a, last line), ‘all sufferings are divided into three parts’, one which Messiah bore. Ruth 2:14 (p. 985) is connected to it. The word ‘eat’ is seen speaking of the days of Messiah and the world to come. The whole passage is mystically applied to Messiah. ‘Come hither’ means to draw near to the Messiah’s Kingdom and to take the bread of royalty, and dip it in vinegar speaks of the ‘sufferings, as it is written in Is. 53:5’ Midrash Rabbah Ruth 5 (ed. Warsh. p. 43 a/b).
14 Ibid., p. 109. Midrash on Canticles (ed. Warshau, p. 11a/b).
15 See Yeshua: God the Son at http://www.seedofabraham.net/yeshua.html for how God is ‘one’ and has a Son. It’s biblical.
16 Joel 2:28-29 (3:1-2 Hebrew); Ezk. 36:24-27.
17 Yom HaDin is Hebrew for The Day of Judgment, when God will judge all peoples by the Good News about Messiah Yeshua that I share with you.
18 For more on what our Tanach says about Messiah and how it all points to Yeshua, read other Jewish Newsletters at http://www.seedofabraham.net/newsletr.html.
