Judaism and the Resurrected Life

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Any believer who lives presently unto the Lord, and for the Lord, out of the abundance of Life in Christ Jesus, demonstrates to the yet unbelieving Jew [or Gentile], like the Apostle Paul, the millennial mode of life of a future, restored Israel. This ascension Life is the provision of the Covenant-making and Covenant-keeping God, and constitutes the great Rest and ultimate Sabbath of those who believe. In it, we cease from ourselves, and God becomes 'our righteousness.' This was already Paul's distinction, privilege, and appropriation by which he lived his tireless and expansive apostolic life. Paul prefigured and foreshadowed in his Covenant-union with God the basis upon which the entire nation of Israel would fulfill its future apostolate [mission task] to the nations.

But the self-life does not die easily. What we see now in the present Israel are the last convulsions and paroxysms of a nation unwilling to "give up the ghost." We see, daily, a people without God struggling to find solutions to the predicaments from which their own self-life has brought them. The more frantic the effort is, the deeper the perplexity. Whether in the defense of the nation against Palestinian terrorism, or the fending off of a growing global anti-Semitism, world Jewry finds itself more despised and more morally traduced in the means employed.

One might ask whether the offense of Jesus, and later that of Paul and the apostles, was the exhibiting of the Life of God the Father to the class of men who lived pre-eminently out of themselves. Does not present Judaism employ 'God' to define its own terms and obtain its own self-forgiveness? Such a religion will inevitably practice a false piety, which will be most revealed in the hatred shown toward Jesus, the Son, eventuating in the willing consignment of Him unto death! This fury, revealing the predominance of the demonic powers operative in men whose captives they are, continued in the unabated persecution unto death of the apostles and the apostolic church, who lived after Him in the same power of the Resurrection life.

Ironically, a religion of ethical monotheism is seemingly celebrated as the template for all the world's salvation, though unable to save itself. Through its intricate labors, it has succeeded in sewing together the veil rent at the crucifixion of its Messiah - even as Adam and Eve sewed for themselves fig-leaves to cover their nakedness! This has become ornately overspread by generations of rabbinic addenda of such an extra-biblical kind and detail for which the rabbis themselves are the arbiters and administrators. All this is collected in vast Talmudic libraries that threaten to be revered above Scripture and where God Himself is said to be instructed!