Worthy to Save?

[00:00:05] Speaker A: Last week, you'll remember what. What word should you remember from last week in Hebrew? The entire thing was about this one word in Hebrew. It was close. I saw your lips, Which we translate often as grace. Zechut is another word that you could remember, but I wouldn't have expected you to. It's too complicated. Merit. We talked about zechut hatzadikim, the merit of the righteous, Zechut avot, the merit of the fathers. And we talked primarily about the chain of Moshe, of Moses. Right. If you didn't hear it, you need to, because it's part one of a thing that's happening around here called atonement. Explained a series. So I left, though, with a question. And we spent all that time talking about favor flowing through the demonstrated righteousness of a tzadik, that that's what grace in an Old Testament sense was, merit or favor or blessing. And that Moses is the Torah's clearest picture of this, that he stood in the gap. He extends himself to the people. He's bound to. He refused to be separated from the people. Blot me out. And on the merit of his chain, the nation survived the golden calf, the presence of God stayed. And then I left you with this thing. If chain is something that needs to be demonstrated, if the pattern requires that there is faithfulness under testing, under real challenge, the way Moses faithfulness was very, very real, then what does that say about Yeshua? What does that require of Yeshua? Does the way that we talk about him leave room or enough room for his human obedience to be that, to be very real, to be very costly, to be meaningful? Now, that is kind of a confusing question, but I hope, I desperately hope by the end of this message we'll have some clarity in that. Today we'll go there. And next week, of course, we're sitting down at the Passover table. We're talking about all kinds of things related to merit. And I want you to have some of these things in mind, because after the Golden Calf, and we spent quite a bit of time actually talking about the fact that God, God, this was back in Show Me youe Glory, when we talked about Moses and what God actually produced for Israel in the sacrificial system. He built an architecture. He built a physical and spiritual architecture which allowed his presence. The tabernacle, right, the priesthood, the sacrificial system, the festivals. And we read one rabbinic opinion that said everything, everything from Sinai flows or from the crisis at Sinai, that all of this was a reconciliation. It was a guarantee of God's continuing presence that he made. And it was good. It is good. It was real. It was God's answer. But there's something which I didn't say when we worked through this previously, because we talked about how it was all Moses, Moses, Moses, Moses, Moses. There had to be more. But this system that we have did not actually eliminate the need for a righteous one that stood in a mediating role. That had to be there. There had to be. The weight that Moses had been carrying around was. Was actually spread across an institution that became the Aaronic priesthood. Aaron, primarily Aaron and his sons. You think about Yom Kippur, the Day of atonement. Once a year, one man is allowed to enter into the holy of holies. It was not Moses, but he does that on behalf of the entire nation. But before he does that, he prepares himself meticulously. He confesses his own sins. He achieves a state of very, very strict ritual purity. He puts on specific garments. There's an entire process and protocol because the stakes are very, very high for this mediator who cannot just casually stroll into the space. Hey, God, here, here's some blood. Hope that fixes it all. Like, there's an incredible process. Everything about that tells you that that mediator role is not only weighty, it's actually. It's dangerous, actually, if you don't prepare properly. And the point is that it's connected. It's bound up to the one who enters. It's connected. The whole success of the thing is based on the one who enters, the one who goes in. So the tabernacle didn't officially solve the Moses problem, that of one man being the connection. It institutionalized the Moses problem. Instead of one man's chain, you now have an office of chain, which is the priesthood. And the priesthood still is existent today. You find people with the last name Cohen. It's very, very Cohen. There's a lot of Jewish names that have this. This is evidence of an existing priesthood that is still there today. So that institutionalized system is still there. And listen, that's better. That's better than one, just one man. There's this passing down, but it's still dependent on human standing in the gap with this righteousness. And human beings are mortal and they are fallible. And you don't have to really wonder about what happens when the person in the mediating role is not worthy of the role. Because you can read the prophets to understand quite a bit about what this looks like. And what they show us is that God's system is and Always will be perfect. But the holy things that are put into corrupt hands become profaned. And that's the issue. Malachi rebukes the priests because they have corrupted the covenants. Covenant really of Levi. They were instructed with guarding knowledge and carrying out this holy role, and they've compromised it. Jeremiah looks at the temple, he calls it a den of robbers. Not because the temple was flawed, but because the people serving around it were flawed. Right? They had lost this righteousness that made the whole thing function like it was meant to. Isaiah does not look at all this and conclude that the answer should be no more temple, no priesthood, no institution, none of that, no mediation. That is not at all what the prophets ever say about the temple, about sacrifice. People think that's what the prophets say. We'll talk about that later. The problem is not God's system. The problem is the people mortal compromised. And too often we see corrupt. So the prophetic burden that's being shared throughout many of the prophetic writings is clearer and clearer. It's not we don't have mediation. We need less mediation or we need to get rid of the priesthood. There is a different question. Who can bear the role faithfully? Will someone please rise to the occasion? Will someone reclaim the holiness of the priesthood and walk in purity and invite the presence of God? God properly, that is supposed to inhabit the temple space. The prophets are asking for that. And then you have, you know, Psalm 110. We find things about a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. It's a very, very important holy role. And who can hold it without defiling it. That is attention. And it's so, so, so, so important to understand. And very few people do that when they read the prophets. And we have the temple rebuke and the sacrificial rebuke and all this stuff. It has nothing to do with the temple. It has nothing to do with the priesthood as an institution. I've made this point. The point is to a cry for the righteous to rise up and reclaim the role. And in that we find the prophetic pointer that we're all familiar with that is sharpening the hope that one day, the hope for a righteous and enduring mediator, someone who can bear the role, who's standing before God, does not change, will not be corrupted. Someone who does not know, need to have constant renewal because the righteousness never collapses. This is the longing that we see coming out of the prophets. And guess who enters the equation for this? I get the question. Well, like, you know, messianic Judaism seems to diminish the role of Yeshua a lot. I hear this. I mean, what's the point of. What's the point? What did he do? There are a lot of answers to that from various sources out there in the world. But let's ask that question. We have to be careful because I've built a framework about chain and I want to connect it to Jesus. There's a phrase that Paul uses. You're very familiar with it, Romans 3, Galatians, Philippians. In Greek, it's Pistis Christo. Faith in Christ is how this is often rendered Romans. But it is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe. For there's no distinction. He goes on. Pistis Christo. There is a very significant debate that has occurred for many years, decades, about this phrase, Pistis Cristo. It is commonly translated here is the NIV for the righteousness of God through the faith of. I'm sorry, here's the. Oh, I already read that. It's the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe. Okay. The new American standard, the traditional reading says. Well, it's about your faith in Jesus, right? Your faith in Christ. We can get into the objective and subjective genitive here if you'd like to. Who would like to go into the Greek grammar? Don't raise your hand. We're not going to. The scholarly debate is that, no, this is not right. It's not about your faith. The new American standard says the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus. Not your faith in Jesus, the faith of Jesus for all who believe. Pistis Christo is the faithfulness of Christ. Christ, his faith, his obedience, his demonstrated righteousness before God, his chain. There it is. It means that the decisive thing is not that you believed something, but that he did something. Not the merit of your response. When which the entire system is built around. Say the prayer, right? Say the prayer. Believe. Say the prayer. Not the merit of your response, but the merit of his faithfulness. In other words, moving from. Not abandoning, of course, but moving from the believer's faith as the thing that counts instead to the righteous standing of Messiah. The. As the thing that counts. Your confidence is not the strength of your believing, but in the chain of the one whose faithfulness stands before God and covers those joined to him in allegiance. You understand the difference? It's very clear. Moses chain covered Israel at the golden calf, right? But Moses was mortal. The high priest chain sustained the system through Yom Kippur and all of the other sacrifices, but the high priests were mortal and fallible. Yeshua's chain, the Pistis Christo, is the permanent answer to the question that the book of Hebrews works so very hard to tell us. Now, let's get uncomfortable. Just that makes some people uncomfortable, but. And the theology behind everything I'm teaching you and talking about requires this. I don't love to. I don't like to be disruptive necessarily. It's necessary quite, quite a bit. But this matters because when you get this wrong, there's a framework that will fall apart. The question about who Yeshua is, specifically the nature of his righteousness. Now, there's a very common way of talking about Jesus in the church. The church. No such thing. I understand it. There is no the Church. I'm just saying there is a prevalent way of thinking among Christian orthodoxy and Protestant thinking, which is that Jesus is so strongly identified with deity that his humanity can begin to sound incidental. He looked human, he experienced human things. But in practice, the story gets told as though everything was already settled in advance. Now, can you feel the thin ice I walk on here? I understand why people talk that way. There are theological impulses. But I want you to see what that does to the argument that we're making, that Pistis Christo makes, that the Bible actually makes. If our way of speaking about Yeshua empties the humanity of the real testing, then chain, of course, falls apart. There is no merited favor, and we say very little about the reality of his human obedience. Chain, as we've traced it out from Moses to Jesus, involves demonstrated favorite faithfulness. Demonstrated if nothing was actually at stake in his obedience, if there is no real testing, if there's no real proving, no real costly faithfulness, then the mediator pattern is completely useless. And if Yeshua's righteousness is not genuinely demonstrated, then the Tzaddik pattern breaks apart. And this is the merit of the righteous, if you've ever seen it. Moses Chain was real because his faithfulness was real. It cost him something. He chose solidarity. When God offered a free break, a new start, he walked with God through decades of difficulty. His standing was built. That was Moses, first Redeemer. If Yeshua's standing wasn't walked out under equally, if not more difficult conditions, then he does not fill the Tzaddik role in the way that the Scripture presents it. This is the important pattern that we've traced from first Redeemer to final Redeemer would fall apart. Now, this is not a Christological message. I'm not here to settle every christological debate that has occurred in the history of the church. But we do have to read texts carefully and the text is very clear about this. In the book of Hebrews, from Moses to Jesus, first to final, the writer of Hebrews opens the letter identifying Yeshua's exalted position. Right? He's higher than the angels. The exact imprint of God's nature, the heir of all things. That's chapter one. But then in chapter two, the writer does something that brings the chain framework right into line. He says, Yeshua was made for a little while lower than the angels. He took on flesh he shared in blood and humility. He was made like his brothers in every respect. And then the line, for because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those when they are being tempted. What is that chain? An extension of chain. One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. The language is important. It is, and this is the New Testament telling us, of course, that Yeshua's faithfulness was tested. It was not automatic. It guess what? He didn't come preloaded with the software. This was not theatrical what he did on earth. He faced the same pull that you face. That is genuinely demonstrated righteousness by walking with God through everything, choosing obedience when he had alternatives. He definitely had alternatives. Do you not know? I could call down legions of angels. God, I wish you'd take this from me. He had options, but he built the relationship with the Father. Genuine weight forged under genuine stuff. Real chain. No, staged, pre, programmed obedience. He is not a holiness robot. And this is what makes him the answer to the question that the prophets and we talk about the failure, the breakdown of the system. His standing, it required no ritual maintenance. It is demonstrated, tested, and it's proven to be permanent. Now, what does this mean? I know that's a lot of pieces. What does that mean? It's practically grace is the favor that God gives through the standing of the righteous one. That's the pattern we've traced and we see it in Noah, right? Noah's chain, Noah's favor. It protected these eight people, but they couldn't stand apart. They had to get in the boat. Abraham had standing. Moses certainly had standing. It covered Israel because he refused to be separated from them. It's us. It's not me. They couldn't have just wandered off, though. They had to stay in the party. They had to be there. And Yeshua, of course, this is the same thing. His merit before God, his faithfulness, his pistis, his demonstrated Chain, that is the ground you stand on. That's what Paul saying in Romans 3. That's the ground you stand on. You didn't build it. You can't boast about it. It's not yours. But your allegiance to him, your binding yourself to him, your willingness to declare that that's your part and that's what it means to be in the Ark, to be in the community of the Tzaddik, to shelter under Yeshua's merit. And this is where. Okay, pause. That said point established. Okay. And such an incredibly obvious point, right? So obvious. This is the average traditional Jesus loving Christian at this point can say, of course grace comes through Jesus. Jesus did something Moses could never do. Jesus fixed what I could never fix, gave me grace I did not deserve. And now the point is that I get to go to heaven when I die. Why did you really need two messages to tell me that? It's so familiar. And I understand that. But everything I've shown you about Chin, about the tzadik, demonstrated favor. All of that, Yeshua as the ultimate expression of it. All of that is simply preparation, because that's not even really what our teaching series is about about. But you got to have the foundation. It's preparatory, laying down categories. But the reason I've taken the long way around is because the issue is not simply grace comes through Jesus. Why is he worthy to save? The issue is how people think the grace comes through him. What is it that made him worthy to save? And the answer to that, in most people's minds, it's quite fitting. As we approach Passover, Jesus, the sacrifice, grace demonstrated through sacrifice. Now, Moses had chain. No, it's the soft H on the Moses had chain. Moses saved Israel. Moses was willing to be blotted out. But there's a big difference. There was no blood with Moses. Blood. Yeshua's story is different. Blood sacrifice. Literally laying your life down with Moses, specifically Moses, and the intercession and the demonstration of chain. There was no lamb, there was no sacrifice. Moses stood in the gap through solidarity, and God received it. But with Yeshua, there is blood. The New Testament uses very specific sacrificial language to describe what he accomplished as the lamb, as the offering, as atonement, blood. Something is happening in these texts that goes way beyond what Moses did at the Golden Calf. And it's described specifically related to Passover. This blood is a very big deal. And that's exactly where the confusion begins. Because many people, most people were taught a story in which that blood means one specific Thing God had to punish, had to be pacified, had to have payment, finally turned from bulls and goats to Jesus and it all got fixed. That is a story that must be challenged. And that is part of why I've taken the long way around. What we're moving toward in this series is a challenge. Pretty central assumption in Christian theology that's called penal substitutionary atonement. The idea that the grace of God, the grace of Jesus comes to us because Jesus took the punishment we deserved, satisfied divine wrath, and in that way opened the door for forgiveness. And right there, the story of his merit actually becomes something very different than the story the Bible tells. And there are confused faces, and that's fine. The way the Bible tells it, the way that the original audience would have understood it, the disciples, the way that the first communities would have understood before it got blurred and reframed by centuries of theology built on top of it. As I said, certainly nothing I will propose to you asks you to walk away from the beauty and significance of, of the death of Yeshua. But I am going to ask you to be willing to question whether that story has been told in the right way. Because if we don't understand it, if the categories are wrong, the Passover lamb is read through the wrong lens. The sacrifices in Leviticus are read wrong through the whole point that basically all God really cared about is that something dies. And we will keep reading Hebrews wrong as though it overturns the entire system that God put in place to pacify his desire for blood. This is prep, favor, standing, mediation, the benefit of the righteous extending to another, that is the foundation and what comes next. We build on a way, in a way starting with Passover, that will demand a great deal from you if you approach this from traditional Christian theology. Now, I know we're in a Messianic synagogue and we think outside the box, but sometimes we just don't know how small our box actually is because we've inherited a lot of these things. We will revisit ideas that many of us were taught were untouchable. But I believe that what's on the other side of that is a more beautiful appreciation of Yeshua, more biblical, more coherent, more faithful Yeshua. This is. This is it. Yeshua is not merely our redeemer because he is the victim at the end of a punishment mechanism. He is the righteous one whose proven faithfulness opens the way for those bound to him. And what that means for you and me as disciples is also part of what I want to show you. That is the road and stay with me. You'll like it. You're gonna learn things and you don't even have to agree with me about everything. But I am going to make you think and really thinking is part of it. I hope I'm going to change the way you see Messiah, God, discipleship and your future. Next week we start with a look at the Passover lamb. The calendar works just right. [00:31:18] Speaker B: Shabbat Shalom I'm Darren with Shalom Macon. If you enjoyed this teaching I want to ask you to take the next step. 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