Growing up, we always understood that we had our Bible and the Gentiles had their
Bible, the New Testament, and that they were two completely separate books.
Because the only people I knew who were believers in Jesus were all people in our
public school who were Italian Catholic, I imagined that Jesus was Italian.
My best friends across the street were Catholic.
And actually, I didn't know about that.
I didn't know about anything having to do with religion or even Jesus.
And they informed me that I would not be able to go to heaven, but I would be able
to go to purgatory.
One of the things I loved to read was Greek mythology.
All the great heroes of Greek mythology, Hercules and Perseus and Theseus,
they're all these half-men, half-gods.
You know, honestly, that's kind of the way Jesus came across to me.
There's this God, and he finds this Mary, and they have a child, and it's Jesus,
the Son of God.
I mean, it just came across as very... not monotheistic and not Jewish at all.
The mix of my neighborhood was 50% Jewish and 50% Catholic.
We were told, you cannot read the New Testament.
If you believed in Jesus, you were Christian.
I was asking the rabbi who God is and some of my teachers who God is and my friends
of all kinds of different friends who God is.
You know what I never really did?
I never really asked God who he is.
My mother's family came from Minsk.
They escaped from the pogroms, and they brought their Orthodox Jewishness
to America.
And that's how I grew up, as an Orthodox Jew, with the bar mitzvah, Hebrew school,
and all that went with that.
Love didn't seem to be a part of the picture.
Our whole household was full of anger, throwing things, yelling, slamming doors.
I was not loved, nor was I loving.
Growing up, I learned nothing about Christianity, nothing about Jesus.
I didn't learn too much about God either.
When I was about 19 years old, somebody recommended I go into town in San
Diego and buy a Bible.
In the New Testament, I saw that Jesus said, Come to me, all of you who are
heavily burdened, who have trials and troubles.
Come to me, and I will give you rest.
And I realized that without the help of God, the love of God, and the healing of
God, I couldn't get there.
I couldn't make things better.
I think that was the greatest experience in my life, that understanding.
I'd never seen a New Testament before.
And I began right at the beginning with the Gospels.
And as I read, it wasn't the Greek mythology that I was expecting.
It was Yeshua.
He was talking to all the people right there in Israel, His Jewish brothers and
sisters.
And He was teaching them from the Torah.
I saw that Jesus loves the Jewish people.
He was born Jewish.
He lived as a Jew.
He preached and taught to the Jews.
I started to move back to loving the Jewish people, my people, who I had
rejected.
And I saw that Jesus was rejected, but He continued to love back.
I had no idea about this idea of forgiveness.
Jesus gave His life for mankind, for the world.
That's how much He loved us.
Here's the first sentence.
It says,
So three people are mentioned and they're all Jewish.
I was very shocked.
And as I continued to read, I'm reading the story of a Jewish man who was born in
a Jewish village, in a Jewish country, and one day walks into a synagogue and
announces that He is the Messiah.
I never really asked God to reveal Himself to me in a way where I can truly
understand who He is.
So on May 3rd, 1981, about 10 a.m., I did just that.
I got down alone in my dorm room and I picked a verse that was both in the Hebrew
Scriptures and the Newer Covenant.
The verse is, And I said,
And all I can say is this, at that point, I just knew.
All my questions, all my arguments, everything just faded away.
I just knew that He is Moshiach.
I never felt more Jewish.
Because what can be more Jewish than believing in the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob?
The God of Moses, the God of David, the God of Jeremiah, the God of Isaiah,
the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua.
The identity of Yeshua, as you can see, has been a topic of great struggle for our
people.
You might have a few questions yourself about who He is and what that means to you
in your life.
Let's start with what He said about Himself and then look at what the Hebrew
prophets said about Him in the Bible.
First, He said, He is the only way to God.
In the book of John, He said,
He saves us from death and judgment.
In Luke, He proclaimed to a woman, The other guests began to say among
themselves, He is life eternal.
Yeshua said,
He is the judge of all.
He said,
He is God.
As Matthew in his gospel says, quoting from Isaiah the prophet,
And they shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated God with us.
In Isaiah 9-6, the prophet again says,
And finally, in the book of John, Yeshua said of Himself, Assuredly,
I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.
And in the gospel of John, chapter 10, Yeshua says, He is Lord.
What does that mean?
It means that He is the ruler over all.
Yeshua obeyed the Father's direction and so should we.
He never said, follow your heart.
He said, follow me.
Yeshua isn't a philosophy.
He's a person.
He showed us by example the way of life and commanded us to follow Him.
Aristotle said to his disciples, follow my teachings.
Socrates likewise said to his disciples, follow my teachings.
Buddha said to his disciples, follow my meditations.
Confucius said to his disciples, follow my sayings.
And Muhammad says to his disciples, follow my noble pillars.
But Yeshua says to his disciples, follow me.
At His first coming, He died for our sins, sacrificing Himself to save our souls.
He saved us from God's judgment for our sin and through His Holy Spirit gives us
new life and the strength to overcome temptation and trials.
Yeshua introduced a new way, not just following the Torah or religious rules,
but by obeying God from the heart, going beneath the surface of the
commandments to the very heart of what God wants for our lives.
Do not commit adultery became do not lust.
And you shall not kill became don't hate or be angry without cause.
Yeshua went past the surface to the core issues that drive us to sin.
The prophet Jeremiah said that God would write His law upon our hearts.
Our tendency is to focus on correcting the outward actions.
But Yeshua wants to change our heart and desires so that we are motivated to pursue
Him and His ways.
And one day, Yeshua will return as our King and reign on His rightful throne in
Jerusalem.
This is something every Jewish person understands about the Messiah.
But most Jewish people don't know that the Bible predicted two comings of the
Messiah.
The Messiah would come first as a humble servant and return as a conquering King.
For example, in Isaiah 53, the prophet prophesies that the Messiah would die for
our sins as a perfect sacrifice.
He would take our punishment upon Himself.
Sounds a bit like the story of Yeshua, right?
And there is a host of other prophecies that all point to our Messiah,
Yeshua.
And we encourage you to watch the attached study resources to dive into this in more
detail.
But these prophecies bring up two important and related topics.
The deity of Messiah and the unity of God.
As mentioned before, Yeshua claimed to be God in the flesh.
This idea turns many Jewish people off to Jesus.
This could have easily done so to me, but I understood that the Bible prophesied
that the Messiah would be God in the flesh, what Christians call the
incarnation.
This is the teaching of Yeshua Himself and also the message of the prophets.
Again, Isaiah not only told us that a virgin will conceive and bear a son,
and you shall call His name Immanuel, God is with us.
But He also spoke of another child which would be born and be named Wonderful
Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.
And we know this is referring to Messiah as Isaiah tells us in the very next verse
that this person would reign on David's throne forever.
And that is a very long time.
Clearly, Isaiah believed the Messiah would be God in the flesh.
And this is why as a Jewish person, I can accept it, because I see it taught
in the Hebrew Scriptures.
We also understand that the Bible speaks of the nature of God as triune,
three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, distinct and yet the
same.
Some would try to argue that this puts followers of Yeshua at odds with Judaism
and the teachings of the Torah.
But the subject of God's complex unity is not foreign to the Torah or even modern
Judaism today.
So what does the Hebrew Bible say?
Our opinions only carry weight if they agree with the Word of God.
So we need to start at the beginning and build our understanding from the bottom
up.
The fundamental Jewish confession of faith called the Shema is taken from Deuteronomy
6-4.
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.
Or in English, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
The Hebrew word Echad is translated one here, but it refers to a compound unity.
Just as in English we could say one team or one couple.
It could mean a single unity, of course, but when used in this instance,
it refers to something more.
Let's give a few practical examples.
According to Genesis 2-24, when a man is united to a woman, the two become Echad,
one flesh, clearly a compound unity.
So also in Exodus when God instructs Moses to join the many pieces of the tabernacle
together so that it will be one, Echad.
The Shema was simply a way of saying to our people Israel that the Lord alone was
to be our God, He and no other.
The persons of this divine unity are understood to be co-eternal, co-essential,
and co-equal.
God's triunity is not some neatly spelled out doctrine or a trite little teaching to
be explained in 30 seconds or less.
It's like asking a Hasidic rabbi, is the Shekhinah God, or is the Memrah
God, or are the Sefirot God?
These are deep theological and philosophical issues.
Honestly, describing God and understanding the deepest nature of His being is like a
fly trying to figure out nuclear medicine.
There's still so much we don't know, but what we do know through the Word is
what we're trying to reveal to you today.
And because this is such a complex concept, we have some extra resources
available in our study guide to go deeper.
The Gospel of John gives a beautiful description of the unity of God and the
person of Yeshua when he says, In the beginning was the Word.
The Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
All things were made through Him, and apart from Him nothing was made that
has come into being.
In Him was life, and the life was the light of man.
The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.
We looked upon His glory, the glory of the one and only from the Father, full of
grace and truth.
Out of His fullness we have all received grace on top of grace.
Torah was given through Moses.
Grace and truth came through Yeshua, the Messiah.
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only God in the Father's embrace has made
Him known.
Wow!
That's a ton to unpack, but let's focus on a few key points.
First, the description of Yeshua as the Word.
John said that this Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.
Just as God pitched His tent in the midst of His people Israel through the
tabernacle and temple, while remaining God in heaven and filling the universe with
His presence, so He pitched His tent among us through His Son Yeshua, while remaining
God in heaven and filling the universe with His presence.
The concept of God's fullness dwelling in the Messiah in bodily form presents no
problem when properly understood.
For just as the glory of God filled the tabernacle and temple without in any way
emptying, depleting, or lessening God, so also His glory filled the Messiah
without in any way emptying, depleting, or lessening Him.
Again, we can go much deeper with this, and we have more resources attached in the
study guides on our site.
The concept, simply put, is that the Father and the Son are one, as Yeshua
stated in John 14, 9.
He who has seen Me has seen the Father.
Remember the Creator of the world who created all things and dwells in
dimensions still unknown to our world.
He's not just a simple character to define.
It's unity with diversity.
So we've touched on many of the various aspects of Yeshua, that He's Lord,
salvation, divinity, and one in the unity of God.
But quite possibly, one of the most important aspects for us to understand is
that Yeshua is our husband, the lover of our soul.
Wait, hold up.
That just got a little weird.
I'm God's bride?
It might seem strange for some of us to think that way.
But if you look throughout the Torah, the prophets, and the New Testament,
you will see the same theme.
Remember in the book of Hosea, God said He would betroth us to Him
forever, and that He would call Him Ishi, My husband, and no longer Baali,
My master.
The prophet Isaiah said, Your Maker is Your husband.
Adonai Tzevaot is His name.
The Holy One of Israel is Your Redeemer.
And in the book of Revelation, we see a common theme of the Bride of
Messiah and the Married Supper of the Lamb.
Many religions throughout history have seen God as a distant master and Lord,
but God's desire is deeper and more personal.
He is seeking a relationship built on faith and love.
But I'm still a bit confused about the bride part.
Well, don't let it trip you up.
Let's break this down.
Traditionally, the husband is the provider, protector, and leader of the
home.
Yeshua is all of that, and He loves you more than you can know.
And if we could summarize the Bible into one central theme, one could say it's
God's love story to mankind, His pursuit of our hearts to bring us back into a
loving relationship.
If we lose this point, then we easily find ourselves falling into dry and dead
religious ritual and works.
But how beautiful is it that God demonstrates His own love toward us and
that while we were yet sinners, Messiah died for us.
The good news of our Messiah is that God loves us so much that He paid the ultimate
price so that we could be brought back into fellowship with Him again.
And that's truly the point of it all.
The beginning of the Bible tells the story of a relationship broken and trust
severed.
But the culmination of the scriptures in the last book of the New Testament is God
dwelling with His people in perfect fellowship forever.
But now to the important question.
Who do you say Yeshua is?
This is by far the most important question of your life.
We've covered a lot in this short time and we encourage you to take a look at the
scripture yourself.
Get to know Yeshua through reading the Word of God.
His Word is the best description, what's important to Him, what He values,
what He's like.
We have tons of resources available for you to dig in further into this question.
And your discussion guide has links to other videos and resources that can help
you on your journey.
If you would like to connect with other believers in your area to talk some of
these things through, connect with us over email, Facebook or WhatsApp.
If you've decided who Yeshua is and want to take the next steps, there are many
around you that have taken those same steps that would love to pray with you and
help you in your journey to truth.
And remember, you're loved and valued by God.
Keep seeking and asking God for help.
Next, we will be covering our prayer life, how we communicate with God.
Make sure you take time in the week for your daily readings and the discussion
questions.
These resources can help you get daily focus and personal discovery in these
truths.
Just like anything in life, the effort you put in will be the result you get out.