In Article one, we began this journey of understanding
Replacement Theology. We looked at Paul’s
response to the Gentile Christians who were beginning to adopt the theology and
offered a different perspective. For
Article two, I felt it was important to delve further into the origins of
Replacement Theology and the result of the Christian Church adopting its
philosophy.
Replacement Theology says that the Jewish people have lost
their covenant status with God. God got so angry at the Jewish people for their
disobedience and inability to keep their part of the covenant that he decided
to transfer over the covenant promises to the Gentiles and the Jews won’t get
it back. The Jews are no longer God’s chosen people.
Unfortunately, in my research I discovered that this
ideology has been around almost since the beginning of the church. As more and more gentiles came to faith in Jesus they began to reject the idea that the Jews had any part in Christianity
and no longer wanted anything to do with Jewish believers. The Christian church has come against the
Jewish people almost from the beginning.
There was a Samaritan believer ca. 150 A.D. named Justin
Martyr who first began to propose the idea that God was finished with the
Jewish people and therefore the Gentile Christians would become the new Israel. According to Avner Boskey in his book, Israel
the Key to World Revival, Martyr’s presuppositions could be summarized in the
following way:
1.
“Jews have forfeited the title ‘Israel’ but
Gentile Christians have received it;
2.
Jewish physical circumcision is a sign of judgment;
3.
God likes Gentile worship better than Jewish
worship;
4.
Jews have forfeited the Bible and it now belongs
to Gentile Christians;
5.
Gentile Christians are now the ‘true Israel’.”
These presuppositions planted seeds into the heart of the
Gentile Christian Church and grew until anti-Semitic acts began to manifest. Some of the earliest anti-Semitic acts perpetrated by the
Gentile Christian Church included the following:
*175 AD Pope Victor
condemned the use of the Jewish calendar;
*306 AD the Council
of Elvira, Spain forbid Christians to marry Jews, receive Jewish prayers
or blessings,
and eat with Jews;
*325 AD Council of
Nicaea severed the Jewish connection of Passover with the date of Resurrection Day;
*345 AD Council of
Antioch excommunicated Christians who celebrated Passover with a
Jew;
*Antisemitism
increased year after year with canons forbidding Christians from attending
Jewish
festivals, enforcement of strict rules for the baptism of Messianic Jews, preventing
Jews from
holding public office;
*1492 Spain expelled
all Jews who do not renounce Judaism and Old Covenant practices,
even to the
point of burning them at the stake if they did not comply;
*1542 many Jews were
burned at the stake by the Church for following Old Covenant
practices;
*1936 Hitler under
Germany’s National Reich Church required pastors to expel all Messianic
Jews or Christians of Jewish descent from the
church.
Why did Christian Church Fathers allow such hatred to be enacted
against our Jewish brothers? Apparently
Paul saw this coming when he addressed it in Romans 11:18. He wrote “Do not boast over the branches and
pride yourself at their expense. If you do boast and feel superior, remember it
is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.” Clearly Paul
saw that the Gentile Christians were beginning to feel superior to their Jewish
brothers.
Paul also writes that it is the
root that supports the Gentile Christian Church not the other way around. The word root here is speaking not only of
Jesus, as in Isaiah 11:10, “And it shall be in that day that the Root of Jesse
shall stand as a signal for the peoples; of Him shall the nations inquire and
seek knowledge, and His dwelling shall be glory”; but it is also referring to
Israel and the Jews as the root or the nation from which the Messiah came.
How can the Christian Church, whose foundation hinges on a
God who sent His Son to be born into a Jewish family, and raised as a Jew,
persecute and excommunicate the very family of that Son. The Christian Church would not know Salvation
and how to worship God if it were not for the Jewish people. The first church was not Christian and made up
of Gentiles it was formed from Jewish men and women who followed the Torah and believed
that their Jewish friend was the Son of God.
It wasn't God’s intent to send His Son that only the
Gentile Christian Church would be saved and walk in the Kingdom. It wasn't His intent to use the Jewish men
and women to spread the message of the Kingdom to the Gentiles and then take
the Kingdom away from them completely. This is not
the nature of the God we serve.
Paul addresses this issue in Romans 11:8-10. He writes that God gave the Jewish nation a
spirit of stupor so that their eyes could not see and their ears could not hear
the truth of the Messiah Jesus. In verse
8 Paul starts out by saying “As it is written” then he goes on to say in verse
9 that David discussed this very thing in the Psalms. (Psalm 69:22-23) Paul appears to be saying
that God planned from the beginning to give the Jewish people this spirit of
stupor.
So does that mean that God took the Kingdom away
from them? According to Paul the answer
is no. Romans 11:11-12 clearly says that
God gave them this spirit of stupor so that the Gentiles could have a part in
the Kingdom. And if the Gentiles are so
blessed with Salvation then there will be even greater riches when God lifts
the spirit of stupor and the Jewish people recognize Jesus as their Messiah. So according to Paul God had a purpose all
along and it wasn't to completely cut off the Jewish people from His covenant
promises.
So what was God’s purpose in using the Jewish nation in this way? We will explore the Jewish role in God’s plan
in the next article.
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