Israel, My Beloved

I grew up in East London (UK not South Africa) just a 15 minute bus ride from a community of Orthodox Jews, my secondary school (Convent type) was smack bang in the middle of the same community so I had quite a bit of exposure to Jewish life.   Even though I could see the Jewish community, it was always from the perspective of an outsider, and even though many of my peers thought their behaviour strange and ridiculous, to me they held a certain type of mystique because they represented a physical connection with the God of the Bible.

As I got older and as I wandered from church to church, denomination to denomination I began to realise that every Christian that i met seemed to have a view about Israel and the Jewish people.  I found that many in mainstream Christianity tended to have a negative perspective of Israel which resulted in subtle signs of anti-Semitism whilst those who were either Jewish Believers or who had adopted the Hebrew roots belief were more likely to have a prideful and almost idolatrous perspective of Israel and ethnic Israel.  As a Messianic Believer I find both of these extremes upsetting, they are definitely not godly emotions or thoughts; but what does God think about Israel and who does He view as being Israel?  The answers to these questions are in the bible but I think we might be surprised by what is revealed and I hope that these answers will change our opinion about Israel and the Jewish people so that we become more aligned with God’s heart.

Shall He find faith on the earth?

I lay awake early one morning pondering the words of a dear friend, she writes:

So many people I know and care for are going through some very trying times… everything… that can be stretched, tested and tried seems to be getting the full force in recent months and years.

As I lie here I can’t help but nod my head in agreement, things seem to be getting tougher and harder across the board but I see this trend most especially amongst God’s Children.  Alongside this trend, is the obvious desire to escape from it all, to find a way out from all this hurt, pain and coldness that seems to be becoming second nature within the world.  Unfortunately Christians are not exempt from this either and I see this most clearly in the rise of prosperity teaching which teaches people to have it all now, and the consequence of this is greater coldness, self-centredness and materialism which slowly causes the individual to break out of the sheltering wing of the LORD and become firmly rooted in the world.  So now we see a world in pain, straining under the weight of living and its people frantically looking for any way to ease the load and to shift the burden, how far do you think mankind will go to make themselves comfortable?  What does the Bible say?

I have never been one that has clearly understood eschatology (the study of the end times) but I have always possessed an understanding that things will get increasingly hard and that there will be a time of great tribulation, so I am shocked when I hear Christians brothers and sisters say that they will not be affected by any of this because Jesus (Yeshua) will come and rapture them out.  Is this really and truly what the Bible teaches us?  Matthew 24 covers the signs of the end in some depth, Yeshua said:

⁹Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.  And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.  And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.  And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.  But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

Verses 9-13.

What can we see here? A few things:

• Betrayal, who is doing the betraying?  I sincerely believe that betrayal will come within the body of Christ, when things get too hard there will be people who will choose to save their own life and turn against their spiritual family.  We have seen this occur previously in history, and we should not be surprised that human nature should repeat itself.

• Mass deception and the rise of false prophets.   Who will we be more inclined to listen to someone who tells us that we don’t have to suffer anymore, that we can have all we want now or a distant God who wants us to suffer the worst tribulation in all history (verse 21)?

• Coldness and hatred, the hearts of men will turn cold, there will be no love left to give only a desire to take and survive, but Yeshua says: “but he that endures unto the end, the same shall be saved.”  Ahhh, we see that word ‘endurance’, God tells us that living in the world during these times will be something that we will have to endure until the end, there is no ‘get out now’ button.

There has been a proliferation of end times movies which show the Body of Christ being ‘raptured out’ before things get too scary and too traumatic, this reminds me of memories of childhood where when a horror movie would come on the television, I would simultaneously hide behind the sofa and peek over it to see what was going on.  I feel that Christians are now watching the world, behind the sofa (safety net of the rapture), scared of what the Bible says the future will hold and using the concept of a pre-tribulation rapture as a safety net.  Is this true, will we really not have to go through the tribulation at all?  What does the Bible say?

Yeshua said:

“And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.”

 verse 22

Who are God’s elect, God’s chosen ones, if not those who faithfully confess and hold on to the commandments of God and the testimony of Christ?  Yes it’s true, God’s people will still be here on earth during the time of the great tribulation.

But does this mean that the rapture will not occur at all?  No. if the rapture refers to the catching up of God’s people to meet Him (Yeshua) in the air, this is a biblical truth (verses 31, 40 and 41).  But this event occurs after the tribulation, not before and not during it:

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.  And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Verse 29-31

Why am I writing all of this and what do I hope to achieve?

I am writing this in love, because I see the signs spoken of in Matthew 24, not just wars, earthquakes and famines but those more subtle signs which are taking place within the heart of mankind.  People are not only getting colder, darker and more desperate, but people are becoming more and more afraid as the world seems to break down all around them.  Does God want us to live in fear?  No!  Yeshua said that when we see all these things that we should look UP because our salvation (He, Yeshua means salvation) draws near.  If you read my post on the Last Trump, you will recognise that it focuses on the second coming of the Messiah and reminds us to be soul-ready for His arrival.  Am I really there yet, are you?

Chapter 24 ends with stark warnings to His people:

• will we allow the deceiver to break into our house and steal our salvation from us while we are too busy in the world (verse 43)?
• Will we grow tired of waiting and frustrated with the trials of life, that we begin to mistreat one another and become more and more like those in the world (verses 48-49)?

The Lord says that the recompense for the world will be very, very heavy because He will avenge His elect (Luke 18: 8).  When the Son of Man returns, shall He find faith left on the earth?  How is your faith today, shaky, barely visible?  We must be strengthened in our faith in order to be amongst those who do still have faith, no matter how little when our Messiah returns.  And I sincerely believe that all this stretching, testing and trying that my friend spoke of is God’s way of saying to us: I love you so much that I’m making you go through this now so that your faith is strong enough for the time to come ahead.  No my dear friends, it’s not easy, none of our spiritual ancestors had it easy, why do we expect any less for ourselves, does God rate us any higher than He did His prophets?  Please as Yeshua said, let us learn our lesson from the fig tree (verse 32) and be ready, let us not rely on false glimpses of hope but instead let us help to build each other up in faith and truth in readiness for the day that our Messiah returns.  Even if we are not alive for His return let us live and die marked in and by faith.

Please share your thoughts, I really am interested in them positive, neutral or negative.

Missing the Last Trump (Second Coming Series)

A few years ago, the Lord led my husband and I to start celebrating the Biblical feasts.  It wasn’t something that we felt we had to do to ensure our salvation but something that we were convicted to do out of love for God and an increasing knowledge of the role of Israel and the Jewish people in the origins of our faith and in prophecy.  Last year, things were quite bad for me health wise, I had been attending a Messianic fellowship at the time so I knew that the fall feasts of Trumpets, Atonement and Booths would soon be upon us.  Even though I had an awareness of this, it was a dulled knowledge that became more and more muted by the worries, stresses and strains of life.

It is an unwritten rule in our relationship that I am the person that keeps tabs of the dates of each individual feast, when it starts and when it ends and which days are rest days.  Although Judaism as a whole tends to use a calculated calendar which predicts where the feasts fall each year, we feel led to use the method of reckoning in the bible which is based on the citing of the new moon month from Israel.  This means that I have to regularly check validated sources online to check when they determine the feast days to be.  Last year it totally slipped my mind.  It wasn’t until my husband asked me what date Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement – 2^nd fall feast) would be that I realised that the Fall Feasts had already begun without any knowledge on my part.

At first I felt quite nonchalant (I have to be honest) after all Rosh Hashanah only marked the start of the Hebrew civil calendar so I hadn’t really missed much; but slowly a surge of remorse began to flood over me.  I remembered that each biblical feast points towards our saviour in one shape or form and that this very fact meant that this feast was important to God and therefore should be important to me.  I recalled that Rosh Hashanah also named Yom Teruah (Day of Trumpets) was a prophetic feast which marked the second coming of Messiah in glory ready for Judgement over the earth (Matthew 24: 29-31):

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:

And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.  And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

With the understanding of exactly what the Day of Trumpets signified came a wave of guilt, and I began to berate myself over and over, how could I miss this feast day, any feast day?  And then I heard the voice of the Holy Spirit speak over my inner turmoil and say to me, “Be thankful you did not miss the real thing!”  I can tell you that those words really arrested me; it was sad and unfortunate that I had missed the Feast of Trumpets, and I made a concerted effort to celebrate the remaining feasts, but I was extremely glad, grateful and thankful that I had not missed the real Trumpet call!

Yom Teruah - The Last Trump

I learnt two things from this whole experience:

1. That I really shouldn’t allow the worries of life get in the way of my salvation, no matter how stressed and anxious I am or how overwhelming and difficult life gets that I should always be spiritually awake and not become dulled to the reality that Christ will return again and that I should be ready.
2. That we can also be seemingly upright on the outside, going to church, celebrating the biblical feast days and generally doing “good works” without being soul ready for the second coming.

This really made me think about how ready we are as Believers for the second coming of our Lord, I truly believe that many of us as it stands fall into the category of either being too numb and uncaring of our faith and our daily walk because we place most of our time and energy on the cares of this world and as such are in danger of not recognising the signs of His return.  Whilst others are too focused on their own righteousness, and the pride of their own works that they no longer look outside of them to take time to look around and see that they have come off the narrow road that leads to salvation.  We need to earnestly pray against the spirit of pride, fear and idolatry which is present in both of these scenarios.  Let us pray:

Abba Father,

Your word says that we do not know the hour of Your return and that only You know but that if the master of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up and so You call us to be ready and alert so that we are not caught off guard too.

Lord God, I pray for your people that we will let neither the worries of this age or the deceit and wickedness of pride from preventing us for preparing ourselves for your return.  Lord, make us soul-ready for your second coming whenever it shall be.

In Yeshua’s name I pray.

If you would like to find out more about the significance of the Feasts of Trumpets for Christians here is a great article.

Note:  a special thank you to everyone that helped me to spread the word of the free kindle booklet download, the last time I checked on Sunday, 29th January there had been 95 downloads, which was only 5 away from the 100 that I was aiming towards!