Evangelism / Proselytizing / Repentance

It seems to me that many Christians focus a LOT of their efforts into trying to make as many converts as possible. And I was just thinking the other day why that is.

In the final verses of Matthew and of Mark Jesus gives the so called great commission to go into all the world preaching the gospel and baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In Luke and at the beginning of Acts He implies that the gospel will spread out to the whole world, but He doesn't command them to do the spreading.

In Mark 6 when He sends out His disciples He tells them to preach repentance and to heal the sick. In Matthew 10 He says the same thing: preach repentance. But this time He specifically says to only go to the Jews; nobody else. In John 10 He says to tell them that the kingdom of God has come near to them. In John 20:21 He says, "As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you."

My point is that there are very few places in the gospels where Jesus says we have to go out and tell people about Him. When He does send out His disciples he tells them to heal the sick and preach repentance, just as He did while He was walking around with them. He wasn't going around saying, "Hey everybody! I'm the Messiah. Believe in me or else you'll go to hell." He did do some of that but it seems that His bigger focus was on repentance and healing.

Really quick I will define repentance for you, because a lot of Christians really don't understand this word. Repentance means you stop sinning. In modern Judaism when we say a Jew repented what we usually mean is that he left his life of doing whatever the hell he felt like doing and he started living according to the Torah. I think that's a very accurate definition of repentance.

In the gospels (I'm particularly thinking of John) Jesus says that if they knew the Torah and the prophets they would know Him; they would have immediately recognized Him as the anointed redeemer of the world. What I'm suggesting now is that rather than making our priority going to all the world to tell them that they are sinners who need Jesus, maybe we should be doing exactly what Jesus did: healing the sick and preaching a return to the lifestyle of the Torah. My theory is that once people have truly repented and gained an understanding of the Torah they will automatically see Jesus for themselves.

But then why aren't all the religious Jews seeing it so obviously? They have been purposely blinded for now and it may be that in all world they will be the last to see it. As it has been said, "the last will be first and the first will be last."

When was the last time you saw someone both preaching repentance and healing the sick? I've never seen it personally. I've heard a few stories from Africa and India, but I've never seen it up close. There are so called healers like Benny Hinn, and there are feel good preachers like Joel Osteen, and there are guys like Paul Washer preaching repentance, and there are theology teachers like John Piper, but why have I never seen anyone preach total repentance AND heal the sick? Isn't that exactly what Jesus told us to do in the gospel accounts I mentioned above? So why aren't we doing it?

I want to remind you that also how well carry out the great commission has no direct connection to our own salvation. In other words our entrance into heaven is not at all based upon the number of people we led to know Jesus. What it IS based upon is that Jesus is able to say to us, "oh yeah, I know you! Well done good and faithful servant!" The way Jesus describes His good and faithful servants is they kept watch for His return, they tended the "vineyard", they visited the sick and imprisoned, they clothed the naked, they fed the hungry, they invested what He freely gave to them so that it grew.

The good and faithful servants' lives show the following characteristics: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. When you look at someone and see that these things are the description of their character you will also notice that it's contagious. Their great character also gives the people around them great character. Now add to that the fact that this guy has the power to miraculously heal people and he does it in the name of Jesus, who he follows with all his heart. After about 10 seconds with this guy you would see others like him who were doing the same things. Because the Holy Spirit doesn't lie dormant; it spreads like fire to all who will receive it.

Now I come to my main thought and question: how did we Christians get our priorities so mixed up? How did we make the great commission mean we just go tell people about Jesus to add them as a number on our list of converts we made? The Gospel is so much more than that! How have we so easily received Christian doctrine and thrown out the Bible? What have we done? We desperately need repentance: to return to God in humility, to study the Bible as is, and to completely rethink what our mission from God is here in this world.

He says if we seek Him we will find Him. If we seek Him with our whole hearts.

Why did Jesus have to die?

Why did Jesus have to die?
Have you ever wondered this? I used to. Wasn’t there any other way for us to come clean before God? Yeshua (Jesus) Himself said in John 14 that he alone was the way to the father and He would give truth and life as well.

First let’s look at God’s relation to His creation. In Genesis 1 and 2 God creates everything that we know as our world, He creates the “Heavens and the Earth”. John 1 shows us that Yeshua also was in the beginning. He did not come out of God because He was one with God, one yet also distinct. Deuteronomy 6:4 says, Hear O Israel! The LORD (YHVH) is our God. The LORD (YHVH) is one. It says He is ONE! How exactly does that work? I don't know, but I don't need to understand how something works to believe it is true. 

In Genesis 1 and 2 He creates everything and we forget that He also creates the less tangible things like Math and Physics. I think he created those right after Genesis 1:2 where it says the earth was without form and void. He made what I will refer to now as conformity laws. These are the laws that affect our universe and we have no choice but to live by them, examples are: gravity, time, aerodynamics, light and dark, the periodic table of elements, etc. We may learn to manipulate these laws to our own scientific advantage. For example we can manipulate them to build an airplane and we can in a sense fly. But when we do this we are still conforming to all the laws of physics and we cannot do otherwise no matter how hard we try. God created these conformity laws for the universe to abide by though He Himself is not at all bound by them. Thus we say God is not bound by time or space. He is infinite in every way.

We are stuck in a three dimensional experience of the world. We can only know our three axes of space and we have labeled them x, y, and z. Or they could be thought of as height, width, and depth. 

A two dimensional square has only height and width and 
consists of four strait lines making one face. 

 
Now if you turn that square into a cube by giving it depth also, 
it will now have twelve lines and six facets. It just got a lot more complex. 


Now say as an illustration you were to take a coffee mug and look at as if it were only a two-dimensional shape. From the side with the handle facing away from you it looks like a rectangle.


 
Spin it so the handle is perpendicular to you and you get an oval attached to the rectangle.



 
Look at it from above and you get a circle with a 
line sticking out of it.


If you were stuck in two dimensions and that was all you knew a 3-dimensional coffee mug would be a very confusing object. You would see from one angle and say “that is a rectangle.” Then you would see it again from a different angle and think it was a completely different object when in fact it is not. Now since we are actually limited to a maximum of three dimensions try to imagine what a fourth dimension would be like. Can you even guess what it is like? Now try a fifth, and then a sixth. The nature of an atom (electrons, and neutrons) can be very confusing at times, as can the nature of light (is it particles or waves?). It is likely that they exist in dimensions beyond our understanding and that is why we cannot quite figure them out. String theorists have speculated that there are at least eleven dimensions to our universe and have done their best to explain what each one is. What I'm getting at is that God created all these dimensions and He is more complex than all of them.

He is not bound by space as we are; we have now established that. It has been said that as our soul fills our body, in the same way God fills the universe [Talmud: Ber 10a]. I'll give an example of how our soul fills our bodies. We do not think about synapses in our brain firing off in a certain order for our tongue and lips to move while also forcing air out of our lungs through our vocal chords; and all this has to work together for us to say something intelligible. It just happens. Our person completely fills our body and does things without our conscious effort.

God is not bound by time like we are. Jesus’ death was both for us now, after, and also for those in the past: before He walked the earth. We often think of time in a linear way that must be experienced at a certain rate. We can think into the past and relive experiences in our memories at whatever speed we like but the future can only be experienced as it happens: one second at a time. God is so far beyond that dimension that He knows our whole life stories before we are even born (Psalm 139: 2, 4, 16). It may be thought of as a person with perfect memory who has read a novel from cover to cover. They can recall any string of events at any time of the story or even look at the whole story all at once. Jumping from beginning to end is done effortlessly. Now imagine that our universe is a story that God can experience in that way.....

God created the laws of Math and Physics and bound the universe to these laws, but He also created other laws which we can choose to accept or reject: The Torah. The Torah shows us how we ought to live. Aside from just being rules to live by these laws are attributes of God. Or maybe I should say they are primarily attributes of God and He has commanded us to be like Him by living according to these rules. His nature is justice and mercy and love. He has commanded us to be just and merciful and loving. Or to use His own words, “Be holy as I am holy” [Leviticus 11, 19, 20, 21]. Essentially for us to accept or reject these laws (the Torah) is to accept or reject parts of God Himself. Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the law (Torah) but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). Yes they were fulfilled in Him: He lived by them perfectly in His Godly nature.
 

One of the laws that we were given was the law of firstfruits [Exodus 23, 34]. This law states that the first and best of everything we receive (or earn) is given as an offering to God. Later we may keep the remains for ourselves. This law was originally given to the agriculturists of the time so they would bring their first ripe harvest and their firstborn animals and children into the temple for dedication. The first crops were given to the priests, the animal was sacrificed if it was a kosher animal, and the children and had to be bought back from God (because they were already His) [Exodus 13]. God promises that when we give Him our firstfruits he will bless us with an abundance of things to come later and the concept applies to much more than just agriculture, it should encompass your whole life. The law of firstfruits is commonly used in God’s story as a sign of what is coming, as we will see more of later. 

Somewhere in between the laws of physics that bind our universe and the laws of the Torah that give us choice and morality are the spiritual laws. The laws of good and evil are a spiritual law. On one hand evil simply cannot be in God’s presence, just the same way that in physics darkness cannot be where there is light. But on the other hand every person is given the choice of being good or evil from the Torah. So spiritual laws have similarity to both the previously laws but they are also in some ways completely different because they belong to a different dimension than what we are familiar with. 

Originally all chose goodness and lived in the divine presence of God [Genesis 1, 2]. But once the first humans did what was evil, their evil spread like a genetically inherited cancer down to the generations of all of mankind, and with that cancer comes separation from God and death for the sinners. So with that cancer that we have genetically inherited we are no longer even capable of choosing to do good to the point of being in God’s presence again like in the Garden of Eden. We can't simply will it to happen, just like we cannot just will ourselves to live forever in this world. We have rebelled against God and as a result have been banished. Evil has won in our lives, but there is hope.
 
God wants for His creation to be reconciled with Him so He carried out a perfect plan to show us His mercy and justice. He showed us in the Torah that His justice demands our death because we are evil sinful creatures. And He gave us a sign through the slaughtering of a clean, perfect, and very valuable animal as a burned sacrifice to Him that the death we deserve would then be on that animal instead. But animal sacrifice was never really to take away our punishment (Hebrews 10); instead it was a picture of something else that could take away our punishment and restore us to God. For one life to be given in the place of another that being would need the authority to do such a thing. You cannot give your life if it never belonged to you in the first place. Animals can't do it. People can't do it. There is only ONE who is the owner of everything and He owns it because He created it.

So now we come back to the main question of why Yeshua had to die. God wanted so badly for all people to live in His presence worshiping Him that He provided for them the only suitable being to take their evil onto itself ::::::: Himself. 

He alone was valuable enough, perfect, and able to do it; so he came as Jesus. Why did it have to be Him and not another human? No regular human could do it because all humans had inherited the first man’s evil making them unsuitable for it while, Yeshua was completely without sin. He was not born by normal means so he did not inherit the first man’s evil. 

What about the animals sacrifices? Besides not having the authority to give their lives think about the value. How many cow or sheep lives are worth as much as one human life? They are not comparable. Though animals were used as a continuous symbol of God using Himself for the sacrifice, their value just could not cover the cost; while Yeshua’s value is far above our cost for redemption. Yeshua was so valuable that He was able to pay for all of creation to be reconciled with God. Because by Him, through Him, and for Him all things were made (Colossians 1:16-17) He greatly exceeded the value of all things. 

Since Yeshua is human and bound by the laws of physics He was then capable of taking our evil and dying with it. But since He is God, the creator of all things, He has the authority and the value to give His own life in our place. He is the only thing that would be enough for us. 

Because He is also the creator of life and death He rules over both and is able to come back to life as the firstfruit of the resurrection. Now think about this: if He had stayed dead, He would not be God; death would be. And if He were not God, He would not have been a perfect suitable candidate for all people. But since He is God and outside of the laws of time and space, it did work and He was able to take on the evil of people who lived in the world past, present, and future! Amazing!
 
Do you believe it? It is the truth. It is THE good news. Jesus was not just a good Jewish teacher. Yeshua was God in human flesh, here for a specific goal and He accomplished it all perfectly. We are all now faced with a choice. We can choose to believe that what God has done is the truth and choose to live in God’s presence again by forsaking our natural evil lifestyle, or we can continue in our rebellion against Him and reject what He has given us. The choice is your and yours only to make, choose wisely.