My Second Response to Yisroel Blumenthal || The Judicial Hardening of Israel

Yisroel,

I count it a privilege to dialogue with you. My aim is to be as gracious as you have been with me and as faithful to the Scriptures as I can. I have colored your words in blue and have responded beneath each section. Generally I don’t like this method of response because it is so impersonal and comes across crass and condescending even if it’s not. But since you were so succinct and well written, I think it may work. Have mercy on me if it doesn’t. You raised jugular issues, and I want to respond sufficiently. And hopefully it will ward off some of the nasty emails I’m getting from your fellow anti-missionaries who feel I’m launching an ad hom attack on you without giving thought to your arguments or proper response to your assertions. 

Point #1

You contend that our message is inadequate and our skills are not up to par.

I will not comment on my skills – I would be the first to agree with you that they are not up to par. I will however disagree with your assessment of the message I bear. It is not my message. It is the message that God Himself imparted to our nation (Deuteronomy 4:35). That message is not inadequate. That message is the hope of all mankind – Jew and Gentile alike (Isaiah 54:5).

I’ll take message over method any day.  Truth is preeminently more valuable than the package it comes in. So I commend you for putting all the emphasis on message over method. But unfortunately for you, your apologetic lacks substance.

I receive the passages and propositions you stated above as true. Amen and amen! But there is far more to the “message that God Himself imparted to [your] nation” than you are heralding. The same God who proclaimed Himself as “One” in Deuteronomy also declared Himself “One” in the Gospels. There is no contradiction between Moses’ revelation of God and John’s revelation of God. The only difference is that in the Gospels He was wrapped in flesh (just as the Tanakh promised). “The Lord is One.”

Now, if the mystery of the Godhead–Father, Son and Spirit–was a new revelation in the Gospels and epistles, I can understand why you would reject it. But it’s not. The mystery of a trinitarian Godhead was being proclaimed long before Jesus said “I and the Father are One,” “Before Abraham was, I AM,” and “If you have seen Me you have seen the Father.” Remember, it was Isaiah who said that the “CHILD” who would sit upon the throne of David would be both “SON,” “GOD,” and “FATHER” (Isaiah 9:6-7). The trinity is a Jewish idea rooted in the Old Testament.

The reason I repeat and reiterate that your message is inferior is because your message is incomplete. You’re only telling part of the story. You’re reducing a grand epic into something that the LORD never intended to be reduced or manipulated. You say that your message is a message of hope for all mankind. I disagree. Your message is not a message of hope until it includes all the elements of the holy story. The LORD who is One is the hope of all mankind. And His name is “Jesus.” Yeshua is the greater Hoshea who bought Gomer out of her slavery. And He alone is the hope of both Jew and Gentile. 

Point #2

You contend that our “resistance” to the message of Jesus is part of a long historical continuum of hard-hearted Jews.

We don’t “resist” Jesus. We insist on remaining loyal to the God who loved us first. This is what we were chosen for and it is for this loyalty that we will be vindicated as the prophets promised (Isaiah 26:2).

Brother, “I” don’t contend that your resistance and rebellion is a historical continuum. Your Jewish prophets and apostles do. I’m not creating a message. I’m simply being a parrot of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and rest. And I wish you would do the same. It was Moses who said the following:

“For they are a nation void of counsel,
and there is no understanding in them.
If they were wise, they would understand this;
they would discern their latter end!
How could one have chased a thousand,
and two have put ten thousand to flight,
unless their Rock had sold them,
and the LORD had given them up?
(Deuteronomy 32:28-30 ESV)

That line “unless the LORD had given them up” is holy. It speaks not only of Moses’ generation of rebels, but of the historical continuum of rebellion that would persist until “the time of the end” when “the power of the holy people will be completely shattered” (Dan. 12:1-7) after being “given up” one final time (a sublime hour of suffering and salvation that is mounting on the horizon).

You are correct to say that your people as a distinct nation will be vindicated as is promised in Isaiah 26. But again, you’re not telling the whole story! The context of Isaiah 26 is Isaiah 24-27 which speaks of the Eschaton when Jacob will undergo the final time of discipline and Zion will be exalted in the wake. It is that age-ending discipline that will lay the ancient “controversy” (Mic. 6) that God has with your beloved nation to rest (Is. 4). I’m not pulling this out of the air or the New Testament. This is from your books written by your prophets. You are right to speak of your future vindication. But look at the context of that vindication:

For the LORD will vindicate his people
and have compassion on his servants,
when he sees that their power is gone.
(Deuteronomy 32:36 ESV)

Take note of that phrase, “when their power is gone.” What does that mean? It means that Jewish vindication follows exasperation. Your future glory (of which I also long for) will not come before the dark night of suffering (which has not yet come). And why is the suffering coming? The same reason that your precious people have suffered so much at the hands of Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and even Nazi’s–”their Rock gave them up.” Why would He give them up to suffer so horrifically?! Because of the historical continuum of Jewish rebellion against the LORD–the very thing you are here denying.

Could it be that your failure to acknowledge your long standing guilt before the Holy One is the root of all your past, present, and future suffering as a people? Could it be that the succession of military invasions throughout history have been the “rod” of God’s chastisement? Was this not what Moses prophesied in Deuteronomy 7, 28, 30 and 32? Was it not what Isaiah prophesied over and over again? Was it not what Jeremiah declared? If you remove Jewish rebellion and unbelief from the story, you’re ignoring the majority of the story! I urge you to read your holy Book again.

Claiming that God is going to someday reward you for your loyalty while in reality He is judging your for your harlotry is the greatest of tragedies. And since your Jewish Old Testament centers around “the controversy of Zion” (Is. 34:8) and the ongoing conflict He has with you as an elect people, I suggest you wrestle with the possibility that your loyalties are misguided and your integrity mistaken.

Some will undoubtedly label this “anti-semitic.” But if this is anti-semitic, then Jeremiah and Isaiah were worse than Martin Luther. 

Point #3

You contend that I had argued that Jews were somehow endowed with superior skills which give them an edge over the Gentiles in evaluating the claims of Jesus.

It is here that you most seriously misunderstood my point, and I thank you for pointing out to me how my point can be misunderstood.

When I say that the only ones qualified to evaluate the claims of Jesus were the Jews, I was NOT referring to superior skills that the Jews may or may not possess. I was referring to a social context – and let me explain:

All of Christendom agrees that before Jesus came on to the scene, God had already imparted truth to the Jewish people. All of Christendom acknowledges that it was the moral duty of the Jew to examine the claims of Jesus in light of the truth that had already been granted to them. All of Christendom agrees that as long as the Jew sees the claims of Jesus as contrary to the truth that God had already granted to them – then it is their holy and moral duty before God and man – to reject those claims.

Dear brother, I didn’t misunderstand you at all. I completely understand what you meant in the previous response and what you mean here. My response remains the same. You claim that you are in a unique position with a unique vantage point from which to accurately judge whether Jesus is who He says He was, namely, the GodMan. And you clearly and unambiguously asserted that the uneducated Gentiles were in no position to draw a credible conclusion about the authenticity of Jesus’ claims as the “promised One” and the “LORD of glory” who is “one with the Father” and “the express image of God.” The basis for our incompetence is bound up in our not being Jewish. You have asserted that you alone have the right and the ability to determine whether Jesus is God in the flesh and worthy of worship that belongs to God alone. And I take issue with this. 

What were those truths granted by God to the Jewish people before the advent of Jesus? My guess is that you would say: The Jewish Scriptures (and please don’t hesitate to correct me if I am wrong).

Here is my challenge to you. Try to read the Jewish Scriptures as a Jew would have read them before the advent of Jesus. Try to read those holy words as a personal message from a loving Father to His firstborn son – because that is what the Jewish Bible is. Try to develop a complete world-view on the basis of the Jewish Scriptures alone. And then, and only then, evaluate the claims of Jesus in the light of that world-view.

It is not impossible for a Gentile to do this. However, it would help if their teachers would be more willing to help them in this process rather than hinder them.

Reading this brings me joy and brings me sadness. We are on the same page! But yet we hold such different convictions. You’re correct: We must approach Jesus with the history and theology of Israel as our guide. But this is precisely why I take issue with your illegitimate dismissal of Jesus. The continuity between the Testaments is dazzling! The Jewishness of Jesus, Peter, John, James, Philip, Stephen, and Paul is incredible! 

When you act as if we Christians have not thought through the issue of Torah, Tanakh, and all things Jewish, you lose even more credibility as apologists. We have! I for one am intrenched in it so as to wage war on Christian anti-semitism that is spreading like cancer right now. I am deeply committed to the Hebrew Scriptures, genuinely affectionate and indebted to the Jewish people, and committed to the continuity of Judaism from Moses to Paul, and from the Tanakh to Matthew. That is, understanding Israel, covenant, election, promises, sacrifices, feasts, and judgment are all essential categories of thought that Jew and Gentile Christians must understand to understand both Testaments and the Man of whom they testify. I say that to say: I wish you would heed your own counsel.

When I read the Gospel of John, Acts, Romans, or Hebrews I’m stunned by two things: the Jewishness of Jesus and the great mystery and anomaly of Jewish rebellion. Yet you deny both of these. How can this be? I’ll elaborate after the next paragraph you wrote.

As part of a response to the June 92011 Line of Fire radio show, I wrote the following appeal to Dr. Brown: “The myth of the “blindness of the Jew” is an ugly stain in the history of mankind. Dr. Brown, instead of working to perpetuate this myth, I appeal to you to educate Christians of the fallacies of this myth. Explain to your audience that as long as the Jew sees the teachings of Christianity as a contradiction to the Scriptures with which we were entrusted by God – it is the moral duty of the Jew to REJECT those teachings. Encourage your audience to try to read the Jewish Scriptures as a Jew would have read them before the advent of Jesus. Encourage your listeners to attempt to acquire a complete world-view on the basis of the Jewish Scriptures alone – and ask them – how would they view the doctrines of Christianity in the light of the Jewish Scriptures.”

Why is it that one of the most conspicuous realities in both Testaments (but more so the Tanakh) is casually disregarded as a mere “myth”?! How can this be? How can you call the blindness of the Jews a myth? Yes, Jesus and Paul taught on it extensively. But when they did, they never spoke of it without referencing the Tanakh! It is a Jewish teaching! So my dear brother, I must turn the challenge back on you, as it is you who has failed to read the Jewish Scriptures as a Jew. Hear your Jewish prophets:

MOSES SAID:

But to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear. (Deuteronomy 29:4)

ISAIAH SAID:

“God gave them a spirit of stupor,
eyes that would not see
and ears that would not hear,
down to this very day.”
(Romans 11:8/ISAIAH 29:10 ESV)

DAVID SAID:

“Let their table become a snare and a trap,
a stumbling block and a retribution for them;
let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see,
and bend their backs forever.”
(Romans 11:9-10/PSALM 69:22-23 ESV)

JEREMIAH SAID:

“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not.” (Jeremiah 5:21)

EZEKIEL SAID:

“Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see, but see not, who have ears to hear, but hear not, for they are a rebellious house. (Ezekiel 12:1)

How can you call this a “myth”?! This is a bedrock foundational theological truth that was spoken by Moses and then reiterated by almost every prophet since! You can’t treat it as a nonissue. It’s a massive issue! It is the issue. National Israel has been partially hardened. And that judicial blindness will not be removed until after “the time of the end” when the Spirit will be poured out upon the whole house of Israel. In that one single solitary day your sin will be removed (Zech. 3:9; Is. 66:8-10) by being “purged by a spirit of judgment and burning” (Is. 4:3-5). Then you will be “restored to the bond of the covenant” as a restored and regenerate nation. But not until the hardness has been removed and the blindness healed. For that glorious Day we watch, wait, and pray. That Day aside for a moment, the present hardness and blindness must be affirmed and acknowledged. And yet you call it mythical. Amazing.

In my humble opinion, it is this attitude of Christian leaders that makes it so difficult for the Gentiles to acquire the proper tools to evaluate the claims of Jesus.

Say what?! The blindness and hardness of Israel is not a contrived theological category. It was not constructed by anti-semitic Christians who wanted to legitimize pogroms and expulsions. While this doctrine of judicial hardening was in fact used by rabid anti-semitic Church fathers like Augustine, Jerome, and Luther, to justify gross atrocities against Jesus’ beloved kinsmen, the reality itself cannot be denied. The inappropriate use of it must be condemned. But the reality must be acknowledged. According to Moses, Jeremiah, Zechariah and the rest, it will be the national acknowledgement of this guilt that will bring this age to its consummation transitioning us into the glorious age to come. But the new heaven and the new earth will by no means precede Israel’s new heart. And this will require national repentance–something that the military invasions of your ancient history and the holocaust of recent memory did not produce. Suffering alone cannot produce repentance. Only grace. And the Day of grace will come on the heels on the Day of judgment and vengeance. 

To summarize; my point about Gentiles not possessing the proper tools was a point about the Gentiles failing to read the Jewish Scriptures in its proper context – I was not making any elitist claims about “superior skills” of Jews over Gentiles.

 You were and you weren’t. Your elitism is unperceived. You’re assuming that I am an uneducated Gentile who has yet to read from a Jewish perspective and doesn’t understand the implications of the Deuteronomic commands concerning the rejection of prophets and wonder-workers who claim to be God. But what if it turns out that I am in the unique position of expositing the Jewish Scriptures to a Jew who has failed to be truly Jewish? What if through your rejection of Jesus and your misguided allegiance to the Tanakh has hindered you from seeing the miracle that is unfolding before your eyes? Namely, that Jew-loving Gentiles are expositing Jewish Scriptures to Jews who have yet to acknowledge central elements of their saga and story as a people. By me expounding upon the texts and categories that you’re not willing to consider, I am fulfilling the ancient promises that “stammering tongues” of foreigners would point you to your own Scriptures “line upon line, here a little, there a little” so as to point the way to true rest in the LORD (Is. 28).

Now for your challenge: You ask me to give you one good reason why the prophecy of Isaiah (49:1-7) cannot be the words of Jesus.

I will give you two reasons.

a)      You may have noticed that the words in 49:2 are directly parallel to the words in 51:16. If you read 51:16 in context (verses 12-16) you will see that God’s servant is the righteous of Israel.

You’re engaging in eisegesis. The Servant in Isaiah 49 cannot be Israel because the Servant of Isaiah 49 saves Israel. Moreover, not only does the Servant of Isaiah 49 save Israel, He gathers in the Gentiles as well. The text couldn’t be any clearer:

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
(Isaiah 49:6 ESV)

The amount of intellectual dishonesty required to assert that the Servant is Israel who “raises up” and “brings back” Israel is amazing. The next verse makes it even clearer:

Thus says the LORD,
the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One,
to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nation,
the servant of rulers:
“Kings shall see and arise;
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves;
because of the LORD, who is faithful,
the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”
(Isaiah 49:7 ESV)

The “one despised [and] abhorred by the nation” cannot be the nation! The despised Servant of rulers, is the Servant of Israel, the Servant of the Gentiles, and preeminently, the divine Servant of GOD. He IS God. As Jewish John said of Jewish Jesus, “the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And that Word “became flesh and tabernacled among us” as a Jewish Man. He is the Davidic GodMan. And this prophecy prophetically declared, He was destined to be hated by “the nation.” To suggest that He is the nation is altogether ludicrous and exegetically bankrupt.

b)      The servant that Isaiah speaks of brings glory to the God of Israel. Jesus brings glory to himself – not to the God of Israel.

 If Jesus IS the God of Israel, then your argument is hollow. And as Isaiah 49 clearly shows, “the Holy One OF ISRAEL” is intimately and affectionately involved in the exaltation of the One abhorred by the nation. 

You assert that to “love Jesus is to be a true Jew”.

Please; don’t try to redefine Judaism. According to the Jewish Scripture being a true Jew means being loyal to the calling of our nation to bear witness to the world that there is but One God (Deuteronomy 4:35, Isaiah 44:8). Of all the Jews who ever lived, it is Jesus who represents the most extreme antithesis of Israel’s calling before God. There can be no greater conflict with Israel’s calling than to direct the devotion of men towards an entity other than the One that God Himself taught us to worship.

 I am doing nothing more than reading and affirming the Testaments. In your Jewish Scriptures, a GodMan was promised to come. According to your Jewish Scriptures, He came. Jews killed him because He claimed to be God. And Jews worshiped Him as God. And so do I. To say that this is redefining Judaism is illegitimate. I’m magnifying true Judaism. Because true Judaism is a Judaism of the Spirit, not the flesh; a Judaism that understand the circumcision of the flesh was a sign of a national covenant that was a downpayment of the promises of a coming One who would circumcise the heart by putting His Spirit in the hardened sons of Abraham. This is not Gentile logic. This is Jewish logic predicated on Jewish exegesis of Jewish Scriptures. Hear Paul, the Jew, speaking of Jesus the Jew and his Jewish brethren who rejected Him on the basis of Jewishness:

Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:1-13 ESV)

I recognize that you may have a problem understanding some of what I wrote, or perhaps even all of what I wrote. I encourage you to read my blog. Many of the concepts that I touched upon here only briefly are articulated more clearly in various articles.

With respect, I understand you very clearly. You reject the category of national blindness. You reject that it is the primary reason for your rejection of Jesus. And you reject true Judaism in favor of a stunted and immature expression that can only reach its full potential through faith in your Jewish King that you traded for Barrabas. 

But most of all, I encourage you to write again. As long as we can still talk, there is hope that we can reach some level of understanding.

I look forward to engaging more with you in the future. I count it a privilege and an honor to have the opportunity. 

In His grace

Dalton

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