Yeshua Explored

Re-alignment?

Seven principles that should define our Christian walk

(This series of articles was written at the beginning of the first lockdown in March/April 2020)

Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – (until they finally pull the plug!)

Let’s stall a bit and consider Flockdown, the current lockdown situation for the Church. Flockdown produced a Church in exile, but, as was the case with the original Exile, a situation of blessing as well as a curse. The curse of Babylonian Exile came about through idolatry and corrupt practices. The curse of Flockdown, as I suggested, came through the modern equivalent; idolatry that has seeped into Church practices as it compromises with the World and the corrupt practices redefines as the systems the Church has inherited that are not the best way to worship God and follow Him. It is time to unpack this a little bit, in terms of both doctrines and practices.

In my book Hebraic Church I listed seven basic principles that should define our Christian walk:

How real is your faith? If there’s one major theme as a result of the Church replacing its Hebraic roots with Greek thinking, it’s the supplanting of God in the centre of our thinking, replacing Him with the thoughts of man, often resulting in God as a figurehead without power (as with our Queen). This was a non-issue in the early Church. God was at the centre of all that they did, He was a given, Someone to talk and argue with, not Someone to argue about.Faith is sensitivity, understanding, engagement, and attachment; not something achieved once and for all, but an attitude one may gain and lose.

How Jewish is your Jesus? We need to see Jesus in his historical context, not just the Incarnation in the Gospels, but the back story provided in the Old Testament. We need to see Jesus as an agent of Creation and as a regular visitor as the Angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Scriptures. We need to see him in his Jewish environment, his rabbinical way of teaching, his observance of Torah and the festivals of the Lord. We need to see why he was the Messiah, the Son of God and the Son of Man, to see beyond the familiar slogans. We also need to understand subsequent Jewish history, as a result of the corporate rejection of our Messiah. Finally, we need to understand that Jesus is going to return one day in a thoroughly Jewish manner, to a Jewish location and instigated by events centred around his own Jewish people.

The Bible is God’s mouthpiece. The Bible should speak to us primarily about God, rather than be used as a reference book for the plans of man.We especially need an understanding of the much reviled and neglected Old Testament. Did Jesus come to destroy Torah or promote it? Are the Biblical festivals for Christians? What about the Sabbath? These are all important questions and have rarely been asked because the Church has traditionally been taught that the New Testament has replaced the Old, just as the Church has supposedly replaced the Jews.

Do the Jews have any divine favour? The Jews are God’s treasured possession and He has never changed His mind on this, otherwise He would have told us and, also, we Christians would never be able to trust Him again. If God has rejected Israel for what it did in Biblical times how can He continue with a Church that has let Him down continuously, corrupted His Word and failed so many times to reflect Jesus in its dealings with the World? If God is as fickle as Replacement Theology tells us, then we’re all lost! Despite any public statements you hear, the Church still has issues with the Jews.

Is there real life in your Church? What is its attitude to the “Law”?This is something confused by many in the Church who believe that we are so much “under grace” that there is really nothing we should do to show for it, otherwise it may seem that we are working for our salvation. The fact is that we work because of our salvation. The Torah is more relevant to the Church than it has ever realised. Worship has been pigeon-holed into a stereotype of singing sessions, but there’s so much more than that, so very much more. Our whole lives are meant to be expressions of worship to our God, it is a function, an activity, not a session, or a special time, or a concert or celebration. The whole function of our lives should be to love Him and use our mind, body and soul in worshipping Him.

Wisdom is one thing the Christian world is very short of at the moment, proper Godly wisdom that draws people towards Him and away from ourselves. Awe is the beginning of wisdom and we need an image of God that takes our breath away, even if it is accompanied by fear and trembling. The other thing is our giftings, the unique skillset and character given to all of us. Our chief goal is to find ways of giving them all back to the Lord, finding our place in the Body of Christ and embracing whatever is Plan A for our life.

We still have the capacity to sin, we must never forget this and true repentance is probably the most neglected facet of our Christian life. Although the Biblical imperative is for us to “change our mind” about our sins, a more Hebraic approach is implied by the Hebrew word teshuvah, a change of direction and whatever that involves. Action is always going to be better than words, because this will usually involve other people. Our prayers should also involve other people and communal prayer is a strong feature of the Hebraic tradition. Prayer, as well as all other activities where the Body of Christ builds itself up, should flourish in a Church environment, whereas evangelism, our interaction with the World, should occur where the World is … outside the Church. Finally, we see that the Hebraic way is quite restless and noisy and we should embrace this if applicable to our circumstances, it’s born out of a reverence for life itself.

Remember, don’t analyse. The Bible shows us again and again that God wants us to consider time over space. Those first Christians were a people of a tradition that stretched back for centuries. They followed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They are part of the nation forged by Moses in Sinai and led by David in the Land of Milk and Honey. They knew their history, they revered these men of old and especially those prophets, from Moses to Zechariah, who met with God at a given time, with messages for them all. There is no such thing as “holy spaces”, places where God can be found, but there are holy times, when God has visited our lives. This is our on-going testimony, God causes us to remember, to remember and believe, it does far more to sustain and build our faith than any number of clever arguments.

Function is to be preferred over form. The thing that turns Greek thinking right on its head is the concept of form and function. It arises from a view of things from the perspective of God, rather than the Greek concept of man being at the centre of everything. For God everything in Creation has a purpose.Everything in Creation (including you and me) should be identified by its purpose, or function, as well as its physical appearance, its form. In our culture, it is form that rules, we observe objects, we use them, we collect them, we are them. We’re comfortable with nouns. In God’s Kingdom, verbs are more important, even the Hebrew language, the language of most of the Bible, is a verb-orientated language, a language of action, of doing things.This really is thinking differently. When we meet a Christian friend we should be wondering what good works God has prepared in advance for them to do. What are their gifts according to the grace given to them? What is their function in God’s Kingdom? When we meet an unbeliever, we wonder what role God may have for us to introduce them into God’s kingdom. It’s not so much who we are, but rather what we do, that is important to God.

Now consider your Church experience. We have inherited a system and an environment borne in the minds of pagan Greek philosophers and forged into something we call “Church” by those, such as Origen and Thomas Aquinas, who wished to create a synthesis between these systems and the Word of God. We may have inherited this as a fact of the processes of history, but we don’t have to accept it. Flockdown has disrupted our inherited system, has removed us from the brick and mortar and the structures that thrived in that environment and has issued us a challenge. This is where the blessing lies.

This is an extract from the book, Flockdown: Is the Church out for the count?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-263-p.asp