Beloved, this two-part article contains, in my opinion, some of the most important disciple training concepts we’ve considered so far. But they have always been controversial and some may find what is said difficult to accept. If that describes you, I urge you to continue to plow your way through it anyway. Ponder these meditations with a prayerful, teachable spirit, keeping in mind the whole range of the Scriptures, including their Last Days Fulfillment.
If you struggle with these issues, you certainly won’t be the first. Many have agonized over this. In fact, what we discuss here drove people to want to kill our Lord, and Stephen, and many others throughout history! But I offer this article on repentance to help Last Days disciples come to grips with the ultimate fulfillment of God’s will, because instead of going away, these issues are going to intensify! And, in the end, it won’t be my opinion or yours that will matter. All that will matter then… will be Almighty God… and what He thinks and what He requires of us all! And that’s why it’s important that we take to heart what He has really and truly revealed to us… in writing.
So I urge you to ask the Holy Spirit to transmit to you exactly what is in our Father’s heart. Open yourself to what He has revealed about how things will be after our Messiah returns to this world, and after He makes, of His Son’s enemies, a ‘footstool’ for His feet (Ps. 110:1). That climactic era of Creation’s Full Restoration and its ultimate conformity to the Absolute Authority of God’s Living Word, is what this article has in mind. Right now we are still far removed from that point. But by the end of our Exodus Journey, we will all be perfectly aligned with everything Father has revealed, commanded and promised.
Remember also that this material is meant to serve as a tool to help Last Days disciples get through Disciple Boot Camp Training, successfully. Our training is deliberately designed to take us through the gut wrenching process of crucifying anything in us that still stands in the way of our wholehearted acceptance of, and union with, the mind, heart and commission that Father gave to our risen Lord. Messiah Yeshua is here to fulfill His Father’s will and purposes… through our crucified, yielded flesh! That’s why we’re being taken through boot camp. We must rewire our brains and reprogram our minds until we are fully one with our Messiah and His God-given commission!
So, although the content of this meditation may be hard for us to deal with at this time, it contains an essential lesson every disciple must learn and absorb in the light of the Fulfillment and Complete Restoration that Father has in mind for all of His Creation. Please apply Proverbs 3:5-6, and Isaiah 55 and 66:1-2 to your heart as you read. Don’t allow your past or current understanding, or your habitual comfort zones, to filter out or dilute and distort the depths of Biblical repentance and the Heavenly Realities into which the Holy Spirit must take us in the future. So now, having said that, I ask you to begin to consider this two-part article…
********
Repentance: A Core Boot Camp Issue (Part 1)
New Covenant disciples must be trained and taught to ‘repent’… truly and effectively. This is an essential requirement! And the Holy Spirit will place major emphasis on it while He equips and prepares us to obey and live out our Lord Yeshua’s revelations, claims, commands and promises. So let’s begin our considerations by pondering the following New Covenant texts… in their proper, original, historical context:
Romans 12:1-3
“Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.”
Notice that chapter 12 of Romans begins with the word, ‘Therefore’. This connecting word is vitally important. It introduces some natural conclusions to what Paul had just finished saying in the previous three chapters where he discussed the relationship union that God has created between His chosen people Israel and all of His Son’s non-Jewish New Covenant disciples. His intent was to drive home to those New Covenant Gentile believers, this utterly essential reality: that by grafting Gentiles into the Blood Covenant union God had established between Himself and His chosen people, God had bound and blended the two groups together into ONE! So now, spiritually and emotionally they had become one New Man under the Headship of their mutual Messiah. And now, God required them to continue to embody that Reality…. to live it out by staying together and walking out God’s Plan… as one unit. Each group had been endowed with certain unique gifts and abilities so that they would be able to combine their assets. The blend of their hearts and lives would create the needed mixture of each group’s God-given ingredients that would finally make possible the Last Days Fulfillment of God’s Plan to completely restore His Creation.
So, only when that mixture is complete and the ingredients are blended properly, can the awesome Explosion of Grace for the whole world take place. So the context of these remarks has to do with the Last Days Fulfillment of the awesome New Covenant that God made and had incarnated His Living Word, so that He could come into our midst to institute and launch it on behalf of the entire human race… with and through… The Whole House of Israel!
So Paul was emphasizing and highlighting the proper, essential heart attitude and sentiments that non-Jewish believers should entertain toward their Jewish spiritual elder brothers in the Faith! Thus, while the revelation wisdom that is contained in Romans can be applied in all situations, eras and circumstances, nevertheless, to properly understand the meaning and impact of repentance, as Paul was ‘unpacking’ it in this very important letter, we need to understand some of the very revealing and enlightening historical context that surrounded the writing of this letter… the pressures and issues… that moved Paul originally, to send this urgent message to the Roman congregation.
He was emphasizing something similar to what he mentioned in another letter he sent to a congregation in Galatia. And this highlights implications that God has embedded in the word ‘repent’. So let’s link part of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, to the Romans text we quoted above:
Galatians 3:23-29
“But before faith came, we (Jews) were kept in custody under the (commands given in the Torah) Law, being shut up to the faith (that is, remaining unaware of all the Fullness that is contained in God’s written Word) which was later to be revealed (and embodied in and through Yeshua, His Living Word). Therefore the Law (God’s written Word in the Torah) has become our tutor to lead us to Christ (God’s Living Word made flesh), so that we may be justified by faith (in God and in His Living Word’s Perfect Finished Works of Creation and Redemption).
“But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For (now, because you are all one in our Messiah in spirit,) you (Jews and Gentiles alike are now spiritually equipped to obey and fulfill what is revealed and commanded in God’s written Word. For you) are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ (that is, you have become one with God’s Living Word, and therefore,) There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female (in your regenerated New Covenant spiritual identities you have become one, so only your Messiah and His Perfect Finished Work, remains. You must all derive your identities from Him); FOR (now, in your Spirit-infused human spirits,) YOU ARE ALL ONE IN CHRIST JESUS! And if you belong to Christ, then you are (also one with Israel… one with) Abraham’s descendants, (and you are, now and forever, co-) heirs (with Abraham’s original Covenant Family) according to (God’s Covenant) promise (made to Abram (Abraham) in Genesis 12:3).” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Beloved, as we will soon see, Paul’s insight into the oneness of the Lord’s disciples had been burned indelibly into his innermost being by the risen Lord Himself! So Paul really knew what he was talking about! He was eminently qualified to know the depths of the awesome Truth that was contained in the words he was sending to them! And, despite the fact that there are so few in modern times who give this spiritual reality much serious thought, Paul agonized over it, because of the unforgettable way through which the risen Lord had revealed to him how important this is to His heart, and also to His Father’s future Last Days plans!
God is eternally serious about the revelation He embedded within all of the Scriptures… including the apostolic writings of the New Covenant! And after Yeshua came to introduce and launch the New Covenant, God inspired His apostolic writers to emphasize the fact that when anyone (Jew or Gentile) becomes one with Messiah Yeshua in the New Covenant by faith… that person also becomes one with Almighty God! So it follows that since we are one with God, we are also one with each other! And in the atmosphere of the first century, this awesome revelation was unwelcome and unthinkable to most people! The Jewish world and the Gentile world were not at all ready or willing to hear it! And unfortunately, it has still not taken hold in the minds and hearts of most of God’s people, even to this present day!
Nevertheless, Paul was insisting that as soon as we enter into God’s New Covenant Reality, whatever we thought we were, before our spiritual union with Yeshua took place, is immediately crucified, executed and forever cancelled out. It happens the moment we submit to and come under Yeshua’s Absolute Authority! So this total spiritual transformation is what is at the heart of the word ‘repentance’ and what it requires! God insists that we realize, accept and absorb what happens to us the moment God’s Spirit is fused into our regenerated righteous spirits. After that, we must realize and willingly admit that as a result of what just happened, we will never be the same for the rest of our time on Earth, and into eternity! That’s why we must continually realign and adjust our inner workings to match and synchronize with the eternal spiritual reality that the indwelling Presence of our resurrected Messiah creates within us!
Forsaking Soulish but Religious Worldly Attachments
But this is a direct attack against the centuries of worldly selfishness and brutality, and mutual prejudice and antagonism that has always existed between the Jewish people and the rest of the world! And since God’s Nature and Plan never change, please realize that what was so relevant to the apostles in the first century will naturally become even more relevant to us as we approach the fulfilling climax to human history! So… here’s a sobering question for us to ponder: Which of us can deny that the divine revelations contained in Romans and Galatians and Ephesians, are still being widely ignored and violated today?
So, New Covenant repentance requires all believers to completely forsake their original, purely worldly, inherited habitual cultural identities, priorities, beliefs and lifestyles… even those soulish, worldly attachments that are religious! This is what our Lord means when He tells us to deny ourselves, pick up our crosses, and follow Him! We can’t just follow Him intellectually and virtually and theoretically, we must actually follow Him personally – volitionally and physically! So we must be crucified in spirit and in truth. That means we will stop clinging to our earthly attachments. Just as our Messiah had to die to His Perfect Sin-less Humanity to redeem us, so must we die to our fallen, Sin-corrupted, radically independent state in order to share in the Fullness of His Heavenly Resurrection state and His Eternal Covenantal Inheritance and oneness with God and His Perfect Righteousness!
Thus you can see that our spiritual regeneration creates a monumental reality shift within us! And that demands that we undergo a corresponding massive paradigm-shift as well… a total revolution in our perception of ourselves and of our fellow disciples, and a new thrust and direction that will give new meaning to all of our future thought processes, actions, reactions and interactions!
But that creates a huge problem for us. Our personal identity patterns and past histories and habitual thought and reaction patterns have been hard-wired into our brains and deeply programmed into the minds and hearts of our souls! So the data that is embedded within our souls and brains, is extremely difficult to forsake and forget and actually surrender to the Cross and leave behind! Matters of the soul are much easier for us to apprehend than matters of the spirit that can only be known through faith in God’s Word. So humans struggle with having to make this Exodus from Flesh to Spirit. They continue to identify deeply with those earthly things. They assume those things are their true essence and identity. That’s why the Heavenly revelation and the New Covenant issues under discussion have always been a major sticking point, even with people who really do want to love and please God!
Many of us remain stuck in our old ways. Instead of identifying with what God has done in our spirits, and switching over to identifying with the new Heavenly realities God created in that intangible spiritual part of our makeup, we insist on continuing to identify with the temporary, man-created, sensual worldly familial traits, habits, sentiments and traditions that have accumulated for years in our Sin-corrupted brains and souls! So, even after we become believers, many continue to wallow in those soulish Gentile (‘Egyptian’) patterns, giving them higher priority… even over the awesome eternal spiritual Heavenly Israelite identity and spiritual Realities that God says He has bestowed upon us!
That’s why so many continue to identify with their human genetic ethnicity and their former inherited, temporary, family heirlooms of religious and national cultures and priorities and divisive sectarian traditions. And, as long as they cling to those soulish things, they will continue to ignore their God-given spiritual Treasure… the new identity, purpose and destiny that now abide deep within their spirits… in seed form! As long as they obsess over their natural, original, earthly priorities, they will fail to garden, feed and water the precious ‘Eternal Life Seed’ of our Messiah’s Perfect Humanity that God has placed deep within our spirits.
Stop Identifying With the Past
The fact is that the Cross removes from us all of the former soulish matters that once pertained to us. The temporary earthly things we picked up in this world’s system are removed forever! But we were taught to entertain and cling to them from our earliest childhood! We maintain deep sentimental attachments to them, thus their grip on our fallen souls holds us in the jaws of an emotional vise… like a hypnotic trance that forces us to identify with and cling to past outdated matters that once pertained to our fallen souls, but are no longer actually with us. Among those earthy attachments are: man-made worldly nationalities and inherited tribal, ethnic, racial and religious traditions, and regional and political mindsets and attitudes. God-less people consider those things to be their identity and primary essence! But none of that comes from God and His Heavenly Kingdom in Eternity. It comes from this fallen temporary dimension of time and space! But it’s so strong, that even ‘believers’ refuse to forsake them because they fail to realize that they, along with all their worldly mental and emotional baggage, have been crucified with our Messiah and baptized into His Death! Their God-given new spiritual reality requires them to learn to identify with their Messiah’s Eternal Resurrection Reality, which has forever replaced whatever may have pertained to them before!
So even spiritually regenerated believers remain grossly divided by matters of gender, race, nationalism, organized sectarian religious concepts, family histories, sexual matters and ethnically derived political traditions and structures. They do this because they fail to understand what true repentance requires. It requires us to stop identifying with whatever is past, and to learn to identify solely with our risen indwelling Lord from now on! And ignorance of this fact prompts them to continue to ignore and disobey the standards that our Lord has set before us. And, in His place, they exalt and obey their former worldly identities, priorities and preferred theologies, philosophies, political persuasions, natural physical passions and urges, and financial and social status levels. Thus they remain rooted in worldly considerations and priorities… in bondage to ‘Egypt’. Those things serve as ‘taskmasters’ that drive the people of this world to continue to maintain an endless number of dividing walls against each other. People and nations claw and tear at each other for the sake of such things. But none of that pertains to what God’s Word, living within us, truly is… nor does any of that give proof that God’s own Spirit now abides within our regenerated spirits! And most assuredly, none of that will ever exist in God’s perfect human image and likeness when His Eternal Kingdom finally reigns supreme!
And so this natural reluctance to switch over from soulish things, to spiritual reality, is what prevents the transforming Life and the creative fruit-producing Power of God from manifesting themselves in our daily experiences and decisions and interactions. They may serve as topics for theoretical study and academic discussion, and perfunctory religious sermons… but the electrifying, world-changing personal and corporate transformations and supernatural fruit that, according to Scripture, should appear in our midst are seldom seen, thanks to all that soulish blockage that we allow to remain in our hearts.
There is a vast difference between what pertains to the human soul, as opposed to the tremendous realities of our awesome, infinitely Majestic God, who is here to abide in and work through our regenerated human spirits! We can’t feel or touch or get an intellectual hold on what is spiritual. We must learn to believe it and operate in it by faith in God’s unchanging Word. And this was what Paul was trying to get across when he wrote to the Roman congregation. This applied to them, but it also applies to the rest of the world! Once Almighty God enters us, He is supposed to take over! His awesome Presence is in us to change and transform everything about us! But if the former worldliness with which we began is allowed to remain, it will continually get in God’s way – even after we become ‘saved’! So if we allow that to keep happening – how can we honestly claim that Almighty God is truly abiding within us… as OUR God? And how can we give any convincing proof to back our claim that we have truly repented, if we remain focused on worldly, carnal things and priorities?
This is what Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was pointing out to the congregation in Rome. He was stressing and insisting that we must no longer identify with former worldly things. It is totally inappropriate to keep putting alien concerns in God’s way. They cancel out what He is here to do in our midst! When we died with our Messiah, we died to this world! So from then on, the only Reality left to us is the indwelling Life of our Resurrected Lord! And because He is now our Life, we exist to live only to Almighty God, in and through Yeshua! The New Covenant God made with Israel and anyone who will believe and obey Yeshua, makes them to be one with God and therefore, one with each person that is also one with God! So despite anything that is currently in vogue in this fallen world, and despite any past differences we may have had between us, we must all come to grips with this unifying Covenant Reality that places us all… far, far above and beyond all the temporal earthly situations, circumstances, resentments, vendettas and any other concerns that continually engulf the hearts of the worldly people around us and keeps driving them to habitually forsake, vie against, and attack one another.
James 4:1-10
“What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: “He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us”? But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.“ (Emphasis added.)
The two texts (Rom. 12 and Gal. 3) we’re considering are spelling out the depths of what repentance really requires. They also tell us much about how different things will be at the end of the Last Days Era, which we seem to be entering even now. If this is true… then, as we approach the complete Fulfillment of God’s Restoration Process, everything will soon change drastically for all of us! At the end of our Journey, things will differ greatly from the way they are today. Even the status quos of all organized religions will be vigorously shaken and tested and purified. And whatever soulishness remains in them, will be destroyed and removed!
So the Era of God’s Ultimate Eternal Spiritual Fulfillment is what Paul and the other writers of Scripture were describing and announcing so long ago. Their writings revealed something for their times… but they were also revealing the way things will truly be at the end of human history… when God’s Kingdom is fully established in the New Heavens and the New Earth that God has promised to provide for us. And, knowing how the Consummation of our Exodus Journey will be, we disciples, especially those among us that will actually witness the Last Days’ Fulfillment, are being given the chance to recognize all of the things that are still in us, that God will have to remove from us surgically… between now and the end of our Journey! He is equipping His own to successfully complete their God-given assignments during the climactic finish of our Exodus Journey. We won’t be allowed to smuggle into God’s Kingdom even a tiny speck of what we used to be, before Yeshua became our New Life! So these texts we’re considering will be of great help, as we begin to realize the awesome depths of personal repentant change that the Gospel has been requiring of the Word’s true disciples… even from the days of Noah and Abraham!
We mentioned that when Paul began to write Romans chapter 12, he was concluding what he had just said concerning Israel’s place in God’s Plan of Salvation. In light of that, I ask you to notice the attitude adjustment he was requiring the recipients of this letter to make in their hearts! This will give us insight into the changes that must still take place in all the rest of us! Paul was warning non-Jewish disciples about some serious errors that had arisen in the midst of the Roman congregation. And he was addressing this issue from his own gut-wrenching, extremely bitter recent personal experience! So, notice closely what God required Paul and the other apostles, and their fellow first century Messianic Jewish disciples to do. When we see this, we’ll better understand what God will require of all disciples who are destined to be part of the Last Days Fulfillment of everything Scripture has revealed, commanded and promised!
God requires all disciples, Jew and non-Jew alike, to repent of (that is, to stop clinging to) everything they used to be, or strove to be, in this fallen world, before they knew Yeshua. (See what Isaiah 55:1-11 and 66:1-2 say about God’s Living Word and what He is here to do and to be, to us, in us and through us!) God is commanding us to disregard and ‘unlearn’ whatever we thought we knew before Yeshua entered into us! We must forsake whatever we believed about ‘life in this world’ and how we saw ourselves, before our Messiah came in and took over. All true disciples must die to what was past… to make room in their minds and hearts for God’s glorious Living Word and what His Resurrection Reality has come into us to be from now on! The Word must be free to take us over completely… so that He can execute His Father’s will and Plan and serve as our Perfectly Righteous Future! So when He says, “Follow Me!” He is ordering us to consider ourselves to be dead to everything we were up to that point. And from then on, Almighty God will expect us to make His Living Word, and what He sent Him to do, to be our one and only Reality and Priority!
Psalm 119:41-42
“May Your Lovingkindnesses also come to me, O Lord, Your Salvation according to Your Word; so I will have an answer for him who reproaches me, for I trust in Your Word.”
Yeshua must now, and in the future, be Everything to us… our new Heavenly Identity, our Covenant Friend, our Lord, Master, Owner, Shepherd, Commander and abiding Eternal Life! He is here to lead His disciples into Exodus territory about which they formerly knew nothing! And He will give them a brand new, totally righteous, pure, Sin-less identity; and share His Eternal Inheritance with them, even though at present, none of us can even imagine what all of that means or is going to entail! So our boot camp training is like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence. It is the sudden end of whatever we were before Yeshua’s arrival. But that will also lead us into the brand new territory that will be the beginning of what God has waiting for us in Eternity! And, of course, that will be completely different than anything we’ve ever known before in the dimension of time and space! True repentance prepares us for that profound level of transition that must take place within us. And God expects us to embrace it wholeheartedly! This is what taking up our personal crosses must entail.
God’s Exodus Journey is absolutely terminal! Once we start, there can be no going back. It is our personal liberation from any trace of the former demonic radical independence in which we may have indulged previously. The Covenant Union we now enjoy with God forces us to undergo a cataclysmic revolution in our perceptions, attitudes, thought patterns, and future lifestyles!
Luke 9:61-62
“Another also said, ‘I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God!’”
Never again will we be allowed to follow the wisdom and dictates of this fallen God-less world. Never again will God allow us to assume that it’s up to us to figure everything out for ourselves. We are now disciples and bond slaves to the Person, Nature, Character and Disposition of His Son, His Living Word! And God is intent on transforming us into His Word’s image and likeness! All that matters now is what His Word is here to be and to do… to us… in us… and through us. From now on, we exist to do whatever it may take to reflect and embody Him into the world that is all around us. So, as far as we are concerned, from now on, He is our Identity, our Motive, our Purpose and Future… and from now on, He is the Center and Wellspring of everything that pertains to us:
Matthew 28:18-20
“And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, ‘All Authority has been given to Me in Heaven and on Earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations(disciple the Gentiles), baptizing them in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Luke 9:59-60
“And He said to another, ‘Follow Me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.’ But He said to him, ‘Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the Kingdom of God!’”
Can you see the tension between the will and priorities of God’s Living Word made flesh, and what remains in the hearts of people like that young Jewish man that Yeshua called into His service? Yeshua was continually focused on doing what His Heavenly Father sent Him here to do. But the fallen flesh in that young man kept dragging him in an alien direction, to pursue and satisfy his own self-generated, living dead, worldly desires and priorities. The attraction toward radical independence from God abides within our fallen dying flesh; and it continually pulls at us to separate ourselves from God’s Word… and therefore, away from God! And this is why the Love-compelled, selfless Faithfulness of God’s Word, and His supernatural Spirit-empowered, Father-obeying lifestyle are what disciples must be taught and trained to uphold, embody, and reflect to the rest of the world. That’s why we must die to everything else! Yeshua must be free to ‘circumcise our hearts’ (See Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 30:6-10). When our hearts are truly ‘circumcised’, God’s Word is free to live His Life in and through us… smoothly, spontaneously, with no interference or opposition or resistance or contradiction from us! The Word is our Perfect Solution, and so nothing can be more important to us than what He is here to be… to us… and in us… and through us!
Ezekiel 36:24-28
“For I will TAKE YOU FROM the nations (pagan unbelievers, and I will), gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own (Blood Covenant Israelite) land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you AND CAUSE YOU TO WALK IN MY STATUTES, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. You will live in the Land that I gave to your forefathers; so YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE AND I WILL BE YOUR GOD!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Worldly boot camp training invades the souls of military recruits. But it is not nearly as invasive as what must happen to the Lord’s New Covenant disciples! There will be shocking events, pressures and challenges that will overtake both groups. And similar things will happen to both. But the tests disciples must undergo will probe and invade all the way to the primary source of their essence! God’s Word has transported us, through our newly regenerated spirits… from the temporal dimension of time and space and He has grafted us into the Eternal Dimension of His Kingdom in Eternity!
Colossians 3:1-4
“Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our Life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in Glory.”
So, all levels of boot camp training bring a form of death… death to what the trainees used to be. But for disciples, this means a total death… the absolute end of everything earthly that was previously deposited into our fallen souls! God requires that the Resurrection Results that follow our death to self-life must be prominent and tangible and observable, and provable to the people around us! Our death must be followed by a demonstrable Resurrection Reality-shift… the emergence of qualities so new, and so supernatural, that the disciple trainees appear like former caterpillars that have now transformed into gloriously beautiful butterflies! God intends for us to become new creations that are so amazing that anyone who knew us before could not have imagined that such remarkable changes could be possible… until they see the supernatural changes that are appearing in and through us!
The changes created by earthly boot camps will be less radical and drastic. Nevertheless both levels of training require intense and rigorous discipline that must be imposed on the recruits’ souls, wills and mortal bodies. But in our disciple boot camp, the changes must go all the way to our essential root! We must die totally to self-reliance, self-management and self-enhancement. Our Resurrected Lord and His Perfect Finished Work must, from now on, be our abiding, supernaturally fruitful Source of Life, Ability, Direction and Provision. So for disciples, the Power that will transform them is purely a gift from God. In fact, it actually will be God… infusing His Spirit into our regenerated spirits! So, after our spiritual rebirth, we must train, discipline and update our minds, wills and bodies, and steer them into proper alignment with the amazing new nature and reality of our Messiah’s Resurrected Covenant Life that is now free to abide and work and produce Heavenly Fruit from within our spirits.
This is the Spirit-filled Life that Yeshua was demonstrating and teaching to His disciples! He was preparing them for the day when they too would be equipped to do the same thing! They would be able to do it, when He, by the Holy Spirit, became their new indwelling Life. Then He would be free to abide and do what God sends Him to do from within them:
Matthew 10:7-10
“And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The (King of the) Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give. Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, or a bag for your journey, or even two coats, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is worthy of his support.” (Emphasis added.)
Philippians 2:12b-13
“…Work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure!”
This awesome God-given New Life, and its New Realities, was what Paul and the other New Covenant apostles were commissioned to demonstrate and teach to their first century disciple contemporaries. Paul took pains to convey to those disciples, that they were now commissioned to embody God and His ways to each other and to the rest of the world! It was essential that he point this out to them because a crisis was developing in their midst. The congregation was undergoing a major reality-shift; and they were struggling to adjust to it.
Paul and Barnabas had not pioneered the Roman congregation. Other Jewish Messianic believers founded it. It began as a result of what happened in Acts 7, when some unbelieving Judean Jews became infuriated with what the Messianic Jew, Stephen, had been proclaiming to them about Messiah Yeshua and about their need to repent. And the unbelievers in attendance became so enraged (because of the conviction they felt and how they were choosing to interpret Deuteronomy 13) that they stoned Stephen to death… over the very issues we’re discussing here!
And, after they killed Stephen, many began to hound and persecute the other Messianic Jews that were in Jerusalem and its surroundings. And so the Jewish believers had to flee for their lives. And the Holy Spirit used that event to strategically deploy them all across the empire. And they took the Gospel with them and began to sow its seeds into the hearts and minds of whoever happened to be around them in their new locations. Some of them ended up in Rome and settled there. And that’s how the Roman congregation got started.
Acts 8:1-4
“Saul was in hearty agreement with putting him (Stephen) to death. And on that day a great persecution began against the Church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Some devout (Messianic Jewish) men buried Stephen, and made loud lamentation over him. But Saul (of Tarsus, who did not believe or serve Yeshua at that time, and who hated and despised the Jewish believers, seeing them as an enormous threat to the purity and integrity of the Jewish Faith) began ravaging the Church (that is, the original Jewish believers), entering house after house, and dragging off men and women (from their midst), he would put them in prison.
“Therefore, those (Jewish disciples) who had been scattered went about preaching the Word (concerning their resurrected Messiah, throughout the Roman Empire).” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
So can you see the irony underlying the writing and sending of this letter? Paul had been a ringleader of that mob of religious thugs that stoned Stephen and instigated the persecution of all the original Jewish believers! So, although he did not found the Roman congregation as a disciple, he was nevertheless, greatly responsible for why it came to be! In this unintended way, Saul did help to start that congregation! But now that he himself had become one of those formerly despised Messianic Jewish believers, he had to act in their defense! Now, not only was he a chosen apostle of Israel’s Messiah, he was also God’s designated ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’! So the Holy Spirit moved him to serve as a prime example and teacher to the non-Jewish Church of what God means whenever He tells His New Covenant people to ‘Repent’!
The Lord forced Saul to completely overhaul the inner workings of his heart and soul. He had to repent of believing whatever had been driving him to persecute Jewish Messianic believers! Now he had to become one with them on every level! And that forced him to reconfigure his theological perspective and world-view, and self-understanding… COMPLETELY! That’s right: he had to create a brand new identity for himself! He was forced to die to his traditional self-righteous Jewish arrogance. He had to repent of being soul-driven and hyper-religious and diabolically controlling! And he had to repent of what he had formerly assumed about Yeshua and his followers. He had to repent of his lifelong practice of spurning Gentiles and seeing them as unclean pariahs that were always to be avoided! He had to die to being Saul of Tarsus so that God’s Living Word could take him over completely… for His Father’s Eternal Purpose!
Paul was indeed equipped with authoritative credentials. And he and his fellow apostles were perfect examples of New Covenant repentance and what it requires. God used what had happened to them, especially to Paul and Peter, to teach the depths of repentance to those Gentile believers in Rome, who at that time were very ignorant and clueless, and doing great damage to the Lord’s New Covenant Body through which God intended to reveal the Glory and Authority of His risen Son!
We’ve already seen that when Yeshua confronted Saul on the way to Damascus, Saul was a hyper-religious ‘hit man’, a self-righteous judgmental ‘terrorist type’, commissioned by the unbelieving high priest and Sanhedrin in Jerusalem to hunt down those ‘heretics’ that were creating such a disturbance among the Jewish people and stirring up great potential trouble for them with the Roman governing occupiers! So Saul’s mission was to hunt down as many of those Messianic Jews as possible. And that’s what he was bent on doing, when the Lord suddenly invaded his space and overwhelmed him. And so I ask you to notice carefully… the very first thing the Lord said to him:
Acts 9:4b-5
“‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting ME?’ And he said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And He said, ‘I am Jesus (Yeshua) WHOM YOU ARE PERSECUTING!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
In this context, Yeshua’s meaning is perfectly clear. “I am one with My disciples, and they are one with Me! So whatever you do to them, you are doing to Me!” So… the Lord was revealing to Saul, what He had earlier revealed to His other Jewish apostles:
Matthew 25:31-40
“But when the Son of Man comes in His Glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His Glorious Throne. All the nations (believing Gentiles, as well as unbelieving pagan worldly Gentiles) will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.
“Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’ Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, TO THE EXTENT THAT YOU DID IT TO THESE (Blood Covenant) BROTHERS OF MINE, even the least of them, YOU DID IT TO ME!’” (Emphasis added.)
Matthew 10:32-33
“Therefore everyone who confesses Me (or those who are one with Me) before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in Heaven. But whoever denies Me (or those that are one with Me) before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in Heaven!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Beloved, ponder the totally spiritual Heavenly implications of this awesome New Covenant revelation! It goes directly counter to what is so common in this fallen world! What God sees when He regards His chosen Blood Covenant people, is radically different from the way they are regarded by the fallen intellects of the souls of worldly people! Because of the Covenant into which He had brought Abraham and his family, and because of the Covenant he had made with Israel through Moses at Mt. Sinai, God, and His Living Word and Holy Spirit, is forever one with the Jewish people… even with those that do not believe and who reject Him as their Messiah! This Reality does not depend on Man… it depends on the Nature and Character and Eternal Consistency of Almighty God!
So how much more should we New Covenant believers honor His union with them? And how much more should we revere and cherish the Jewish Messianic disciples that have believed and have become our fellow New Covenant disciples? Compare what God says about them… to the actual attitudes and behaviors that are common and normal in the world of Christendom, which, contrary to God’s revealed will, remains so ‘Jew-less’ and so terribly divided within itself! The Lord clearly proclaims that He is ONE with the Jewish and non-Jewish Remnant of New Covenant Israel that believes and obeys Him! And this tremendous, world-shaking Oneness is what Paul was requiring His fellow first century disciples (and their successors) to honor, protect, join with and embody, before the rest of the unbelieving, horribly divided, Jewish and non-Jewish worlds!
So… this is a fact of disciple life that we must all face: we disciples are ONE with God’s Word, and one with God… and one with each other… in God’s sight! God will not sanction any individualistic, radically independent, divisive lone wolf behavior from His Word’s disciples. And, in the end, all of Israel will be one with us, and we will all be the embodiment of our Messiah! So can you see why God’s Blood Covenant ways won’t allow any exceptions? Can you see why no one is allowed to try to make a different, alternate personal deal with God on the side? In God’s sight, we are One New Man, under the Headship of His Living Word! This is at the essence of God’s Blood Covenant Heavenly Reality! And the New Covenant, to which we now belong, is the means by which God will fulfill and display our unified transformation… to Perfection!
Why Do We Ignore the Question?
Now I’m forced to ask myself, and you, the following questions: “What is it about Jews and Gentiles who claim to love and serve God… that makes it so hard for them to hear and obey what God is clearly telling us concerning His New Covenant with Israel throughout Scripture? And… why do we ignore the question our Lord asked Saul about why he was persecuting Him and fail to apply it to ourselves? And what will it take before we see and feel what Saul of Tarsus was forced to see and feel… when he finally began to fathom the meaning of the New Covenant and grasped the awesome union it creates between God and men… and realized that whatever we do to any one of the Lord’s disciples, we are also doing to God? What will it take to blast us out of our arrogant self-adoration and draw us to each other in a right spirit of deep humility and repentant transformation… before God and before the rest of the world?
This was the awesome New Covenant lesson that the Lord caused to explode in the depths of Saul’s Torah-formed Judaistic heart, soul and brain! When Yeshua revealed Himself to Saul in such a shocking, stunning, devastating way, God’s New Covenant Reality pierced that man to the core and it forced him to realize the magnitude of the crimes he had been committing against the living members of His own Messiah, and against the very God that he was claiming to serve! Now the very Messiah that Saul had been yearning for, was suddenly before him, standing within the blinding Light of the Shekinah Glory of God’s Presence. And that Glory that had been seen in Israel in earlier times was now combined with the overwhelming Messianic Resurrection Glory of this Man, Yeshua!
There was nothing in Saul, and nothing in His previous experience and background that could have prepared him for this, or equipped Him to understand what was happening to him. And the searing Truth of Yeshua’s Divine Messianic Reality opened Saul’s spiritual eyes and trashed his arrogant previous theology and worldview. The overwhelming Brilliance of Yeshua’s Resurrection Reality exposed that man for what he really was. God showed him, in unmistakable terms… what terrible damage he, despite his deluded good intentions, had been doing to God’s awesome New Covenant Plan for Israel and the rest of the world! He had actually been trying to prevent the Fulfillment of the Plan for Full New Covenant Restoration that God had promised to Israel! Saul had been contradicting what God had said through prophets like Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel! So how do you think he must have felt after he realized this?
Now, he had to face the depths of his sin: Whatever he had been doing to the precious New Covenant Israelite people that were following Yeshua, in his misguided religious zeal, he had done in total spiritual blindness! And… what he’d been doing to those New Covenant believers… he was daring to do to the earthly Body of God’s Living incarnate Word! Suddenly he realized that he had been blasphemously presuming and pompously posturing before the world, boasting and pursuing the destruction and suffering of Israel’s precious Remnant! And all the devastation he had heaped upon them… he had been claiming to be doing… on behalf of and… in the Name of… Almighty God! That’s right. He was attacking God… in the Name of God!
Can you imagine the depths of desolation and horror and repentant grief Saul must have felt, as this terrifying realization wracked the core of his being? It overwhelmed him for three days and nights in Damascus, and left him stunned, blind and prostrated. He must have wondered how God could ever bring Himself to forgive, or be willing to have anything more to do with him. And he must have been totally stripped by the realization of his unspeakable religious, demonic arrogance. How could he, who identified himself as a ‘Pharisee of Pharisees’, with all of his past Israelite training and personal brilliance and diligent erudite Torah study… have been so blind and so tragically wrong? And that is the very question the rest of us who are so denominational and sectarian and self-absorbed must also ask ourselves.
Radically Transformed
Beloved, Saul of Tarsus died that day! And as the new creation, Paul, he continued to absorb and process the ramifications of this incomprehensible shock and all of its life-shattering realities… God breathed His own Holy Spirit into him after He sent Ananias to restore him. And the Holy Spirit regenerated Saul’s human spirit. And from that moment forward, God began Paul’s disciple-level boot camp training! He taught this chosen apostle the New Covenant understanding of what Scripture really means when it commands people to ‘repent’! He was infusing Paul’s soul and will with what Yeshua meant when He called people to turn and change when they hear the proclamation that God’s Kingdom on Earth is at hand (Matthew 4:17). And because of what this revelation did to him, Paul crossed over from the Covenant of Sinai that focused primarily on Israel alone… over to the New Covenant instituted by Israel’s Messiah… which focuses primarily on the Salvation of the whole world… through Israel. And more specifically still… through Israel’s resurrected Messiah… the crucified and resurrected Word of Almighty God!
Can you begin to see why poor Saul of Tarsus was so radically uprooted and stunned beyond belief? If you can see that, you’ll be able to better understand why the apostle Paul was so eminently qualified to address the issues that were arising in the midst of the congregation of Rome. He transformed into the New Covenant apostle Paul, because of what the Cross did to poor Saul of Tarsus and his Covenant of Sinai mindset. The risen Lord Himself forced Saul to learn what it means to repent, in Spirit and in Truth! Saul had his nose rubbed very deeply into God’s Eternal Truth… and that set him free to enter the awesome new Life and Righteousness that God’s Living Word had come to put into all of His New Covenant people. This is what boot camp training did for all of the original first century apostles. It trained and prepared them to demonstrate and teach this New Covenant Reality to the demon-possessed world:
Luke 14:26-27
“If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate (free himself of idolizing and clinging to) his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple!” (Amplification added.)
So now, the Apostle to the Gentiles was doing his utmost to make the poor clueless Gentile believers in Rome aware of their New Covenant privileges and responsibilities. At that time, they were beginning to do to the Lord’s Messianic disciples in their way, what he himself had once done to them, as Saul of Tarsus! And because of the awesome depths of Paul’s personal repentance, he was urging the Gentile believers of Rome, in a very loving way, to do what his Master had recently forced Him to do with such devastating, soul-shattering rigor! Paul and the other apostles were required to repent first… so that they could lead the way for the rest of us… and show us by their own personal crucifixions and death to self-life… what God expects of all the rest of mankind!
The congregation of Rome was in great need of learning this lesson, because they were struggling to adjust to the fallout of what the emperor Claudius had recently done. He had expelled all Jews from Rome! So the Messianic Jewish elder brothers of these Gentile believers were suddenly forced to pack up and leave their homes once again! And they had to leave the spiritual oversight and care of the congregation in the hands of their Gentile brothers. Paul had recently learned that some of that Gentile remnant was becoming arrogant and anti-Jewish. They were most likely trying to create distance between themselves and the Jewish people so they could avoid the emperor’s wrath and save themselves from any suspicion or persecution on the part of their fellow Roman citizens. And, in addition to that, after Rome destroyed the Jewish nation and leveled the temple and scattered the survivors… the emperor Vespasian imposed a special tax, the ‘Fiscus Judaicus’, upon all Jewish people living within the empire! Now, amid the agony of seeing their own temple destroyed, the chosen people were forced to pay this extra tax for the upkeep of the temple of the Roman god, Jupiter!
These developments gave Gentile believers much incentive to strive to create separation between themselves and the Jewish people in order to avoid having to share in their woeful fate. And, some probably relished the idea of being able to take over the preeminent positions of congregational authority for themselves. In this way, they could back away from the demands and difficulties of learning and embracing the strange new Jewish ways and they could dilute the alien flavor of their Torah-based Messianic Legacy. Now they could ease their sense of ‘culture shock’ and allay their feelings of ‘homesickness’ for their original non-Jewish cultures and the worldly mindsets and customs they had originally been required to leave behind. So in a very real sense, they were backing away from ‘Israel’… and edging back toward their former comfort zones in ‘Egypt’. They began to redesign and reconfigure the Faith into something that would be much more ‘Gentile friendly’. In effect, they were turning away from the New Covenant Reality that God had recently entrusted to their care. They assumed that the rebuilding of the ‘Wall of Partition’, would make it easier for them to ‘sell’ the Faith to the other Gentiles they were trying to reach. It was tempting for them to think this way because the Gentiles around them knew and cared nothing for the Scriptures, nor did they care about the Israelite, Biblical Legacy God had entrusted to the Jewish people. (See our glossary of terms in the website for a further explanation of this ‘wall’ to which we continue to refer.)
So, that is what was happening in Rome. And because Paul could not travel to Rome at that time, he had to try to reach out to this congregation from a distance and teach them the Lord’s New Covenant Reality and its principles. Thus we see that the tables were turned. At first the Jewish believers had been forced to admit and accept these Gentiles. But now, these Gentiles were being called upon to remember what their fellow Jewish brothers had done for them, and to return the favor, by honoring and protecting the Legacy the Messianic Jews had shared with them. The Messianic Jews had been forced to make it possible for Gentiles like them to be allowed to join the Family of Israel’s New Covenant believers! Salvation truly had come to the world from the Jews! And so the original Messianic apostles and their brethren were the first Jews in many centuries of Israelite history, to have to re-learn what it meant to accept and honor and identify with Gentiles, and embrace those total strangers as if they were their own family members!
Leviticus 19:34
“The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God!”
God was now requiring these Gentile disciples to learn to accept and honor their Jewish elder brothers in the Faith, to a corresponding depth… regardless of the consequences! So can you see the irony in all of this? The Jews that these Gentiles were holding in contempt and dishonoring had been forced to learn this same lesson when Gentiles began to believe and request admission to the congregational family they had pioneered in Rome. Even after the fleeing Messianic Jews had been forced to leave Israel and landed in Rome, they stayed in touch with the apostles who remained in Jerusalem. So they’d heard about what had happened to Peter, and how he and the other apostles had been led by the Holy Spirit to embrace the family of Cornelius and accept all of the other believing Gentiles that followed him into the fold. And so they too obeyed God and began to embrace and include Gentile believers into their family fellowship in Rome!
So ponder the tremendously startling things God had done with those original Messianic Jewish disciples. He required them to undergo a supremely supernatural level of repentance! They had to forsake much of what they had been taught and conditioned to believe and think by the centuries-old traditions and practices of their inherited Sinai Covenant Judaism! Many of those traditions had actually been violating God’s Torah commandments to bless and accept the Gentiles. By the first century, the time-honored practice of shunning and excluding Gentiles had become so normal and so deeply entrenched in Judaism’s traditional lifestyle that the Messianic believers were required to rebel against their own upbringing! And they had to create new ways of reacting to and fellowshipping with Spirit-filled Gentiles who had been steeped in rampant paganism all their lives, and knew nothing about Scripture or the Israelite realities!
The original Jewish believers in Yeshua were all products of the Torah and the Covenant of Sinai. They had been faithful to observe the commandments God had set down for them through Moses, to the best of their ability. And they had been born and bred to live and thrive behind an enormously thick Wall of Partition. That spiritual, mental and emotional ‘Wall’ separated most Israelites from the pagan Gentile world. It had been built up over the centuries by religious rituals and lifestyle customs and traditions that Israel had developed. Many previous historical events and situations had also conditioned and deeply programmed the Jewish people to remain apart from all Gentiles and their unclean ways! So over the past centuries, because of that enormous wall that developed in the minds and hearts of Jews and Gentiles alike… ‘good’ Jews stayed on their side of the wall, and, in response, the Gentile world remained separated from them on their corresponding side of the wall.
But now, after Yeshua’s coming, God was requiring the Jewish and non-Jewish Messianic believers to repent of and change, all of that! The Jewish believers had to repent of their man-made traditional Judaistic mentalities and comfort zones… so that God’s Holy Spirit could bring Gentiles into their midst. God was now leading both groups into His long-promised, brand new, New Covenant territory! This is what Messiah Yeshua had been sent to institute and launch! So now the apostles had to begin to confront and deal with THE WALL that existed in all contemporary Jewish hearts… as well as THE WALL that existed in all Gentile minds and hearts! They had to deal with both sides of that Wall… at the same time! God intends to destroy that Wall, once and for all! Then He will lead the entire world into His New Covenant Fulfillment for the whole House of Israel… and set the stage for all of Creation’s Ultimate Fulfillment in the Last Days Era. This is what was now beginning to appear in those first century days!
Peter Reverses Alienation of Gentile World
So can you see the awesome significance of what took place in Acts 10? God suddenly required Peter and the other apostles and all of the Messianic followers of Yeshua to repent of all the antagonism and prejudice against Gentiles that centuries of tradition and practice had bred into them. They had to stop – and reverse – the centuries-old momentum of prejudice, contempt, discrimination and total alienation from the unclean Gentile world! And they had to begin to learn to embrace and welcome and identify with all of the Gentile strangers that God was filling with His Holy Spirit, redeeming from the Serpent, and drawing into their midst! God was bringing those alien peoples to the apostles and letting them know that He was grafting them into His New Covenant with Israel!
So I doubt if we can come close to understanding how shocking and unthinkable this had to be for Peter (Shimon Kefa), as he was being led by the Holy Spirit to begin to accept, love and identify with repentant, Spirit-filled Gentile believers! He was now being forced to begin to blast a way through that Wall, for Gentiles to unite with Israel and become part of the Messianic Jewish Community. And somehow, he had to urge and teach his Messianic Jewish brethren to be willing to struggle to understand what God was doing and to follow his lead!
And that was how endless streams of non-Jewish believers began to come into the fold and increase the original numbers of Israel’s Remnant… the Messianic Jews… as far as Rome, and even beyond! And I maintain that we can’t begin to imagine how excruciating and gut-wrenchingly difficult it was for our apostolic Jewish spiritual forefathers to do this. And it is their Legacy that we have inherited. – And it is their example that God will require His Son’s Last Days disciples, to follow.
At that time, this ‘rebuilding of the Wall’ was happening because the Roman emperor Claudius had entered the picture (41–54 C.E.). He was the youngest son of Nero Drusus (not the emperor Nero, but the brother of Tiberius and Antonia, who was the daughter of Marc Antony and Octavia.) Claudius’s health was frail and he lacked impressive personal credentials. He had no significant political connections or allies with clout. In fact, after Caligula was assassinated, Claudius hid in terror somewhere in the palace! And that’s where members of the Pretorian Guard found him. So, since the imperial throne was now vacant, and since Claudius was a member of the imperial family, and was insignificant and not at all prepared to rule… the army thought he would serve well, as a puppet under their influence. So they installed him as emperor and backed him with their military might.
And at that time, as usual, Rome’s power structure was rife with factions, intrigue, and deadly political maneuvering and power plays. As if that wasn’t bad enough, also at that time, the Jewish part of the population, which was well established and influential, was clamoring to be allowed to worship their God in the Jewish way, without any outside pagan interference. So all that clamor, confusion and turmoil began to overwhelm Claudius. It drove him to ease the pressure he felt in any way he could. So, he decided to expel all Jews from the city of Rome. And that forced the original Jewish founders of the Messianic congregation to leave the care and wellbeing of the New Covenant Family of Israel that resided in Rome in the hands of non-Jewish believers who were still not very familiar with the meaning and significance of Israel… and the Biblical Covenant Legacy that had been entrusted to her by Almighty God, to share with the rest of the world! Those Gentile Roman disciples did not fully grasp or realize the awesome Gift from God into which they had been recently engrafted by His Grace and Mercy.
Destroying The Wall of Partition
So the expulsion of the Jews opened the door for some seriously ignorant and destructive attitudes to develop. Now God required Messianic Jews and the Gentile believers to become as one… so that together, they could work to destroy the Wall of Partition! Jews couldn’t do that alone, and neither could Gentiles do it alone. They had to do it together! And so the integrity and authenticity of the Roman congregation was now in great danger. Some of those non-Jewish believers were slipping back into their natural bondage to past history and its age-old anti-Semitism. To avoid persecution from their Roman pagan leaders and fellow citizens, they distanced themselves from the Jews and all of their troubles. And they began to create a new, Jew-less identity and lifestyle for themselves… in the hope of coming across to the emperor as a new, separate entity that had nothing to do with the Jews. Because it was no longer safe or convenient to be linked to Jewish believers, these Gentiles followed the path of least resistance, mentally and emotionally distancing themselves from their Israelite brothers in the Faith. And some harbored attitudes of indignation and resentment against Jews in general, because most Jews continued to despise and reject their Messiah and hold His followers in contempt.
This backlash reaction caused many non-Jewish believers to assume that since most of Israel still rejected Yeshua, and since the empire was persecuting all Jews… God must have rejected Israel for their crime of deicide, as was indicated in Deuteronomy 28! And that assumption led many to believe that God was finished with all Jews, and had shifted his attention and affection over to the non-Jewish part of the ‘Church’. Thus ‘The Wall’ that Yeshua died to destroy, was rebuilt and it began to be reinforced in the hearts of many non-Jewish believers. Many of their leaders began to pull away from the Messiah-given authority of the apostolic Messianic Jews.
After Claudius died, Nero did allow the Jews to come back to Rome, but by that time, the erosion and damage that had already begun in the Church continued to grow and spread. So the contempt and exclusion of Messianic Jews became habitual. And over time, the Jewish believers became totally isolated and marooned. Not only did they lack acceptance and support from their fellow Jews, but now their fellow Gentile New Covenant brothers had also turned their backs. So they dwindled in number and in influence… and their light died out for centuries.
But Paul could see all of these things happening during the time of Claudius. And the Holy Spirit moved him to try to nip them in the bud. Paul realized that the same sin he had once been committing – persecution of Israel’s Remnant, was rearing its ugly head again. But this time it wasn’t coming from unbelieving Jews… it was coming from so-called, fellow Gentile believers that had responded to Yeshua’s call to be His New Covenant disciples! The wonderful beginning the apostles had made with the first Gentile believers, was already beginning to break up and come apart.
Acts 18:1-4
“After these things he (Paul) left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, having recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. He came to them, and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and they were working, for by trade they were tent-makers. And he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.” (Amplification added.)
Aquila and Priscilla told Paul what they had seen and heard in Rome. So at first, it was the Jews that had been forced to repent of excluding and ignoring Gentiles… and now the Gentiles were going to have to repent of excluding and ignoring Jews!
This ongoing division between Jewish and non-Jewish believers is what the powers of Darkness always try to perpetuate… to derail the fulfillment of God’s New Covenant with Israel! Until both parts of the Body actually come back together as one… The Ultimate Fulfillment of God’s Salvation Plan will be prevented from coming to its Ultimate Consummation!
So naturally, the enemy always looks for ways to keep God’s Jewish and non-Jewish people effectively apart from each other. He knows that as long as they remain separate, they will remain ineffective and the Last Days Installation of Yeshua as Israel’s Messiah and King… and their own final downfall… will continue to be placed ‘on hold’.
The enemy knows that God has put some vital ingredients into each group of New Covenant believers. And each is called to use and provide the ingredients entrusted to them, to assist and complement and reinforce the other! Each group has a vital part to play in the Last Days Fulfillment. So as long as the Serpent succeeds in preventing the Jewish and non-Jewish ingredients and roles from working together in Spirit-empowered union and cooperation… the Jewish believers will not be able to do everything that is needed on their own, nor will the Gentile believers be able to do everything that is needed on their own. And so… as long as they remain apart from each other, they will not be able to ‘complete the circuit’ that is necessary before God’s Power can enter into their midst to permeate and transform this demon-possessed world!
The Final Fulfillment of God’s Plan continues to be demonically sidetracked and delayed and the powers of Darkness can ‘buy more time’… keeping their inevitable immersion into the ‘Lake of Fire’ pushed into the distant future (See Revelation 20). As long as the disciples remain ill-prepared and not completely equipped for the Final Showdown, God’s enemies can retard the progress of Creation’s Full Restoration!
Bringing Gentiles Into the New Covenant Family
Consider the enormous level of significance of this to all of the modern day Last Days disciples! And ponder the level of repentance that God must require of us all, just prior to the Final Fulfillment of God’s promises to the world. In the first century C.E., He had to teach this to the original Jewish apostles and disciples first… when it was time for the Gospel to spread from Israel to the other nations of the world. But now He must teach it to the Last Days disciples… so that the Gospel that has gone all around the world can finally come back to its starting point, back to Israel, and to Jerusalem, so that God’s circle of Salvation can be completed and closed once and for all. So what God did to the Jewish New Covenant believers in the Beginning, He will have to do to ALL believers… at the End!
In the beginning, when it was time for the Gospel to be taken from Israel to the rest of the world, God took the disciples completely by surprise. He suddenly did something they could have never imagined possible! He ordered the apostles and their fellow Jewish believers, to start accepting Gentiles into God’s Israelite Covenant Family! After Peter had his Spirit-led encounter with the Roman Centurion Cornelius and his household in Acts 10, and was able to process and absorb what happened, he brought the other leaders in Jerusalem up to date and instructed the other Messianic believers to accept Gentiles as they were, without requiring them to become Jewish through physical circumcision! (See Acts 15)
So the Jewish apostles and their fellow Jews who embraced Yeshua as their Messiah had to endure the outrage and wrath of their fellow Jews who continued to deny and reject Yeshua as Israel’s Messiah. Thus the Messianic Jews were forced to suffer the indignity and disgrace of being labeled ‘traitors’ and ‘renegade Jews’. And they were forced to leave their own beloved Jewish world behind! To accept Gentiles into their Israelite New Covenant Family, without first having to become Jews, in the religious ritualistic sense, was social suicide for the Messianic believers! And that was excruciatingly difficult, distasteful and very dangerous for people like them, who had such deep tribal and family ties, to be forced to do. (Acts 21:15-40 gives a good example of how volatile this issue was for the Messianic believers.)
But, difficult or not, the Messianic disciples did it! They died to themselves and obeyed God and accepted those Gentiles into their fellowship because God had begun to fill Gentiles with His Holy Spirit – just as they themselves had been filled, starting in Acts chapter 2! But… after Claudius forced all Jews to leave, the Gentiles who were left in charge began to disrespect, ignore and exclude their Jewish brethren from their future considerations. They were assuming that the Covenant Family of Abraham – or ‘The Church’ or ‘The Christians’ – as they began to call themselves, were now under the sole management of the Gentile world! So throughout the second, third and fourth centuries, they took great liberties with what their elder Jewish brothers had taught them, and, little by little, they let go of much of the Israelite Legacy of the apostles that Yeshua had entrusted to them. Scripture-ignoring Gentile leaders began to change things and operate as they thought best and saw fit to do.
And so the more they ignored the example and teachings and directions of the original New Covenant Jewish apostles, and the original Gentile disciples, the more they twisted and morphed and reshaped the Faith, and their understanding of their Messiah, who had come to them from the Seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Thus, over the centuries that elapsed, the Church itself, and the Messiah or Christ they were now proclaiming, had become ever more alien and unrecognizable, and very often, even supremely hostile and violent toward His own beloved, chosen, Blood Covenant Jewish brothers! God told Israel that their Messiah would save and bless them; but the Messiah that many Gentile Christians were presenting to them, had come, fully disguised in Gentile and Anti Semitic garb… to declaim, devastate and kill them and drive their very memory out of human consciousness!
This continued to happen for centuries, because many powerful Gentile Church leaders in succeeding generations introduced ideas and practices that were Greco Roman, and pagan and Hellenistic in origin, attitude and mentality. And that was totally alien to what was Biblical and Hebraic and Jewish. And, as more and more Gentiles swelled their numbers, more and more of them were born into this new, Jew-less world, and the succeeding generations came to know less and less about what had happened in the beginning, when the New Covenant Era was just being launched. And, the more they lost touch with what was lost from the beginning, the more they naturally assumed that what they had inherited was ‘normal’ and God-given and apostolic. But in truth, they had been cut off from the roots of the Faith that the original Jewish apostles had passed on to Cornelius and his family and followers. And this is why later generations naturally assumed that God had transferred the seat of Church Authority, from Jerusalem, to Rome! But Scripture lets us know that this will never be the case!
Paul’s Lesson Forgotton
So to this day, the Wall of Partition still stands; not the granite wall that encircled the temple area that was reserved only for Jews… but the dividing wall that lives and works in the soul-driven hearts, minds, wills and lives of countless contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish people! So, much of what Paul said in Romans, and elsewhere, has been forgotten, ignored and disobeyed. And I submit that this is going to be addressed and firmly dealt with by the Holy Spirit… in the Last Days… in the very near future. And the true knowledge and experience of what repentance really is and what it actually requires will become much more vitally relevant and prominent than it has ever been, since the days of Peter and Paul and their fellow disciples. For us, and our generation, this will be even more relevant and gut wrenching than it was for them!
The Holy Spirit enabled Paul to see what was happening when it was just beginning. He was unable to travel to Rome; so, as the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul wrote a letter to that congregation. He spent the first eight chapters introducing himself and his thinking to them. Then he began to address the major issue that was developing between the Messianic Jewish portion of our Messiah’s Body, and the Gentile portion. In chapters 1, 2 and 8, 9, 10 and 11, he brought up the main reason for the letter and did his utmost to generate understanding and reunification. He felt compelled to prevent the Lord’s Body from cutting itself into two separate pieces! And he took great care to spell out the New Covenant issues that required their repentant attention. And then starting with chapter 12, he spelled out his conclusions to what he had just discussed. Thus, as he began the closing chapters of his letter, he gave specific details in practical terms as to how the repentance he was urging them to undergo was to be implemented:
Romans 12:1-3
“THEREFORE (in light of what I’ve just said concerning your attitudes toward Israel and the Jewish people) I urge you, (my non-Jewish) brethren, by the mercies of God (that were extended to me when I was doing the very same things you are doing), to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, (that you may follow our apostolic example: to die to everything you thought you were in the past) which is your spiritual service of worship. And DO NOT BE CONFORMED TO (the God-less attitudes, patterns and Sin-corrupted Gentile lifestyles of) THIS WORLD, but be transformed by the renewing (rewiring, reprogramming and total New Covenant updating) of your mind, so that you may prove (actually demonstrate by the totally supernatural, Messiah-embodying, New Covenant Israelite Fruit of the Holy Spirit, appearing in your lives and interactions,) what the (New Covenant purpose and) will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
So beloved, because of his own recent experience with repentance… can you see how what was happening in Rome must have gripped Paul’s heart? And now that we’ve seen some of the historical context underlying his words, I ask you to take what he was saying into your own heart. Ponder what the Holy Spirit is saying to all of us about our own repentance. Remember that Paul was originally writing to non-Jewish believers. They needed to consider and follow the example of their Messianic Jewish guides so that they would know how much the original pre-Yeshua brain wiring and mind programming of all Jews and all Gentiles has to be radically and fundamentally uprooted, removed and completely replaced! Paul was urging them to create and install brand new, New Covenant Israelite wiring, wiring that was compatible with the new realities God had put into their spirits, so that they would be able to see and cherish, and demonstrate to the rest of the world, the awesome unity and consistency God had actually been revealing, commanding and promising to give to us from the very beginning and throughout all of the Scriptures.
It was the responsibility of Yeshua’s original apostles to show Israel, and the rest of the world, that, since Genesis 1:1… God had been revealing Yeshua, His Living Word, to Israel all along! Starting with Genesis and throughout the Torah and also throughout all the other subsequent Hebrew Scriptures, God’s Living Word was doing all of it and was therefore being revealed within all of it.
John 5:45-47
“Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, FOR HE WROTE ABOUT ME! But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” (Emphasis added.)
And this is why the apostles, who finally came to realize who Yeshua really was, had to do their utmost to help Israel and the rest of the world gain insight into the new uncharted vistas of New Covenant Fulfillment that no human had ever had the capacity or opportunity to fathom or imagine, until the actual Incarnation of God’s Living Word had taken place. In keeping with His long established pattern, God’s Word revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants first. Then… through them… He was to be revealed to the rest of the world. And that is the pattern He followed when it was time to institute and launch God’s New Covenant with Israel. Yeshua came to Israel first… and then… after they had a chance to respond to Him… He began to reach out to the rest of the world… through His yielded, crucified and unified New Covenant disciples.
In the days of the apostles, including Paul, the Hebrew Tanach was the only Bible in existence! The apostolic Gospels and letters would not become part of the canon of Scripture for a long time after their deaths. So all that the apostles had to work with at the time was what God had entrusted to Israel. But that was more than enough! As Yeshua Himself had said, the revelation of God’s Living Word had already been embedded throughout the entire Tanach! So, naturally, Yeshua, as He was already revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, was what they had been given to use to teach the Gentile newcomers. That is how they would naturally have come to know their Messiah and Lord and Master… through the thoroughly Israelite ‘eyes’ of their apostolic leaders and teachers!
That was the Biblically-derived ‘bread’, that the first Gentile believers received from their Israelite brothers. That was the only revelation ‘diet’ available, the only means by which Yeshua could have been revealed to them. And, Israel was the one and only source by which any of those newly-saved Gentiles could have possibly received it! They had to be grafted into Israel’s New Covenant Commonwealth because God did not make His Covenant with any other people, nor does He operate with humanity in any other way!
So the idea of breaking away from Israel and from the Faith that God had entrusted to her, and starting a new and totally alien religion never could have entered the minds of the apostles. That would have been utterly impossible! They were not about to leave Israel, nor were they about to teach the new Gentile believers to leave it either. And since it was never their intent to do that, it never was part of the teaching they gave to the new Gentile believers that gathered around them after Peter’s encounter with Cornelius in Acts 10. And therefore, to those original Jewish apostles… the future Gentile-controlled Church that is so used to ignoring and disregarding and contradicting what is written in the Torah and the rest of the Tanach, would be totally unrecognizable to Peter, Paul and the other apostles that had been entrusted with implementing the New Covenant Fulfillment that God intended for the entire world! They were determined to remain faithful to the death to their resurrected Messiah, and to the instructions and commands He had clearly given them to carry out:
Matthew 5:17-20
“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law (Torah of Moses) or the Prophets (the Tanach, or the Hebrew Scriptures); I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until Heaven and Earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven. For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
To those apostles, the God-given commission required them to teach and protect and expedite the grafting of the new Gentile believers into the Fullness of the Covenant-based Spiritual Legacy that God had given to Israel for her safekeeping and propagation throughout the rest of the world! So, if Gentiles were going to embrace Yeshua, they would have to embrace His chosen people and their Legacy, because that was what He Himself, as God’s Living Word, had been born into and had embraced and practiced and interpreted and revealed and entrusted to His apostles! Those original new Gentile believers were made to realize that their new Lord and Master, Yeshua, was God’s Living creative Word who had created and established and protected Israel all of this time! And now, it was their task to join Him as He fulfilled all that had been promised to Israel before, through the promises of the New Covenant that they and the new Gentile believers were now commissioned to embody and allow the Lord to fulfill, now that He was able to abide within their spirits, souls and bodies!
Israel’s resurrected Messiah is that same Living Word, through whom God has done everything for all of His Creation! Thus Yeshua is revealed throughout… from Genesis 1:1… all the way through the Torah… all the rest of the Tanach! And the New Covenant apostolic writings serve to tie all of Scripture together, by showing us that what is in the Book of Revelation is actually the Perfect Fulfillment of what was first revealed in seed form in Genesis and Exodus! So, the Word of God is forever the Creator, Initiator, Shepherd and Messiah King and Fulfillment of Israel! He was sent by His Father to fulfill everything God had revealed, commanded and promised to Israel before His arrival in the flesh took place! And thus, through Israel, He has appeared to serve as the Messianic King and Lord and Restorer of all of Creation! (See Deuteronomy 18:15-19; Isaiah 52:13-15; 53; Matthew 5:17-20)
So can you see how tragic it was when the Gentiles in Rome began to break away from their Messianic brethren? That was a horrible mistake! What God had entrusted to Israel will always be the foundational Biblical, Israelite Legacy Root, to which God must, mercifully and graciously, engraft the rest of the world. So Romans is telling us that not only do our spirits need to be regenerated and saved… but our brains and minds also have to be updated with corresponding SPIRITUAL, BIBLICAL NEW COVENANT DATA that will enable us to see and protect and maintain the unity, cohesion and unbreakable, unstoppable continuity that God has packed into His entire Biblical Revelation… from Genesis to Revelation!
God’s revelation isn’t chopped up into certain dispensational pieces that replace and supersede each other! There is no portion of God’s dealings with us that suddenly becomes obsolete and irrelevant! His revelation is more like a telescope. Each section is contained within and comes forth out of, the one that preceded it. But regardless of whether the telescope is fully extended, or whether it is fully compressed within its outermost final segment, it always remains one integrated, inseparable working unit! Each section in God’s revelation has its purpose, but they are all united and they work together to constitute God’s full revelation of Himself, through His Eternal Living Word made flesh. God placed His Living Word made flesh… the world’s Messiah… into the womb of Israel… forever!
We Must Embrace Israel
So Paul was telling the Gentiles: ‘If you Gentiles claim to embrace Yeshua… you must embrace Israel and all of the spiritual Biblical Legacy God entrusted to the care of Israel’s New Covenant apostolic Remnant! And if the Jews claim to believe and obey God, they must embrace Yeshua and all that His Heavenly Father sent Him to Earth to do in our Name, as our Messiah!
But despite the warnings God gave to believers through writings like Galatians and Romans and Ephesians… the split that Paul was trying to prevent took place nevertheless. And the problem continued to grow and spread. And what Paul feared, has, to this day, become normal and acceptable. In fact, to modern day people, the awesome beautiful union that actually took place between the Messianic Jewish believers and the original Gentile believers in Acts 10, seems now to be incredible and unthinkable and, therefore, impossible to accept and take seriously, much less, to restore, develop and extend to its logical, God-ordained Consummation Fulfillment!
So, beloved, it appears to be inevitable… that the current status quo of the organized religious structures of non-Messianic Judaism, and those portions of Christendom that remain Torah-less and Jew-less, and who both approve of the rebuilding of The Wall in their hearts and lifestyles, will soon be dealt with by God in a very stern and firm manner. God will soon have to set everything right once more. The time for that Final Correction and proper Realignment is now at hand! I say this because the Messianic Jews have returned. The world had to wait nineteen centuries before those that are destined to be the first fruits of Israel’s New Covenant Fulfillment reappeared. But now they are here. They emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust tragedy. The Messianic legacy that the original Jewish apostles imparted to the Church has begun to grab hold again. And now, it is Life… springing forth from the ashes of Death! It is spreading throughout every region of the world… including Israel! And so it appears very likely that the prophecies in Scripture that foretold the Restoration and the New Covenant Fulfillment of Israel are about to come to pass into fullness and actuality and living color… in this present Age!
If that is true, then many of us who are alive today will most likely experience a season of shaking and rigorous discipline that will equal what Sinai Covenant Israel, or ‘Old Testament’ Israel and her form of Judaism, were forced to undergo shortly after Paul wrote his letter to Rome. No Jew living in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s of the first century could have imagined or anticipated what was about to happen to Israel in the year 70! That is why Yeshua’s prophecy about the coming destruction of the temple seemed so blasphemous and unacceptable to his contemporaries when He warned His contemporaries about it. But nevertheless, what He said, and what the letter to the Hebrews had also warned Israel about, actually did come to pass a few years after those warnings were given:
Matthew 24:1-2
“Jesus came out from the temple and was going away when His disciples came up to point out the temple buildings to Him. And He said to them, ‘Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down!‘” (Emphasis added.)
Hebrews 12:25-27
“See to it that you do not refuse Him who is speaking. For if those did not escape when they refused him who warned them on Earth, much less will we escape who turn away from Him who warns from Heaven. And His voice shook the earth then, but now He has promised, saying, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heaven.’ This expression, ‘Yet once more,” denotes the removing of those things which can be shaken, as of created things, so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.(Emphasis added.)
In 70 C.E., Israel was the first to experience this awesome Last Days shaking. The Roman emperor Vespasian sent his son Titus, and his legions to Israel, to break the back of Jewish rebellion and resistance, once and for all. The soldiers laid siege to Jerusalem, the City of David. Then they breached the walls and stormed the city with unspeakable fury and ruthlessness. They leveled the second temple, slaughtered tens of thousands of Israelites, dismantled and destroyed the entire priesthood and religious sacrificial system of God’s chosen people, and scattered the survivors all across the world. And thereafter, none of the dispersed Jews were allowed to come back to their God-given home. The Romans even changed the name of God’s Land of Promise… from Israel, to ‘Palaestina’.
So the prophecies were vindicated: Starting with Israel, God did begin to shake everything that could be shaken… whatever men had created, whatever had not come from the mind, will and Spirit of God, whatever was only earthly and temporary… all of that has been, or soon will be, taken completely away! And only what comes from God, and what pertains to His New Covenant with Israel and its Ultimate Eternal Fulfillment Realities, will be allowed to remain! God has warned us all, that only what is Uncreated and Eternal, only what comes to us from Almighty God Himself, will, by the End of human history, be all that God will allow to remain! So check the foundations upon which your feet are currently resting! Make sure they match what is in Almighty God’s written Word!
The time for that awesome Last Days shaking is about to take place throughout the entire world. And that includes the world of organized Jewish and non-Jewish religions. Whatever abides in the current religious ‘status quo’ that is man-devised and soulish and out of alignment with God’s Biblical Revelation and Commandments and Promises… will be shaken and destroyed, just as it happened to Israel in the first century! The letter to the Hebrews has warned us all that this is going to happen. So… as it happened to Israel in the first century… so will it happen again, throughout the whole world… and anything that dares to stand in the way of God’s Perfect Restoration of Creation and the Fulfillment of His New Covenant promises, will suddenly disappear. Whatever abides in Judaism and in Christendom, and in anything else that God has not revealed or commanded or promised in His written Word will, in the last century, collapse, crumble and be completely removed… forever!
So beloved, take heed: we too are in for a season of massive shaking and enormous changes. Unfortunately, all the chaotic terrifying things that naturally and inevitably follow such upheavals will also appear. Even New Covenant believers of the Last Days, both Jews and non-Jews, will see and experience fearful, distressful things that no one could have dreamed possible! But in His Perfect Faithfulness, God will see to it that His people will be brought to a level of repentance that will be worthy of His Perfect Standards. No longer will He leave things up to the flaky wills and intentions of our soulish flesh. God Himself will take over and His Spirit will move us into proper alignment, as only He can do. And in His omnipotent Power and Grace, He will personally walk us safely through the Valley of the Shadow of Death!
Ezekiel 36:22-27
“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for My Holy Name, which you have profaned among the nations (Gentiles) where you went. I will vindicate the Holiness of My Great Name which has been profaned among the nations (Gentiles), which you have profaned in their midst. Then the nations (Gentiles) will know that I am the Lord,’ declares the Lord God, ‘when I prove Myself holy among you in their sight! For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own Land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and CAUSE YOU TO WALK IN MY STATUTES, and YOU WILL BE CAREFUL TO OBSERVE MY ORDINANCES!(Emphasis added.)
Hebrews 12:28-29
“Therefore, since we receive a Kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a Consuming Fire!” (Emphasis added.)