How should Christians view the Old Testament? And should they reject it as having nothing to say to people today? That's page 82 in the new section. Or should they obliterate all distinctions between the two testaments? The Old Testament is related to the New in the way that a bud is related to a flower and an acorn is to an oak. The people of God in the Old Testament are compared to children. In the New, they have come to adulthood. The Christian attitude towards the Old Testament should be like that of the Lord Jesus and his apostles. If one were to remove all the Old Testament quotations and their explanation and application from the teachings of the apostles, he would be left with a very small New Testament. As a case in point, one should read Paul's epistle to the Romans and observe how often he establishes each point of doctrine out of the Old Testament. In fact, the apostles appeal to the Old Testament for their doctrine the same way Bible teachers appeal to the whole Bible today. Paul is simply following the example of the Lord Jesus, who established His teaching by quoting from the Old Testament, one should not overlook what the Lord Jesus Himself said. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law of the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Matthew 5.17. I want to ponder that. He didn't come to abolish the law of the prophets, but he came to fulfill them. For Jesus to fulfill the law and the prophets does not mean that he came simply to press the obligations of the Torah. That's the law. on God's people without change taking place in the structure of the law. The Lord came to bring the revelation given at Mount Sinai to completion. Through His death and resurrection, He inaugurated the new covenant. Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost in a new way, and so He brought the law to its fullest expression in people whose hearts are embossed with God's own moral character. You know what embossed means. It's got a raised paper, you know, you put a stamp on it. Through the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, the law has been fulfilled and the forms and structures of worship under the Old Testament have been transformed. If we think back to the sermon that I preached a week ago today, we see that things like circumcision and the Passover continue on, but they continue on without blood. In other words, virtually everything in the Old Testament, all of the ceremonies involve the shedding of blood. But in the New Testament, the ceremonies that replace them, the Passover and the Lord's Supper, don't involve the shedding of blood. And so there's a transformation, there is an inner likeness and conformity to the Old Testament ordinances, but there's this transformation, no shedding of blood. We don't shed blood in baptism. We don't shed blood in the Lord's Supper. The cup represents the blood of Christ, and the waters of baptism take the place of the shedding of blood in circumcision. Only in Israel among the Samaritans, who still are alive today, they practiced the bloodshed of the Passover. It's interesting, Judaism, after the collapse of the temple in 70 AD, Judaism replaced Old Testament religion. that sink in for a moment. Judaism replaced the religion of the Old Testament because the religion of the Old Testament always involved the shedding of blood and without the shedding of blood there's no remission of sins. So what is Judaism? Judaism is simply ethical monotheism. In other words, it's a religion that's based on ethics and it's monotheistic and it's adapted to any place at any time. There's no shedding of blood. Now if we take the Old Testament seriously, that means there's been no forgiveness of sins symbolically offered since 70 AD. There's no going back to what was there once because it's been replaced with the new covenant and the temple has been destroyed. The wall where they pray, is that an original wall? Yes, but that's not part of the temple. Yes, it's the foundation on which the temple was built. In 19 BC, Herod the Great Herod the Great entered into a huge building program. Remember that Herod was half Jewish and half Edomite. So he wanted to satisfy his Jewish people. So that helps us also date the New Testament in the time of Jesus because in John chapter 2 Jesus is asked, 40 and 6 years was this temple being built and you're going to destroy it and raise it again in three days? Of course he's speaking of the temple of his body. Take 19 BC and take 46 years, and of course, zero doesn't count for anything. You go from 1 BC to 1 AD. And so that means that Jesus is giving this teaching around 26 AD, which means that Jesus, who began his ministry around the age of 30, was born. several years BC because the people that set up our calendar calculated wrongly. Scripture is accurate, but the people that gave us our calendar calculated wrongly. And so anyhow, In Herod's great building program, he decided to reinforce the foundation of the temple. And he had these massive stones brought. And so he built this wall that's left, the Wailing Wall, is simply the foundation of the temple. But the temple itself was destroyed so that not one stone was left standing on another. And how that happened is interesting. In order to keep the temple clean, they had to have a lot of water to wash away the blood. And so they had an aqueduct that provided water. And so what happened is when the Romans set the temple on fire, and then they released all of this very cold water coming down from the mountains, those rocks and stones blew apart. And so, pardon? The heat and the cold. And so those stones superheated, blew apart, and then the Romans took the gold and the silver from the temple. I think I may have shared that. Did I share that? No. I have a silver coin that was minted by the Romans with silver from the Jewish temple. And they financed the building of the Colosseum in Rome with this Jewish money from the temple with gold and silver. And so the reason that coin is recognized as having come from the temple is that on one side, it has a picture of a woman under a tree and the inscription around it says, Judea Weeping. So I bought that coin. One day I saw it in an antique shop in the French Quarter. They have coins and money and a lot of other things. But anyhow, the Jews went into captivity. And they left the city. Many were slaughtered terribly. If you really want to understand what happened, the only historical witness to this is the Jewish general, Flavius Josephus, who took the name Flavius from the family of those that conquered it, Vespasian and his son Titus. And this is all going on at the time that Nero is killed And Vespasian hightails it back to Rome and becomes the emperor and leaves his son Titus to finish the job. So the temple is destroyed. The Jewish people are sent into exile, all of them. And there were terrible things that happened. Before the city fell, there was a great confidence that they were going to be supernaturally delivered. And so what happens is that the Romans surrounded the city in 66 A.D. and then suddenly withdrew. And so those who were already inside the city took courage from that and decided to continue the resistance. And so what happens is the city falls under the control of extreme zealots and then supernatural things begin to happen. Josephus writes about it. They heard voices. They saw visions in the sky of angels departing from the temple area. And interesting, you see, a civil war broke out in 66. Josephus was commander of the armies of the Galilee, and he realized This is a lost cause. And so he surrendered, and then he came to be trusted by the Roman family of the Flavians. And so he became both a translator and a negotiator, trying to persuade his people to surrender. which had they done, the temple would have been spared, and the city would have been spared, and many thousands of lives would have been spared. But what happened is that people wanting to escape swallowed their gold and their jewelry, and so then that became known, and so all of the people who were escaping then became searched. And the only way to search somebody whose stomach is full of diamonds and gold is to slit them open. And so just terrible massacre occurs and it's a fulfillment of a curse section in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 28 and Leviticus chapter 26 warning the Jewish people that if they violated His covenant these terrible things would happen and they would end up eating their own children. Well we know that that happened in the northern kingdom of Samaria. We know that it happened in the siege of Jerusalem under the Babylonians, and then it happened again under the Romans. So, people eating their own children. It's a terrible thing. I mean... So, anyhow, the temple's destroyed, and so what's left is an oral tradition that displaces the Old Testament with the oral law. The oral law has been passed down. And you see that in the Gospels, that Jesus is having to deal with a tradition that's there. And the tradition is actually put above the written Scriptures. Because, you know, you can't understand it. And we have a tradition going back to Moses of how to understand it. That was the spin. And so that tradition is preserved for us in the Talmud. There's the Babylonian Talmud. And there's the Jerusalem Talmud. And those are the traditions passed down over the generations. Rabbi so-and-so says this, Rabbi so-and-so says this. And you remember in the Gospels they said that Jesus taught as one with authority and not as the rabbis, because for the rabbis it was, well, I cite Rabbi Akiva, well I cite Rabbi Gamaliel, and so on. And so there's this body of tradition that's passed down. So Judaism is what's left of the Old Testament after the way of worship and the way of forgiveness of sins has been destroyed. Does that make sense at all? What do they do now for the forgiveness of sins? Well, they confess their sins on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and basically they believe that they're forgiven by doing that. So there is no forgiveness, biblically, for Jewish people, because there's no shedding of blood, and it's just, you know, good people. In a sense, they were hindered from being able to remove sins ritually, as on the Day of Atonement with the victim where the blood is shed on that day, or the Passover lamb. All of that's gone. But in Israel itself, the Samaritans still exist. They're a small number of people, and they are to the north of Jerusalem, and they're allowed to practice their religion, which they've practiced since people began to come back to the Holy Land. So they do engage in shedding of blood. By the way, it reminds me of a story I was told where a preacher wanting to get a point across brought a lamb into the church and slit his throat. They never forgot that illustration, but they probably forgot him because he was probably fired on the spot. It doesn't have a lot to do with this lesson, but I was very fascinated by this on the airplane. Going to Australia, there was a Jewish couple, an older man, and they were very Jewish. The whole time we were waiting to get on the plane in Los Angeles, he had a very small book, it was a thick book, that he was just reading. Well, before sunrise, he moved, there was a whole row of seats on the exit, nobody was sitting at. And it was right, like right there from where we were. He went up there, he opened this case, and he took out this shawl type thing that he took over. But, then he wrapped his arms in something and he put like a camera or something on his head and he had them on his wrist and he proceeded to you know and stand up and pray and I mean I didn't and then he had to take all that stuff off and methodically I didn't know what I mean I knew he was dude those things that look like a camera are portions of scripture And so he's putting that portion of scripture up there and tying it, and portion of scripture here and here. Now he was, let's see if I can put this up here. Not necessarily, he could have been, but... This is one of your problems you have in modern Israel. You have orthodox Jews. My question or my thought is that he may have been ultra-Orthodox, and the ultra-Orthodox are called Hasidic Jews. He did not have that weird hair. Oh, yeah. He didn't have that weird hair either. Oh, okay. He just had a beanie. Yeah, a yarmulke. So anyhow, I'm sure he was an Orthodox Jew. And then modern Jews, going back to the mid-1800s in Europe, particularly Germany, came up with the Reform Movement. And that's nothing to do with Reformed Christianity. So Reformed Judaism... Most Jews today are Reformed Jews. And their relation to the Old Testament and to the traditions passed down by the elders is similar to agnostics who put up a Christmas tree. In other words, they're still observant of certain things, but not of much. And those are the Reform Jews. And Reform Jews, My friend, who's a rabbi, he's older than me, he's about 80, doesn't believe in prayer. He will say things. He doesn't believe, in other words, he'll do a reading. He doesn't believe in life after death. And so, if you think about many of the Hollywood Jews, they're Reform Jews. And then in between the Reform and the Orthodox are conservative Jews. And they're going to observe the things that are in the Torah that are not... Well, they're going to observe the things that are required, but they're not going to be fanatical about it. So the man, Trish, that you saw was undoubtedly an Orthodox Jew. So you've got reform. The three major sects of Judaism today are reform, which is very liberal. The conservative, which kind of has one foot here and one foot there, are people who are conservatives on some issues, but not where it's going to really make them look ridiculous. And then the orthodox are those that really observe. That man had to be orthodox to do that. It must have been. I mean, it was amazing. And it went on. He did that for like an hour. Oh, my. I mean, it was, you know, I mean, we've been on the show for anybody that I remember working at a summer camp in upstate New York and as you drove to get up there you passed through what was called the Borscht Belt. The Borscht Belt would be where a lot of Jewish people who lived in New York would have a camp they would go to. And in the movie, which I saw years and years ago, but I haven't seen it since, called Dirty Dancing, it took place in one of these camps. Now, as you're going up, you would see tables of young men with a pigtail. And they would be doing this. They would be reading. And they're doing... And I guess that kept them from going to sleep, and it also kept them alert, and they're also tending to fiddle with that pigtail on the side. And those were probably ultra-Orthodox. Now, when I was in Israel in 2000, and this is where the conflict is today, because the Orthodox represent a voting bloc. that you've got to have in order to maintain power. So when we stayed in the hotels, we would have a breakfast that would have things like cheeses and whatnot and milk, but for other meals there were no cheeses and milk. It was only your meat. And so that goes back to the rules of the Old Testament. And what's preserved in the Talmud is a fence around the law. In other words, if God says, you know, don't go out of the yard, then the rabbis would say, don't go out of the house. In other words, it's a fence around the law. To keep you from doing this, they take it yet another step and say, well, don't do this. Anyhow, those were places maintaining kosher diet laws. It wasn't just that they didn't have ham sandwiches. It was that they couldn't mix meat and milk. And the reason for that is the Old Testament prohibition that you would not boil a calf in its mother's milk, which had to do with cruelty. So what you did was, they took that a step further, where you could never eat dairy products at the same time that you were having meat. And in a good Jewish home, you're gonna have a separate set of plates for dairy and a separate set of plates for meat. So that was true in the hotels. You could never get a cheeseburger in Israel. And so that's the fence around the law, the tradition of the rabbis, and that's what Jesus is dealing with. And, you know, we have a lot of things like, for example, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. That's clearly biblical. Well, from that, You have a tradition. God's name, first of all, in Hebrew, written Hebrew does not have vowels, only consonants. Have I told you all that? Yeah. And so when you come to these four letters, YHVH, They wanted to remind people never to say that, which probably was pronounced Yahweh. So what they did was to put the vowel points, they never messed with the consonantal text. And so what they did was, they had a tradition, And they passed that tradition down, never to... excuse me, that tradition down was how to pronounce this word, how to pronounce that word. And so they came up with a series of dots, like one, or three dots is an e, one dot is an e, this is an a sound, and this is an a sound. And so they came up with dots and dashes, and so what they did were to take the vowels for the ordinary word Sir, Lord, Master, Adonai, and they wrote underneath it This is to soften it, two dots in a row and the three. And so that would remind a reader, when he comes to it, to say, Adonai. So if you were saying what I would call the Apostle's Creed of the Jews, His hero Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one, which in Hebrew would be Shema Yisrael, Yahweh, Eloheinu Yahweh Echad. You would never hear it said that way in a synagogue. What you would hear them recite would be Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Now, non-Jews trying to pronounce this came up with Yehovah. And so if you anglicize it with a J instead of a Y, you get Jehovah. Well, Jehovah is a mispronunciation of the four letters, and instead of... they were never meant to be read, they were meant as a substitute. Adonai. Hero Israel, Adonai your God, Adonai is one. Master our God, Master is one. So what I'm getting at is, The rabbis took so seriously the prohibition to use God's name in vain that they didn't use it at all. So in the synagogue, they never referred to the God of Israel by His distinctive personal name, Yahweh. They referred to Him as Lord or Master, a substitute, and they did many other things. It's interesting as you look at the Gospel of Matthew, which was clearly written for Jewish people with its massive number of citations from the Old Testament, as over against Mark and Luke and John, you have something there called the Kingdom of Heaven. as over against the kingdom of God. And there are many places they're identical except kingdom of heaven versus kingdom of God. And so, Mark isn't worried about it. Luke isn't worried about it, but Matthew, what do you call that, a circumlocution, where you say it in a roundabout way, refers to it as the kingdom of heaven, because heaven is a substitute for God. So anyhow, those are some thoughts. Trish, you hit the nail on the head. Right. And so you can see how the Orthodox Judaism, which lasted for well over a thousand years after the fall of Jerusalem, as they went into all the world trying to survive, When they enter into the modern age, particularly in places like Germany, they come up with a compromise, and that's Reformed Judaism, sometimes Reformed Judaism. And Reformed Judaism is belief in God, but we're not sure what He's like, and no confidence in life after death, and prayer generally is just recitation of things. Now I remember one day we had lunch with the rabbi and his wife, Sandy and I did. And they had a servant that worked for them whose son was very critically ill in the hospital. And that's the only time I've been in Arnie's presence where he actually appeared to pray. Yes. I once had Arnie and the Muslim imam into my home. Now Muslims follow similar dietary laws. They will never eat pig meat and they will never drink alcohol. Jews will drink alcohol a lot. And so I thought, what can I do here? So I did a little research and I found out that Arnie liked vodka. So I served coffee to the imam and vodka to the rabbi, and I think he overdrank. Because when the Muslims left, the imam came with one of his men, and they left before doing their prayers. Arnie stayed and sat on the back porch with us on the swing, and we had a lovely time talking until his head cleared. I drank nothing. Sandy hightailed it to another room because men and women don't eat together in Islam. So I had another imam in my home another time and he asked if he could do his prayers. So sure, go ahead. He went to my bathroom with his sons, and then I realized what he was doing later. He washed the back of his neck, his hands, and his feet in my bathroom sink. So anyhow, and then he asked me what direction was north, and I told him, so he figured where Mecca was. So he began facing Mecca to pray. you know, reciting things of the Quran and with his sons. And I'm on my knees begging Jesus to protect my home from any spirits that are not good. And Sandy was in our library with his teenage daughter who spoke good English and his wife who spoke no English. That was another imam. But anyhow, you know, these things, the three religions are very similar. There is no following of the Old Testament today, with the exception of the Samaritans, who have a distorted view, but still follow the basics from the time of Moses. They were the mixed race group of people who came back during Assyria. The Assyrians did deportations and importations of people, so they were a mixed group of people. But the Jews don't really follow the Old Testament. They don't really read it directly. They read through the eyes of the traditional rabbis going back a very long time, before the time of Jesus. And the Muslims take portions of the Old Testament and they distort, like it's Ishmael who is the chosen son of Abraham and so on. It's kind of interesting. Where do Reformed Jews find hope? Oh, I'm going to say this, Diane. They don't. That's what I'm wondering, hearing what you say, what they practice and what they do. Well, if you don't believe in life after death, then your deceased loved one is not really any different than a possum run over on the side of the road. Which is the way a lot of young Americans are going. Yes. Oh yeah. My nephew is dating a girlfriend who's probably a reformed Jewish. I think she's not just flat out agnostic. But, you know, really without hope. At least Orthodox Jews believe in life after death. You know, I've been to the synagogue a number of times, and I've been to the mosque not as many times as to the synagogue. It's just very sad. And in Islam, you can't have assurance of life after death. They believe in life after death, either in heaven or in hell, but you can never know. You don't know whether you've been good enough. We're the only ones with John 3.16. So, anyhow, we went far afield, but I think that it's useful. So Reform Judaism was an effort to maintain a Jewish identity without being bound by the traditions, which are pretty tight in Orthodox Judaism. And you really want to be on an airplane flying to Australia and have to get up and move and put all of these things on. Well, I'll tell you one other thing, interestingly. I worked in a hotel when I was in seminary, and they were right across the street within walking distance of a very famous synagogue designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Now it was a conservative synagogue, which meant that they tried to observe the Torah. And so we would have an influx of Jews on Friday afternoon. They would spend the night there, and then they would check out late Saturday. And so what that was about was that they would observe the Sabbath day's journey. And they would simply walk from the hotel over to that synagogue, which was an amazing synagogue. My Hebrew class went there one time on their Saturday service to practice Hebrew. reading it as they were reading it. Whereas in Reform Judaism, they're not going to do a lot of reading of Hebrew. But the conservatives still do, and the orthodox, pardon me, really do. And so I'm chatting with the other clerk who was Jewish, and she talked about her grandfather back during the Depression, who had pulled out a $20 bill, which during the Depression would be an amazing amount of money compared to today. And anyhow, he dropped it. And he was very observant. So what's he going to do? He can't pick it up. So he put his foot on it and stood there. That's right, the Sabbath ended. That's very observant. So you can see why people moved away from Orthodox Judaism to Reform Judaism, and then some said, well, we've moved a little too much. And that's why the message of the New Testament is one of liberation compared to the bondage of the law. Because it's not just the law, it's the tradition added on top of the law, the traditions of the elders. And so Jesus is always being quizzed, why don't you do this? So anyhow, well let me go get ready to preach. Somebody pray and pray for me to be clear and concise and not as concise as Christmas Eve, but that was the shortest sermon I've ever preached, but anyhow.