Call Me a Messianic Hebrew

Call me a Messianic Hebrew.

There is (as usual) the ongoing debate within the Messianic community as to where the gentiles (read nonJews) fit in. As a nonJew, as far as I know, I have been told to convert to Judaism, go to a gentile Messianic congregation and to even go back to the church where I belong. As someone who viewed coming out of the church nearly the equivalent of coming out of Babylon, to be told to go back really makes me question the heart of those who would recommend that.

So as the one being told where to go, I have had to turn back to the scriptures to see where God would have me be.

About thirteen years ago I was in the middle of a “spirit-filled” church, when God started telling me to “be a Godly man.” When I looked around my church and saw only “the world”, I realized that being Godly meant being somewhere else. At about the same time, my wife who is a family practice physician started to get asked to do eighth day circumcisions by some of the local Messianics. Over the next few years she became the mo’el for almost every Messianic congregation within two hundred miles. And it was because of this that we came in contact with almost every Messianic flavor there was.

For a little more than ten years I have been sliding back and forth on the scale between Jew and Christian. I used to say, “that on a scale of “one” being the most orthodox of Jews and “ten” being the most charismatic of Christians, the real answer lies about a “four. “” When it came to Messianic congregations, I used to rate them that way. Ie They are a “three” or they are a “three” on their way to becoming a “two”. For us a “two” would be a congregation that was so orthodox that it hardly ever mentioned Yeshua or read from the New Testatment. We saw many of those over the years.

When I was part of the Spirit-filled congregation, I used to feel the presence of God in our midst. I have experienced the same in Messianic congregations, but with much less regularity. In fact, it may be anecdotal, but the closer I got to a “one” on the scale, the less I felt the presence of God.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do not believe the Jews are farther from God than the Christians. What I saw instead was as Christians tried to become more Jewish, they would move farther from the Spirit of God. So maybe my scale doesn’t work. I think that instead of having the two points of Judaism and Christianity, there is a third point of Godliness that has both the Spirit and the works present. More of a triangle than a straight line, where if a Christian or a Jew wants to be more Godly, they will have to move towards it.

So how do we find that point? Where do we have to go to find the common point between Jews and Christians where they are both more Godly? I think that Paul was trying to teach it to us in Romans and Galatians. We must get back to Abraham! If you had the faith of Abraham, then you are a child of the one true God.

Abraham was called a Hebrew which means "one on the other side" or "one who has crossed over" because he had crossed over and set himself apart from the pagan world. From the beginning he was recognized by those around him as someone who followed God, not the world. Notice however that those who came after him were not called Abrahamites, but were also called Hebrews. Being a Hebrew was not about lineage, but about a state of mind.

Abraham was called a Hebrew. His sons and members of their camp were called Hebrews. And finally the Israelites were called Hebrews because they were all “on the other side”. As for the title Jew, that did not come about until after the Babylonian captivity. Prior to the expulsion to Babylon, the capital of pagan idolatry, the Israelites were referred to as Hebrews. Afterwards, they are only referred to as Jews. You might say they went into Babylon a Hebrew and came out a Jew.

Is that an unfair assertion that there was a change? I don’t think so when you see that all of the pagan and Hellenistic influences date back to the Babylonian captivity.

To tell me that I should go back to the church is impossible because I could never go back to what I now see as all the pagan influences. However, I cannot go willingly to the Jewish side because of the same reasons.

That is why I have decided that I will be a Hebrew or in this case a Messianic Hebrew.