Ask Your Preacher - Archives

Ask Your Preacher - Archives

“The Messiah”

Categories: JUDAISM, RELIGIONS
I am a Jew and was invited to a friend’s church, and I went out of respect.  Wonderful people, but I was blown away with the preacher’s bottom line of "convert or burn in hell".

Jews believe there are righteous gentiles (non-Jews), but it appears from going to this church that there is no such thing as righteous non-christians.

Do all churches teach this?  Is this love and mercy?  It is hard to understand when the priest who read Adolf Lekman his last rites was asked after he purified himself with Jesus for one minute if he was now in heaven, and he replied, “Yes, he is”, and when asked about the 1.5 million Jewish children who were murdered he said, “May God have mercy on their souls”, meaning they are doomed.

Does this not cause division and pit one group of good people against another?

Sincerely,
Of A Friendly Faith

Dear Of A Friendly Faith,

As a Jew, you must appreciate the importance of the Messiah as much as we do.  Every Hebrew has anxiously searched for and waited for the coming of the Savior of Israel for thousands of years.  If that Savior came, and you rejected Him… you would be rejecting your own religion.  The coming of the Messiah is the single most important element of Judaism… even your own rabbis state this.  The only difference between you and us is that we believe that Messiah has already come.

Jesus is the Christ (Jhn 20:31).  Jesus professes that He is the only way to God (Jhn 14:6).  God’s definition of being a ‘good person’ is when we follow and obey His Son (Jhn 12:26).  Jesus is a stumbling block to many Jewish people (1 Cor 1:23), but that has always been the case.  Jesus even said that His coming would bring division (Matt 10:34-36).  If Jesus is a liar, we should desert Him, but if He is the Word of God (Jhn 1:1), any other religion cannot stand beside His (Eph 4:4-6).