Identity Theft (12 page)

“This is the same Kefa who, only fifty-three days ago, denied that he even knew Yeshua!” Ariel said.

“What!?”

“I am afraid so. It was just after Yeshua was arrested. A young servant girl accused him of being a disciple of Yeshua. He swore up and down that he wasn’t. Kefa was a gaffe machine! One minute he declares that Yeshua is the Messiah, then the next, he is telling Yeshua that he won’t let Him go to the Cross. And then he denies even knowing Him—not just once, but
three
times!

“Afterward, he was so ashamed. But Yeshua, after His resurrection, immediately reassured Him of His love and forgiveness and affirmed that he would have a significant role to play in His kingdom—no, not as the Pope,” he smiled, “but as one of the greatest communicators of Yeshua’s message there has ever been!

“I’ll let you in on a secret. The Father doesn’t always choose the ones that others would. He took the youngest son of Jesse, David, and made him king over Israel. He chose Joseph, the hated brother of the sons of Jacob, who was sold as a slave, and made him the second most powerful leader in the world—just in time to save from starvation the very same brothers who had wanted to kill him. And here, He takes an impulsive, uneducated, burly fisherman and gives him a gift like no one has ever seen before. The Father is far more interested in a person’s heart than in their talents. And Shimon has a great heart. Take a look.”

After hearing his message, the men cried out to Kefa and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

Kefa didn’t hesitate, “Repent and be immersed in water, every one of you, in the name of Yeshua, the Messiah, for the forgiveness of your sins.”

The crowd began to weep, as people openly confessed their sins. It was like someone took a collective blindfold off of these Jews and they saw clearly that they were in need of forgiveness. This was nothing like Yom Kippur in my synagogue. Every year we all dress up and come to the congregation to pray. We fast for twenty-four hours—many without even water. We spend the morning reading prayers that someone else wrote, confessing our sins—but never in tears! Never like this. I wouldn’t say it is a joke, but neither is it taken seriously. At least now I could see that. It wasn’t unlike the state of these people
before
the Holy Spirit fell upon them. They had come to Jerusalem out of religious obedience, but hadn’t actually expected to have an encounter with God.

The apostles organized the crowd and used what appeared to be a system of baths (
mikvot
), to immerse these people in water. Thousands went into the water and came out on the other side. As they did, they were glowing. They entered with tears of anguish and guilt at the realization of their sin, but emerged with tears of joy. Many were actually dancing with each other as they came out. In fact, it reminded me of the story of Miriam and the Israelites dancing on the other side, having passed through the Red Sea unharmed. The city was in an uproar. And while I could see that these people’s lives were being radically changed, I couldn’t understand why a Jew would be baptized.

“What is happening? Why are these Jews being baptized?” I asked Ariel.

“Remember what John told you earlier—immersion in water
began
with the Jews. These
mikvot
or immersion pools have been in existence for centuries. It was the practice of all those coming up to Jerusalem to present an offering at the Temple to first be made ritually clean by passing through these waters.

“The problem is that most Jewish people, when they hear the Greek word
baptism
, tend to think of the Middle Ages, when so-called Christians forced Jewish people to be baptized in water, symbolizing their conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, just like Christophe in our story earlier. To the Jewish mind, baptism is not equated with coming to faith in the Jewish Messiah or seen as a sign of dying to the old nature and rising to new life, but rather it is equated with persecution, expulsion, and even physical death.

“But as you have just seen for yourself it was not like that in the beginning. Thousands of Jews, plus their wives and children, joyfully and
willingly
entered into the waters of immersion, seeing it as something entirely Jewish, which it is.”

Written before me appeared an archeological reference in cloud-like letters as before:

A series of public ritual bathing installations were found on the south side of the Temple Mount. Because of the stringent laws regarding purity before entering holy places, demand for
mikvot
was high and many have been discovered from first century Jerusalem.
²

“The difference is that immersion in water during the Temple period was something that needed to be repeated over and over again, each time one would come to the Temple to make a sacrifice. In the New Covenant, it is something we do only once, when we come to faith—as these have done today—and it symbolizes dying to our old life and entrance into a new life with God. Just look at their radiant faces—it’s so obvious, they’ve undergone a life-changing experience.”

A passage appeared.

Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into
[Messiah Yeshua]
were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as
[Messiah]
was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life
(Romans 6:3-4 NKJV).

“Unbelievable!” I was beside myself. This journey was endlessly amazing. “Ariel, do you realize that Yeshua
died
on a Jewish feast day—on Passover? And that He
rose from the dead
on the Jewish feast of Bikurim, Firstfruits. And then, He
poured out His Spirit
for the first time on His followers on the Jewish feast of Shavuot. It’s almost as if God was trying to impress upon the world that this thing is
Jewish!
Am I right?”

“You’re preachin’ to the choir,” Ariel was beaming. “However, within a few decades, the number of non-Jews who would join the
Kehilah
, the community of believers, would far outnumber the Jews, and the Father was laying a blueprint that would ensure people never forgot that salvation began with the Jews.”

“But they did forget,” I offered. “The Christianity in most of those stories, the movies you showed me, bears no resemblance to anything that I’ve seen here today. The Church changed so much over the centuries that Yeshua was no longer even recognizable as the Jewish Messiah of Israel. And it was not just His name that was changed, but His very nature. They made it seem like Yeshua was against the Jews!”

“And,” Ariel interrupted, “they conveniently forgot that He’d said that He had been sent
to the lost sheep of Israel,
and that, not only were all His followers Jewish—He was Jewish Himself! Furthermore, according Jeremiah, the New Covenant would be made with the house of Judah and the house of Israel!” (See Jeremiah 31:31.)

“Even baptism,” I jumped back in, “they managed to turn into something altogether foreign to Jews. Nor was it ever emphasized, if the Church was even aware of it, that all these powerful milestones of Christianity, like His death and resurrection, took place on Jewish holidays.

“And another thing—why do Christians worship on Sunday when the Sabbath is clearly from Friday evening to Saturday evening? If this all started with Jews, why would they change the Sabbath?”

“You wanna go there? Okay then, I guess we can take a look at it.” The angel
stretched
, feigning exhaustion. “But we will need to return to the classroom first. Hold on to me.”

Instantly, we were flying again.
I would never get tired of this!

Notes

1
.   While it has been a longstanding view that the 120 were at the Upper Room, many modern-day scholars, including Daniel Juster and Richard Longenecker, as well as the NIV Study Bible authors, not to mention the 19
^th
-century scholar Adam Clarke (Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible) and many others believe the disciples were in the Temple, probably in an enclosed area as part of Solomon’s Portico or porch.

“When, moreover, we bear in mind the fact (which appears both from the Scriptures and from other contemporary records) that the Temple, with its vast corridors or ‘porches’, was the regular gathering place of all the various parties and sects of Jews, however antagonistic the one to the other, it will be easy to realize that the Temple is just the place—both because of its hallowed associations, and also because of its many convenient meeting places—where the disciples would naturally congregate. Edersheim says that the vast Temple area was capable of containing a concourse of 210,000 people; and he mentions also that the colonnades in Solomon’s Porch formed many gathering places for the various sects, schools and congregations of the people. In commenting on John 7 this trustworthy authority says that the gathering places in Solomon’s Porch ‘had benches in them; and from the liberty of speaking and teaching in Israel, Jesus might here address the people in the very face of his enemies.’ It was, moreover, and this is an important item of evidence, in Solomon’s Porch that the concourse of Jews gathered which Peter addressed in Acts 3 (see verse 11). Hence there can be little doubt that one of the assembling places to which Edersheim refers was the ‘house’ where the disciples were ‘sitting’ when the Holy Spirit came upon them.” (Philip Mauro, The Hope of Israel: What Is It?, 1922, accessed August 10, 2012,
http://www.preteristarchive.com/books/1922_ mauro_hope-israel.html
#CHAPTER_X.)

Let us also consider that this was on the morning of Shavuot, one of the most significant days of the Jewish year. It was the custom of the disciples to worship and pray in the Temple courtyard daily—how much more on Shavuot? Luke records: “While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the Temple, praising God” (Luke 24:51-53). This passage refers specifically to the ten days immediately after the ascension leading to Shavuot.

Furthermore, the Upper Room, at least the place where it is believed to have been, is a good twenty-minute walk from the Temple Mount and the immersion pools. The throng of Jewish pilgrims who witnessed the outpouring would have been at the Temple on Shavuot, as that is why they had journeyed to Israel. At the very least, if it was a home, it had to be adjacent to the temple.

2
.   “Southern Temple Mount,” Excavations (
BiblePlaces.com
), Mikveh, accessed November 17, 2012,
http://www.bibleplaces.com/southerntm.htm
.

Back in the classroom, the lesson began…

“In the year 364
CE
, at the Council of Laodicea, the Church formally declared Sunday as the Lord’s Day, the day of worship and rest, effectively changing the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday—at least in their minds. The pervading sentiment of the Council is given expression in this quote from Canon XXIX:

Christians shall not Judaize and be idle on Saturday, they shall work on that day; but the Lord’s Day they shall especially honor; and being Christians, shall, if possible, do no work on that day. If, however, they are found Judaizing,
they shall be shut out from Christ
.
¹

“These believers were not merely discouraged from celebrating the Jewish Sabbath, they were
commanded not
to do so. If they
did
, they would be ‘anathema from Christ,’ as another English translation of the same quote says. That means they would be, in the eyes of the Church—but not the Father’s, mind you—cut off from the Church and the Messiah—in short
excommunicated
.”

“How could they do that if it is not expressly written in the New Covenant? Where did they get the authority to do such things?” I asked.

“That goes back to the Kefa debacle. Remember when we talked about how the Roman Catholic Church misinterpreted Yeshua’s comment to Kefa?”

“Yes,” I said, marveling that my capacity to absorb information here was at least ten times what it had been when I was in university. “Yeshua was saying that the rock He would build His Kehila on was
the revelation that He is the Messiah, the Son of the living God
. Roman Catholics believe that Kefa
himself
was the rock, and that is why they assume he was the first pope.”

Ariel added, “From there they somehow concluded that Kefa, ‘the first pope,’ had special authority when it came to issues of doctrine, and so every pope after him had this same authority. This really gave them
carte blanche
when it came to dogma. They could basically make up whatever served their purposes, whether it was in the Bible or not, and then declare that it was binding—not because God had said it, but because He had given them the authority to do so. In fact, later they would claim that not only did the Pope have permission to establish doctrine, but that he could not err in doing so—he was infallible. He was preserved by God from error. It is taught that this was an expression of God’s love to protect the Church from deception, which is in fact why we have His Word. In truth, this was invented so that the Church could control the people and the Pope’s authority over doctrine was drilled into them. For example, in
The Convert’s Catechism for Catholic Doctrine
, the question is asked, ‘By what authority did the Church substitute Sunday for Saturday?’ The answer: ‘The Church substituted Sunday for Saturday by the plenitude of that divine power which Jesus Christ bestowed upon her.’
²