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Answer for yourself: How much do you know of the conditions that existed in Israel in the first century? How well are you acquainted with the spiritual condition of the Priests of Israel in the first century? How well are you acquainted with the cultural influences made by Hellenism upon Israel in the first century? Lastly, how would you characterize the moral and ethical conditions that existed among the Jews of Israel in the first century?
Answer for yourself: Are you aware that if you do not command a workable knowledge of the above questions then it is impossible to understand the dynamics involved in the events recorded in the New Testament surrounding the Messianic push of the first century?
As demonstrated earlier Israel was to be "the" Priest of the nations. A "Priest" is to be holy and the literal Sadducean Priesthood of the first century was no longer of the lineage of Zadok and were in Rome's "pocket" as many times the Priesthood was sold to the highest bidder. I guess the best way to characterize the whole of the problem is with the well familiar adage: "When in Rome do as the Romans". This is exactly what was happening. Modernism and liberalism was in vogue. Notice what was said of the messenger of the covenant renewal which was to come:
Mal 4:6
6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
Luke 1:17
17 And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
Preparation was necessary for the Lord to come. Preparation was necessary for the Kingdom to come. Preparation was necessary for the Messiah to appear. There was work to be done spiritually if the Kingdom of God was to appear. For without such repentance among people and leaders it would not appear; neither would Israel's King. The people were called to "repent" and turn their hearts to the "fathers": Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and not to Rome or Athens. Repentance was the order of the day.
The nation did not repent and was unworthy of their calling; thus unworthy of the Kingdom. The corporate nation had failed to be a "holy nation and a royal priesthood." They had abdicated their calling. Now you can understand the continual call of the Prophets for the people to repent.
Now this is very important. Eventually, it began to be despaired by the Pious of Israel that the whole people could be brought to the necessary state of perfection. Hopes were pinned on an elect remnant of faithful souls, by whose obedience the redemption would be hastened. They would be the elite of the final World Order, entitled to its highest honors by their loyalty and by their sufferings in this present world. The Messianic Hope, in light of the failure of corporate Israel spiritually, became concentrated upon the determined efforts of the pious, the Saints, to observe the Law, thus justifying God in acting speedily. If the time was greatly prolonged even the Elect might prove unequal to the strain. It was imperative for the pious themselves to search out what Divine guidance had been given to set a term to their endurance, what signs were to be expected to intimate that the End of the Days had arrived. The last stage of the evolution of the Messianic Hope envisaged the intervention of God by means of the Anointed Ones, ideal figures, a Prophet like Moses, a perfect Priest, a righteous King of the line of David. These would come in the End of the Days as God's highest appointed representatives to transform the whole world scene and usher in the Kingdom of God.
Coinciding with Israel's Messianic hope was he worst calamity which had befallen the Jews since the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah and the loss of the Temple at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The new calamity was seen by pious Jews to be impending as a consequence of the attractions of Hellenism, which since the time of Alexander the Great had made increasing inroads into Jewish life and thought, fostering moral laxity and apostasy. The judgement of God must surely fall upon the nation as it had done in the past. It fully confirmed this opinion when the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (175-62 B.C.) decreed the abolition of the Jewish religion and converted the Temple at Jerusalem into a shrine of Zeus Olympius. Throughout the country there was great persecution, until resistance was organized by the sons of the aged priest Mattathias of Modim. One son, Judas Maccabaeus, led the revolt in the name of God, and after a series of remarkable successes cleansed and rededicated the defiled Temple One of the products of this testing time was the book of Daniel. Its apocalyptic dreams and visions were to exercise a major influence on messianic thinking and prediction.
The leaven of Hellenism had to be dealt with if Israel was to ever realize her potential and calling as the Priest to the Nations. Israel had to remain separated from the nations and the influences exerted upon her by her captives was pulling her from her religious roots. No one person or section of society had the answer to the infection of Hellenism. The answer came in the form of Jewish sectarianism. The experiences of the nation in the time of Antiochus and his immediate successors had administered a severe shock. The people became much more devout. There was revived in them a sense of destiny, of belonging to God in a special way, which demanded faithfulness to the Law revealed to them through Moses. They saw in the victories of the Maccabees the hand of God, outstretched for their deliverance when they were obedient to his commandments. The Messianic Hope comes out strongly in Daniel, where the people of the Saints of the Most High (likened to a Son of Man compared with the Beast figures representing the predatory heathen Empires) are entrusted with God's everlasting kingdom, when all rulers will serve and obey him (Dan. 7:26-27). It began to matter very much to the more spiritually sensitive that the Divine laws should be observed meticulously, and this inevitably gave rise to sectarianism, to competition in holiness.
From this period three ways of life in particular are made known to us, those of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. They were minority movements, numbering only a few thousands in each case, but they were nevertheless extremely influential and gave impetus to the exposition of the Messianic Hope. Unfortunately, as regards the first two, they were also involved in a power-struggle for control of the political affairs of the nation.
From 160 B.C. we are in a new age, an age of extraordinary fervor and religiosity in which almost every event, political, social and economic, was seized upon, scrutinized and analyzed, to discover how and in what way it represented a Sign of the Times and threw light on the approach of the End of the Days. The whole condition of the Jewish people was psychologically abnormal. The strangest tales and imaginings could find ready credence. A new pseudonymous literature came into being, part moral exhortation and part apocalyptic prophecy, a kind of messianic science fiction. People were on edge, neurotic. There were hot disputes, rivalries arid recriminations. Such "messianic science fiction," also know as apocalyptic eschatology, is called by a noted Dead Sea Scholar, Lawrence Schiffman, as being "totally discredited today." To this I concur. This "star wars theology" as found in the pseudoephigraphical literature and other such books like the book of Revelation in the New Testament is hardly to be entertained as reality or true for that matter. The first to be obliterated in the Roman war were those who wrote such texts. It never ceases to amaze me when reading their materials that they all have one thing in common: "read the last page in the book...we win." Well they didn't win; in fact they were the first to be destroyed and unfortunately their writings outlived them and today people read this stuff as if "God-breathed." Hardly! The Jews never canonized "apocalyptic" writings as "prophecy" and we find the book of Daniel listed in the "writings" and not the "prophets." That should tell you something!
The essence of the Messianic Hope, as we have seen, was the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, The Last Times for which the prerequisite was a righteous Israel or at least a righteous remnant of Israel. There must be a return to the relationship with God initiated at the Covenant of Sinai. Of this the prophecies of Jeremiah spoke, when he had said:
'Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a New Covenant [understood as "renewed" and "not new"] with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah ... After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more" (Jer. 31:31-4).
Israel had to return to God and allow His Commandments to be written on their hearts and minds. Israel needed a Covenant Renewal of their Sinai Covenant. They needed to repent and return to God through obedience to His Laws thus being a witness and an example to the nations. Only be being such a righteous Priest and example could they hope to be the catalyze that merits the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven and its King. Here it was promised that the spiritual infirmity of Israel would be helped by the intervention of God.
Answer for yourself: And how was this new (renewed) Covenant to take place?
This would occur when the people had the Laws of God written in their inward parts; their hearts and heads. No longer was it to be expected that the Levities were the only ones to be holy; now everyone was called to such a task. Such hopes sadly had been pinned upon the remnants of Israel…the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. They each saw in themselves that they were the last hopes for Israel and the world.
Now listen very closely. Two of the above three "Messianic hopes" were wrong and only one was right. Following the war of 66 C.E. with Rome only the Pharisees emerged along with their writings. The Essenes were the first to be obliterated and only their writings survived and were only located in this century. We can find nothing remaining of the Sadducees or any of their writings. It seems rather clear that Divine providence ensured the survival of the Pharisees as the hope of Israel. Let us not forget that just days and hours before Yeshua's death he is recorded saying:
Matt 23:2
2 Saying, The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat:
After saying to the Sadducees in the same discourse in John that the "kingdom is taken from you" he quickly points to the Pharisees and says that they now set in the seat of Moses. Understand this is said in the same discourse. The Greek word for seat is rather illuminating as we see the Strong's number is #2515 kathedra-
meaning:
How strange just prior to his death he makes such an announcement that the authority in Israel is removed from the Sadduceean Priest (who no longer were of the lineage of Zadok anyway) and given to the Pharisees as the teachers and judges of Israel. Coupled with this announcement is the historical fact that the Pharisees were the only one of the "Messianic hopes" that survived the war with Rome. It sure is something to think about especially in light of Christianity's replacement theology which listens to little if anything the Rabbis have to say. For Yeshua they were in charge and still are the authorities that the non-Jews are to look to today in spite of what you might think otherwise.
To become worthy of this interposition was imperative. The three movements to which we have referred, and
there were others, were fundamentally responses to this conviction. The Sadducees emphasized a strict and literal adherence to the Laws of Moses and the cultivation of ethics. The Pharisees aimed at the sanctification of the whole of daily life, and formulated new rules which extended the application of the Law to cover all contingencies. The Essenes, determined to be even more faultless, formed close communities from which contamination and impurity could be excluded, and where the utmost simplicity of living and rigid discipline could overcome material and fleshly temptations. These three "movements" were understood to be the last hope for Israel as the "remnant" was hoped by many to be the last chance Israel had to merit the Kingdom. Strict adherence to the Laws of God was understood as imperative for it was the laxity of keeping the Commandments of God that had resulted in the prior captivity of both Houses of Israel. These three movements in their own ways believed themselves to be the last hope for Israel and the Kingdom to appear.
Answer for yourself: Can you not find it strange, especially in light of Yeshua's pronouncement, the theology of Christianity today which prides itself of "not being under the Law" when the very hope of Yeshua and these three movements was just the opposite; returning scrupulously to obedience to the Laws of God in hopes of meriting Divine intervention and the manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven let alone the King of Israel?
Well the year 2000 just passed and I hear little about the failure of Yeshua to come again. Hal Lindsey is quite and as far as I know plans no new book to explain whey his other books on Christian prophecy failed. It should make you seriously wonder and consider if the Kingdom will ever come let alone the Messiah of Israel if Pauline Christian theology which prides itself not being under the "Law" remains in vogue for 2.5 billion people in the world. Surely they are the not the light for their darkness is far greater. More to follow. Shalom.