Lesson 76 - Matthew Ch 23 cont

[Music] [Music] well our study of matthew 23 continues today but bear with me before we reopen its inspired pages early in the book of genesis we learned of a fundamental governing governing dynamic of god he divides elects and separates he divides he elects he separates one of the most obvious examples of this dynamic was when he called abraham to become the inaugural leader of a new group of people set apart for a divine purpose to be a kingdom of priests for god being elected however wasn't sufficient this newly created division meant that abraham had to separate from his past and from his present he had to leave his father and his siblings and even his homeland we shouldn't minimize the severe pain this would have caused all involved now later when abraham's wives and concubines bore him children there was yet another uncomfortable and painful division election and separation between his sons isaac and ishmael and some years later it happened again among his grandchildren jacob and esau now the believer's life journey with the lord necessarily exposes us to the same and ongoing challenge and pain of division election separation yet if there is a common theme within the worldwide church community it's unity unity now unfortunately the type of unity that is usually contemplated is entirely human in its nature despite the spiritual overtones used to try to achieve it if ever there was a strong biblical example of the wrong type of unity the type god does not want the type that is against his nature against his governing dynamic it must be the story of the tower of babel human unity was so desired and accomplished that god devised a simple way to divide and separate nimrod's subjects he gave them to multiple languages so that communication among babel's citizens became impossible so people were forced to scatter they divided themselves up into groups based on speaking one of the several new languages god imposed upon babel now i've commented numerous times that culture and language are organically coupled together language is human speech that expresses cultural norms and historical customs and it is language that provides the necessary unity and cohesion for a society of people to best operate and thrive people of course can learn a second language but unless they are also immersed into the native culture that is the mother of that language talking can occur but communicating meaning and nuance likely will not the heavenly kind of unity that god does want for us is when we connect ourselves to him through christ and then he becomes like the hub of a wheel through which this kind of unity occurs the irony is that this kind of unity only happens when people are divided elected and separated away from the community of the world it's when those who trust in god's son yeshua become a new and separate order apart from all others much like for abraham this is how those who worship god become abraham's seed seed of abraham this or process is cooperative it's a cooperative venture between us and god is elect god does the dividing in the electing but it falls upon us as his worshipers to do the separating separating is the painful but mandatory part that is at once the hardest to do but it's also how the community of christ on earth is formed john 17 11. now i am no longer in the world there in the world but i am coming to you holy father guard them by the power of your name which you have given to me so that they may be one just as we are one revelation 18 4 then i heard another voice out of him and say my people come out of her so that you will not share in her sins so that you will not be infected by her plagues luke 14 26 if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father mother wife children brothers and sisters yes even his own life he cannot be my disciple i can quote you a couple dozen more teachings in the new testament alone about god's type of unity about dividing electing separating but the point is that separating is not an option if we're going to follow yeshua and be part of a godly society on earth and much of it depends upon us bending our will to the lords and thus taking those required steps this doesn't mean becoming isolated or cultish we are to separate ourselves spiritually from this world behaviorally from this world and to fellowship with the like-minded yet until we die we will always be physically connected to this world and it's our duty to take the gospel that has saved us and changed us to the people of the world who don't know god don't know of his love for them this is a tall task and it's difficult at times i'll tell you to balance and reconcile we can stay so attached to this world while still claiming to have trust in christ that we become what some call carnal christians we also can be so cut off from this world that we are so heavenly minded we provide no earthly good division election separation this is the undertone of all that jesus has been instructing and he's been demonstrating it in his own life throughout his earthly ministry and it's especially front and center in matthew chapter 23. let's reread a portion of it open your bibles to matthew chapter 23. we're gonna start reading in verse eight but you are not to let yourselves be called a rabbi because you have one rabbi and you are all each other's brothers and do not call anyone on earth father because you have one father and he's in heaven nor are you to let yourselves be called leaders because you have one leader and he is the messiah the greatest among you must be your servant for whoever promotes himself will be humbled that whoever humbles himself will be promoted woe to you hypocritical toward teachers and paro shame your pharisees for you are shutting the kingdom of heaven and people's faces neither entering yourselves nor allowing those who wish to enter to do so woe to you hypocritical toward teachers and pharisees you go about over land and see to make one proselyte and when you succeed you make him twice as fit for gay and home as you are woe to you you blind guides you say if someone swears by the temple he's not bound by his oath but if he swears by the gold in the temple he's bound now you blind fools which is more important the gold or the temple which makes the gold holy and you say if someone swears by the altar he's not bound by his oath but if he swears by the offering on the altar he's bound blind men which is more important the sacrifice or the altar which makes the sacrifice holy so someone who swears by the altar swears by it and everything on it someone who swears by the temple swears by it and the one who lives in it and someone who swears by heaven swears by god's throne and the one who sits on it woe to you hypocritical torah teachers and pharisees oh you pay your tithes of mint dylan kuman but you have neglected the weightier matters of the torah justice mercy trust these are the things you should have attended to without neglecting the others blind guides straining out a gnat meanwhile swallowing a camel woe too hypocritical toward teachers and pharisees you clean the outside of the cup in the dish but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence blind pharisees first clean the inside of the cup so that the outside may be clean too whoa to you hypocritical torah teachers and pharisees you are like whitewashed tombs look fine on the outside but inside full of dead people's bones all kinds of rottenness and likewise you appear to people from the outside to be good and honest but inwardly you're full of hypocrisy and far from torah woe to you hypocritical torah teachers and pharisees you build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the sodokim the holy men and you say had we lived when our fathers did we would never have taken part in killing the prophets in this you testify against yourselves that you are worthy descendants of those who murdered the prophets now go ahead and finish what your father started you snakes sons and snakes how can you escape being condemned to gay you know therefore i am sending you prophets and sages and torah teachers some of them you'll kill indeed you will have them executed on stakes as criminals some you'll flog in your synagogues pursue from town to town so on you will fall the guilt for all the innocent blood that has ever been shed on earth from the blood of innocent hevel abel to the blood of zakaria ben barakaya whom you murdered between the temple and the altar yes i tell you that all this will fall on this generation oh jerusalem jerusalem you killed the prophets you stoned those who were sent to you how often i wanted to gather your children just as a hen gathers your chickens under her wings but you refused look god is abandoning your house to you leaving it desolate for i tell you from now on you will not see me again until you say blessed is he who comes in the name of adonai now we ended our last lesson by briefly going over a short list of titles that yeshua says ought not to be used within the hebrew faith rabbi father and leader now the term rabbi didn't yet quite mean what it means today but within a few decades after yeshua's earthly ministry came to its predestined close it would begin to transform from indicating a greatly admired teacher of god's word to meaning great one in the sense of a person who holds a special office in the hierarchy of the religion of judaism the term father was actually a term already in use of the various semitic religious sects and so also within the sphere of authority and reach of the synagogues this is to indicate a highly positioned elder leader that's a little hard to decipher except it seems to mean anyone who has exalted themselves above others within the synagogue religious structure now obviously christ's idea was not to abolish these words from the hebrew language but rather it was dealing with the worldly norm of setting some men upon pedestals such that it led to them glorifying themselves and then the people acquiescing to their unquestioned leadership this leads us right back now to the purpose for my opening words of today's lesson essentially jesus was using the pharisees and the scribes of the synagogue system as examples of the wrong way to do things within the hebrew faith of god as he originally intended it to operate jesus thoroughly denounces them as he continues to set the boundaries the priorities the entrance requirements even the structure of the new believer's community that he's establishing this new is being formed out of the existing jewish community and its members are those who trust in yeshua of nazareth as god's son each member is neither higher nor lower in status than another rather whether a leader or a follower in the jesus community everyone is to see themselves as equals as brothers so in verse 11 jesus sums it up by saying that the greatest among them the necessary leadership are not to see themselves is having attained a higher status than the rest but rather there to see their purpose and function as servants for the others this is the way the kingdom of heaven is to operate it's a complete reversal from the way the world operates it's also a reversal from the way the jewish religious system had come to operate in christ's era and in too many cases it is the way that the christian church of the 21st century operates and it has since the second century too often people serve the pastor or the rabbi or the priest not the other way around does it ought to be too often the pastor or the rabbi the priest they're seen as elevated above the others deserving of special privilege and honor you know i know of many church and synagogue leaders who believe they are elevated thus rightfully ought to be catered to but i also know of others who are wonderful servants and the mold that god intends and they daily sacrifice their personal needs for the congregants no doubt this too was the case among the scribes and the pharisees jesus was talking to the ones that needed to be taken down a notch not to all of them even flavius josephus speaks about how there were many pharisees that were fine and humble men loved by the people for their kindness and for their mercy but there was a far deeper consequence to what yeshua was speaking and demonstrating he was demanding that his followers were to become a separate sect the messianic sect for lacking lack of better words which would operate both within and outside of the present state of the hebrew faith that had been morphing into what bible scholars jewish and christian loosely call early judaism that is the hebrew biblical faith had evolved into a a human-devised system of behaviors as defined by the synagogue leaders and far from the true meaning and sense of the god-given law of moses now this helps us to gain more comprehension of a core principle that jesus taught in his sermon on the mount in matthew 5 17-20 do not think that i've come to abolish the torah of the prophets i have not come to abolish but to complete yes indeed i tell you that until heaven and earth passes away not so much as a ute or a stroke will pass from the torah not till everything that must happen has happened so whoever disobeys the least of these commands and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven whoever obeys them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven because i tell you that unless your righteousness is far greater than that of the torah teachers and the pharisees you will certainly not even enter the kingdom of heaven it's that last line i want you to hear and this passage i've quoted to you so many times yeshua was speaking about the same type of synagogue leaders that he's now chastising so severely in matthew 23 the term righteousness that he used in characterizing the torah teachers and the pharisees was almost meant sarcastically or perhaps better jesus was referring to the fake righteousness that describes in pharisees assigned to themselves that was far off the mark of biblical righteousness and so it amounted to little to no righteousness whatsoever in the father's kingdom rather jesus describes true biblical righteousness as what what did he just say in those verses we've heard so many times it's as obeying the commandments of the torah and the prophets to set it that's how we show true righteousness and teaching these commandments to others the scribes and the pharisees are condemned by yeshua because they were not teaching god's commandments rather they were teaching their own man-made doctrines they were teaching a system of behaviors that brought with him heavy burdens not much righteousness now with all this in mind then beginning at verse 13 yeshua unleashes a torrent of seven woes upon these synagogue leaders who are misleading their people interestingly some bible versions perhaps the very one you're reading from had an eighth woe it is this that i'm about to read to you for those who don't have it in your bible woe to you scribes and pharisees hypocrites because you devour widow's houses even while for a pretense you make long prayers therefore you shall receive greater condemnation okay in reality this verse is a much later christian gloss that was added to matthew's gospel it never existed in the earliest greek manuscripts that we have so the addition must have occurred around the 5th century or later probably as we've already seen happen in earlier chapters a christian bible editor saw those same words that appear in mark chapter 12 and he thought the gospels would harmonize best if those same words were also included in matthew therefore we're not going to deal with that verse and instead only look at the seven woes that matthew records i wonder if by now after we've worked our way through 22 chapters in matthew some of you who are listening or watching would still insist that jesus can be described only as love that is love's the only attribute of christ or at least the only one worth mentioning yet if jesus really can say if you've seen me you've seen the father and he means it then the same attributes of the old testament god that wholesale destroys entire evil cities in their citizen who judges judged canaan turned it over to the refugee israelites who killed 185 000 assyrian soldiers in a single day that must live within yeshua too and indeed that is more or less what we find in god's word if we'll just lay down our man-made doctrines that merely function i don't know it's a cover-up although certainly in his first advent jesus states he did not come to condemn on the other hand if he didn't come to condemn it's difficult to fit even a thin sheet of paper between that and when we find him using such strong language to set the synagogue and the temple leadership back on their heels and here during a non-stop diatribe against them since entering jerusalem i mean he now harshly judges the synagogue leadership that stands before him by pronouncing seven woes upon them what's a woe anybody here ride horses it's not that for the sake of illustration i think it's not too big of a reach to equate the woes of jesus with the plagues of moses since jesus is the prophet like me that moses promised would come and since throughout his gospel matthew has made an obvious implied comparison between yeshua and moshe then for the sake of trying to just best describe what a whoa meant to him we could probably replace woe with plague that is in verse 13 where it begins but woe to you hypocritical toward teachers and pharisees it could just as easily say a plague upon you hypocritical toward teachers and pharisees now i'm not saying that the meanings of these two words are precisely the same i'm saying that they're close enough in purpose and in effect that it might help christians in the 21st century to get the sense that jesus is talking to these scribes as though they were foreign enemies so how deeply offensive it must have been to them now since i'm occasionally called out by mainstream church leaders and christian laymen for saying some uncomfortable things such as i just said that jesus is not only love i'd like to quote someone of note who at least sees him more or less similarly ben witherington iii and his commentary on matthew says this most people reading this commentary would like to have had a user-friendly jesus an approachable jesus a jesus who is threatening and who warns of coming judgment in hell does not produce warm feelings those of us who love jesus need to do our best to avoid the tendency to whittle down or lop off the hard edges of his teaching if there are parts of his teaching that makes us uncomfortable perhaps we should allow that to tell us something about where we are what we believe rather than saying jesus could never have said something like that the human tendency to minimize what we find disturbing or painful or hard to swallow needs not to be given free reign when it comes to jesus's teachings jesus must be allowed to have his say whether we're happy with his words or not i don't know how that makes you feel it makes you feel any better but it does mean the first wall will sort of sums up the why and the what for of the six following woes upon these religious leaders whom yeshua finds as despicable and dangerous he calls them hypocrites now we shouldn't focus on that word because in his day and for many centuries before and after one jew calling another jew a hypocrite especially when arguing religious issues that was just common banter it's not too far from english speaking people calling somebody a jerk or a phony i mean the problem is that while we common people can do that to one another with a little more risk than somebody maybe being a little bit put off it's not without its consequences when it's said to people who consider themselves as having a privilege to have this status and having power over you and we must always factor in the reality that to the minds of these revered scribes and pharisees of privileged status and rank yeshua was essentially an intruder an uneducated troublemaking itinerant galilean holy man you talk about a bunch of strikes against you and he was saying these condemning things to them and making them look bad in front of crowds of people how dare he yeshua says that not only will these esteemed scribes and pharisees not be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven but also their error-filled teaching their arrogant behavior and their bad example to others is leading those who believe that their religious leader's instruction is god ordained who long to be able to someday enter into god's kingdom by following their instructions instead they're being led in the same abyss that these leaders are going to eventually fall into following up on those hard-hitting comments by witherington i'll once again risk the ire of my fellow christians by saying that is those who love our savior we're just much too close within the church today to epitomizing the very people yeshua was speaking to and speaking about much too close and i'll tell you every time i say these sorts of things my email inbox inbox overfloweth with notes that say stop church bashing or well my church isn't like that you know as with yeshua just as he wasn't bashing the hebrew or the hebrew faith but he was bashing the jewish leadership for the wrong teaching it's my intent not to church bash but rather to shake up things among these church leaders to rethink these many doctrines that they teach which often does not say something quite different than what the word of god says you know it's the job of bible teachers and pastors and messianic rabbis to teach the biblical truth not to teach denominational doctrines it's our job to lead people into the kingdom on god's terms not on ours or those stated terms of denominational counsels it is our job to be willing to bear the anger and the rejection of others even of our fellow brethren because what we teach and do isn't always going to meet their expectations frankly it's not always going to make your lives more comfortable on the other hand it's not our job to be people pleasers we're supposed to be god pleasers yeshua was willing to displease the jewish faith leadership and most of his fellow jews in order to reform the jewish faith back into what god had given to moses on mount sinai this bold teaching of truth this was the catalyst that led him to the cross well the next world christ hurls at the scribes and the pharisees is in verse 15. now remember some bibles have a verse 14 some don't and it's about their great efforts to proselytize now there is a reasonable disagreement among good bible scholars over whether jesus is referring to jews proselytizing gentiles or the pharisees attempting to sway diaspora jews to their pharisaical traditions and doctrines other than this rather ambiguous statement from yeshua there is no historical evidence that prior to the destruction of the temple and the birth of rabbinic judaism the jews ever tried in the least to convert gentiles to the jewish faith we do read in josephus josephus's jewish wars of many gentiles being attracted to judaism he never accused the rabbis of proselytizing gentiles although certainly some small level of outreach must have occurred even so he was writing specifically about a time well after 70 a.d that's 40 or more years after the death of christ a few years after paul died therefore my opinion is that the viewpoint among some bible scholars that the jewish missionary activity spoken about here is directed towards pagan gentiles is born out of the church wanting to connect this passage to the dreaded judaizing that we read about in some of paul's epistles a term that the christians generally regard as holy negative ungodly and an arch enemy of the church however that view seems so entirely out of place from what we know historically and from what we actually read in the bible rather it seems to me that considering the jewish culture and customs and faith of the times and that when we hear of peter and other jewish believers going to gentiles is is they risk being shunned or worse by their jewish friends and religious leaders well that what must be happening what must be happening is that the pharisees went about trying to sway some of the millions of jews out in the diaspora to adopt their particular doctrines and traditions that were far more onerous and strict than what they had been practicing in their synagogues in europe and asia and north africa in other words the pharisees traveling far and wide was a competition it was a competition to acquire adherence to their own jewish sect from within the many far-flung colonies of jewish culture and it never involved gentiles there's no evidence of it at all even christ instructed his disciples to go only to the jewish people with the good news in fact yeshua were railing against the scribes and pharisees for teaching their misguided traditions to other jews has been the central focus for a few chapters now in matthew so to interpret this passage is indicating pharisees proselytizing gentiles that just doesn't fit any context that we've come across so what is being spoken of here is this passionate determination of the sect of the pharisees that spares no time or expense or travel danger to convert marginal jews to the strict holocaust the doctrines of the pharisees the least we can say is that while the pharisee leadership might not have practiced what they preached they seemed to believe most of what they taught in christ's mind this great passion made them all the more threatening to the spiritual welfare of the jews who expected to be part of the kingdom of heaven nearly exclusively by means of their jewish birth and says jesus whenever these jewish missionaries convert another jew to their holocaust it makes the convert fit only for gay genome or an english gehenna no this was not speaking about the christian hell clearly this was some kind of ancient hebrew religious expression that meant those jews excluded from god's kingdom jews that were so sinful like prostitutes and tax collectors that they were not allowed to be part of it however since the jewish faith did not contemplate the idea of gentiles ever being part of god's kingdom then being cast and to gay genome generally speaking was not meant as even a possibility for gentiles well the third wall begins in verse 16. now i've so far mentioned that the issue with synagogue authorities describes the pharisees is their holocaust their traditions that rules the sect and therefore becomes the lifestyle of the common jews almost all of which belong to one synagogue or another so after the first two woes being rather general in nature this third one specifically addresses certain traditions that jesus finds as absurd on their face i want to be clear yeshua is not being hypothetical he's also not exaggerating these are actual jewish laws at least of some of the pharisees takes up a few verses i want us to re-read the third woe so that you can hear what was actually going on turn to uh chapter 23 verse 16. i'm just going to read a few verses we'll go through 22. it's almost comical woe to you blind guy do you say if someone swears by the temple well he's not bound by his oath but if he swears by the gold in the temple he's bound you blind fools which is more important the gold or the temple that makes the gold holy and you say if someone swears by the altar he's not bound by his oath but if he swears by the offering that's on the altar he's bound blind men which is more important to sacrifice the altar which makes the sacrifice holy so someone who swears by the altar swears by it and everything on it and someone who swears by the temple swears by it and everything on it and someone who swears swears by it and the one who lives in it and someone who swears by heaven swears by god's throne of one who sits on it look what connects these various examples i was trying to rush through them that christ gives is temple ritual that's the connecting fiber temple ritual and since this is this scolding by jesus is actually taking place at the temple and it's during the passover festival in jerusalem this object lesson about halakhah as concerns temple ritual that makes all the sense in the world to be clear however this ritual this is ritual that's based upon pharisee traditions not so much as rules imposed by the sadducees although the two religious factions could well have agreed upon them so this begins by dealing with the important matter of oaths oaths see oaths were important in jewish society because most business transactions were settled orally and were not written down but because people in their regular conversation headstar also started using oaths to amplify their yes and their no these business transactions among jews were seen as guaranteed by god if an oath was pronounced by both parties so an oath was part of nearly every business matter thus the religious authorities determined what constituted a valid and binding oath and what didn't and naturally since all oats among jews necessarily invoked the god of israel not just any old god that indeed it was a religious matter now the pharisees then had all sorts of built-in loopholes by which someone could declare an oath but surprise it's not binding and yeshua's position was all those are binding because all os invoke the god of israel in one way or another he calls those who make and enforce these rules blind guides well there's no question to exactly whom he's referring because in chapter 15 he used the same epithet for the pharisee leaders matthew 15 14 let them be their blind guides when a blind man guides another blind man both will fall in a pit in this point in counterpoint session about different oaths being used notice how the pharisees sought to avoid using god's name that is for a couple of different reasons they sought to avoid directly invoking god first it was because beginning late in the fourth century bc a superstition had broken out against saying god's formal name yudhi vave yeyovei we see jehovah in english it soon expanded to not saying the word god out loud then pretty soon to not even writing it this taboo remains intact to this very day in the 21st century within judaism now the second reason to avoid directly invoking god is because it can make the oath more malleable so a business partner can find a way out or on the other hand maybe a way to keep it enforced and no doubt the particular oath formulas yeshua spoke about were real and they were commonly used this was not a joke even though it might sound pretty ludicrous to us when we just read it so if a shrewd jew swore an oath using the temple as the guarantor then he could back out but if he swore an oath on the gold used inside the temple then he couldn't you blind fools since christ not exactly a nice thing to say was it he asked which is more important that is which has more gravitas the temple or the gold inside of it then yeshua teaches something that the pharisees would have known if they had been torah scholars instead of halluca scholars he says it is the holy temple that makes the gold holy see this is the principle that holiness can be spread through contact that is a common object like gold coming into contact with a holy object like the temple transfers holiness to the common object making it holy as well the torah explains that holiness must not be accidentally spread or maliciously misappropriated by human device see we should remember from the book of numbers the terrible outcome for the levite quora who rebelled against moses and argued against god's command that only a certain clan of levites wouldn't korok's clan would be allowed to come near to god's holiness and serve in the tabernacle great honor moses put corus assertion to the test korok and 250 other men approached the wilderness tabernacle with their incense burners and as moses said that god would then reveal just who had the authority to be near holiness and as the men approached the tabernacle god struck them all down with fire from heaven even destroying their fire pans their incense burners why well the men and consequence of their rebellion the fire pans because they had contracted holiness from being so close to the holy tabernacle god would not allow objects that maliciously and wrongly misappropriated holiness to continue to exist see god and god alone controls who and what can be holy how using this same ancient torah principle yeshua says that another common dodge used by shrewd pharisees is to swear by the altar because the pharisees believe this can allow him to renounce his oath but if he swears by the offering the sacrifice that's placed on the altar then he can't back out yeshua says that their logic for this tradition again is hugely faulty because an offering of itself is not holy it's merely common it's only the holiness of the temple altar that gets transferred to the offering the sacrifice that makes the offering holy once it's set upon the altar exodus 29 37 seven days you will make atonement on the altar and consecrated thus the altar will be especially holy and whatever touches the altar will become holy in verse 22 we find it had become another tradition that one could swear by heaven and it too was not binding on the oath maker see there's a nuance here it's not visible to us unless we understand it in first century jewish cultural terms see using the word heaven in that era was simply a way to refer to god without breaking the taboo against saying the word god or saying his name this is why we see the gospel writer matthew the righteous jewish believer using the term kingdom of heaven so often instead of kingdom of god because the other gospel accounts do heaven and god were essentially synonymous terms but saying heaven was a religiously and cultural culturally allowable loophole while saying god was not this rule was holoka it was jewish tradition it was not scripturally correct however since christ since god since heaven is god's throne and it represents the one sitting on it then saying heaven is just as binding as if god himself were invoked so the terms heaven and god meant essentially the same thing and one couldn't wiggle out of it just because some pharisees with religious authority said so this is not because the two terms heaven and god technically mean the same thing they obviously do not but because the leaders of judaism thought they could be clever and they could just kind of refer to god by saying heaven then they are obeying jewish law i want you to please follow along with me on this i think it's fascinating it's very revealing that the only time in the book of matthew that we find the phrase the kingdom of god is when matthew is quoting yeshua only five times in matthew do we find the phrase kingdom of god but we find him using kingdom of heaven more than 40 times in mark guess what we never find the phrase kingdom of heaven it's not in mark at all it's also only the kingdom of god and it's exactly the same way in the gospel of luke why this stark difference simple mark and luke were gentiles they did not observe the jewish taboo of not saying god and they were also not writing their gospels for use by the jewish community but rather by the gentile community so saying god wouldn't have brought them a swift negative reaction equally fascinating though is this christ is quoted and all the gospel accounts is sometimes saying kingdom of god this means that yeshua did not adhere to the traditional jewish taboo of refraining from using the word god jesus saying god out loud would have surprised any jew and would have deeply upset the pharisees okay next up is the fourth row woe and we'll get into that next time [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Torah Class

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Keywords: Beatitudes, Hebrew Heritage, Parables, Torah Class, Bible, Bible Study, Christ, Christian, Christianity, God, Hebrew Roots, Jesus, Jews, Matthew, New Testament, Seed of Abraham, Sermon on the Mount, Son of God, Tom Bradford, Yeshua

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Length: 56min 13sec (3373 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021