Well-Defined in the Mind of God

Scott carried the Foundations series into its third week by turning to the question that quietly unsettles a lot of Jewish believers: now that I trust Yeshua, who am I? He told the old story of a rabbi who insisted that Messianic Jews are not Jews at all, his proof being only that he refused to believe they were, and answered it the way Muddle Ballaston once did, that it was not the rabbi who defined our Jewishness in the first place. It was God. The point that held the message together is that we do not need to beg anyone’s approval to be what God has already said we are. We are well-defined in the mind of God.

From there Scott built God’s view of the Messianic Jew on plain ground. A Jew is a Jew by the unconditional Abrahamic covenant and not by keeping the law of Moses, because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were Jews four centuries before Sinai. That identity comes with no shortcut to heaven. The dual covenant idea, that Jews have a side entrance to God apart from Messiah’s atonement, is a heresy, and Isaiah is blunt that our righteousness is filthy rags and that only the Redeemer bridges the separation our sin created. What’s been taught here before runs right alongside this: the Jewish people remain chosen and loved for the sake of the fathers, yet salvation still comes one broken heart at a time through Yeshua, for the Jew first and also for the Gentile. And the same covenant that makes a Jew a Jew makes Gentile believers full family, never second-class. Previous teachings here have made that concrete, pointing out how strange it is that a Messianic congregation full of welcomed Gentiles gets criticized for reaching its own people when no one faults a Korean or Haitian church for the same thing.

The hardest turn was the warning. Scott named the temptation to distance yourself from the word Christian, and from Gentile believers, and eventually from sound doctrine itself, all to keep the approval of an unbelieving Jewish world. He called that what Paul called Peter’s table-fear in Galatians: hypocrisy driven by the fear of man. The remnant God guards in every generation, the forgotten little piece off the remnant table that He holds up and calls true Israel, has never been the crowd that wins the room’s approval. So the question to sit with this week is the one underneath the whole message: are you letting God settle who you are, or are you still waiting for someone else to sign off on it?