From: hamilton@hydra.gmr.com (William E. Hamilton CS50 CS/50)
Newsgroups: alt.messianic
Subject: guilt, paying (was re: purpose, meaning of circumcision)
Date: 10 Apr 92 17:07:52 GMT
Reply-To: hamilton@gmr.com
Organization: GM Research Labs, Warren, MI

Tom Albrecht contacted me off line and asked me to comment on Matt 27:25, which
I (like Bruce :-)) neglected to comment on. Here is my response to Tom 
(Tom: you will note I've made some changes)

Sure. I confess I didn't look at it til after I posted.... Matt 27:25 reads "And
all the people answered and said, 'His blood be on us and on our children'". 

I noted before (in my post to a.m. a couple days ago)
that the Lord charged the scribes and pharisees with
the guilt for all the righteous blood shed on earth from Abel to Zechariah
(Matt 23:35)

Now (in Matt 27:25) the people accept the guilt for the blood of the Lord. 
You can infer from that that now the bloodguilt for all righteous blood shed,
including the blood of the Lord, falls on the Jews.(If you assume that
the request, 'His blood be on us and on our children' is granted.) 
But I think it's stretching it to say that the Jews *paid* for the blood of the
Messiah. (At least they could not "pay in full" - we both know that. And
furthermore, His purpose in dying was to pay for *all* sins, so that men
could be saved by confessing their sins and trusting that His finished work
on the cross has paid the penalty for sin. So the idea of them paying for His
blood seems strange). 

It may be reasonable to conclude that the Lord began at that time to discipine
the Jews, and is still disciplining them for the blood of the Messiah (or for
not believing Him?) and for the blood of all the righteous prophets. 
But I would have to add that

1. God disciplines those He loves (Heb 12:6, which quotes from Prov 3:12)

2. He disciplined Israel in OT times and restored them(the wandering in
   the wilderness, the Babylonian exile, ...)

3. Jesus said "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do"(Luke 23:34),
   which could be taken to mean that they were forgiven for His blood right
   then and there.


I think it's fair to conclude that, if the Lord is disciplining the Jews, it's
because He loves them, and indicates
a possible future restoration. *No one* has fellowship with God, and *no one* is
saved except through Christ, so the restoration we're talking about here isn't a
restoration which puts them, as a nation, in fellowship with God, or results
in anyone being saved, except by the way prescribed in the New Testament:
Believe in Him.

The tearing of the veil, the destruction of the temple, and the demise of the
sacrificial system are pretty emphatic indicators that God has radically
changed the status of the Jews. And it's pretty clear that the people of God are
the church(which includes believing Jews, obviously). 

But do these things rule out a restoration of Israel that is aimed at
bringing the Jews to the point that many of them will accept Messiah? In other
words, something like what happened when Josiah was king (I Kin 22, 23) when
Judah repented and resolved to obey the law? Moishe Rosen says that the best way
to convince a Jew of his need for the Savior is to convince him
to try to be a "good Jew" - obey all the law. The national repentance I'm
talking about has not happened - modern Israel is a secular state, and sometimes
seems to be a rather cynical one at that.
But I don't see that that kind of a restoration is ruled out. Yes, I know that
toward the end of I Kin 23 the Lord says that the sins of Manasseh are too
great, and Judah will still be exiled. So no amount of sack cloth and ashes is
guaranteed to save the *nation*. But it might be the means by which individuals
are convinced of their need to trust in Jesus as Messiah. Under those
circumstances I could even see Bruce's restored sacrificial system - not
as ordained by God, but reinstituted by the Jews as part of an effort to
once again keep the law. 

Bill Hamilton
The incurable synthesist

please reply to hamilton@gmr.com
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Bill Hamilton                  |
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