Grafted Into Israel

I just heard this amazing study on how Christians can actually trace our spiritual roots back to the Israelite tribe of Ephraim! Before Jacob (Israel) died, he blessed his sons, and just before that, he also blessed Joseph's two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, which became tribes of their own in Israel. The blessing for Ephraim included that his descendants would become a multitude of nations, greater than the descendants of his older brother, Manasseh (Genesis 48:8-20). The Hebrew meaning behind these words is that Ephraim's descendants would fill up or be made the fullness of the Gentile peoples throughout the earth. Later, after the northern tribes of Israel were exiled and carried off to other nations, God began teaching us His plan for bringing them back through the prophet Ezekiel. God instructed Ezekiel to take two sticks and label them. On one stick, Ezekiel was to write "For Judah and for the sons of Israel, his companions (or fellow worshippers)" and on the other stick, Ezekiel was to write "For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and all the house of Israel, his companions (or fellow worshippers)". Then, Ezekiel was told to put both sticks in his hand, to join them together. God said that He will bring Israel back from all the places they were scattered all over the earth and bring them together with Judah (Ezekiel 37:15-24). In one way, God was promising to bring the divided nation of Israel and Judah back together as one, but in another way, God was promising that the Gentile nations would also be brought into the nation of Israel and made as one people with them.

Of course Gentile believers already knew that in Christ, we are adopted into God's family. All who come to Jesus are one people to God, whether they are Jew or Gentile. But since Jesus came out of Judaism, we must remember that those who believe in Him are to follow after Him and the life He lived, and He lived out the Law of God perfectly. Since we are grafted into the family tree of God's people, our heritage is Judaism - the faith, not the tradition or the religion. Jesus initiated the New Covenant on the foundation of the Old, and meant for God's people to continue on after Him. What isn't corrected by the New Covenant, still remains from the Old Covenant, because Jesus didn't come to do away with the Law of God or the Word of God spoken by the prophets (Matthew 5:17).

"Christians" are not meant to be a separate faith, we are meant to be Messianic Jews or New Testament Jews - or I guess a more accurate term would be Messianic Israelites. Whatever we are called, we who believe in Jesus are all God's people who carry His name and live by His ways. The Church has gotten so far from the ways of God, and has simply stamped Jesus' name onto so many pagan practices, that it's no wonder that we look and act so much like the world and so differently from what God's Word says. When a child is adopted, they must learn the ways of that new family and abide by them. We Gentiles have lived out our Christian faith taking only bits and pieces of what we like or understand from the Old Testament and stand stubbornly in the New Testament as if it could stand on it's own without it's foundation. The "Church" was not established at Pentecost after Jesus was taken up to heaven, rather it was established at the base of Mt Sinai, when Moses brought God's Law to the people. That's when God's people became an assembly of those who worshipped God and believed His Word. And since then, through the prophets, through Jesus, and the apostles, and the Holy Spirit, and through those anointed for leadership ministry within the Body of Christ today — we have been learning the true meaning of loving and pleasing God, and loving one another and growing up in Jesus. We should be learning God's Law, and ridding ourselves of the traditions and legality made by human wisdom.

For example: we Christians in America fight for the posting of the Ten Commandments in public, yet the majority of us don't even keep the Ten Commandments... How much of the Church observes Sunday as the day of rest, rather than Saturday, which is the real Sabbath? Sunday is the first day of the week - a day originally honored by pagans to worship the sun god. We call it the Lord's Day and claim to meet together for worship on Sunday because Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday. That's all well and good, but that's not keeping the Sabbath, which is the third Commandment (Exodus 20:8-11). The real reason we observe Sunday, over the Saturday Sabbath is because tradition teaches us to do so, and it would be too inconvenient to go against the flow of what the Catholic religion and Roman rule has programmed into all of modern civilization. We replace God's Law with our own, and we do it in many ways all the time, even when we read the Truth in God's Word, and then we claim "grace" to excuse it.

Of course all who come to Jesus as their Lord and Savior through faith are saved by grace. God grants grace to cover our immaturities and ignorance, until we learn better. And by God's grace we are no longer under the laws and traditions of men, we are free from sin, ourselves, and the world, and enabled by the Holy Spirit to live according to God's Law. It ceases from being a matter of "HAVE to" and becomes a matter of "GET to" - resting in the work and righteousness of Jesus! We live by the Holy Spirit and automatically fulfill the Law of God, what God's people struggled to do and failed at before Jesus came. We need to stop perpetuating traditions in the Church and instead, learn God's Word, promote and teach it, and help bring us Gentiles back to God's ways - the ways God taught to the Israelites. They are our spiritual roots too, after all. Even if we cannot trace our DNA lineage back to the tribe of Ephraim, we certainly qualify at the very least as "fellow worshippers", and the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob (Israel), and the God of Moses, is still the same God of our Lord Jesus Christ and is our Father!

Eventually, all of God's people will no longer be different and separate branches of one tree, we will be joined together as one branch rooted in Christ Jesus! We should get to practicing God's ways now, and no longer expect Him to bend to and bless our version of living for Him.