Messianic Myths (4): Did God Divorce Judah?

[Rebbe]

MESSIANIC MYTHS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (PART 4)

DID GOD DIVORCE JUDAH?

Copyright © BRI 2012,2018 All Rights Reserved Worldwide
by Les Aron Gosling, Messianic Lecturer (BRI/IMCF)

CAUTION: BRI/IMCF Yeshiva notes are not available to the general public. They are not for distribution. They are not for reproduction. The notes may also bear little or no resemblance to the actual recorded BRI/IMCF Yeshiva lecture.

"When the Torah was written down and given to His people with Moses acting as the mediator, conditions were set. The Torah defined the rules of the covenant; blessings were given when the covenant was kept, curses would be received when sin occurred, a breaking of the covenant by Israel. Israel agreed to the terms of the covenant. Eventually... Israel's disregard for the covenant was evidenced by their disobedience and spiritual adultery; this led God to divorce Israel, as described in Jeremiah 3:8-18. It's important... that Judah was not divorced, [and therefore] the [Sinai] covenant has been ongoing."

http://www.119ministries.com/119-blog/the-new-covenant/

A Google search has confirmed what I already knew, and that is that there are many organisations, churches and sectarian sites that lamely repeat the rabbinic myth that "God never divorced Judah" because (in a nutshell) God needed a remnant to bring about the experience of a New Covenant. I know from whence these objections come, but this is a diabolic heresy and blasphemy because it puts God exclusively on a very human level. The rabbis just say something (in fact "anything") -- that justifies at a subconscious level their rejection of Yeshua -- and Christians run with it not realising the Orthodox intent. Putting it plainly Yeshua stated to the rabbinic authorities in his day, "If you believed Moses you would believe me" (Jn 5.46,47).

My question to those who may desire to follow the teachings of the Orthodox Jews is this: Do rabbinic teachers believe Moses? Do they follow Moses? Really? Or are they among the false Judaisers who follow the Talmud and the teachings of the sages? Listen! I'll accept Our Lord Yeshua and what he had to say over and above the opinions of mere mortals, Jew or Gentile.

The great pity is that because of their twin teachings that the Sinai Covenant has not been dissolved and that God did not divorce Judah, Jewish people will willingly accept the coming Antichrist without a second thought. He will come in his own name, and they will flock to him! (Jn 5.43). And this vain bloke afflicted with ego is just around the corner.

I agree with the rabbinic authorities that there can be no doubt that God divorced Israel. This is because it is so plainly stated in the Scriptures. The "divorce" that God spoke of in imaginative metaphorical, allegorical and parabolic terms (just as much as his "Marriage" to Israel and Judah is spoken of in the same identical way) came to pass when Israel suffered national destruction at the hands of one of her lovers -- the Assyrians -- in circa 735-718 BCE. That is when the divorce came into effect. A century later Judah suffered the same fate in 585/587 BCE at the hands of the Babylonians. They also suffered national destruction, but unlike Israel a handful of about 50,000 returned to the Land and "regrouped."

God had stated through the prophets that he yearned for Judah to "return" to him. Yes, this was God's feeling, even after his divorce. But they were divorced. (I'll prove that in a moment.)

They were in fact MORE GUILTY in their sins than their sister Israel. God stated explicitly that he tore up the marriage covenant involving the Israelites. God painfully admits that Judah was far more treacherous than her sister Israel. I have emphasised in bold what most people seem to purposely overlook.

"If a man divorces his wife and she goes from him and becomes another man's wife, will he return to her? Would not such a land be greatly polluted? You have played the whore with many lovers; and would you return to me? says the Lord.

"Look up to the bare heights, and see! Where have you not been lain with? By the waysides you have sat waiting for lovers, like a nomad in the wilderness. You have polluted the land with your whoring and wickedness.

"Therefore the showers have been withheld, and the spring rain has not come; yet you have the forehead of a whore, you refuse to be ashamed.

"Have you not just now called to me, "My Father, you are the friend of my youth" will he be angry for ever, will he be indignant to the end?" This is how you have spoken, but you have done all the evil that you could.

"The Lord said to me in the days of King Josiah [recall that Jeremiah is sharing his prophecy with Josiah the king of Judah and heir to the Davidic throne]: Have you seen what she did, that faithless one, Israel, how she went up on every high hill and under every green tree, and played the whore there? And I thought, "After she has done all this she will return to me"; but she did not return, and her false sister Judah saw it. She saw that for all the adulteries of that faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce; yet her false sister Judah did not fear, but she too went and played the whore.

"Because she took her whoredom so lightly, she polluted the land, committing adultery with stone and tree.

"Yet for all this her false sister Judah did not return to me with her whole heart, but only in pretence, says the Lord.

"Then the Lord said to me: Faithless Israel has shown herself less guilty than false Judah.

"Go, and proclaim these words towards the north, and say: Return, faithless Israel, says the Lord. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, says the Lord; I will not be angry for ever. Only acknowledge your guilt, that you have rebelled against the Lord your God, and scattered your favours among strangers under every green tree, and have not obeyed my voice, says the LORD" (Jer 3.1-13).

Judah went much further than Israel ever did with sins of the heart as well as of the body.... God therefore divorced Israel for far less.

But Jews and Christians claim God did not divorce Judah as He did Israel.

If this is the case, then God violated His own Word concerning His Self-revelation as being without partiality -- without favouritism.

GOD IS CONSISTENT in His dealings with humankind. That is a prime message of Paul's Letter to the Roman Christians. Those who refuse to admit that Judah was divorced (and Christians as well as Jews are guilty of this) have to come up with some uncanny solution to this problem and they can't do it.

So (as the Jews admit) a remnant returned to the Land, but as Jeremiah foresaw, they did so in hypocritical "pretence" -- pretending to want to obey God's decrees for them. So true was this precognitive recognition by the prophet, that Judah later actually murdered her ex-husband Immanuel, "God with us." She wanted her religion MORE than God. It meant more to her than God. It was more special than God. Modern web sites and Jewish ministries establish this to be a fact over and over with their insistence that they are righteous in the sight of God because of their heritage and Torah observance. Keeping mitzvot will get them into God's favour and keep them there. What hysterical hypocritical rubbish.

Yes, some Jews regrouped after the Babylonian Exile. Another regrouping occurred in 1948 but there are many more Jews in the Diaspora than in the modern State of Israel. This will change during a coming period of prosperity which will attract the Jews from all over the globe back into the Land.

Again, the Bible is plain about Judah's sin being linked to prostitution (Jer 3.8) for which God sent Israel away from Him with a metaphorical, allegorical and parabolic "certificate of divorce" -- a getz. The State of Israel (Judah) still cries over a lack of support from God and the nations but this need will be reversed when God brings them all back into the Land again. And, I might just add... It is the Land God marries and which Land experiences a reversal of curses that are ingrained into the soil of her existence. That which is presently unclean will become whole again when God marries it (Isaiah 62 especially vss 4,5 RSV).

At this point I would like to mention another fact conveniently overlooked by many expositors when they repeat the rabbinic claim that Judah was never divorced by God (a very hypocritical God in my opinion if we unthinkingly accept the extremely pious Jewish argument). While God admittedly divorced Israel -- the Jews are also Israel!

True, both Israel and Judah are typified as two sisters living in two distinct territories but BOTH are guilty of the same adultery -- only Judah went further in her sins than Israel ever did. Judah by God's confession was far more sinful, MUCH worse, than Israel (we should all be concerned with a study of both Jeremiah and Ezekiel's scrolls which make this point patently and candidly clear).

Remember, the Sinai Covenant was a marriage contract between God and Israel (ALL of Israel including the Jews). This is where it all becomes rather ridiculous. God divorces Israel (including the Jews) and the Jews AFTER divorce proceedings have taken place (destruction of the nation) start to return and begin to obey the conditions of the original contract.

Imagine that happening between divorced couples in our world today! People just do not think things through to a logical conclusion. Say I was divorced and later my ex-wife started to act as if we had never been divorced. She proceeds to go through a huge list of marital expectations and starts to apply them in her divorced and excluded state of existence. Horrendous madness indeed. But, that is what is occurring today amongst Jews -- and that includes the Messianic Movement!

In Jer 31.31-34 the Jews are called "the House of Israel." This is due to the fact that (1) they are racially connected to Jacob their father, and (2) at the time of the Assyrian total conquest of the northern ten tribes of the House of Israel, many myriads escaped and made their way to the southern kingdom of Judah and intermingled all the surviving populations of the ten tribes with the Jews and Benjaminites. Thus Judah became truly and authentically the House of Israel!

They are destined to remarry God in the form of the Messiah (Immanuel -- "God With Us"). Remarriage implies a divorce (or a death) does it not? In both cases it applies to the Jews. The New Covenant is a new marriage contract.

Lastly, but even more importantly, God who is Spirit mocks the hyper-materialistic human perception of the reality of the "divorce certificate" (its purely metaphorical, allegorical, parabolic) that God Himself has given to the Israelites (and that included Judah) when He asks through Isaiah in the prophet Isaiah's latter engagement with Judah...

"This is what the LORD says! Where is the certificate of your mother's divorcement, whom I have put away? Or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have you sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away" (Isaiah 50.1).

In effect, God is saying that the divorce was brought on Israel and the Jews (see for instance Isa 51.17 for the identity of the Israelites to whom he is directing his message -- which even Jewish scholars accept) but actually laughs about the concept that there was an actual piece of papyrus as a getz that was handed to the Jews and that God had creditors! But -- and here is the issue at hand -- read closely what God says about the nation of Judah:

"....your mother... WHOM I HAVE PUT AWAY... Behold, for your iniquities... and for your transgressions is your mother PUT AWAY" (Isa 50.1).

Twice Isaiah states that the Jews as a nation were "put away." It's mentioned twice for emphasis because God knew in advance that Jews and Christians would not agree about the "divorce certificate" concerning Judah! In my opinion, God's Spirit failed to refer to it in specific terms in order for each of those who are God's children to take such an opportunity to research correctly the biblical revelation in order to obtain a proper balance in matters such as these which present themselves. God wants each of us to become brighter and better students as we grow in all of the knowledge of God.

Recall this section of Isaiah's prophecies constellates around JUDAH the southern kingdom for whom Isaiah was its chief prophet. To be "put away" is a DIVORCE. It is not (as some Gentile expositors suggest) "a mere separation." It is a divorce. Plain and simple. Judah was divorced and she will stay divorced until she remarries Yeshua at his return under the terms and conditions of the NEW Marriage Contract. That's the real deal and no amount of "proof-texting" will change it.

There are students of the Bible who have convinced themselves that ONLY Israel was divorced by God and that the marriage contract (Mosaic covenant of Sinai) torn up by Israel's husband (God) as a consequence of their adultery and promiscuous behaviour with pagan Gentile lovers. Therefore, they say, the remaining Jewish nation (Judah) is still married to God and is bound to the Sinai contract. It's amazing how many Christians believe this story. I have had personal dealings with MANY who assess this idea to be the truth of the matter and of the biblical revelation.

But -- and this revelation is most important -- in the scroll of the prophet Jeremiah we find something quite clearly to the contrary. Jeremiah is told by God that the surrounding nations wonder why it is that God has cast off -- divorced -- His own people.

"Moreover the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying, Consider you not what this people [the nations surrounding Israel and Judah] has spoken, saying, The TWO FAMILIES which the Lord has chosen, he has even cast them off? Thus they have despised my people, that they should be no more a nation before them" (Jer 33.23,24).

Listen! The "two families" of God which God divorced, by sending them away into Gentile captivity, were Israel and Judah. Both sisters, both married to God as His two wives -- were subjected to God's fury and denunciation for their infidelity and continued pursuit of pagan lovers. He divorced them both and tore up the Marriage agreement (contract/covenant) made at Sinai. This is why the Sinai covenant is not an issue today. Rather the issue is the LORD Yeshua and the New Covenant -- a covenant "NOT LIKE the one made at Sinai" (Jer 31.32: therefore not a renewed covenant or renewed marriage agreement) as we are forthrightly told in the New Covenant Scriptures.

Here in the Jeremiah text we find that the Gentile nations themselves are convinced that both Israel and Judah have been divorced because of the shocking invasion and captivity into Assyria (as pertained to the northern kingdom of Israel) and a later captivity for the Jews of the southern kingdom of Judah being taken into Babylonia.

BOTH Israel and Judah were cast off -- DIVORCED -- by God. Furthermore, the Jews killed their Husband, bringing an end to whatever might have remained and salvaged of the definitely defunct Sinai Covenant (at least in the minds of the Jewish people who returned to Jerusalem from Exile).

Judah is "put away." God is starting to interact with her now, but it's clear from the prophets (all of them, not just Jeremiah or Ezekiel) that her repentance will orient around the person of Yeshua her husband whom she killed 2000 years ago. The crucifixion was also the event that occasioned the END of the Sinai Covenant. God finally made the divorce abundantly clear to ALL the Jews when the Romans stormed Jerusalem and the Temple (which signified the Sinai Covenant) was destroyed.

Some Jews actually claim to observe the Sinai marriage contract now but if they are really doing so all the self-effort that is put into it is utterly useless because Judah's divorce is actualised and she has been "put away" until Yeshua returns. The destruction of the nation was in 70 CE when the Temple was destroyed and the nation scattered until "the time of the end" when God brings about Judah's change for the better. It will not change without Yeshua.

As Our Lord Yeshua wryly stated, "You shall not see me again until you can say B'ruch haba HaShem Adonai." "Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord."

So come Lord Yeshua!

In our next mini-lecture in this series on "Messianic Myths" we shall discuss the "renewed covenant" belief -- a notion I once held and taught vigorously until Messiah opened my eyes to a little bit of biblical reality.