Friday, April 12, 2019

Welcome to Life, It's For Us!

Hello Grafted In Readers,

A considerable amount of life events have passed since last posting on March 04. The Festival of Pesach (Passover) is a week from Saturday, and many celebrate Holy Week, beginning this Sunday with what is known as the Catholic ceremony of Palms Sunday. I say Catholic, because the occasion of this coming week is man-made. Here is an excerpt from an article that if you are a professing believer in Messiah Jesus, you are welcomed to consider.
It is in full at
https://www.jewishvoice.org
I will highlight the past month after the excerpt:
Should Non-Jewish Believers Celebrate the Passover?
Jewish man and boy
Jewish and Christian leaders, both in history and in the present day, offer considerable objection to Christian observance of the Passover. It seems that neither official Judaism nor official Christianity is very tolerant of Christians who confuse and confound the clear delineation between these two faiths by attempting to observe the traditional Passover, with or without including the Calvary experience.
Christian Concerns
Most Christian objection to Passover observance is based on ecclesiastical anti-Judaism that developed after the Church’s first century. Before the Church fully opened the door to the Gentiles at the Jerusalem Council, the vast majority of its communicants were Jews; therefore, there was no question as to whether Christians should observe Passover. Its celebration was a significant part of the biblical heritage upon which the early Jewish leaders of the Church had founded a faith and polity that recognized Yeshua (Jesus) as the fulfillment of the Messianic expectations of His people and as the Savior of the world.
As Gentiles came to prominence in the Church, they were influenced by traditions which they had brought with them and by pressures from the political powers of the day to disassociate themselves from the Jews and things “Jewish.” At the same time a controversy raged in the Church over whether complete obedience to the Law of Moses was essential to salvation in addition to faith in Jesus. Of particular concern was the practice of circumcision, whether it should be physically enforced on new converts to this Judeo-Christianity or whether the circumcision of the heart that God had described to Moses, Jeremiah, and Paul was sufficient without the physical procedure.

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In some of Paul’s writings, he openly attacked that part of the Jewish community (both in traditional Judaism and in the Church) that believed salvation resulted from submission to and ritual observance of God’s law. This social criticism, an intramural exercise among fellow Jews, was misunderstood and generalized by later Gentile Church leaders.
Rather than maintain Paul’s balanced position on the interrelationship of Christian faith and the Law, subsequent Church leaders adopted an increasingly antinomian posture, ultimately insisting that Christians have nothing in common with Jews and Judaism. This was particularly true in relationship to ecclesiastical holy days which had been changed from their original First-Century construct to accommodate the various societies into which the Christian faith had expanded. Passages such as Colossians 2:16-17 were enlisted to assure Christians that all “Jewish” holy days and Sabbaths had been abandoned by the Church.
Additionally, virtually all of the Christian Church, including the reform movements that began in the sixteenth century and afterward, maintained a supercessionist view toward Jews and Judaism, which asserted that Christianity had forever replaced Judaism in God’s economy of salvation and that Christians had forever replaced the Jewish people, who had been cursed because of their rejection of Jesus.
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I personally observe a modified quiet Pesach at home on the evening of Passover. Perhaps this will change in time..

Writing and Reading
The Spring Issue of New Authors Journal, by Mario Farina, available at
https://www.amazon.com features two of my stories along with those by other authors:
-- Little Man No Big Ham, is about a family making do though they are impoverished in Iowa.

-- As Time Goes By, tells of an evening at the fictitious Rivertown Cafe. Patrons support a customer who is losing his son to cancer.

I hope you might consider securing a copy of the New Authors Journal and treat yourself to some short stories. It is priced reasonably.

I would like to know if you are interested in further blog posts by me?

Could you either leave a comment saying yes or no, or email me at:

david son of hashem at gmail.com.

david.sonofhashem@gmail.com

Unless I hear from you, posts will be phased out and appear once a month through summer 2019.

Thank you for your time, reading and pondering.

Kevod Yeheveh, His presence be with us day and night.

Mellow Rock
David C. Russell

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