Given the title of this blog entry, one might be tempted to think that I am writing some kind of personal plea to readers for understanding or writing a song analysis of a hit by the Black Eyed Peas. Neither of those is correct, but as I pondered over some tangled and complicated matters, I struggled to find a title that would be fitting for the subject and its many complications and implications. This is not a post that is meant to provide anything dogmatic, but at the same time it should be recognized that there are some very serious and very contentious issues dealing with worldview that deserve to be recognized, and if there are no easy answers to wrestling with these sorts of questions, at least there will be a great deal of value in the wrestling, so long as it is wrestling with ideas rather than with people.

I would like to begin today with a scripture, and rather than providing a commentary on the scripture I wish to point to ideas that may at first seem to be unrelated but that will, hopefully, be connected and make sense. There is a passage in Romans 11:16-24 that deals with the thorny issue of the grafting of the Gentiles into the Israel of God: “For if the firstruit is holy, the lump is also holy, and if the root is holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, but that the root supports you. You will say then, “Branches were broken off that I might be grafted in.” Well said. Because of unbelief they were broken off, and you stand by faith. Do not be haughty, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, He may not spare you either. Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God; on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off. And they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and you were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?”

There is a lot that could be said about this passage, but today the main point I would like to make about this passage concerns the early Church of God. When the majority of Jews, then and now, rejected the point of the Law and Prophets and Writings, on which godly religion is based, and preferred to remain in their own manmade traditions rather than to accept Jesus Christ and follow His practice and doctrine, the way to salvation was opened to the Gentiles in a way that had never been done to that time in any wide amount (despite the clear indications in Psalm 87, 117, Isaiah 56, and Zechariah 14 that salvation as well as obedience to the Sabbath and Holy Days would eventually be found widely among the Gentiles). The Jews had been cultivated by many centuries of knowledge of God’s laws in order to gradually develop faith in God and obedience to His ways–but the Jews failed by either rebelling against God’s ways or seeking to turn what was a delight into a burden, both of which are unacceptable corruptions of His ways. And when the way of salvation was opened to the Gentiles, they were to abandon their lawless and rebellious nature and to be grafted into an obedient relationship with God as part of the Israel of God, and were forbidden from boasting in any superiority of their own to replace the unjustified self-superiority of the Jews in their “natural” righteousness as sons of Abraham, for it was God’s mercy through Jesus Christ and not their merit that opened the way to eternal life.

What we see is that the Gentiles who wished to enter into the Israel of God had to be grafted on to Israel. The Body of Christ did not then adopt the practices of the heathen, but rather the Gentiles were to adopt biblical and godly ways. I, and many of the readers of this blog (though by no means all), spring from a particular culture that claims a desire to cast aside the accretions of pagan thought and practice over nearly two thousand years and to restore biblical belief and practice. This particular culture of “Primitive Christianity” was a deliberate rejection of the authority of men to change the laws and ways of the Eternal, and a desire to return to the way that was preached and practiced by the apostolic church. But it was not possible that leaving all of the corrupt traditions of man could be done in a single generation, nor that adopting biblical culture would be a straightforward task. After all, there was (and is) a considerable fear among people of looking and being too “Jewish.” Obeying the Sabbath as commanded by God and His holy days was Jewish enough, but new moons and tassels seems a bridge too far for many. Likewise, in leaving behind corrupt days and practices, there was plenty of pietism and a desire to escape from God-given responsibilities that remained, along with plenty of corrupt authoritarian Gentile leadership culture.

Let us therefore be blunt. What God desires of believers is that they be grafted into His tree, that of the Israel of God, not that He will let us remain in our wild and rebellious olive trees. We are to have a deeper understanding of God’s ways as something far deeper than 19 fundamental doctrines, but rather as to ways of life that encompass all walks of life, and that preach freedom and justice and social responsibility for our brethren and their well-being, freeing us from the shackles of either leftist or rightist ideology that seek either to deny the importance of personal and social morality. We must recapture the spirit of the prophets who confessed their own sins and corruption, were cleansed by God, and then spoke boldly and honestly to corrupt Israelite and Gentile societies both of the rigorous demands of godly morality as well as the reality of God’s judgment if nations would not repent of their sins. God wants people to become like Him, not blend into a corrupt society where beliefs and practices and worldviews are not able to be distinguished from the statutes of Omri or the corrupt ways of this wicked world, to whom we must be models and lights and examples of knowledge of and obedience to God’s ways.

This means, in other words, that if we desire to recapture the worship and practice of the apostolic Church that we will look Jewish to many people. We already do in our present state. That does not mean that we should reject our own talmudic ideas and interpretations for the Talmud of the Orthodox Jews, and that represents its own corruption and deviation from the ways of God, an attempt to wall of the Torah by making it a joyless and excessive burden rather than freedom from slavery, debt, and oppression to sin and to authoritarian tyrants. But what it means is that we should be impossible to distinguish from our Savior, from Rabbi Saul (Paul), from the apostles, from believers in the faith like Abraham and Moses and Samuel and David and many others named and unnamed in scripture. I do not wish to be dogmatic, nor do I wish to provide specific recommendations, but rather I wish for us to engage and discuss among ourselves how we are to understand and adopt the ways of God, not to be content in a halfway place between the corrupt ways of man and the commandments of God. How long will we continue to waver between two opinions? We have much to wrestle with–but if we wish to be a part of the Israel of God, we should embrace the “Jewishness” that involves rather than running away from it. For if we trumpet our closeness to Israel, why should we be more content to look like our heathen neighbors than like the people of Yahweh we see in scripture, whose brethren we claim to be.

Therefore, I believe we should, as a culture, seek out those who likewise seek to follow the original ways of our Messiah, whether they be Messianic Jews or Sabbatarian members of the Church of the East. We need not adopt their own specific ideas and traditions, but we should benefit from those who share our desire to follow the ways of the Eternal and consider our own beginnings as a beginning, a point of departure from a corrupt faith towards the ways of the Eternal and not an ending or a target of its own. We need to be open to discourse and discussion with others who share our biblical worldview, and who we can learn from. We need to be open to learning and growth and awkwardness as we reflect between our desire both to blend in and not stick out too much as well as to follow the ways commanded in scripture. There are no easy answers for the dilemmas we wrestle with. I certainly do not have all of the answers, as I wrestle with the same questions and concerns myself. But we can at least acknowledge that we need to wrestle, rather than assume that we already know and do all that we are commanded to do at this present state. And if we can do that, it will be enough as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and walk in faith and not by sight, leaving aside the corrupt traditions of man to seek after the ways of our Heavenly Father above, so that we may become indistinguishable from our Lord and Savior and Elder Brother.