We Gentile Christians, who have not been under the bonds of the law and have the N. T. Scriptures the key to the O. T., should consider how great is our privilege above the believing Jews in the early days of Christianity. They had only Moses and the prophets; and these did not reveal the great and wonderful change which would take place after the cutting off of the Messiah, the parenthesis between the sixty-ninth and the seventieth week of Daniel's prophecy (9:25-27), a few passing hints excepted which only shone out after the True Light came or rather when the Spirit led beyond what they could previously bear. That system ceased which had been ordained of God for Israel and had existed for fifteen centuries: “carnal ordinances,” which men could see with their natural eyes, and in which every soul of Israel might take a part. All that was now set aside by spiritual sacrifice and by the priesthood of every believer become a priest, Christ Himself in heaven being their great High Priest. It was no longer sights and sounds acting on the senses, but now eternal and unseen things discerned only by the eye of faith.
Hitherto Jerusalem had been the place wherein God had chosen to put His name; thither they were to bring their sacrifice and offerings, and there at the altar where He recorded His name He was to come and bless them (Ex. 20:24). But under the new order of things how great the change! Jerusalem is no longer the place where men worship truly. “The hour cometh,” said the Lord, “and now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:21-23). It is well to remember that these believers did not see this written till more than fifty years after Pentecost. Neither James, nor Peter, nor Paul when he at first comes on the scene, unfolds as yet such a truth so far as we know. The time had not arrived till a late day for Paul to tell them, “Let us go forth to him without the camp (the Jewish system) bearing his reproach.” This they were not yet prepared to do. Neither were they told till then, “We have an altar whereof they have no right to eat who serve the tabernacle” (Heb. 13). This last the saints in Jerusalem had been all doing, and continued to do till the Epistle to the Hebrews was written, more than thirty years after Pentecost.'
If we take these things into serious consideration, we shall the better understand how these saints could continue to follow Moses, “all zealous of the law,” for so many years after the cross. How many saints think that from the moment of the utterance of the Messiah's dying words “It is finished,” when “the vail of the temple was rent in twain,” there was an end, not merely in principle before God but in fact, of Judaism, material sacrifices, priests, temple, with all other legal ordinances? In Acts 6:7 we read of a great crowd of priests obeying the faith; and Christians who read it now jump to the conclusion that they then gave up all sacerdotal functions, because the Lord added them to the church. But this is premature; there is no ground to believe it, but that they continued their service in the sanctuary. How slow most of us find it to apply a principle so new, strange and deep!
If we pay attention to Heb. 8:13, we see that the first covenant which had ordinances of divine service and a worldly sanctuary “was becoming old and growing aged,” and thus ready to vanish away. Thus the Levitical regime had not yet disappeared; and it was made known to the Christian Jews only at the close, before the city and temple fell under public and divine judgment. A little later (viz. A.D. 70), Jerusalem was destroyed and not one stone left on another of the temple. Then Judaism finally passed away. Its death-blow had been given at the crucifixion. During this interval God patiently bore with the “untoward generation,” delivering out from among them “daily such as should be saved” (Acts 2:47). Up to this the Jewish saints continued to worship according to the law and the prophets; to which they superadded elementary Christian truth, putting the new wine into the old skins. “They continued with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house (or, at home)” (Acts 2:46). Here we see the two things going on together. Their old reverence and attachment to the temple was evidently retained.
We know with certainty that up to Acts 21:20, or some twenty-seven years after Pentecost, the many myriads (or ten thousands) who believed were all zealous for the law. Among these James who was “a pillar” at Jerusalem, and even Paul too who “had come with offerings and alms to his nation,” were not behind in deference to the Mosaic routine. It was at James' instigation that Paul agreed to prove his subjection to Moses, and that he did not, as had been calumniously reported, persuade the Jews who dwelt among the Gentiles to forsake Moses and the customs, and the circumcision of their children. Hence Paul went, with others who had a vow, into the temple, and, had he not been hindered, would have offered the offering which was ordained for the Nazarite. Clearly he had not learned the truths he was taught some years later after his arrest and first imprisonment.
But can it be that these many thousands of believing Jews who were all zealous for the law were guilty, when offering a lamb, of the terrible crime equivalent to “cutting off a dog's neck”? Or would any one of them in offering an oblation be as if he offered swine's blood” (Isa. 66:3)? No. This solely refers to the future day when the man of sin, Antichrist, sits there, and the temple is the scene of apostasy and defiance of Jehovah, and the temple is not owned but for judgment, and the sacrifices utterly abominable in His eyes. What has all this to do with the temple, where after Pentecost Peter and John used to go up statedly for prayer? Is it possible for God to permit of such adhesion if the old ritual was so evil in the Jewish saints, without raising a voice against continuance in it for so many years?
So far from it indeed, that long after His devoted servant Paul was in prison for what many call building again the things he had destroyed, the Lord comes to him to comfort him without uttering one word of rebuke for what the advice of James brought upon him “Be of good cheer, Paul,” says He, “for as thou hast testified of Me at Jerusalem (what was the testimony?), so must thou at Rome.” Peter had early a vision to direct him to go outside the Jewish fold and learn that “what God had cleansed” was not common nor unclean. His preaching in Acts 3 does not rise above the earth: blessings for Israel if they would repent, “when times of refreshing would come from the presence of the Lord.” Peter clearly had much to learn. Had the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews been given to the Jewish disciples in the early days of Christianity, they could not have continued on the old lines without being guilty of despising God's word and offending Him. How far it was agreeable to God or accepted, we cannot say; but if itself utterly offensive, it is unlike God to allow all the saints, apostles, prophets, etc., to continue sinning without remonstrance. We see what the consequence must have been if, after abandoning the shadows for the substance in coming to Christ, they fell away from Him and went back to the shadows. It would be “crucifying for themselves the Son of God and putting Him to shame” (Heb. 6). Up to this time the saints had evidently followed Moses, and, although believing in the Messiah, had failed to apprehend the results of His death, resurrection, and ascension. They had not profited by the Jewish elements as read in the heavenly light. The time had now arrived when they must “leave the word of the beginning of Christ, and go on to what belongs to full growth.” Theirs was a heavenly calling. Jerusalem was not, nor ever had been, the place for worshipping the Father, revealed by the Son. It was now their privilege to enter in spirit into the holiest where Christ had entered, as their great High Priest; into no figures of the true but heaven itself, the true tabernacle which the Lord pitched and not man. Thenceforth all the Jewish saints, like all believers, are invited to approach within the rent veil, having boldness to enter, in virtue of the eternal redemption which Christ obtained, having their hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience. Such a condition the blood of Jewish sacrifices never did nor could procure.
Blessed this was for those now by faith familiar with the old sacrifices, etc., to know them more than fulfilled in Christ. But one must perceive what of divinely given courage it required, added to faith, in order to turn away from that which was dearer than life to a godly Jew; established as it had been by Jehovah's judicial authority under which every transgression received a righteous retribution. No Gentile believer of this day in leaving any of the sects or human organizations, which never were of God but of man's device, can be compared with a Jew giving up what till then had God's sanction and command in all its details. It is plain that the believing Jews added Christianity to their Judaism; and most patiently did God deal with them.
But it is no less plain with what warmth Paul writes to the Gentile Galatians who were adding the law to Christianity. How scathing are his words! “O senseless Galatians, who bewitched you?” etc. (3:1). “Whosoever of you are justified by the law, ye have fallen from grace” (v. 4). “If ye be circumcised Christ shall profit you nothing” (2). They were also observing Jewish festival-days and months and times and years. To Gentiles they were beggarly elements (4:9), a return in principle to idolatry from which they had been delivered.
But Christendom, not satisfied with Jewish festivals, has added to its calendar many pagan festivals with Christian names and so-called saints-days, some of them of reprobate character, like St. George of merry England, merry in being patronized by a scoundrel after his death a saint! Can we close our eyes to the manifest increase of ritualism everywhere? Rome has spread the leaven in almost every section wherever the Lord's name is named. “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump,” as Paul told the Judaized Galatians (v. 2). Christendom is advancing far and fast in this evil direction. The end we read in Rev. 14; 15; 17; 18, as well as in 2 Thess. 2. God calls, as He has called long, His people to come out of her, lest they partake of her sins, and so receive of her plagues (Rev. 18:4). We may and must be accused by the old serpent; but we ought not to be deceived, as the whole world will be. J. S. F. C.