He Found JESUS in Judaism! | Pastor Reacts

When you dig deeply into the rabbinic text, you hear echoes of the New Testament writers, such as divine Messiah, two comings of Yeshua, the necessity for the Messiah to understand the Torah even properly.

How is it possible that rabbinic Judaism contains within it all of these features, and yet Jews reject their Messiah? Jesus told everyone who was following him that he actually came to properly interpret Torah.

He's performing all the functions of the expected Messiah, and many Jews have recognized this already, and they have turned to Christ, just like this man did. Praise the Lord. Rabbinic Judaism will lead Jews to Jesus as their one and true Messiah.

That's not only what this rabbi claims, but it's also his particular testimony. But wait a second. Many Jews argue that rabbinic Judaism is the reason they don't believe in Jesus. So what's going on? We're about to get into all of that.

But first, welcome to Wise Disciple. My name is Nate, and I'm helping you become the effective Christian that you are meant to be. That includes understanding how Jews can know their true Messiah in Jesus Christ.

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I can see right now, a lot of our Jewish people might be watching this going,.

But why not Judaism? Why not Judaism? Why not just come back to your roots?

Well, the thing is, in 2007, there was a book written, which was called The Return of the Kosher Pig.

So this man is a messianic Jewish rabbi, and he's sharing his experience about coming to the faith. Now, he had a moment where there was a bit of a crossroads for him. As he's studying more and more about the Jewish faith, he has an opportunity to go down the path of becoming Orthodox, but something stops him.

And it's the teaching within rabbinic Judaism about the Messiah. Watch this.

Okay.

And that book was like my primer to rabbinic Judaism.

Okay.

It dealt with the idea of the divine Messiah from rabbinic texts. And although we all don't agree about everything, right? This was my first real introduction to rabbinic Judaism. From after that, I did an undergrad in Jewish studies and religion studies, where we studied Jewish philosophy, Jewish texts, rabbinic literature, did the Hebrew language.

And from then on, I examined many, many rabbinic texts. God has allowed me to be able to engage with them.

So it seems like this man is on his way to becoming a Jew. I mean, right? Like undergrad in Jewish studies, diving into Jewish philosophy. I'm sure he probably read Maimonides, right? And others diving into Jewish literature.

And why? Because he desires to know God. And he realizes that his family has Jewish roots. So he's embracing his family heritage, so to speak. And he's considering becoming a Messianic Jew. But he could also go down a different path.

Of deep into rabbinic scripture, to Talmud, to Mishnah, Gamara.

Yep.

And at that point, I was at a crossroad. At that point, it was difficult for me, because although my belief in Yeshua was very strong and had a confidence to believe, at this point, I'm training to become a Messianic rabbi.

I'm studying with the IMCS. I'm in a... Rabbi Mark is raising me up to do this thing. I always had the option to go ahead and become an Orthodox rabbi.

Okay.

I could have gone off and done that. I would have gone back to an Orthodox synagogue. I would have gotten a certificate of return as the descendants of the Bnei Amosim. They would have welcomed me back.

And I could have gone to Yeshiva University totally for free and received an ordination as an Orthodox rabbi.

But yet, you weren't convinced through a deep dive into rabbinic commentary and writing that that was the truth.

No, absolutely not. Instead, I found the opposite. When you dig deeply into the rabbinic text, you hear echoes of the New Testament writers, such as divine Messiah, two comings of Yeshua, the necessity for the Messiah to understand the Torah even properly.

Wait, wait, this is in rabbinic commentary.

Rabbinic commentary.

Not the New Testament.

A hundred percent.

Okay.

In rabbinic...

So how is it possible that rabbinic Judaism contains within it all of these features, and yet Jews reject their Messiah? What's going on here? I heard a great podcast on... This is a fascinating subject.

So I'm going to circle back around and see if I can work this into the discussion in a moment. So let me just... I'll let him finish.

In rabbinic commentaries, it teaches us that the Messiah will give us a new Torah, that he will give 30 new commandments. Even in rabbinic literature, they believe that King David, Joshua, all these other men of the faith have amended the Torah through what's called takkanot and gezerot.

These are stringencies and leniencies. So if we have the men of old, the prophets of old, who could amend and adapt the Torah for a current condition, how much more so the Messiah?

I love it. I love this. So Rabbi Arroyo just listed a few things that I think are noteworthy. Pay attention. A divine Messiah, this comes out of rabbinic teaching. The two comings of the Messiah, the necessity of the Messiah to understand Torah properly, even the fact that the Messiah would give his people a new Torah, even the concepts of takkanot and gezerot.

All of these things Jesus fulfilled, guys. Look at this, watch this real quick with me. The concept of the divine Messiah actually comes out of places like Daniel 7, when the prophet had a vision of one, like the son of man ascending to God.

Daniel 7, verse 13, I saw in the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man. And he came to the ancient of days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory in a kingdom that all people's nations and languages should serve him.

This phrase, first of all, is what Jesus used to refer to himself over and over again. Son of man, son of man, son of man, particularly in the gospel of Matthew, but also in Luke, look at this, verse eight.

And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the son of man also will acknowledge before the angels of God. He's identifying himself as the son of man. The crazy part is Jesus takes on the language of Daniel.

When he sends his disciples out to fulfill the great commission, he says this, Matthew 28, 18, Jesus said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. He has dominion. And then shortly after this, he dramatically ascends to heaven in front of the disciples' eyes at the end of Acts 1.

You can literally pick up Daniel's vision from the moment that Jesus leaves his disciples' sight in the sky to the moment that one like the son of man ascends to the ancient of days. But wait a second, right?

Two comings of the Messiah, right? So Jesus came to earth and was born as a man, but check this out. When he left his disciples and ascended to heaven, this is what the angels said to the disciples. Chapter one, verse 10.

And while they were gazing into heaven, as they went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

This is also commensurate with what he told his disciples in Matthew 16. Verse 27, for the son of man, there it is again, is going to come with his angels in the glory of his father. And then he will repay each person according to what he has done.

And of course the disciples taught that Jesus would return one day. Why? Because Jesus taught this, you know? And, but not until the time of the Gentiles was fulfilled. The apostle Paul talks about that in Romans 11.

So we do have two comings of the Messiah. You know, we, it's amazing. What was the other thing that he said? What about the necessity of the Messiah to properly understand Torah? Did you know that Jesus told everyone who was following him that he actually came to properly interpret Torah?

It's true, look at this. Matthew 5, verse 17, do not think, this is Jesus, do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Now these terms, abolish and fulfill, are Hebrew idiomatic expressions that refer to misinterpreting and interpreting properly.

In other words, Jesus is saying here that he came to properly interpret, by the way, not just Torah, but the law and the prophets. The whole Tanakh is what he's referring to. Did you know any of these things, ladies and gentlemen?

I know those of you who have been watching this channel for a little while know this, because I've been talking about this for a while now, but this is all here and it's fulfilled in Jesus. What about the concept of the Messiah giving a new Torah?

Did you know? This is so awesome. In Jesus' ministry, particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives five discourses or five teachings. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five through seven, the Discourse on Mission in Matthew 10, the Parabolic Discourse in Matthew 13, the Discourse on Kingdom or Church Community in Matthew 18, and the Discourse on Judgment in Matthew 24 and 25.

By the way, right now we're going over the study of the Gospel of Matthew on my Patreon. That's why this stuff is fresh. But check it out. Why does Jesus give five teachings? Because he's giving a new Torah.

The number five is associated with the five books of Moses, which is the Torah. Any Jew hearing the number five would immediately think of the five books of the law. There is no coincidence here. This is intentional by Jesus.

Because why? He's the fulfillment of the new Moses that was promised to come in Deuteronomy 18, verse 15. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me. This is Moses talking. From among you, from your brothers, it is to him you shall listen.

Verse 18, I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I, this is the Lord, will put my words in his mouth. And he shall speak to them all that I command him. That's where you get this concept of the Messiah coming as the new Moses with new teaching.

Can you see that? It's so awesome. You know, the ways that you can see this play out, right? Wait a second. Finally, so the rabbi here spoke of the Messiah giving takanot and gerizot, right? By the way, these are all, the concepts, I'm going over them very quickly.

These are all deep issues that deserve their own individual study, granted, right? But real quick, these two concepts, this is all related to what's referred to as walking out the Torah in your life. In other words, this refers to halakha.

If you pay close attention to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, he's providing new gerizot. Gerizot refers to putting a fence around the Torah. Now I explain more about this concept in the debate on lust between Dennis Prager and Matt Fradd.

So if you want to hear my greater explanation on these things, you should check out that video. The takeaway here is this. Jesus fulfills all these things, guys, if you have the eyes to see it. He's performing all the functions of the expected Messiah, and many Jews have recognized this already, and they have turned to Christ, just like this man did, praise the Lord.

So when I look into the rabbinic text, the rabbinic texts point to Yeshua and in many of their voices. Now, we're not saying, as some people might say, well, a lot of rabbis don't believe that Yeshua is the Messiah.

We're not saying that the rabbinic rabbis believe Yeshua is the Messiah. We're saying that what rabbinic Judaism teaches in many of its places line up with the New Testament. This is why I could not go into rabbinic Judaism because the New Testament is Jewish.

It's a Jewish book with a Jewish text that points to the Jewish Messiah with the exaltation of the first century.

That's something

Ah, gosh, man, I just, I wish, I wish my brothers and sisters in today's churches really appreciated what this rabbi just said. I remember the moment where it dawned on me, you know, all of what the rabbi just said.

I was a pastor at a church in Las Vegas. I kind of fell into a teaching assignment where I was asked to teach the leaders of the church how to effectively lead their circles of influence. And so the way I decided to think about it and to approach this particular series of lessons, I think there was like four or five sessions we went through, was that we should focus on Jesus as an exemplar in leadership.

But as I prepared to teach about Jesus, I realized, man, I needed to do a deep dive into his teaching methodology, which was clearly in line with first century rabbinic practice. And that's when I discovered what rabbi Arroyo is talking about now.

This was years ago. I've said it like this. The Bible is like a coloring book that has no color. For a lot of us in the church, we know what the shapes are. So, you know, there's no question about that.

The shapes that give us our theology and doctrine are clear in the Bible. But when we do some work to truly understand the Bible in its own context, all of a sudden, the coloring book starts to get filled in with vibrant colors.

All of a sudden, the images that come out of the scripture, they pop. And now there's a whole new wonderful layer of appreciation and understanding that can take place when you seek to understand the Jewishness of Jesus and of his teaching.

It's amazing.

I think most Jewish people wouldn't know that this New Testament is not theirs. It's not other than, and we get criticized a lot. I do, even personally, for deceiving the Jewish people to making them think that the New Testament is a Jewish thing.

And we put words around it and we add comments and we say it in a specific way to make it sound Jewish and at home for the Jewish person. Yet, this is, you know, when an Orthodox rabbi comes and says to me, you need to go back to your roots, young man.

I say, our roots are the Tanakh.

Yeah.

Because I know what he's referring to. He's referring to Talmudic, rabbinic Judaism.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's not.

Which is post New Testament.

100%.

So let's talk a little bit about the Jewishness of the New Testament.

Yeah.

We have portions in the book of Acts where it says there were myriads, thousands of Jewish believers, and they were zealous for the law of the Torah.

Right?

Jewishness of a text. A Jewish guy born in Israel, raised up in there, whose mother's name was Miriam, his father's name was Joseph, obviously virgin birth, but his father's name is Joseph, right? He went through all of the things, circumcised on the eighth day, all of these things.

It is a thoroughly, thoroughly Jewish text that's embedded within the Judaism of the first century. And see, the difference is most people say, oh, they were rabbis and rabbinic Judaism goes further back, but that's false.

The first person ever called rabbi in history was John the Immersive, John the Baptist.

Okay.

Second person in text is Yeshua the Messiah himself, called rabbi as well. So I believe that it is the believers in Yeshua, the new Testament who have a greater claim to this, to this, to this rich history and heritage, even in written texts.

Are you picking up what he's putting down? It's the new Testament in Jesus and John the Baptist who set the precedent for rabbinic teaching. Now, you know, I'm sure others would push back and say, well, hold on, wait a second.

The concept was there before the, I guess, official office. So, so they would probably say that even though Jesus is called rabbi for the first time, and John, the concept of this kind of role, teacher and master goes, goes back to Elijah and Elisha, to Moses himself.

That's what some would say. But I'm going to let this sit because I still think there is a point being made here that must be appreciated by everyone. Jesus and John the Baptist predate quote unquote rabbinic Judaism as it is practiced and as we understand it today.

You got to let that sit.

And so that's why for me, I couldn't go back to rabbinic Judaism because if the premise is whatever's older is more authoritative, the new Testament is older than the oral Torah. New Testament is older than rabbinic literature.

The new Testament is older than all these things. Before there was an Akiva, there's rabbi Yeshua.

Right. Oh, but the, but the oral Torah goes all the way back to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Yeah.

And as a, as a oral, a binding authority for the Jewish people handed down from generation to generation, unbroken.

Yeah.

Tell me about that.

They say that, well, it's impossible for it to be. It's impossible for it to be because when the Torah was given to Moses on Mount Sinai,.

It says.

These are, these are shots fired on the streets of New York city. You know what I mean? Like the oral Torah is connected to the various ways that rabbis would interpret the written law given on Sinai.

So you have, you guys are going to have to look into this. If you, if this is, you're hearing this for the very first time, you have the written law or the written Torah in Exodus, right? That's what Moses goes up.

The mountain comes back down with, but then in a lot of cases, there were these debates about how to walk out the written Torah in the Jews lives in their personal lives. The whole point really was to know how to apply Torah to your daily life too.

That's what it means to walk it out in your everyday practices. That's what Jews have been wrestling with for centuries, but they realized that the written Torah doesn't go far enough to give guidance on very specific examples that tend to pop up on a day-to-day basis.

So for example, the written law states that you should Sabbath for a full day. It's on the seventh day that you should Sabbath. Take a look at this. Deuteronomy 5 verse 12, observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy as the Lord, your God commanded you.

Six days, you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord, your God on it, you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter, your male servant, your female servant on down the line.

Okay, but wait a second. Here's the question. What counts as work? The Bible doesn't actually say. And that's where the oral Torah steps in. Jews would seek to interpret the written law because they had a high respect for it so that they could apply it to very specific circumstances in their own lives.

By the way, this is why Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, you have heard it said, but I say to you, which Torah is Jesus seeking to correct there? Is it the written Torah or is it the oral Torah?

If you guessed oral Torah, you're absolutely correct. Jesus does not say it is written, but I say to you, right? He says, you have heard it. You have heard it said. And the reason he's saying that is because he's referring to, he's dealing with the oral Torah.

The ways that the Jews would interpret God's law. That's why, again, Jesus said in Matthew 5, he came to properly interpret Tanakh for the Jews. That means that their oral Torah had strayed from the true intention of God's word.

So what Rabbi Arroyo is challenging is the idea that the oral Torah was also given directly from Sinai to the Jews. That is a claim that Jews make. It was given in the same way that written Torah was given on Sinai.

And this is false because we know that Jesus was correcting a lot of their misinterpretations. By the way, you guys with me on this? Is this interesting to you at all? I love this kind of stuff. I think it's fascinating.

It provides a deeper, like I said, like a layer of appreciation of Jesus and God's word. I hope you love this stuff the way that I do. Just one more minute and we'll close.

He wrote down all the words of God, right? So the premise for the rabbis is that the oral Torah was given on Mount Sinai. Why is it that afterwards when the daughters of Zelophehad, a woman, comes up to Moses and says, hey, we want to inherit the land.

Our father has no sons. The Torah says only sons can inherit it. What happens? Moses has to go up to God. Why is Moses going back up to God if he already received the oral Torah on Mount Sinai? So Moses didn't know what to do, showing us that there's no authoritative unbroken chain.

Now this isn't saying that Judaism or the Jewish people don't have a tradition, right? A tradition's fine. The thing is, is this tradition authoritatively binding for all time on the Jewish people? And absolutely it's not.

Wow.

But Jews would say it absolutely is. Look, I mean, this guy, he's cooking with olive oil. I love his insights. I think he has his own YouTube channel. It's called Radar Apologetics. I don't know all of his beliefs this first time I'm hearing him, but he seems solid to me.

Maybe you should go check out some more of his videos. For those of you who are interested in knowing the Jewishness of the Bible and of Jesus, I think this video is worth your time. I, so just personally, I think I mentioned this at the outset, but like I have these kinds of ministries in my podcast rotation.

So the channel is So Be It, where this interview originally exists. There's another podcast I really super enjoy called One Pod for Israel. Highly recommend that you guys check out these ministries as well.

It's just, it's so amazing. So you should definitely look into this. I don't think it like, you know, at the very least, if you go deeper in understanding the historical context, the Jewishness of Jesus, I promise you it's gonna clear up a lot of the confusing things that Jesus says.

The only reason they're confusing is because we don't know about the Jewish way that he spoke and taught. All right. Well, that's enough out of me for now. What say you at this point? Do you think rabbinic Judaism can actually lead Jews to Jesus as their one and true Messiah?

By the way, have you engaged with Jews on this issue? I would love to find out like how it went. Let me know about all of that in the comments. Since you made it all the way to the end, you got to join the Patreon community right now.

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