The universe is broken. Humanity is broken. Human beings have been devastated, paralyzed, corrupted, ruined by the powerful forces of rebellion, sin and death. Our rebellion caused us to be alienated from our Creator, who is the source of well-being, peace, happiness and eternal life. We are now under the control of dark, evil, demonic and satanic forces. We are headed toward death, not life; Hell, not Heaven.
Yeshua alone is the answer! He is the Son of God and Son of Man and the unique God-Man; He came on a great mission to rescue ruined humanity. He is the only Savior of a lost and dying world; He is the Messiah – the ultimate Prophet, Priest and King; He is the Supreme Sage; wisest of Rabbis; greatest of Torah-teachers, teaching us about God and salvation; He is the Healer of Humanity – the One through whom God was doing and will do great miracles of healing from all kinds of illnesses; One through whom God was casting out demons; the One who will ultimately cast out all evil spirits.
Yeshua has ascended back to Heaven. There He is seated at the right hand of God the Father. From there He will return to planet Earth one day, to take over the administration of this planet. Until He does that, the Savior needs our help! The One who is the Source of Salvation, the Only and Great Helper of Humanity, the Rescuer of the Wretched, needs good men and women, boys and girls to help Him rescue human beings.
Yeshua needs our help. Yeshua wants us to take on His mission. Yeshua asks a lot from human beings who will follow Him. He asks for total commitment. And, what He asks is not just for the leaders, like Peter, James and John. This request to take on His mission is for every potential Christian and Messianic Jew.
Yeshua is not looking for pew-warmers. He is not looking for mere synagogue-goers. He is not looking for people to only give money to their congregation and think that is enough. He is looking for disciples, students, followers, co-workers, assistants, helpers. And, the people He wants aren’t only the ones who start off being good and respectable and religious. Yeshua is able to take bad and unrespectable and irreligious people, and touch them and save them, and teach them and transform them, and make them into His followers and the forwarders of His great mission to rescue human beings.
Let’s learn about what God wants from each one of us – mission and purpose and discipleship – from what happened with a tax collector named Matthew. After that Yeshua went out and noticed a tax collector named Levi sitting in the tax booth, and He said to him, “Follow Me.” And Matthew left everything behind, and got up and began to follow Him. Men of God are to help God create other men of God. Saints are to help the Holy One make saints. Disciples are to help the Master make other disciples.
Yeshua turned this tax collector, Matthew, into His disciple. Then, brand-new disciple Matthew took what he knew, even though it may have been little, and tried to do the same with his friends. And Levi gave a big reception for Yeshua in his house; and there was a great crowd of tax collectors and other people who were reclining at the table with them.
Tax-collectors were generally disliked by the rest of the Jewish community. They were not known for their great religious piety and faith. They were perceived to be collaborators of the hated Romans. They were perceived to be greedy blood-suckers and parasites. They collected taxes for Rome; maybe they collected taxes for Jewish leaders as well. The taxes they collected were perceived by the population as being too high. Then on top of those already high taxes, the tax collectors would charge even more, and take that hard earned money from an impoverished people for themselves.
But, these tax collectors and their associates were Matthew’s co-workers and friends, and Matthew wanted to honor his new Rabbi and Mentor, and introduce Yeshua to his friends and co-workers. Even though most of the other rabbis of His day wouldn’t have gone to a party like this with people who were known for being irreligious, Yeshua went to Matthew’s reception. That did not please Israel’s other religious leaders who were monitoring everything Yeshua was doing, and who were increasingly hostile to the miracle-working Rabbi.
The Pharisees and their scribes (experts in Torah) began grumbling at His disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?” The Pharisees knew that this world is full of sin and temptation, and righteous men and women need to avoid temptation, and avoid getting too close to sinners. That’s true, but it is only part of the truth. Godly men and women are on a great mission for God. They need to be salt in a decaying world, among human beings who are not tasty to God. They need to be light among human beings who are living in darkness, confusion, chaos and death. They need to be strong enough to get close to people who are far from God, who are far from morality, and bring them closer to God and repentance and salvation.
Yeshua, who was and is perfectly holy and good; Yeshua, who resisted all temptation; Yeshua, who hated and hates evil, understood that His great mission was to heal spiritually sick human beings. And to accomplish His great task of redemption, He had to get closer to those who were far from God.
And Yeshua answered and said to them, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” Humanity is spiritually very sick. We are not just a little sick. We are deathly ill. We are dying. If left to ourselves, we will die physically and spiritually. We will experience the First Death – Physical Death, followed by the Second Death, eternal death in Gehenna.
Yeshua is the Greatest of all Doctors who came into this world to help those who have broken God’s laws, who have ignored God’s ways, to turn them to God, to turn them back to God’s ways; to encourage them to start doing what is right. Doctors need to be among the sick. Healers of the spirit need to be in contact with their spiritually sick patients. The righteous need to be among the unrighteous.
Obvious, right? But, here is the problem: Christians and Messianic Jews tend, after time, to only associate with other Christians and Messianic Jews. Our contact and interaction with those who are not part of our community can become less and less. In our desire to be holy, we can become isolated from a sin-sick world. That’s not good!
We don’t want to stay within these walls and only relate to other believers. We want to be getting strength and encouragement from one another, and then going out to heal a sin-sickened world, and help those who are spiritually sick become healthy by getting close to God and faith and morality and truth and salvation and life – meaningful life, purposeful life, eternal life.
The Creator wants to redeem and save and transform and eternalize human beings who will be loyal companions, eternal loving friends. God wants sons and daughters. Yeshua wants disciples. It turns out that God’s eternal son and daughters and Yeshua’s disciples are the same thing.
Be a disciple! Get closer to Yeshua. Allow Him to teach and transform you! Then, go and make other disciples. Go to where they are. They may be enmeshed in sin, in ignorance. Go to those tax collectors and sinners and help them!
The Pharisees and their Torah experts were offended by Yeshua and those who committed themselves to learn from Him because they went to this party. The Pharisees and their Torah experts also observed what they thought were other inconsistencies with Yeshua, and how He was training His disciples. Not only were they were hanging out with tax collectors and sinners, they weren’t fasting and engaging in organized times of prayer like some of the other religious groups.
And they said to Him, “The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers, the disciples of the Pharisees also do the same, but Yours eat and drink.” You can almost sense them thinking: “This man supposedly is a new and great prophet, and maybe the Messiah? And, He doesn’t have the discernment to avoid sinners? He likes to party with them? And, He and His students don’t fast and pray? We don’t think so”!
And, to some degree it was true. Yeshua and His band of disciples conducted themselves differently from the Pharisees and the disciples of John. But, there were good reasons for it. Something very very special was taking place. The Son of God, the long awaited, much hoped for Messiah, the Savior of Israel and the World, was finally here!
The One through whom God created the universe had visited this planet, and His Chosen People, and was in our very midst. Adonai Tzidkaynu, the Lord our Righteousness had come among us! Immanuel, God with Us, was with us, and was powerfully teaching us the crystal clear Word of God. The Lord Who Heals Us was present, healing us physically and spiritually. This was amazing! This was worth celebrating! This was a time of unparalleled happiness! The amazing joy from this very special situation was like the joy that happens on one of the most joyous occasions – a wedding – only greater!
And Yeshua said to them, “You cannot make the attendants of the groom fast while the groom is with them, can you? But the days will come; and when the groom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.”
Yeshua knew God’s plan for His life. He knew His mission would result in His rejection by the majority of the nation, and His death, burial, resurrection and ascension. The Son of God knew that this very special time among us – when the One through whom the universe was made could be physically present with us, and teach us Himself – and help us and heal us, was limited. It would be appropriate to fast after He died and ascended and was no longer physically present among us. But to fast when the King of kings and Lord of lords was here doing amazing things – no. That would not be appropriate.
May each one of us always have that sense of amazement and happiness that comes from knowing that the Son of God has come!
The entire world, including us, needs to understand that a radial change happened when Messiah came into this world. Messiah’s arrival marks the beginning of a whole new age, a new dispensation, and expansion of salvation history. New things were needed.
And He was also telling them a parable: “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment; otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.
With the entry of Immanuel into this world, all of the same old ways and forms and patterns of doing things simply will not do. New teachings and a new message and a new mission were necessary – new, but consistent with the old; new leadership was called for; a new mission among the Gentiles would shortly take place; new communities would develop made up of Jews and Gentiles; new traditions would need to be developed. New life and forms and ways of doing things should characterize Christianity and Messianic Judaism – incorporating the best of the old, but integrating them with the new.
But, Yeshua understood that not everyone would accept the new realities. Some were too comfortable with the old. It seemed so safe. It was tried and tested and familiar. And so anticipating their rejection of the new, Messiah gave the Pharisees and their experts in Torah a warning:
And no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, “The old is good enough.” But, the old is not good enough if God really is doing something new. And, in Yeshua He really gave us something amazingly new! New, but not unexpected. He had forewarned us to expect and be ready for something new. He let us know ahead of time that the Messiah would come and we were responsible to recognize Him and listen to Him – otherwise we would be suffer. He told us that a New Covenant would be enacted that was not like the older Sinai Covenant, which we would break. He told us that through the Messiah we would get new life and a new outpouring of the Spirit of God. Those new realities cannot be ignored if one wants to please God, be accepted by God, if one wants to be right with God and live with God.
But not everyone welcomed the new. The majority of those who were the most religious, and the most knowledgeable among our people rejected the new. So, the conflict between Yeshua and the religious leaders intensified. Their rejection of Him increased.
The old still refuses to acknowledge the new. Those who have new life, and those of us who are now representatives of the new, like Yeshua and His disciples, we will also face rejection. We need to be willing to endure conflict, hostility and rejection. We need to be strong. We need to be disciples of the new who honor God, who honor Messiah, who stand for the truth. We need to be like Yeshua. We need to be like Matthew. Be strong! Be bold! Be courageous! Don’t compromise before hostility. Speak the truth. Reach the lost. Correct those who are wrong! Make disciples. Teach them the truth. Don’t back down!
It is not easy, but it is so important. It is so much what our life is to be about. It is so much what our future rewards will be based on. And, there is so much grace to help us!