Christians, History, Jeshuaists, Jews, News and Events, Religiosity + Way of Expressing Faith

A Hebrew-Christian movement

If the estimates are correct, more than 8,000 Jews cross over to the “Hebrew-Christian” movement each year!

Only a few decades ago, there were only a handful of Messianic congregations throughout the United States. But today, many hundreds actively attract and recruit Jews who, because they lack a sound Jewish education and support system, are buying the manipulative rhetoric and persuasive techniques of the Hebrew-Christian missionary movement of mainly trinitarian Christians. And there is the big problem. A majority of those Jews for Christ or “Jews for Jesus” are really very conservative evangelical Christians, who do not believe in the God of Abraham, but worship a “Holy Trinity“.

All over the world there are a minority of Jews who keep worshipping the God of Abraham after they accepted Jeshua or Jesus Christ as the Messiah. For them it is also an heartache to see that in addition, there are over 1,000 Christian missions dedicated to converting the Jewish people, by misleading them into that trinitarian story.

It is estimated that there are more than 250,000 Hebrew-Christians in North America and Israel, but it is not clear how many kept worshipping the Only One True God and how many came part of a community where there is worshipped that Trinity.

The Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest denomination in Christendom. Yet the irony is that despite Rome’s past bitter relationship with the Jewish people, today’s Catholic Church is, for the most part, not interested in converting Jews.

Mainline or liberal Protestant denominations (Methodist, Episcopalian, Unitarian, etc.) are also not so much interested in converting Jews. Liberal-leaning Protestant denominations tend to shy away from Jewish evangelism.

In North America fundamentalist, born-again Christians are dedicated to bringing every Jew to the Cross. In the United States of America there can be found several very enthusiast “Christian believers” who are convinced that all those who do not become part of their church would be tortured in a place called “Hell”. They do want us to believe it is out of love for mankind that they want to convert all of us to their religion.

In essence, the central role that Christian missions like “Jews for Jesus” plays is to act as a clearinghouse and support system for evangelical churches around the world. As a result, these Jewish missions spend much of their resources and manpower instructing lay missionaries in gentile churches in the art of Jewish-evangelism.

People should know that Jeshuaists may be Jews for Jesus, but have nothing to do with those American right-wing evangelicals who worship a three-headed god. Jeshuaists are Jews and non-Jews who follow the Nazarene rebbe Jeshua and want others also come to see that that man of flesh and blood is the sent one from God who is also the way to God.

For Jeshuaists it is important that people come to understand that Jeshua is not God himself but the son of God who is the way to God and is the one in whom everybody should believe and put his trust in. Jeshuaists do not have the intention to bring Jews away from their Jewish faith and traditions.

We do know Jews may be afraid for those nearly one in five Americans who are part of a seemingly strong army of lay people dedicated to share their faith with a Jew. We too want to share our faith with Jews, but they should not be afraid to be lured in human doctrines.

The Southern Baptist Convention two decades ago already managed to clear out the non-trinitarian Baptists and now passed numerous resolutions encouraging its more than 15-million American members to target and evangelize the Jewish people so that those monotheist worshippers also would diminish. It can well be that the reason is that the New Testament specifically prioritizes Jews for conversion. In the book of Matthew, when Jesus is instructing his apostles, he warns them:

“Go not into the way of the gentiles…but only go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

(Matthew 10:5)

The Apostle Paul echoes the identical sentiment in the first chapter of the Book of Romans when he declares:

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek [gentile].”

(Romans 1:16)

We find a unique emphasis on reaching the Jews in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels, almost to the exclusion of the gentiles.

second reason for this obsession relates to the Church’s fascination with eschatology, the study of the End Times. Fundamentalist Christians are consumed by the prophecies surrounding the End of Days. They want to know when the Messiah will come/return. This can be very understandable because we can see many signs predicted in the Scriptures.

Of course, the Jewish people eagerly await the “End of Days,” and the coming of The Messiah. This faith is one of Maimonides’s “Thirteen Fundamental Principles of Faith.”

Because the Jew Jeshua (something some Americans do not want to accept that Jesus was a Jew) was addressing a Jewish audience at the time he made this statement, Christians have often understood this proclamation to have one meaning:

Jesus will not make his second coming until large numbers of Jews embrace the Church.

The Jews, in a sense, are holding up the show. These evangelicals believe that Jesus’ second coming is imminent and the Jews must be converted posthaste and en masse in order to enable Jesus’ return.

Finally, the most significant reason for the Church’s preoccupation with the Jews stems from the unique credibility problem that only Judaism presents to Christendom.

The idea of the Messiah – a man who will come at the End of Days to usher in a utopian society of love, peace, and the universal knowledge of God – is an exclusively Jewish idea.

Fundamentalist Christians insist that if the Jews would only look in their own Hebrew Scriptures, they would discover that Jesus is bouncing off every page.

It stands to reason, therefore, that if in fact Jesus had been the prophesied Messiah, the Jews should have been the first to follow Jesus and his teachings. They should have overwhelmingly embraced the claims of the Church. They forget it were first of all Jews who followed Jeshua or the man they call Jesus. It was only later that goyim joined the followers of Jeshua.

It is wrong to think that Jews who want to accept Jeshua or Jesus as their Messiah should change to an other god and would have to take Jesus as their god. Nothing of it! Real Jews and real followers of Jeshua or real Christians should have the same God as the Nazarene master teacher. Jeshua or Jesus did not worship himself, neither prayed to himself. He prayed to the Only One True God, the God of Abraham, who is a Singular Eternal Spirit Being and not a god man can see.

We would love to warn Jews that they should not fall in the trap of such evangelical preachers who want them to believe the Echad can be three. All the set apart Books are clear that God is only One and that He is an all-knowing Spirit. Jesus was not all-knowing and was not eternal. Jesus had a birth and really died. He did not fake his temptation nor his death. Such acting would have no use at all and would even take away the proof that a human being can stand up from the dead. As such when making Jesus into God all our hope for a resurrection of human beings is taken away, because when Jesus is God he is no man of flesh and blood like us and then we do have no proof at all that man can stand up from the dead.

We call for our Jewish brethren to come to accept Jeshua as one of their brethren and to come under him, accepting for what he really has done, having given his life to do the Will of God (putting his own will aside – which he would not have done when he would be God). Also to goyim or non-Jews we would like to ask them to accept the Jewish rebbe as their saviour.

We want the people know that the Jeshuaists or Followers of Jeshua call other followers of Jeshua to make disciples and fulfilling the Great Commission by engaging Jewish people with the gospel message, equipping them to follow Jeshua, and inspiring Christians to do the same.

All over the world we should show Jews and non-Jews we should form one Kehila or community of brothers and sisters in Christ and we should oppose those groups which want to bring our brethren and sisters away from the True God.

Jews and gentiles should be brought together for the messiah. We see that through Jeshua. This is our redeeming.

J4J Messianic Jewish non-profit organization founded in 1973, sharing its belief that Jesus (Jeshua) is the promised Messiah of the Jewish people

We understand some mainstream Jews are afraid of our movement because they mainly know the Jews for Jesus Messianic groups which worship the Trinity and as such go in against the true Jewish faith of the One God. But Jeshuaists do not worship a false doctrine Trinity but have faith in the Only One true God, the God of Israel. It is true we want the Jewish people to hear the message of the Nazarene rebbe, but our message is also for the rest of the world — that’s in the New Testament. The Jews of our community did not become ex-Jews, and they didn’t come to believe in Jesus to be a god or to stop being Jewish, or to become part of the majority. For sure Jeshuaists didn’t choose the easy route, being between two main groups Jews and Christians, often not recognised by those main religious groups, or being considered a sect.

“To say you can be a Jew and a Christian does a disservice to both faith systems.”

Therefore you perhaps better call yourself a Jeshuaist, a follower of Jeshua, showing that you want to follow the Jewish master teacher and do not want to go for the Trinitarian Christian faith. Jeshuaists as followers of Jeshua (Jesus Christ) believe in Jeshua, but we want it to be a normal thing, not an oppressive, in-your-face thing. We believe in the message that Jeshua is the messiah, but we don’t necessarily believe in the practices of “Jews for Jesus”, of which there are a lot of people who came to believe in the Trinity. Jeshuaists prefer to keep to the Torah teachings, there being only One True God who is One.

You may call us a Hebrew-Christian movement or a Jews for Jews movement, as long as you keep remembering we are real followers of the Nazarene Jewish rebbe Jeshua and do not follow the ideas taken over after Constantine the Great or the Nicene Creed and are real monotheists and not worshippers of a Trinity.

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