Plucking the Eagle's Wings

Plucking the Eagle's Wings

Christians protected Jews during the Holocaust and that hundreds of thousands of true Christians died along with Jews during the war. I told him, "A true Christian loves everyone, including Jews, and would never harm anyone. There is a difference between those who call themselves Christians and those whose hearts have been changed by Christ." For centuries, Romans persecuted Jews in the name of Christ. This persecution caused a division among the Jews. A spiritual rift exists between the religious Jews who adhere to the Law of Moses, and the secular Jews who experience their heritage as being more cultural than religious. The First Century Church An analogy that explains the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is a branch being grafted onto a tree. The Jews represent the tree with its roots going back to their father, Abraham. When many religious Jews rejected Christ as their Messiah, the Gentiles were given the opportunity to accept Him. Their act of faith in Jesus grafted them into the tree of promise, which symbolizes God's covenant with Abraham. The first century church consisted of Jewish believers. The Holy Spirit was poured out during the Jewish Feast of Pentecost upon 120 Jewish believers, officially pointing to the birth of the Christian Church (Acts 2:1-4). Peter and John went to the Temple to pray at the ninth hour, which was a customary Jewish time of prayer (Acts 3:1). Paul went to the Temple with a group of Jewish believers who broke their Nazarite vow by presenting offerings at the Temple (Acts 21:15 26). Paul was a religious Jew who adhered to the instruction of Moses; however, he was called by God to minister to the Gentiles. It was the Apostle Paul, a former Jewish Pharisee, who gave insight into the spiritual relationship between the natural Jew and the Gentiles who converted to Christianity. Paul compared the covenant with an olive tree that had many Jewish branches. In Romans 11, Paul taught that, because of unbelief (rejection of Christ), some Jewish branches were broken off of the original olive tree and Gentile branches were grafted onto the tree (Romans 11:20). He said that many of his own people, the Jews, were spiritually blinded to God's plan to graft Gentiles into the Jewish covenant through Jesus Christ (Romans 11:7). He also stated that, when the "fullness of the Gentiles comes in," God would graft the natural Jew back into the tree and "all Israel would be saved"

168