Follow Not the Way Of The Deceivers!

5 November 2006

Good Morning and may the blessings of our Messiah and God be with you all evermore.

Today in the Gospel of John we read an account of Yeshua (Jesus) speaking to the people of Jerusalem and specifically to the Pharisees, shortly after the incident with the adulterous woman.  The Pharisees were trying to say that they and the people of Jerusalem were not only decedents of Abraham but were heirs to the promises made to Israel, which from our reading apparently they were not!  As we read Yeshua says unto these people “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.”  The question for us as modern day Christians was Yeshua talking figuratively or literally?

As we learn from the Bible Yeshua was in fact speaking literally.  Now you may ask how can this be?  Were not these people he was speaking too were priest in the Temple?  The answer again lies within our bible.  We learn that Yeshua wasn’t sent to the people in control of Judah, which were the Pharisees, who were not the descendants of Israel (Jacob).  Yeshua was in Palestine to preach to the remnants of Israel left there and to the rest of the scattered people of the nation of Israel that were dispersed throughout southern Europe and northern Mesopotamia.  Let’s listen to what Yeshua says in: Matthew 15:24  “Then Jesus replied, "I have been sent only to the lost sheep of the people of Israel”.  And in Matthew 10:5-6  “These twelve men were sent out by Jesus with the following instructions: "Do not go to any Gentile territory or any Samaritan towns.  Instead, you are to go to the lost sheep of the people of Israel.”  Yeshua was sent to call all the peoples of all the tribes of Israel that had been scattered from the Promised Land throughout the whole globe, not to those people who may have been living in the Roman state of Palestine (Judah) falsely claiming to be the rightful recipients of the promise of Israel.

How do we know who were rightful inheritors of the Promised Land?  We need to only look back at the history of Israel, which is the history of the descendants of Jacob, who we see in Genesis 32:28 that God changed his name to be Israel rather then Jacob.  Thus we must keep in mind that the Israelites or Jacobites are.  They all of Israel’s legitimate descendents through his own ten sons and his two grandsons by Joseph his favorite son.  The key to understanding our history as Christians and the prophesies given us by God for our future is remembering who God’s chosen people are and who everyone else is relative to them.  God chose the decedent’s of Jacob/Israel the son of Isaac to be his preferred people, a model nation for all others but these are not the only people who ever believed in God and followed his ways.  Thus we see in Matthew 5:22 when a woman of Canaan comes to Yeshua to ask his help because she believes in him, he grants her request that her daughter be made well.  In Yeshua’s time people still knew who they were, still knew if they were descendents of Jacob or not.  Such as in the case of the Samaritan woman Yeshua meets at the well as told to us in John 4:9-12.  Note how in verse 12 the woman says “Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well”.  She is an Israelite although we do not know through which son of Israel she is descended.  So here we have the clear evidence from the Gospel showing us who it was Yeshua was looking to retrieve into his flock.  The land of Samaria in the time of Yeshua, was part of the former kingdom of Israel and was located south of Galilee, and north of Judea, thus between Judea and Galilee.  The area of Galilee from which Yeshua came from was part of land promised to Naphtali the sixth son of Jacob.  Yet here we see Yeshua a Judahite, being of the tribe of Judah, growing up, and living in area that was not previously a land given to the tribe of Judah.  Why would this be?  Should Yeshua not have been from an area populated by Judahites?  Was not Judea of his time such an area?  As we lean from 2 Kings 24:14-16 that in the exile of Judea, not every last citizen of the Kingdom of Judea was exiled into Babylon, so it was in the former lands of the kingdom of Israel that many of the decedents of Jacob remained. 

We again must turn to the Bible to understand our history as Israelites or descendents of Jacob.  In Isaiah 36:1 and 2 Kings 18:13 we learn that Sennacherib (701 BC), who was the emperor of Assyria (the people of Ararat), sent his armies to Judea and conquered most of the walled cities of the Kingdom of Judea, some 46 cities or so.  He captured, enslaved and drove out some 200,150 Judahites and moved them to the northern part of his empire, to the land of the Medes, where the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel were taken.  Only Jerusalem remained with its mixed inhabitants and Sennacherib encircled it, isolating it from the world.  King Hezekiah, was made to strip the gold and silver from the doors of the temple and send it to Sennacherib along with his daughters and lesser wives to appease him. 

How was it possible for Sennacherib to accomplish the almost total deportation of the legitimate decedents of Israel and his son Judah?  We have our answer in 2 Kings 18:25 when the Assyrian official representing Sennacherib tells the people of Jerusalem that God himself had sent the Assyrians, “Do you think I have attacked your country and destroyed it without the LORD's help?  The LORD himself told me to attack it and destroy it.”  Yahweh himself was bringing the destruction on Judea for turning from the old ways.  The decedents of Judah through his son’s people had drifted from original religion of their ancestors Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses.  Instead they had begun to practice beliefs, holidays, and secular customs of the people around them and who had intermingled with them.  These people were the descendents of Esau who God tells us he hated in Malachi 1:2-4.  God says he hates Esau and his descendents and has destroyed their villages and towns and should they rebuild them he will destroy them again, because he will be angry with them as a nation forever.  These are the people who had infiltrated the tribe of Judah and have begun claiming to be Judeans.  This is why God deports the true Judeans to Assyria leaving behind the descendents of Esau to be destroyed again. 

Yet listen how God repented of his desire to destroy Jerusalem and destroyed the Assyrian Army while they sleep in 2 Kings 19:34-35, “For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David's sake.  And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”  Understand, God choose to preserve Jerusalem not for the sake of the people within the walls the people of Esau and few Judahites and Benjamites but for the sake of David and to keep the promise that he made David that a descendent of Judah would always sit on the thrown of Israel.  The remnants of the Tribe of Judah who were held up in Jerusalem along with the descendents of Sheleh, who was Judah’s bastard (A person born of a Israelite father and heathen mother, who is unable to inherit land or property or be a member of the congregation of Israel, Deuteronomy 23:2) son by his wife the Canaanite (descendents of Cain and Esau) and other peoples who lived in Jerusalem at that time.  These people were the Scribes spoken of in the Bible.  We learn this in 1 Chronicles 2:55, were it tells us explicitly that the Kenites were the Scribes.  And the Edomites among them are the descendents of Esau as told us in Genesis 36:9.  We learn from Genesis 36:38 that an Edomite named Baalhanan was even made King of Israel after Saul’s death, before David took the thrown.  Later we read in 1 Chronicles 18:13 the Edomites were made the servants of King David.  Now this is how they became intermingled with the people of Judah and Jerusalem.  It was these people that Nebuchadnezzar primarily carried off to Babylon in the great exile.  Not the decedents of Judah, because the 200,150 Judahites of Judea had already been transplanted to the land of the Medes by the Assyrians to live with the rest of the children of Israel.  No, it was the Edomites and Kenites the children of Serpents and Vipers spoken of in Matthew 23:33, who made up the majority of only 4,600 people that Nebuchadnezzar took away to Babylon in 597 BC a full one hundred years after the tribe of Judah had been sent to exile by the Assyrians.  

 There were some Judahites still in Jerusalem in 597 BC and we know what happen to some of them as the Bible tells us this in 2 Kings 19:30-31 “Those few people from the nation of Judah who escape will again take root and produce crops.  Those few people will go out from Jerusalem, and those who escape will go out of Mount Zion.  The LORD is determined to do this.”  Yet there were Israelites that went to Babylon who were not Judahites (descendents of Judah) as we see in Ester 2:5 we see that Mordecai who was of the tribe of Benjamin (a Benjamite) who had lived in Judea making him a Judean, often referred to as a Jew.  Then the few people who were called Jews magically multiplied as we learn in Ester 8:17  “In every province and every city where the king's message and decree arrived, the Jews were happy and joyful, feasting and enjoying a holiday.  Then many common people pretended to be Jews because they were terrified of the Jews” (God’s Word Version).  So then when we read in the Bible that the Jews returned from Babylon, we are not reading that the tribe of Judah returned.  We are reading that it was a mixed group made up of mostly Edomites, Babylonians, and other foreign people who returned to Judea.  Along with these were some Judahites, Benjamites, and other Israelites sprinkled in.  These false Jews were the people Yeshua was addressing when he lashed out at the snakes and children of snakes as he called him.  The vast majority of the people in the Roman province of Palestine/Judea were the people God said he hated for always, especially the Pharisees, Sadducees, the Temple priest, and scribes.

            Does this revelation mean anything to us today?  Oh yes it does my brother and sisters because just as the world was deceived by these people God says he hates, so can we be deceived today, unless we stand aware together as the true descendents of Jacob though our Lord and Savior Yeshua.  We need not be afraid in our times, though because God knows our troubles.  In   Revelations 2:9, Yeshua reassures us to be strong in him, “ I know your troubles; I know that you are poor---but really you are rich!  I know the evil things said against you by those who claim to be Jews but are not; they are a group that belongs to Satan!  And Yeshua will know his own from the pretenders as he promises us in Revelations 3:9,  “Listen!  As for that group that belongs to Satan, those liars who claim that they are Jews but are not, I will make them come and bow down at your feet. They will all know that I love you.”

            Though the world may be fooled by the false believers in God who are truly followers and children of Satan, we as the living saints of the one true Lord and Messiah, the decedents of our father Jacob and the final inheritors of the promise land of Abraham and Moses, shall see the day when the sons of Satan bow down before us to majesty of our Lord Yeshua.  And though him and his love we shall never be deceived again!

The Peace of the Lord be with you ever more.  AMEN!