Mere Gentiles
Who Owns the Covenant?

Section IWhat the Record Says

The Messianic Jewish institutions are not shy about their definitions, and they should be read in their own words. Every claim in this section is footnoted to the document it comes from; the references are listed at the end of the article.

Israel is defined by descent, and Gentile standing is graded by it

The Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations adopted its formal definition of the movement by delegate vote on July 20, 2005. Messianic Judaism, it says, is "a movement of Jewish congregations and groups committed to Yeshua the Messiah that embrace the covenantal responsibility of Jewish life and identity rooted in Torah." Jews belong by covenant. Non-Jews belong on a different footing: groups "may also include those from non-Jewish backgrounds who have a confirmed call to participate fully in the life and destiny of the Jewish people." The expanded statement then describes the one Body of Messiah as "a community of Jews and Gentiles who in their ongoing distinction and mutual blessing anticipate the shalom of the world to come."¹ Read it plainly. A Jew is in by birth. A Gentile is in by a call that someone has to confirm, and the distinction between the two is meant to be ongoing.

Daniel Juster and Russ Resnik, writing for the UMJC on January 28, 2005, put the boundary marker on the table. Listing the features of "the unique calling of Messianic Jews," the first item is "covenant responsibility for the whole Torah," and they add: "Circumcision is a unique marker of this call." Gentiles in Messianic congregations are, in their words, "worthy of particular honor, not because they have finally realized that they are responsible for Torah in the same way as their Jewish brothers, but because they have voluntarily taken on a relationship to Torah out of a love for the God and people of Israel."² The Gentile is honored precisely because his relationship to the Torah is voluntary, not obligated. Obligation belongs to the circumcised.

The same paper is also a witness to the other side of the ditch. Juster and Resnik describe the dispensational theology that overtook popular American Christianity from the late nineteenth century, which "taught that the Mosaic Law had no claim at all on the believer," and they note that "many Christians are still influenced by it."² We will come back to that.

Kay Silberling's position paper "The Ephraimite Error," written with Daniel Juster and David Sedaca as committee members and endorsed jointly by the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America and the UMJC, argues at length that Gentile Christians are not the lost northern tribes. In doing so it states the movement's own ground for Gentile standing: "As gentiles, those who became followers of Yeshua were not required to undergo circumcision precisely because they had no known physical connection to Abraham."³ The paper also makes a point we will grant in full when we get to the case against us: it charges the Two House teachers with an unfalsifiable claim, quoting Batya Wootten that "no one can prove that they are, and no one can prove that they are not," and answers, "This is no argument."³

The membership rules match the theology

Definitions become doors. The UMJC's congregational membership page lists its criteria, and the first is that a congregation must "possess a committed core of Jewish congregants or members."⁴ The International Alliance of Messianic Congregations and Synagogues, the congregational arm of the MJAA, requires as item six of its membership requirements: "Jewishness of the congregation: either the applicant's congregational leader is Jewish and/or there must be members of the congregation who are Jewish to be considered a Messianic Jewish congregation."⁵

The Messianic Jewish Rabbinical Council, whose rabbis are mostly UMJC-ordained, states that it "accepts ordination as conferred by the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations, with the caveat that the person receiving ordination is a Jewish person." Full Membership is for "a Jewish person upon whom smichah has been properly conferred." Associate Membership "is also reserved for Messianic Jews." Asked whether non-Jews have a place, the Council answers that it welcomes "the prayers and encouragement of Christians," and says of standards for non-Jews who want to live a Jewish-oriented life that the work "will have to wait for a while." Its stated distinction is that non-Jews who follow Yeshua "become part of the larger Commonwealth of Israel without becoming Jewish."⁶

None of this is hidden and none of it is accidental. It is a coherent position. The word that governs it, from the definition to the door, is Jewish, and the thing being guarded is "the whole Torah" as the covenant responsibility of a people defined by birth.

Section IIWhat We Have Watched

We teach the covenant faith. We teach the Ten Words as the vows of the King, the Book of the Covenant as the terms sworn at Sinai, and Jesus as the one who sealed those terms in His own blood. We do not claim descent from Abraham. We do not keep the Levitical code and we do not tell anyone else to.

For that we have been dismissed, more than once and from more than one direction, as "mere Gentiles." The phrase is not ours; it was handed to us. It has been used to mean that the Sinai covenant is not ours to teach, and it has been used to mean that we have wandered into Jewish law and ought to come back to grace. Same phrase, opposite complaints. We have sat in churches where the whole of Exodus through Deuteronomy is filed under "the Old Testament law that Jesus did away with," and we have sat across from believers who hold that the covenant belongs to a people and we are guests in it.

That is the whole of the first-hand layer. We report it because the podcast listener should know where we stand before we tell him what we think.

Section IIIOur Read: One Error, Two Faces

Here is what we conclude, and we label it as ours. The Messianic Jewish institutions and the dispensational church are not opposites. They are two faces of one error. Both have collapsed two different books into a single thing called "the Law" or "the Torah." One side then guards that single thing as a national birthright. The other side discards it as a national code that never applied to Gentiles. Neither side reads the covenant as the covenant, because neither side has noticed that Scripture names two books, seals them differently, and stores them in different places.

The covenant was sealed before the calf

Notice the order of events. The Ten Words are spoken by the Voice from the mountain (Exodus 20). The judgments that apply them are given (Exodus 21 through 23). Moses writes it all in a book, reads it to the people, the people swear, and the blood is sprinkled (Exodus 24:3-8). Then the elders go up and eat and drink in the presence of God (Exodus 24:9-11). Oath, blood, meal. That is a covenant ceremony, complete and closed. There is no priesthood yet, no tabernacle, no sacrificial calendar. The covenant is finished before any of that exists.

Then Exodus 32. The people make the calf while Moses is still on the mountain. The tablets are broken. Three thousand die. And what follows in the rest of Exodus, all of Leviticus, and much of Numbers and Deuteronomy is a different kind of material: a priesthood to stand between a fallen people and a holy God, sacrifices to cover the breach, a tent to house a Presence the people could no longer approach directly. The covenant did not change. The people's standing under it did, and a system was added to manage the breach.

Scripture stores the two books in two places

The ark held the two tablets and nothing else (Deuteronomy 10:5; 1 Kings 8:9). The Book of the Law went beside it. Moses says why: as a witness against the people. The Ten Words are the terms of the marriage; the Book of the Law is the record of what the marriage required once the bride had broken faith. One is in the box. One is next to the box. Scripture does not confuse them, and it does not let us.

Paul says the law was added, and added later

Paul's argument only works if the covenant and the added law are two things. The covenant of promise stands; the law was added afterward, for a reason (transgressions) and for a term (until the Seed). If "the covenant" and "the law" were one undivided Torah, Paul could not say one was added to the other or that one cannot disannul the other. He is drawing the same line Moses drew at the ark.

The New Covenant restores the covenant, not the added law

What gets written on the heart? Read the verse with the ark in mind. The thing that was written on stone by the finger of God is now written on hearts by the Spirit of God. Jeremiah is not promising that the sacrificial calendar will be engraved on anyone's inward parts. He is promising that the terms of the marriage, the ones the fathers broke, will be kept from the inside. The New Covenant is new in its medium and its power, not in its terms. Hebrews quotes this passage twice (Hebrews 8:10; 10:16) and in the same letter explains that the Levitical priesthood and its sacrifices have been set aside because the true Priest has come. The tutor goes; the vows stay, and are finally kept.

This is why the modern church's instinct is half right and fully wrong. Half right: the Book of the Law is not binding on the believer. Paul says so and Hebrews says so. Fully wrong: the church files the Book of the Covenant in the same drawer and throws both out together, then has nothing left to say about why the Ten Words are still the plumb line for every Christian's conduct except "well, it's just the moral law." It is not "just the moral law." It is the covenant, and Jesus sealed it.

The ethnic gate is gone, and the terms are the same for everyone

Read what the Gentile was a stranger to: "the covenants of promise." Not the Levitical code. The covenants. Then read what was abolished: "the law of commandments contained in ordinances," the added regulations that walled the nations off. Paul does not say the covenants were abolished; he says the strangers were brought into them. And he does not say the Gentile was made a Jew; he says the Gentile was made a fellow citizen. Same city. Same household. Same blood, and the blood is Messiah's.

Jesus had already said it at a well in Samaria, to a woman whose people had been arguing with Judah about the correct mountain for centuries. "Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews." He honors the root. Then: "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth" (John 4:21-24). Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem. The geography is over. The genealogy is over. What remains is the covenant, kept in spirit and in truth by anyone who will swear it.

Standing rests on the covenant oath, not on descent. The Book of the Law was placed beside the ark as a witness. The Book of the Covenant was placed inside it as the terms. Jesus sealed the terms. He did not adopt the witness.

Ten Words Press

So here is our read, in one sentence. The Messianic Jewish institutions guard the Book of the Law as a birthright and the church discards the Book of the Covenant as Jewish law, and both errors dissolve the moment you put the two books back where Moses put them.

Section IVThe Strongest Case Against Us

An argument that will not state its opponent's best case is not worth the listener's time. Here is theirs, put as well as we can put it, and then our answer to each point.

Romans 11:29: the calling is irrevocable

The case. "The gifts and calling of God are without repentance." Israel according to the flesh has an election that has not been revoked, and Juster and Resnik build directly on this: the Word, the covenants, the ancestry of Messiah were given to the Jewish people and "would forever belong to the Jewish heritage."² A Gentile who says "the covenant is mine on the same terms as yours" is, on this view, flattening a distinction Paul himself preserved. Paul tells the wild branch: "thou bearest not the root, but the root thee" (Romans 11:18).

Our answer. We affirm Romans 11:29 without a footnote. The natural branches were broken off for unbelief and will be grafted back in, and the wild branch had better not boast. We do not boast. But look at what the root is. The root is the patriarchs and the promise, "the covenants of promise" Paul names in Ephesians 2. It is not the Levitical code, which was not planted until 430 years after the promise. The irrevocable calling is a calling to the covenant, and the covenant is exactly the thing Paul says the Gentile has now been made a fellow citizen in. Romans 11 humbles the Gentile. It does not fence him out of the ark.

Galatians 5:3: the circumcised man owes the whole law

The case. "I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law." Juster and Resnik read this, rightly, as proof that the uncircumcised are not obligated to the whole Torah, and that circumcision is the marker of that obligation.² So the covenant responsibility is theirs, not ours, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

Our answer. We agree with the verse and with their reading of it, and it proves our point rather than theirs. Galatians 5:3 describes the Book of the Law as a package one enters through circumcision and then owes in full. That is precisely why we have not entered it, and why we will not send anyone else through that door. But the verse says nothing about the Book of the Covenant. Read on in the same chapter. Paul tells these uncircumcised Gentiles that "the whole law is fulfilled in one word, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (5:14), and then lists the works of the flesh (5:19-21), which are the Ten Words broken one by one. He has released them from the tutor and bound them to the vows in the same breath. Galatians 5:3 is a fence around the Book of the Law. It is not a fence around the covenant.

Acts 15: the apostles laid only four things on the Gentiles

The case. The Jerusalem council settled this. Gentiles were not to be troubled with the yoke; they were given four requirements, "that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood" (Acts 15:20). The apostles did not tell the Gentiles to take up Sinai. Whatever the Gentile's relationship to the covenant is, it is lighter, and it is not the same as Israel's.

Our answer. Read the whole chapter. Peter says the yoke "neither our fathers nor we were able to bear" (15:10). That yoke is the Book of the Law, and the council lifted it from the Gentiles; we say amen. Peter also says God "put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith" (15:9). No difference. Now look at the four things. Idols and fornication are the first, second, and seventh of the Ten Words. Blood is older than Sinai; it is Noah's (Genesis 9:4). Strangled meat is a blood matter. The four requirements are not a new, lighter law for Gentiles. They are the parts of the covenant a pagan coming in off the street would not have known were covenant, stated so that a Gentile and a Jew could sit at one table. The council did not create a two-tier covenant. It removed the tutor from the Gentile's back and left the covenant on his heart, where Jeremiah said it would be.

"We could be descendants of Joseph; only God knows" is unfalsifiable

The case. Silberling's paper nails Wootten for this, and the charge is fair: a claim that cannot be proven or disproven "is no argument."³ If we say we might be of Joseph, we are doing the same thing.

Our answer. We agree, and that is why we rest nothing on it. We have said in plain words that we could be of Joseph, that only God knows, and that it does not determine salvation. All three clauses matter. Only God knows: "The secret things belong unto the LORD our God" (Deuteronomy 29:29). It does not determine salvation: "If ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:29). Silberling's charge lands on any teacher whose standing rests on bloodline. Ours rests on the oath. Notice that the Messianic Jewish position has the same exposure from the other side: it cannot prove descent either, only community membership and family memory, and Silberling herself says Jewish identity "is not racial" but "based on memory and choice."³ Good. Then descent cannot be the gate. The answer to the question "who owns the covenant?" is not "whoever can prove a bloodline." It is covenant, not bloodline. The ark held two tablets. It did not hold a genealogy.