Christians cannot and must not ever lose sight of our Jewish beginnings, or the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and that He was born out of the nation of Israel. He is the gift to the world made possible by the Jews. He is the hope of salvation and restoration of fellowship with God, all made possible by the nation of Israel, God's chosen people. God's covenants with Israel remain in effect, and God has not forsaken Israel. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob remains on the throne of Heaven, and at His right hand sits Jesus Christ, the Passover Lamb, the final and perfect attonement for sin.

For the past several months I have been delving hungrily into the Old Testament in search of finding Jesus in the rituals and that God ordained for the Jews, and thankfully I've been listening to some very good teachers on the subject. Although as Christians we can understand the concept of salvation through death and resurrection, I don't think we can understand the context of it without a thorough and solid foundation in the Old Testament, particularly in the Torah, the first five books, also called the books of Moses. Also, without knowing Hebrew and Greek, it is nearly impossible to understand via English translations what the subtleties of the text reveal and how things are hidden in the text, even the plan of salvation right in Genesis 5.

Genesis 5 is a geneology. Most of us read this and skip through it, but I've had a light thrown onto the text, and I read geneologies a lot more carefully now. Let's look at the plan of salvation through Jesus laid out in Genesis via the translations of the names of the patriarchs of the first 10 generations from Adam to Noah.

One of the biggest questions on Jewish minds is, if they accept Jesus as their Messiah, what's to become of Israel? What most fail to realize is that national Israel is covenant with God that will never go away , nor does accepting Jesus as the Messiah they've been waiting for negate any of their Jewishness or nationality. The covenants with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still binding, and those covenants, in fact, do not apply to the Gentile church. The church can never be Israel, nor does the church usurp Israel. God has separate plans for each. The church age is about to end. The 70th week of Daniel is about to begin, and after that is the millennial reign of Christ on the throne of David in Jerusalem. Not only will Israel, God's wife, be restored fully at that time to all of her land (remember that currently much of it has been bartered away to neighbors for the sake of "peace"), but the entire Earth will be restored to its former glory.

I suspect, however, that most of the Jews in the world are apostate in their relationship with God. They cling to the traditions and the heritage but not to a personal relationship with God. Now, before anyone thinks I am being anti-Semitic in my statement, I should also say the same is true of Christians. In some ways I can understand the Jewish apostacy since they have in general been blinded for 2000 years since their rejection of the Messiah, but Christians have no excuse. Obediance and fellowship with God, reading and learning the Bible for ones' self are no longer priorities. Christians cling to their denomination or church or their heritage. If they only really understood or had an inkling of understanding about the richness of their heritage, the promises of God, and a true relationship with Jesus, so much in the world would be clear.