Transcript of Gamaliel & the Colossians - NehemiasWall.com

and I've actually encountered a lot of you know Hebrew roots folks who are believers in Yeshua who um who have told me that they you know they they started keeping Shabbat and their families and their pastors told them "You're going to hell now You've fallen from grace and you've put yourself under the law and you've condemned yourself to eternal hellfire because you're keeping Shabbat." A and so it's interesting the perspective you're bringing that when Sha says in in uh uh Colossians 2:16 he says let no man therefore judge you in meter and drink in respect of a holy day or of the new moon or the Sabbath that that what you're saying is that if if somebody comes and tells you you're going to hell for keeping Shabbat then um you know you can't let them judge you That's right Let let no pagan let no fool judge you because these are all shadows of good things to come Mhm Now um what I was when I was the way I was approaching this issue was really um you know I was dealing with all these people who were you know really being I mean just so negative I was you know there were there were these people who had these different calendars and this is actually over the years not just this year over the years there I've dealt with Hebrew roots folks and it's interesting I'll deal with rabbitical Jews and with kerite Jews and there there really isn't this vast multiplication of calendars There's the Hill2 calendar and there are some disagreements among carerites but but it's not like like you go to the Hebrew roots world and it's I've never seen so many calendars in it's just unbel I think that's a that's that's a very non shimmy way of describing it very dividic way of describing it generously a lot of creativity out there well imagination was another way of putting it I didn't say that okay I did okay so anyway Hey So so it started me thinking so these people believe in the New Testament the ones who were being so negative and vicious and attack and they weren't just attacking me They're attacking other people who are keeping Kaga the feast of unleven bread in April because we didn't find Aviv in March And they're just I've heard people hell I've heard heard him say that I haven't heard quite that but I've heard some really just viciousness And it got me thinking in your Bible it says in Colossians 2:16 "Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of a holy day or a new moon or of Sabbath days." So how is it that they're the ones who are be who are judging uh judging the other Hebrew roots people i don't understand it Like isn't that in there and it got me thinking So in what context did Paul say this that's that's where it it struck me And I started thinking back to things that were going on in the first century and and and it brought up another incident that happened around the same time as Paul wrote this There's what we have the incident of Rabbi Joshua Now it's a very famous story I talk about it in my book shattering the conspiracy of silence It's actually the most quoted passage from the Mishna in kerite literature including my own book You could say um because it's actually a fundamental concept in rabbitical Judaism This idea of the story of Rabbi Joshua What happened in the first century they would begin the month with the sighting of the new moon and the Mishna and the tracted of Russashana chapter 2 sections uh 8-10 It describes this incident that took place in Yavna around the year 80 or 90 AD where uh Gamaliel I the grandson of Sha's teacher um who was Gamaliel the first Gamalio II is the head of the Sanhedin and these two witnesses come and they testify before the the court of the Sanhedrin and they say something they say desri they say they've cited the new moon but it wasn't just enough to say I saw the new moon you described what you saw and Rabbi Joshua was sitting in the audience and heard what they described and knew they were lying and this was very a very big problem because this was the seventh month this was uh what the rabbis called tre so it's the month with yam kipur and it starts out with the uh the day right and so they were actually meeting for their their court on the third day of the month which they normally do in the seventh month situation They keep Yum true for two days and third day they convene the court listen to the witnesses Rabbi Joshua knew the witnesses were lying and they hadn't really cited the moon two days earlier But Gamaliel II accepts their testimony and proclaims Yum Kipur based on that So this put Rabbi Joshua in a very difficult situation And he said "Well I have to follow the truth Does it matter what Gamalios proclaimed?" And he decided to keep Yum Kipur just him and his family on a on the certain day based on uh basically that if the wi if those two witnesses didn't cite the moon it would be one day later than Gamalio was observing it So Gamalio was going to keep Yumkipor in a Tuesday night or whenever and Rabbi Joshua was going to keep it on a Wednesday night No big deal One day difference who cares but Gamaliel heard about this and he was the head of the Sanhedrin and he was enraged He was infuriated He he he uh put out this order to Rabbi Joshua and he said you must be appear before me on the day of your Yam Kipur with your staff and your money purse in your hand to show the whole world that you don't consider that day to be Yamipur that you've accepted my decision and my authority So this put Rabbi Joshua into a tail spin He didn't know what to do He was he was distraught What does he do on the one hand he knows this is the day of Yamipur that God has proclaimed to the world by not letting the moon be visible to any witnesses who have come to testify On the other hand he has Rabbi Rabbi Rabbi Gamliel who is the head of the Sanhedrin telling him appear before me with your staff and money purse in your hand Is he going to follow Gamaliel or is he going to follow God and it wasn't you know to us to me this would be a no-brainer You follow God You know it's interesting I um I have a friend who was the uh president of three messianic synagogues This was his full-time job and he was paid a decent amount of money for doing this for managing these three synagogues And the rabbi heard that he was observing the feasts according to the cited moon instead of the hill to calendar And he said "You have to choose your job or this calendar that you so love." And he says "I'll give you time to think about it I know this is your livelihood You've got children You've got their mouths to feed and you've got a wife And the man said to him he said "I don't need to think about it I'm going to choose God's calendar." And he was fired and he lost this job And it took him a while And it took him time to find another job It was no simple thing Um well that's a resume that heaven will go before him on Amen Michael So Rabbi Joshua had the same dilemma as this messianic friend of mine And um but it wasn't obvious to him He did need time to think about it And he went and consulted rabbis And he arrived at the doorstep of Rabbi Aka who is considered the greatest sage of the generation This is the same Rabbi Aka who years later would proclaim Barba to be the Messiah the false messiah who was killed by the Romans in battle in the year 135 Simon Barokba Um but this is before that happened Um decades before it And Rabbi Aka hears Rabbi Joshua's dilemma and he says "Rabbi Joshua if you stand against Gamaliel you stand against all the court since Moses." And he explained Rabbi Gamliel sitting as the set of of the in the seat of the Sanhedrin as the head of the Sanhedrin is in the seat of Moses He's standing in place of Moses If you defy him you defy Moses himself So even if he's wrong you must obey him because he for you is like Moses And he gave this teaching which I talk about in my book shattered in the conspiracy of silence I won't go into the details It's fascinating because it shows you that the vowels were fixed already in the year 80 or 90 AD because what rabbi aka wanted to do was change the vowels on a certain word And basically ba he did change the vowels only but only for the purpose of interpretation When we read it in synagogue it's still the original vowels And he said for interpretation based on these new vowels even if Raban Gamliel is wrong if Gamal II is wrong you still have to obey him And Joshua said "Okay I'm going to obey him." Which just blows my mind And this became a key concept because what Aka taught was that even if the rabbitical court even the Sanhedrin is accidentally wrong intentionally wrong or or deceived or sorry accidentally wrong Yeah intentionally wrong or deceived In other words they mess up They decide deliberately to twist the calendar or someone's holding a spear to their head For any of those reasons you must obey their decision Even if we know it's factually wrong it doesn't matter Their decision is binding And hundreds of years later when Hill came along and said "We need to figure out a new system The Romans have abolished the Sanhedrin." His system they knew was wrong It was a calculation based on the astronomy of Taly the Greek astronomer and it was wrong by a day or two every single month Occasionally they get it right Even a broken clock is right twice a day you know but it was this system that was guessing based on an average conjunction an approximation and they knew it was usually wrong but it didn't matter because going back to the time of Joshua and Aka they knew that it the Sanhedra doesn't have to get it right because they have the authority to proclaim it even if they're wrong So so imagine so Joshua is dealing with this issue Rabbi Joshua in um whose name is Yahosua he's the Yeshua of the rabbis submits to the authority of Gamaliel And um at the same time Paul's sending his epistle to the uh Colossians around the same time within a few decades he's sending this epistle to the Colossians telling them don't let any man judge you in matters of new moon And it got me thinking what would happen if you had a community that's that instead of doing what Rabbi Joshua did which was submit to the authority of Gamaliel and the Sanhedrin decided we're going to figure it out for ourselves what would happen And if I look at history and I'm to and we're totally honest and humble here we have to admit that there's going to be lots of different opinions you know and we could make fun of people for having different calendars different months and stors and cyclmen and things like this But the bottom line is is the these are people who are doing the best that they can with the resources they have to figure out God's truth And in reality we have imperfect people trying to figure out God's perfect truth Sometimes they're going to disagree And when it comes to the calendar I can show you in history where there were kerites for example who were in in uh what's today Iraq in in Babylonia who had began the year with um with the vernal equinox And why did they do that that was the best they could do They couldn't get information from Israel about the Aviv And the point is that when you have people trying to figure it out and they're not submitting to the authority of the Sanhedrin the Sanhedrin says "We know we're getting it wrong every month but we don't care because we have the authority." But if people are trying to get it right they may end up with lots of different calendars and different situations And I wonder if that wasn't also happening It's happened today It happened in the Middle Ages with Kerite Jews I wonder if that wasn't happening in Kasai with these disciples these believers of Yeshua who had decided we're not under the authority of the Sanhedrin anymore And why would they decide that this struck me when I interviewed with my Hebrew voices series I interviewed the spokesman for the Sanhedrin And he said something absolutely fascinating He said the go the role of the Sanhedrin isn't just to proclaim the beginning of the months the the the sighting of the new moon and or an approximate system It's also to crown the the king Messiah In other words when the Messiah comes they believe it won't be that he says I'm the Messiah and he'll be the Messiah It will be that he'll appear before a valid Sanhedrin recognized by the entire Jewish people and that Sanhedrin will approve and say "Yes you are the king." and put the crown on his head It reminds me of the story of Napoleon Uh you know the story is Napoleon appeared before the pope and the pope was supposed to put the crown on Napoleon's head as emperor and he grabbed it from the hand of the of the pope and put it on his own head to say I don't need somebody else to crown me Well the rabbis believe in this sense they're kind of like the pope They're the one who puts the crown on the head of the Messiah who's who will be the king And it got me thinking you know I remember I had this conversation years ago with my father of blessed memory and and and I'd read all this literature of of the of the anti-missionaries and the counter missionaries and and look one of my uh teachers he was this kerite guy and he was training me to be a counter missionary That was his goal for me his dream for me He was a counter missionary to convince the Christians to give up Jesus And he wanted me to do that and follow in his footstep And I was training and studying this stuff and and I just didn't feel it I just didn't have this I couldn't do it I tried doing it and I just didn't have the calling to do it I would have these conversations and I would say you know what we we disagree but wow we've got some common ground I would have these conversations with people But anyway I'd read all this literature of the counter missionaries and the anti-missionaries trying to you know disprove Jesus And I went to my father who was Orthodox rabbi and I said to him "So why is it you don't believe in Jesus what's your main reason?" And and you know is it is it this verse or that prophecy and he said "No none of that's relevant None of that matters at all The only thing that matters is the Sanhedrin didn't proclaim him to be the Messiah And if Sanhedrin didn't proclaim him to be the Messiah by definition he's not the Messiah." End of story Doesn't matter what Isaiah 7:14 says Doesn't matter what Isaiah 53 says Doesn't matter what Zachariah says And this is not a first level rabbi Oh my father is is is he had yor yora yadin yaden which is there's three levels of rabbi Nobody has the third level today um they only did in in ancient times but he has the second level of ordination and um and is a lawyer I mean this is his life and and because he had the second level of ordination as a rabbi he was able to appear before rebbitical courts in Israel which have legal binding decisions that they they they give out He could uh function as one of those um th those officials in the rebbitical court So so his his judgment on this is that you know all these verses you know what people are always arguing about I mean they had the big debates about whether he's a messiah didn't matter that matter it's completely irrelevant he would say inhami which means uh you know this is this is we're talking about child's place is a clear answer it's a clear answer which is that the that the sonhedrin didn't proclaim him Messiah so he's not messiah bottom line and this is a clear core concept in rabbitical Judaism in ancient phariseism And it got me thinking so the Sanhedrin didn't accept Yeshua as the Messiah Now you're one of the disciples of Yeshua and you're living in Kalysi and the messenger has arrived from Jerusalem and says the Sanhedrin says that Tuesday night is the beginning of the Hebrew year And maybe you're not bound by him anymore by that messenger from the Sanhedrin because it's the very same Sanhedrin who didn't accept who you believe to be the Messiah as Messiah And and this is actually a really important concept We've talked about this Michael I've talked about this with you Then rabbitical Judaism and I think of the Tanakh as well You have this concept that there are certain commandments that are individual commandments and there are certain commandments that are communal commandments by definition Mhm And an example of a communal commandment would be we're commanded to wipe out the Amalachites So no Jew in the right mind seeing an Amalachite walking by in the street would go and kill him because it's understood that that's a communal commandment The king of Israel has to form an army and lead that army against the Amalachites That's the commandment There's other things that are individual commandments A tithe I've got to pay my tithe That's nothing to do with the community That's my individual responsibility Love your neighbor as you love yourself It's an individual responsibility So if you ask Pharisees and modern Orthodox Jews they'll tell you the belief in the King Messiah is a communal commandment There's no individual responsibility to believe in a Messiah That is the role of the community and specifically the Sanhedrin as the authoritative body of the community to proclaim the Messiah King And they'll say it's the same thing with God's calendar You have no and that was the point of the story of Rabbi Joshua establishing this is not an individual responsibility and in fact you could say that was the shift that up until Rabbi Joshua people did think of it as an individual responsibility surely clearly Rabbi Joshua thought of it that way but the established rule that came out of Rabbi Aka's reinterpretation and changing of vowels was no this is a communal responsibility and even if the Sanhedrin gets it wrong they're the ones who make the decision and it's and it's the decision for the community and look I'll meet people today who will say "How can I keep yum kipur on Tuesday night when all of Israel is keeping it on Monday night israel has decided and I say well Israel doesn't make the decision." God does That's my view my perspective I still take this as a kerite Jew to be an individual responsibility Even though if I saw an Amalachite walking down the street I wouldn't kill him because that I still see that's communal responsibility But I see this calendar as an individual uh responsibility I don't accept the ruling of Rabbi Joshua And I have to wonder if in Kalysi they accepted that And maybe what happened in Kalysi and I wasn't there I don't know Maybe what happened is they said if we don't accept the sun headed we got to now figure the calendar out out for ourselves And maybe what happened then is the same thing that's happened throughout history is they had multiple calendars Maybe they had people who were saying we're going to keep it based on and I have no idea what it was right you could say we're going to cite the new moon here in Kasai And other people said "No you can't site it in Kalisa You have to site it in Jerusalem." And other people said "Well but a messenger came over from uh Thessalonica or whatever that place is called They came over from Berea and they cited the mood there." You know we don't know because we weren't there But I got to wonder if when when when he's teaching us and Paul says "Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of a holy day or the new moon or the Sabbath." He's talking about the the Pharisees who were in that community would say "You've sinned against God because you kept Yam Kipur on Tuesday night instead of Monday night." And the Sanhedrin proclaimed it to be you know on a certain night And and why do I think that well you read the verse before in verse 8 but this goes on in verse 20 Let me read this Yeah I'll read you the King James the authorized version Wherefore uh if you be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world why is the living in the world are ye subject to ordinances what are these ordinances touch not taste not handle not which are all are uh to perish with the using after the commandments and doctrines of men Now most Christians take this to be well these were uh Greek pagan aesthetic rules that people I maybe but if he's writing to Jews what would have to do with Greek paganism this for in the and it could have been Greek pagan things as well but in the Jewish context it's clear what this is talking about The rabbis had all kinds of rules and regulations that the Torah says you're allowed to eat this but we say you can't The Torah says you're allowed to touch this We say you can't touch it The Torah says you're allowed to drink that you're not allowed to to drink it You gave an example in a previous uh uh uh teaching we did here in this series about somebody who touched an open bottle of wine who wasn't Jewish I want to share a story about that So the rabbitical ruling of don't touch and don't drink a lot of that has to do with wine And the ruling is that if a gentile touches an open bottle of wine or an open keg of wine that wine is undrinkable It's uncosher So I have a friend uh a guy from Hungary named Ference He uh lived in Jerusalem many years now He's back he's back in Hungary But when he was living in Jerusalem he went to this family for a Passover seder even though he's not Jewish They invited him to the Passover seder And during the seder you do the four cups of wine And there was a large family They had five bottles of wine on the table And they were pouring the bottles And he passed one of the bottles and they said "We can't drink that bottle anymore We have to spill it out because you're a gentile and you touch the open bottle." He said "I set the table and I touched all the wine." They poured out five bottles of wine This is what Paul is talking about about these ordinances Touch not taste not handle not We're going to pour out the wine If you touch it whole kegs of wine which are all the parish after the commandments and doctrines of men It's clear to me in a Jewish context he's talking about these phariseaic rules and regulations And I I think what Paul is saying is don't let those Pharisees judge you about when you keep the new moon and how you keep the Sabbath and what you eat and what you drink Follow the commandments of God and don't worry what these men are saying And look I think that's you know I I could now say well if we figure out what the true meaning is based in the Tanakh let's go judge everybody who's got it wrong But I think Paul was saying something even more than that Even within your community he doesn't say "Let no Pharisee judge you." He says "Let no man judge you." And I think my opinion uh it seems to me what he was saying to the Jews in Kalasai who were trying to keep the Torah is don't even judge each other Maybe he's keeping the new moon on the wrong day Maybe he's keeping it in the wrong month Maybe he's doing something on Shabbat which you've determined is forbidden You know we have that in your in the Hebrew roots movement You got the Torah police You got somebody will say "Well you're not allowed to do that on Shabbat." And the other guy will be doing it It's like "Whoa slap the hand You're not allowed to do that Wait a minute You're not my judge." And I think that's what Paul was talking about I I I think it's a pretty powerful teaching if that's what he was teaching This is this is a coming against the spirit of Shimmy I think the spirit of Shimmy was alive there in Coli saying "Oh you guys aren't doing it right We're going to judge you We're going to condemn you because we have the truth We are righteous." That's the vain deceit I I got to wonder if that's what he's talking about Michael Well I think it fits It fits perfectly It does And we we see its application in daily life right now Okay So we can we can see the application as uh you know let no pagan judge you Now we take a look at uh you know the the the Torah police and even within the our own body and as it says let no man judge you and then it has the contrasting conjunction but let no man of of these this particular but the body of Messiah the believers you know we have to decide how we're going to do it because today nobody can keep Passover I mean that that's that's just a given you know we celebrate Passover but you know on the Orthodox plate the the broken shank bone of a of lamb just to say no we did not sacrifice a lamb in the gates of our own city that's only been done at Jerusalem and we're we're not keeping Passover you know Michael back and shàuote um quite some time ago I I was speaking to this group in in Detroit and this woman in the audience and that was Shàuote based on my understanding in the biblical calendar and I'm always right but you were keeping shave a week later and this one woman in the audience as I was starting said tell us why Michael's wrong Take them down And I said "No Don't you know what it says in your Bible colossians 2 thing 2:16 Let no man judge you in these matters Why would I come to judge Michael he's done the best he can based on his understanding I've done the best I can based on my understanding Why do you want me to be Shimmy and attack somebody who's doing the best they can to live by the Torah does that honor the creator of the universe?" And look I'm convinced 100% No question I've got the calendar right I really believe that But for those who have different understandings can we please come together and meet on common ground and not hit each other over the head with the Torah scroll or with the barley sheath because you've understood it one way and I've understood it another way That doesn't honor the name of our heavenly father And that's what it should be about Loving our neighbor and honoring our heavenly father and doing the best we can to serve him And that includes I think not judging people even when they don't agree with you