" How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, proclaiming shalom, bringing good news of good things, announcing salvation and saying to Tziyon, "Your God is King!"." Isaiah 52:7

Good News for all mankind

I hope to be able to continue to refine this page, but it seems too important not to share as soon as possible.

If you have arrived at this page from the site map page you will have noticed a lot of bad news about how we (mankind) have failed to live according to the way the creator God intended us to and we continually hurt each other by what we do and say. Worse still, God gave us instructions about how to live but we have chosen to go our own way and do what we think best from our point of view. Sadly, God's instructions included punishment for our disobedience but, happily, included the promise of a remedy for our wrongdoing.

God entrusted these instructions to a people or nation through whom he was going to bring forgivness to the whole world. These are the people we know today as Jews, and the rest of us are known as Gentiles (The Hebrew, goyim, word means nations - the other nations)

God's intrucion and teaching (Torah) and the rest of God's correspondence with mankind are contained in the holy books (or scrolls) entrusted to Israel.

Gentiles were later added to the people who trusted, due to the life and work of one particular Jew and his message that was taken out to the world. These people are usually known as Christians and seek to share "the Gospel" (Good News) as a, basically simple, offer of God's forgivness.

This page is an attempt to explain this good news in its full context, but in as simple a manner as possible. To do this we must trace its spread through the Jews and then out to include all the nations of the world. And, since this web site is all about God's single unified plan, we will be doing this in a single narrative as it applies to mankind; to the Jews first and then to the Gentiles.

I hope Jewish readers, who already know this story will forgive my use of the commonly understood English versions of names.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1) and created man and woman.

Sadly it did not take our first ancestors long to disobey the only command they had been given, and that command came with the warning of death should they disobey. Thus we all, who descended from these two, inherit and are bound by sin and live in a world cursed for that sin. This, in short, is the bad news against which we must view the good news.

We are all born under a curse of sin and are therefore alienated from God and his fellowship.

But God had a plan all along. God found a man who would faithfully follow him as the plan was set in motion. God took this man from his home and family in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq?) to a land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea that he promised to him and his descendants. This man Abram, who God renamed Abraham - meaning father of nations, proved his trusting faithfulness to God through his travels and, in spite of both he and Sarah being well past childbearing age an heir was born to them. His new name came with an amazing promise, recorded in Genesis 12, that God was making him the head of a great nation of descendants.

Genesis 12:2 - I will make of you a great nation, I will bless you, and I will make your name great; and you are to be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, but I will curse anyone who curses you; and by you all the families of the earth will be blessed."

This promise was reiterated to his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, later renamed Israel.

Seventy members of this called-out family went down to Egypt because of a famine in their land. But God had taken Joseph, a son of Jacob, from his family and placed him in Egypt where he rose to prominence and set up a way to survive a coming famine. In time his family came to Egypt because they were suffering from this famine, but in time a new king arose in Egypt who was ignorant of Joseph and the Israel family. He brought the Israelites into slavery, fearing them as they multiplied and grew strong.

God heard their groaning and raised up Moses to lead them out in the power of God"s, " mighty hand and outstretched arm" This is remembered every year in the Passover celebration. This not only delivered the Israelites from their oppressors but also formed them into a nation; the nation through which all the families of the earth were to be blessed.

Thus God formed this people into his vehicle for world salvation through a period of forty years spent in the desert, during which he gave them the Torah (meaning instructions or teaching) including the Ten Commandments. This Torah promised life to those who kept it and gave a framework for a nation to live in a right and just society - and to be a light to the surrounding nations. Because God recognised that sinful mankind would be unable to keep a set of commands faultlessly, a system of sacrifices was built in so that those who humbly repented of sin could have their record of sins erased and be counted as righteous.

Successive prophets denounced Israel for deserting God and predicted exile from their land, because although God promised ownership of the land forever, the right to live in this land was conditional upon trusting faith. So the people were driven from it after becoming as corrupt as the surrounding nations. But these prophets looked toward an end to the exile(s) and the further into the future when the Messiah (God's anointed one) would come and set up his kingdom.

Most of the prophecies were not time-stamped and faith was, and stil is, needed to discern which fulfilments are imminent and which concern far-distant events. But Daniel was given a unique and precise prophecy of the rise and fall of empires and the rise of an empire that would be greater than all others and outlast them all. This is the seventy weeks (of years) prophecy that pinpointed the coming of the messiah and his being cut off at sixty-nine weeks from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem after the Babylon exile. This precise time was when Yeshua from Nazareth was crucified; 69 weeks - 483 years after the decree of Cyrus. Most of Israel missed it!

Until this time, God's saints were not forgiven because of their animal sacrifices, but because of their trust in God's promises of salvation in the future coming of his Messiah.

This is a bit of an over-simplification, as God was also concerned with non-Jews during this time. See footnote.

Daniel's prophecy seems to be the only one that specifically tells of a first, humble, coming of the Messiah to suffer and die and then a second, glorious, coming to defeat Satan and set up his Messianic kingdom. This appears to have been lost on Israel when Jesus came and even John the Baptist doubted when Jesus did not defeat the Romans.

Daniel's seventieth week (of seven years) still lies in in the future. and is described in the Book of Revelation. (A book that draws together the long-view words and language of the Jewish prophets) These are the evil times and the final confrontation with evil which will see the Messiah come (again) to finally defeat and bind Satan for a thousand years and set up his thousand-year, Messianic, kingdom in Jerusalem.

The Messiah came at the due time, while Rome held the land as part of the empire that had given the known world excellent communication and travel. This provided the ideal conditions for the spread of the message of faith in the Messiah and the Kingdom of God. Yeshua of Natzeret / Jesus of Nazareth came upon the scene in the Galilee when he was thirty years old, the age at which the priests commenced their calling. He went around as an itinerant rabbi, teaching about righteousness, repentance and the Kingdom of God while healing the sick who came to him. Everybody was amazed at the authority with which he taught and cast out sickness and demonic possession.

Yeshua taught from the Jewish scriptures in a typically Jewish way. One of his methods was the remez, quoting a snatch of scripture that would enable the faithful to call to mind the whole passage to which he was referring, many of which referred to himself. This device functioned like our present-day internet hypertext link. He ministered only to Jews (with the exception of a few Gentiles who had the faith to approach him) but was training a group of followers to proclaim his message to the whole world, empowered with the Holy Spirit as predicted by the prophet Joel.

Yeshua was the one Moses promised would be, "a prophet like me." He brought in the New Covenant that was prophesied By Jeremiah, building upon the covenants of Moses and Abraham; not replacing them.

The covenant given through Moses gave Israel the Torah with its instructions for living a righteous life but it had, built in, the means for dealing with our human failure to live up to it. Torah and the rest of scripture teach of the Grace of God in forgiving sins for those who trust in His righteous provisions - which were to be fully revealed in the coming and ministry of the Messiah.

The Torah gives life. Lev 18:5 -

You are to observe my laws and rulings; if a person does them, he will have life through them; I am Adonai."

But notice the word "if". If you fail they will not bring life but death, unless you acknowledge your sin (transgression of these rulings), repent and trust in God's offer of forgiveness - erasing the record of our sins. The promises of salvation which the repentant (those who would turn around from the wrong direction) would obtain looked forward to the coming Messiah who would come to suffer and die as the once and for all atonement sacrifice.

Thus, when Jesus / Yeshua came preaching repentance and the Kingdom of God from the Torah and the Prophets, he was talking to the Jews (only later would his word go out to include the Gentiles) So when he said,

"I AM the Way-and the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me"

He left no room for the idea that the Gentiles have Jesus and the Jews have Moses.

Yeshua foresaw his rejection by the majority of rulers and people of Israel and wept for Jerusalem, seeing the consequences. Terrible though it was, the priests fulfilled their role of sacrificing the final offering for sin, but also caused the removal of Israel into exile for almost two thousand years. These events triggered the spread of the good news among the Gentiles because Jews from the multitude that trusted in Yeshua as their Messiah went out carrying the message. This faith, known as "the Way," was seen as a sect of Judaism but sadly the divide between followers of the Way and those who refused to believe turned into persecution of the Way. In time, the church became predominantly Gentile, forgot its Jewish roots and persecuted the Jews. This divide has caused so much pain down the centuries while God wanted Jews and Gentiles to be "one new man." (while still retaining our identities)

So it is that all mankind needs to repent of sin, accept God's Messiah and receive God's Holy Spirit for living a renewed life. That man is Yeshua (the name means YHVH is salvation) and he gives life to both Jews and Gentiles. Exactly how this new life is to be lived will be different for Jews and Gentiles as Jews have all their scriptures and only have to slot in the missing piece - that the Messiah has come. We Gentiles have to take on the whole package of new life in the Jews' Messiah (Jesus) by being grafted in (Romans 11) with the faithful Jews (not replacing them). We have a lot of catching up to do.

There will obviously be things that we all have to give up and this includes wisdom that is not from God but from man. For a Jew this might include the teachings of the sages known as the Oral Torah; Yeshua warned against teaching the traditions of men as doctrine. For the Gentile this includes breaking free of various wrong doctrines that plague the church and resisting world's thinking that is piped into our lives by the media; instead, learning to trust the (whole) Bible and recognising that we are now aliens in this world.

So the Good News for all men is that Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus the Christ in English, via Greek) has come to give us forgiveness and release from our sin if we will only repent of our old way of life and commit ourselves to him and his kingdom.

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Footnote

During the time before the Good News was taken out into the world by the followers of Yeshua from Nazareth, God was concerned about the non-Jews. In the "Old Testament" (the Hebrew scriptures) we read of non-Jews who came into God's family, including Rahab and Ruth whose trust caused them to be included in the genealogy of Yeshua. Gentiles who joined themselves to Israel were known as God-fearers or converted to become Jews. When Solomon dedicated the Jerusalem Temple with prayers he included prayer that God would hear the prayers that Gentiles who would pray towards it.

During the feast of Sukkot - feast of Tabernacles - feast of Ingathering, the Nations are remembered in some of the worship. Worshippers at the Temple (and today at the Western Wall) wave a bundle "four species" to all four points of the compass, signifying that the ministry is to the whole world through God's chosen people of priests (Israel). Also, seventy bulls were sacrificed during Sukkot; seventy being the number of nations in the known world at that time. Thus Sukkot is a feast for the nations - not just Israel. And in the Messianic age, the nations will come up to Jerusalem for Sukkot

posted 07/08/23 Latest upgrade 04/09/23

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