From The Coordinator: Shalom to you all
By Kai Kjær-Hansen
On November 8, 2006, a number of leaders of messianic congregations in Israel received a mail with the greeting Shalom to you all, Christians believers who want to serve God according to His truth!!! The long mail had been sent by Bert Woudwijk, Antwerp, Belgium, and is publicly accessible at Shalom-Center.org
In the mail Bert Woudwijk tells that he has been pastor of the Messianic Shalom Congregation in Dordrecht, Holland, since 1998 but that he, in recent years, has been in a process to step out of the Christianity that he as a Protestant was raised in, and he tells how he “finally became a part of the Jewish people, last August.” He and his family are now preparing to make Aliyah. “The step out of Christianity into Judaism did not separate me from God, as some predicted, but brought me more close to Him than ever before,” he writes.
Just as we believe that there will be rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who accepts Jesus as Messiah, there will certainly by rejoicing among the religious settlers in Israel who led the non-Jew Bert Woudwijk to become a Jew. Their love for God, which he had met during his travels in Israel, had made a deep impression on him; “... they were honest enough to tell me that when you believe that Jesus is God, that according to Torah, you are an idle worshipper (as God is One and not man) and that Christianity is a false religion as it takes Jews from observing Torah etc. etc.. I was very shocked about it but felt in my heart to speak with them about it more,” Woudwijk writes.
In a long line of points, Bert Woudwijk attempts to show that “the Christian ‘New Testament’ is a total contradiction of the Torah and Tenach.” This has been done before and can be read on the above-mentioned web address.
I would actually recommend you to read and reflect on the way Bert Woudwijk presents the matter.
However we navigate the complex issues of freedom or obligation for a Jesus-believing Jew to keep the law, etc. – cf. Mishkan no. 48, 2006, where Mark Kinzer’s book Postmissionary Messianic Judaism is for debate – Bert Woudwijk challenges us to reconsider how we read the Scriptures. Without oversimplifying matters too much: We will easily enter a slippery slope if we as Jesus-believers dare not maintain that we read the Tenach in the light of the New Testament.
Also this has been said before. But it is an admonition that needs to be constantly repeated when we work with Jewish evangelism.
Shalom in Jesus, the Messiah!
Kai Kjær-Hansen