Are the Restorations of Israel and the Church Converging? - Brian Hennessy ISRAEL TODAY

Are the Restorations of Israel and the Church Converging?

Thursday, March 16, 2017 |  Brian Hennessy  ISRAEL TODAY

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I believe God is doing an amazing thing in our day that has flown largely under the radar. It appears He is merging His restoration of the church with His restoration of Israel.

In my previous article I discussed how the Feasts of Israel were actually dress rehearsals intended to point to a spiritual fulfillment in Messiah. Passover, of course, was fulfilled in Yeshua on Passover when he died and was resurrected. And Pentecost on Pentecost when he sent the Holy Spirit to the early church. Only the third Feast of Tabernacles remained without a New Covenant fulfillment.

However, as I said, I now believe the first of the three Tabernacle feasts, the Feast of Trumpets, received its spiritual fulfillment on June 7, 1967 when Jerusalem was liberated in the Six-Day War. But as some commented, it didn’t happen on the exact date of the feast. Didn’t that disqualify it?

That puzzled me at first also, until I saw it in the context of the restoration of the church. Let me explain.

To begin, it’s important to understand that the church was taken captive in the fourth century when Constantine married the church to the state. He did so with the help of many church leaders whose Biblical understanding had been corrupted by Greek philosophy.

Convening at Nicea in 325 AD, the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as a new Gentile religion that would have its own feast days (Easter, a Sunday Sabbath), rituals and priesthood. His goal was to separate Christianity from Judaism. To quote the words of Constantine: “Nothing should be held in common with that nation of liars and Christ-killers.”

In doing so, Constantine severed the church from its Hebraic roots and established the Roman Catholic Church as the official expression of Christianity. His actions plunged the church and Europe into spiritual darkness for centuries. A period appropriately termed The Dark Ages.

But God in His mercy did not leave us there. In time He began to restore our stolen heritage and the spiritual truths connected to the seven Biblical Feasts of Israel. As it played out in history, His restoration came as extended seasons which didn’t necessarily start on the Biblical Feast dates.

It officially began when Martin Luther posted his 95 thesis in October of 1517 and the Protestant Reformation was launched. In his awakening to the truth that “the just shall live by faith,” and not by religious works, he discovered he’d been born-again. And the spiritual fulfillment of Passover was restored to the church.

Soon afterwards, the Bible was translated into the common language of the people, first by Luther in Germany, and then by Tyndale in England. As a result, more and more false teachings of the Roman Church were uncovered and discarded and slowly replaced with the correct Biblical understandings. The Feast of Unleavened Bread was restored.

In the process, many believers began to see God required more than just a true knowledge of salvation. He wanted us to put on the new man and live godly lives from then on. The first to switch obedience from the traditions of the Catholic/Protestant Church-state systems to the teaching of Scripture were called Anabaptists. They simply wanted to practice believer’s baptism, not the Church’s infant baptism. And for that they were cruelly persecuted. God soon raised up gifted teachers, men like John Calvin, the Wesley brothers, George Whitfield, George Mueller to build up the body of Messiah. And a new wave offering of faithful believers began to serve the Lord, restoring the Feast of First Fruits.

Then at the start of the Twentieth Century a small group of believers in Kansas sought for, and experienced, the Baptism of the Holy Spirit with its spiritual gifts. That led to the Azusa Street revival, which spread around the world. And the power of Pentecost was back.

Then came June 7, 1967 when Israel miraculously recaptured Jerusalem and precipitated several historic awakenings in both the Jewish and Christian communities.

For Christians, it was the trumpet call that awakened us to the Hebraic roots of our faith. And to discover the enormity of the crime that had taken place at Nicea so long ago.

So even though the event itself didn’t happen on the exact date of Trumpets, it did happen in Jerusalem. And led to tens of thousands of Christians coming up to Jerusalem to bless the nation and celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. But this restoration, which resulted in such a huge spiritual victory in the hearts and minds of so many Christians, was significantly different from all the rest. Instead of being initiated from within Christianity, it was instead triggered by a Jewish military victory in Israel.

Doesn’t that suggest a spiritual convergence of our two communities not seen since the first century?

If I am correct in this discernment, it means we are coming into the unity that Yeshua prayed for just before his death (John 17:21). Because the next feast to be fulfilled in both our restorations from “Babylon” will be the Feast of Atonement. If that feast results in a large scale Jewish/Israeli awakening to Yeshua, and a cleansing of the body of Messiah - as many anticipate - wouldn’t that bring about a complete spiritual merger of the church and Israel in Messiah? Wouldn’t that truly make us “one flock with one shepherd”? (John 10:16)

After Atonement, of course, comes the Feast of Tabernacles, also called the Feast of Ingathering. That convocation speaks loudly of “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together to him” (2 Thess.2:1) But before all that happens there must come the Day of the Lord with the apostasy and revealing of antichrist.

Surely we live in prophetic times.

Brian Hennessy is the author of Valley of the Steeples

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Does the Church Need a Hanukkah? - Brian Hennessy ISRAEL TODAY

Does the Church Need a Hanukkah?

Tuesday, July 12, 2016 |  

Brian Hennessy  ISRAEL TODAY

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This is not a campaign to add one more feast day to the Christian calendar. It’s about the church’s pressing need to celebrate a victory over a tyrannical ruling power as the Jews did over Greece in first century BC. Especially since the tyrannical power that has imprisoned and defiled the body of Messiah for centuries is the same Greek culture of corruption. 

As testimony to the Hellenization of the church, I could introduce a whole card catalogue of eminent historians and theologians. But I’ll let the words of one Biblical scholar, Norman H. Snaith, speak for all:  “Our position is that the re-interpretation of Biblical theology in terms of the Greek philosophers has been both widespread throughout the centuries, and everywhere destructive to the essence of the Christian faith…Neither Catholic nor Protestant theology is based on Biblical theology. In each case we have a domination of Christian theology by Greek thought” (The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, p 187,188)

How did this happen, you ask? And why are so few Christians aware of it? More importantly, what can be done given that most are as clueless of this dreadful state of affairs as I was once. It took a class in Bible College entitled “Early Christian Thought” to open my eyes. That’s where I learned (with no help from the professor) how the early Church Fathers corrupted the church by interpreting the Bible through the philosophical “wisdom” of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. 

Unlike the Jewish disciples who had faithfully delivered the gospel to us, these new Gentile leaders had not been raised on the Scriptures, but converted from paganism. In their zeal to define and defend the new faith, and to steer us away from Jewish hopes and promises for which they had little sympathy or understanding, they moved the church off the bedrock of revealed truth on to the shifting sands of man’s reasoning. 

Like a true Trojan Horse, Greek philosophy was ignorantly inserted into the life of the church.  But it didn’t take full control until a church council met at Nicea in 325 AD, presided over by the high priest of all Rome’s religions, the Emperor Constantine. The parallel between this man and Antiochus IV, the Greek tyrant who tried to snuff out all worship and knowledge of the one true God in Israel, is eerie. Constantine’s conquering “soldiers,” however, were Christian theologians schooled in Alexandria, Egypt, a hotbed of Greek philosophical study. Applying their scholasticism to the most dividing issues in the church, he imposed a cruel theological unity upon the church backed by the power of the state. 

In doing so, compliance to church creeds replaced love as the hallmark of the true believer. From then on, any departure from an approved creed - even when refuted by the plain text of Scripture - defined you as a heretic. Consequently, millions of both Jews and true followers of Yeshua were martyred.

It was at Nicea that the stripping of Christianity from its Hebraic roots began in earnest. The oneness of God, as capsulized in Deuteronomy 6:4, along with the Jewish humanity of Yeshua, were redefined in Greek philosophical terms. The Saturday Sabbath was changed to the Sun’s Day to become the official Christian holy day of rest. The celebration of Yeshua’s resurrection was moved to a week after the Jewish Passover (and later called “Easter”).  And to give this new Gentile religion its own worship places, Constantine soon launched a church building program to rival the synagogues. 

Through it all, Paul’s dire warning went unheeded: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Messiah” (Col. 2:8).

Well, the body of Messiah has been imprisoned in this Greco/Roman dominated church system now for almost two millennium. Will we get a Hanukkah deliverance? Yes, but only as each of us allows the “Maccabee” spirit within us to rise up and renew our mind in the Scriptures, and to cleanse our own temple. But the institutional church system, like the leavened bread of Pharaoh’s Egypt, must be left behind. 

 Isaiah cries to us from across the centuries: “Awake, awake, clothe yourself in your strength, O Zion….Shake yourself from the dust, rise up, O captive Jerusalem. Loose yourself from the chains around your neck, O captive daughter of Jerusalem” (Isa. 52:1,2).

Remember too, Antiochus IV, like Constantine, are but types and shadows of the coming Satanically-possessed “man of lawlessness” who will martial a world gone mad to try and  obliterate all worship of God from this earth. He will no doubt appear as a champion and unifier of apostate Christianity and unite it to the State, as did Constantine.  And then, as Antiochus IV did, try to crush the one nation that by its very existence testifies the Lord Almighty lives - Israel. 

What can believers do? We’ve already been told: “Return to the stronghold, O prisoners who have no hope; This very day I am declaring I will restore double to you. For I will bend Judah as My bow, I will fill the bow with Ephraim. And I will stir up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece; And I will make you like a warrior’s sword” (Zech. 9:12,13).

Brian Hennessy is author of Valley of the Steeples

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