day no. 17,320: american milk and honey

“Jesus is either the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, or He is not. There is no real way to split the difference on such a question. If the claim is false, then Christians are guilty of perpetuating the most preposterous fraud ever. If the claim is true, then pious Jews studying the Old Testament are like Shakespeare scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of Hamlet, but who have failed to recognize the prince of Denmark. As just mentioned, it is not possible to have Jesus be the Messiah ‘for the Christians' and not the Messiah ‘for the Jews.’ That might seem like a mild form of relativism, but relativism always metastasizes.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Either Christians understand the Old Testament better than the Jews or they don't. If Jesus is the Christ, then they understand the prophets better than the Jews. But if Jesus is not the Christ, then the Christians have utterly confused and possibly even corrupted the teachings of the Old Testament.

“After the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, all they had left were their erroneous traditions. This is why modern Judaism is best considered a heresy of the Old Testament faith, and not a representation of it. To be a Christian is to maintain that the fulfillment of the Old Testament is in the Christ of the New Testament, and not in rabbinic Judaism.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Modern Judaism is a Christian heresy. Since Jesus is the Christ, the entire Bible is Christian, thus making modern Jews heretics and apostates.

“The traditions that Jesus so violently rejected were the traditions of the first half of the Talmudic stream. Indeed, the Talmudic traditions of the elders were the reason why Jerusalem was judged so severely.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Jesus rejected Talmudic Judaism. He confronted it and was killed by it. He rose from the dead to overcome it and came back in 70 AD to put an end to it. Jesus judged Jerusalem for its sins, the primary one being its rejection of Him and secondarily being its rejection of the prophesies concerning Him.

“So according to Christ, the rabbis had been supplanting the teaching of the Word of God for the sake of their traditions, and they had been doing this for centuries [Mark 7:6-13]. To be clear, what Jesus is talking about here is a gradually forming Talmud.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

The perverting of God's Word had been ongoing for sometime, but it did not fill up the measure of its sins until it met Jesus and rejected Him. Not only that, but it plotted against him and jury rigged a case against Him in order to snuff Him out. It did not merely reject Him for their own purposes, but it tried to ensure His wholesale rejection by having Him killed.

“Many Christians, particularly some in the dispensational tradition, regard our differences with the Jews as extreme denominational differences, but still somehow within the pale. But modern Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament. It is something else entirely. It is not the biblical faith with Jesus left out.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Judaism is not just the Old Testament faith marching past Christ until our present day. The Old Testament faith culminated in the coming of Christ. Adam was a Christian. Abraham was a Christian. Moses was a Christian. David was a Christian. They looked forward to His day.  There was no way to hold the Old Testament faith that did not involve looking ahead to the Messiah. You cannot reject the Messiah and say that you are still in the Old Testament faith. To reject Jesus is to admit that you were never part of the Old Testament faith. Whatever you believed and continue to believe at that point, based on your rejection of Him, is apostate, heretical, and antichrist in its inception. Any form of Old Testament religion that continued after the ascension of Christ was antichrist by nature. It was based on a rejection of Him. That was the foundation of the faith. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD removed any attempt to pretend differently. The old system came to an end. The only way to perpetuate something beyond that was to hold to a heretical version of it you already had for such a time as this.

“The New Testament warning, delivered to the Gentiles, is [to] not become like your persecutors. Do not turn into your adversary. If you turn into what you hate, it indicates you only thought you hated their sleek arrogance of power. You didn’t hate it—you envied it.” — Douglas Wilson, American Milk and Honey

Christianity hates Judaism the way it hates Islam. Both are Christian heresies and both should be met with fierce opposition. But we do not hate the Jews the way the Jews hated Jesus. We do not hate the Muslims the way they hate us. We hate Allah because we hate evil. We hate Judaism because we hate evil. But we love our enemies. We love them well by opposing them well. And it goes without saying that supporting their efforts is not opposing them well because it is not opposing them at all.