Canada Is A Christian Nation With Tanya Gaw & Hon Brian Peckford, Dec. 4, 2024

If you are a Christian, your faith is based upon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Scriptures surrounding them. Your Savior is the King of the Jews, Yeshua (Jesus) HaMashiach (the Messiah, Christ in the Greek). This is our foundation. This is what we are built upon.

The body of Messiah began with all Jewish believers. The disciples were all Jewish, and the first congregation of believers was Jewish, three thousand alone coming to belief in Yeshua on the day of Pentecost. The first believers did not follow a pope, but James the brother of Yeshua; and they were not located in Rome, but in Jerusalem. Believers in Yeshua were a sect of Judaism and they went to the synagogue and they remained practicing Jews, believing in their Messiah Yeshua, and this was all after the Resurrection. So you see, a Jewish person can be a believer, and throughout the centuries there have been many Jewish people who were also believers in the Jewish Messiah Yeshua.
Well, other than it being a long story (centuries long), church history is far from hidden. But today, many believers do not know how we got here. As Roman persecution came throughout the years, many Gentile believers did not want to be associated with their Jewish brothers, so they distanced themselves from Judaism and the Jewishness of the Bible. Many of the church fathers began to teach this separation first by anti-Judaism rhetoric, which then turned to anti-Jewish rhetoric. Then they taught replacement theory, which is that the church (the Gentile place of worship) and the Gentile believers replaced the Jews and the synagogue.

But a lot has to do with anti-Semitism. Quite frankly, we just did not want to be associated with the Jewish people. In fact, we wanted to be better than the Jews, because we accused them of killing Jesus. We now had all the blessings of God, and the Jewish people, the chosen people of God, were no longer His people. We changed His name, Yeshua, to Jesus to conform with the Greco-Roman world. Many believers today do not even realize that Jesus (Yeshua) was a practicing Orthodox Jew. He kept the 7th day (Saturday) Sabbath (Genesis 2:1-3, Luke 4:14-21, 6:5-6, 13:10) and all of the rest of God’s Appointed Times (Leviticus 23): Passover, Unleavened Bread (Luke 22), Pentecost, Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles (John 7:1-2, 37). He even kept Hanukkah (John 10:22-23). He wore a prayer shawl and went to the synagogue and paid the Temple tax. We stripped Him of His roots and we toppled our foundation. We called the Hebrew Scriptures old and obsolete, and we called the Apostolic Scriptures new and only for believers. We became anti-Torah, or as Paul used the term, Lawless.

We lost our identity, our foundation, our whole purpose for why we exist, and we also changed the Biblical Gospel message (which has to do with the true work of the Messiah in regards to Israel) into a Salvation only message (see our teaching on the good news). In doing all of this, we have recreated a Messiah that looks more Western than Middle Eastern. The Church replaced the Synagogue and Rome replaced Jerusalem. But Paul makes it quite clear that we have been grafted into Israel and they support us, not the other way around (Romans 11:17-19).

People believe that Paul was one of these church fathers that condemned Judaism, but in fact, He boldly said, “I AM a Pharisee,” a Hebrew of Hebrews (Philippians 3:5)! He said the Law (Torah) is holy (Romans 7:12). In fact, Yeshua Himself said in Matthew 5:17-19, “I did not come to do away with the Torah but to fulfill it.” Now, what we do not understand (because we have not been taught to understand) is that Yeshua was Jewish and that He kept the Torah because He was the living Torah, the Word made flesh. So what is the Torah? Let’s take a closer look.
The Torah is the first five books of the Bible. It was written down by Moses as God gave him the revelation on the mountain at the same time He gave him the Ten Commandments. We believers accept the book of Genesis, but for the most part we do not interest ourselves with the rest. The book of Exodus speaks of the deliverance of Israel from slavery and bondage from the Egyptians, the building of the tabernacle, and the giving of God’s commands. Leviticus speaks of the sacrifices and God’s Appointed Times. Numbers speaks of the wanderings of Israel for forty years, but it also shows us the difference between those who believed God and those who rebelled. The last book, the book of Deuteronomy, speaks of the Torah as a whole, like a recap. But here we see that the Torah is written out like an ancient covenant or treaty of its day between God the King and Israel His people. It is also done like a Ketubah, which is a Jewish wedding contract.
So if Yeshua was Jewish, and the early believers were all Jewish, does that mean that we need to become Jewish? Do you have to be Jewish to be a Judeo-Christian? NO! Judeo-Christians believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We also believe in Yeshua (Jesus), who is the Messiah of Israel. Yes, Yeshua is the Messiah of Israel, and He will fulfill all the Scriptures that have been prophesied about Him concerning Israel. As Judeo-Christians, we also have our beliefs in the Scriptures of Israel, the Creation, all of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the Ten Commandments, the Psalms, and the Prophets. We are the only people who believe this way.

Paul’s message to the Gentiles was very clear: Gentiles did not need to become Jewish. Now, what Paul meant was that Gentiles did not need to become ceremonially Jewish, that is, the works (circumcision, sacrifice, and Mikvah) required of them to actually become a proselyte Jew. Paul did not mean that a Gentile could not keep Sabbath or God’s Appointed Times, for we see that even at the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai there were those non-Jews who went out of Egypt with Israel, and they were called God-fearers. God-fearers were those who believed in the one true living God, the God of Israel (Leviticus 24:22, Numbers 9:14, 15:14-16). We see in the Gospels (Luke 7:1-5) when the Centurion asked Yeshua (Jesus) to heal his slave, the people tell Yeshua that this man loves the nation of Israel and helped build their Synagogue. We also see Peter with Cornelius in Acts 10:1-4, just to mention a few. Keeping God’s Word does not make you Jewish; what it does make you is a child of God. God’s word is one just as He is one, and we must not call God’s word old or obsolete. What we do need to call it is holy, and we need to embrace it because Yeshua is the Word of God made flesh, that same word that created the world into being, that same Word that died for our sins. A Judeo-Christian is one who believes in the whole counsel of God and lives by it; for Yeshua tells us if we love Him, we will keep God’s Commands.
So you see, we have many things in common, but we have turned from and do not understand our Jewish roots, the roots that supported us from the beginning, and we have gone our own way, the way of man, and turned from truth, God’s Word. We think that the tabernacle, or temple, has been destroyed because Yeshua came. But what we do not understand is that the temple in Heaven still exists, and we are to be a royal priesthood, yet we do not know what that all means. We must come back to Biblical living and follow the One True God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Paul, Luke, John, and yes, the God of Yeshua our Messiah. We must remember what Paul tells us: that we have been grafted into Israel (Romans 11:17-18) and that the root supports us, not the other way around.