2) Cornerstone
The cornerstone principle in the foundation of faith in Mashiach (Christ) is repentance from dead works and faith toward God. If we are going to build up the new Adam spoken of in Ephesians 2 and 4 starting from this cornerstone, we are going to need to look at this principle in the context of the experience of the Jew and in the context of the experience of the non-Jew who believes that Yehoshua is the Jewish Messiah.
Usually it seems a mystery to a Jew what the writings of the apostles, the emissaries of Yehoshua, would want to offer to them. Already they have known the grace and forgiveness of God and have received a religion of repentance. If they have trusted in their own righteousness or in their own performance of the mitzvot (commandments) where they ought to have trusted in the mercy of God alone, they already have a religion that will teach them that they will need to repent of this. Already they have perfect hope and faith in the coming of the Messiah, even if they have not seen him. Why then do they need a Messiah to die and rise again, they may wonder.
There is much that can be said about the promises in the prophets of the new expression of God’s covenant with Israel, and expression that would be associated with the Messiah. Much can be said about what, according to the prophets, that new expression of the covenant would do for the nation and for the individual Jew. To begin with all that we will say is that, without the death and resurrection of her Messiah, Israel could never have fulfilled the promise of God to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed” (Gen.26:4). The blessing intended by the word of God in this promise was not just the kind of blessing that brings a good influence. It was the blessing of justification and life, instead of the condemnation and death that Adam introduced into the world.
The argument might be made that Israel could have been saved from ending in spiritual death without the Messiah having to die and rise again. How could this argument be made? It could be made by saying that, the truth is that in the end it is God’s covenant which he made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that guarantees Israel’s salvation. The covenant is eternal and irrevocable, for God is a God of mercy and will have compassion upon His people as He has promised by covenant to do without needing to be appeased, as it were, by either Moses or Mashiach offering his own life in the place of God’s people. This argument is true. Yet by definition it only guarantees an eternal relationship between God and Israel. It does not hold when it comes to the salvation (blessing) of the nations other than Israel. For at no time did God ever make a covenant with the nations to promise them blessing. (Appeal cannot be made to the covenant that God made with Noah and his family, for, even if the promises of that covenant are understood as having an eternal as well as temporal application, Israel could possibly be the only beneficiary of the eternal application of that covenant in the end.)
This consideration alone brings out Israel’s need for a new articulation of God’s covenant with them. For it appears that Israel proved by much failure that, at least without Messiah, it could not bring about the salvation of the nations from spiritual death. Yet the promise that Israel would represent this salvation was no less unconditionally given to Abraham than the promise that Israel itself would be blessed (saved from spiritual death – and ultimately physical death). How could it be possible that Messiah would be able to do what Israel as a nation had failed to do – bring the blessing of spiritual life to the nations? Only two answers to this question could ever be conceived. Either Messiah would have to lead all the nations to convert to Judaism, to be circumcised and cease forever being distinct nations, or else God would have to articulate the covenant that he made with Israel in such a way as to bless Israel and the nations equally on the same gracious basis.
Now we know that Christianity, before it became a separate religion, arose out of the teaching that the first possibility could not fulfill God’s will to justify life, and that God accomplished His will of blessing all nations through the death and resurrection of the Messiah of Israel. But this was as far as Christianity in isolation from Israel ever developed in its understanding. Staying at this point and never developing further in its understanding meant that Christian theology became a theology of replacing Israel as God’s servant and source for blessing the nations with Israel’s Messiah apart from Israel, and then replacing Israel as the receptical of God’s redemptive plans for the world with the Christian church.
Historically, when Christianity developed into a gentile institution, it simply never went on from the first principles of the doctrines of the Messiah (Christ). The questions of each of these doctrines have seemed to return again and again, the understanding seeming to break down and then needing to be relaid. This is especially true of the cornerstone doctrine of repentance from dead works and faith toward God. Thus it continues to remain perplexing, most of the time, to the Jewish person what the idea of an executed messiah could ever have to offer them.
Later, I will pursue further the question of the meaning of repentance from dead works in context of the perspective of the Jewish experience. At this point I would like to begin to look at this cornerstone of faith in the Messiah of Israel from the perspective of the non-Jewish person. I will begin by looking first at this question historically.
