There is an unfortunate consequence of having our Bibles divided into the Old Testament and New Testament. Without a deeper understanding of how the Bible is trying to tell one unified story, it is easy to latch onto perceived differences between those two sections more easily than to see how the story of the First Testament (or the Pre-incarnation writings) continues into the Second Testament (or Post-incarnation writings).
The reason for highlighting the contrasts goes back to the early church.
“As the ministry to the Gentiles proceeded and expanded, Christian Jews still met in the temple and the synagogues with the non-Christian Jews, increasing their ministry there even as many of the non-Christian Jews strongly resisted. But there were two events that would change the trajectory of the church.
In AD 66 the zealots started to revolt against the Roman government. The Christians in Jerusalem want to avoid getting caught up in the rebellions and moved to Pella, causing tension between the zealots and the Christians. After the rebellion was defeated by the Romans in AD 70, the temple was destroyed and the Jews were scattered, but now there was increased tension between the Christian and non-Christian Jews.
Later on, in AD 132, a zealot nicknamed Bar Kokhba (meaning “son of the star”) arose to start another rebellion. He, with the support of a prominent rabbi, declared himself a messiah. Now, the Christian Jews not only did not want to participate in a rebellion, but they had to refuse to acknowledge a messiah other than Jesus. And the zealots, who supported Bar Kokhba, declared Bar Kokhba as messiah, thus rejecting Jesus as messiah, which quickly led to a hardening of those non-Christian Jews against the church, making them more resistant than before to the gospel. When the Romans defeated the zealots, Jews were now banned on penalty of death, from entering Jerusalem.
After this point, when leaders in the church tried to reach the Jews with the gospel, they encountered hardened hearts. However, instead of the recognizing that it had been foretold that Jews hearts would be hardened until the time of the Gentiles was over, the leaders in the church now arrogantly hardened their own hearts and became increasingly anti-Semitic. This resulted in the church increasingly turning away from their own roots and thus becoming susceptible to increasing influence of Greek philosophy. This would create dramatic effects in the development of theology in such areas as the rejection of the human body and sexuality as evil and sinful, and the conversion of asceticism from a form of spiritual discipline to a rejection of the pleasures God created as good things.” (Chuck Russell, dancinginthekingdom.com/2023/12/26/the-context-of-theology )
When conflict between the Zealots and the early church caused much of the church to abandon their Hebrew roots, the church lost the sense how much the gospel was rooted in the Hebrew scriptures. Also, the Jewish population is as complex as any other population, and we should not try to stereotype all Jews based upon what we read about particular Jewish characters such as some of the Pharisees in the Bible. Neither should we stereotype the Old Testament as “law” and the New Testament as “grace” for both the law and grace can be found in each section. That said, Jesus was a Jew and lived according to the rules that applied to just the Jews so that He might fulfill the requirements of those rules. As Gentiles, while we are not “under the law,” we should be living grace-filled lives in which our grace and love is shaped by the essence of the laws.
Transcendent Touched 