To Be a Christian, You Must First Become a Jew

I clearly remember many times when, as a Muslim, I would enter the bathroom, take off my pants, and then realize that I was not sure whether I had entered using my left foot. In Islam, you are supposed to enter the bathroom with your left foot, or demons may remain there with you while you are defecating. So I would pull my pants back up if I knew there were other people in the house, or leave them down if there was no one there, go back outside, and then reenter using my left foot.

But there was another problem. Sometimes I would go out to reenter, only to realize that I had forgotten to pay attention to whether I had stepped out using my left or right foot.

I know this seems funny, but this is only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of things a Muslim must remember to observe throughout the day. Otherwise, there may be consequences. For example, Muhammad said that Satan urinates in the ears of the person who sleeps until morning without getting up for prayer. If you repeat “Glory be to Allah,” “Praise be to Allah,” and “Allah is the greatest” thirty-three times after every prayer, and then complete the hundred with the prescribed confession, your sins will be forgiven even if they are as abundant as the foam of the sea. If you recite Ayat al-Kursi before going to sleep, Allah will appoint a guardian to protect you, and Satan will not approach you until morning. If a man asks his wife to come to bed and she refuses, causing him to spend the night angry with her, the angels will curse her until morning.

Life can be difficult for someone who sincerely wants to observe everything Muhammad taught. But even after you do your best to fulfill all these requirements, which can completely overwhelm your life, you still cannot find peace in Islam because there is no guarantee that you will end up in Paradise or even that you will be protected in this life.

Islam teaches many arbitrary things and confuses Muslims who seek comfort in religion. For example, the Quran teaches that if a calamity strikes you, it may be from Allah as a consequence of your sins, but it also says that calamities may be tests from Allah. As a Muslim, you never know whether a calamity is Allah punishing you or testing you because you have strong faith (Quran 2:155; 42:30).

This arbitrariness extends to Paradise. On the Last Day, when you stand before Allah, there will be a scale. The two angels who lived on either side of you during your life will bring their records, and your good deeds and sins will be weighed against each other. There is no way to know which side will prevail on the scale.

Muhammad said that Allah might find the confession of faith among the pile of your good deeds and send you to Paradise. He also said that a person might say one word that displeases Allah and be cast into Hell because of it. Muhammad also said that on the Last Day, Allah will take the sins of Muslims and place them upon Jews and Christians, who will become their ransom from Hell.

There are literally thousands of hadiths like these that confuse Muslims to the point that they lose hope of ever having any assurance about their eternal destiny. That is why I wrote Sola Jihad, because dying in jihad is literally the only way a Muslim can guarantee Paradise.

But what if I told you that, six years after converting to Christianity, I realized I was still living as a Muslim? This was not mainly because Islam had programmed me. No, it was because much of the church had been severed from the Jewishness of the gospel.

In this article, I will try to help you understand why, to become a real Christian, you must first become a Jew. I pray that this truth will change your life and lead you into a deeper relationship with God, just as it changed my life fourteen years ago.

Addicted to the Law

There is a reason God remained largely silent about the afterlife in the Old Testament. There are basically no mention of Heaven or Hell throughout the Old Testament, except for a few indications, such as Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2. The reason is simply that God wanted to establish his relationship with Israel not on the basis of what he would do for them later, but on the basis of what he had already done for them in before.

There is something unique about the Hebrew Bible that distinguishes it from every other religious book in the world, and that is the order of salvation. Salvation took place before the demands of God were given. In every religion, the gods, religious systems, or philosophies require people to fulfill an enormous list of demands in order to have a chance of entering Paradise, avoiding punishment, being reborn into a better life, escaping the cycle of reincarnation, or achieving some other form of spiritual liberation. In the Bible, however, God saved Israel first. He brought them out of Egypt, and only after their liberation did he give them his law. Their salvation from Egypt was not contingent upon their obedience to the law.

God established a covenant with Israel. He did not merely sign a contract.

Four hundred years before God liberated Israel, God asked Abraham to perform a ritual that was known in antiquity. Entering into an agreement between two parties involved slaughtering an animal, dividing it into pieces, and passing between those pieces. The parties were symbolically declaring, “May what happened to this animal happen to me if I fail to uphold the terms of this covenant.”

God asked Abraham to slaughter the animals, but then God put Abraham into a deep sleep. God alone, represented by a smoking firepot and a flaming torch, passed between the pieces. God was declaring that the fulfillment of the promise ultimately rested upon him. He was taking the covenant oath upon himself and guaranteeing the promise made to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 15:7–18).

That is why, when God sent Moses four hundred years later to tell the people enslaved in Egypt about his plan to liberate them, Moses was not preaching to them about a foreign God. He was preaching about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of their fathers who made a covenant with them.

I am always astonished by a story the theologian D. A. Carson tells about two Hebrew men speaking on the night before God sent the angel of death to strike the firstborn of Egypt. After God sent nine plagues upon Egypt, he told Moses to instruct the Jews to slaughter a lamb and place its blood on the doorposts. One of the men had strong faith in God and had no doubt that his son would be spared. The other man was terrified by everything that had happened in Egypt and was not sure that God would spare his son. Yet both men followed Moses’ instructions and placed the blood on their doorposts. That night, when they returned home and the angel passed through Egypt, whose son was struck?

Neither.

Both were spared because the angel was not looking to see whose faith was stronger. He was looking for the sign. He was looking for the blood that identified who belonged to God and who did not. God had said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13).

That is why, when God gave Israel the law and connected obedience to the law with life and death in Deuteronomy 30:15–20, he also declared in the very next chapter that Israel would not remain obedient. The Israelites would forsake him, follow other gods, and God would punish them in the future (Deuteronomy 31:16–21). But notice that obedience or disobedience to the law did not determine whether Israel was the family God had chosen. The consequences of disobedience to the law were real, but they were distinct from the promises upon which Israel’s identity rested. A Jew belonged to God’s covenant people on the basis of God’s promises, not on the basis of what that Jew did or did not accomplish.

Human beings are addicted to the law because the law allows us to remain in control. The law gives us a formula. It turns life into a manageable transaction. If the result depends upon our performance, then the power remains in our hands. Throughout history, many religious Jews turned the law into a de facto condition for belonging to God, and that is what made Jesus angry. The burdens they placed upon people’s shoulders were what Jesus fought against, not the nature of the law itself. God’s law is good. But when the law is turned into a tool for earning a place in the family of God, people gladly accept it because it makes their standing with God a reward instead of a gift. It becomes something we accomplish, a tool that turns our relationship with God into a transaction.

David, just like many Jews, understood that his relationship with God was not based upon how well he kept the commandments. If you examine his life, you will find that he spent years on the run, living among society’s outcasts. He lied. He committed adultery. He murdered Uriah and caused other soldiers to die with him. His son raped his daughter. Another son attempted to kill him and died during the rebellion. This is not the life of someone who could claim to have a good standing before God. Yet David understood that he possessed God’s favor. He understood that it was God’s grace, not the works of the law, that granted him this favor. He was a true Jew, a true Israelite, because he understood the covenantal grace of God.

Gentile Christians

Although the early church consisted mainly of Jews who believed in Christ, it was only a matter of time before Gentiles became the majority. Gentiles had little knowledge or understanding of God’s covenantal grace. In this sense, they were worse than the religious Jews whom Christ condemned. The religious Jews had the covenant, even if they had distorted the purpose of the law, but law was all the Gentiles had ever known. Their gods and religions operated through transactions, sacrifices, obligations, and systems of reward and punishment.

On the other hand, after the destruction of the Temple, Jews had to adapt Judaism to a radically new reality. During this development, firmer boundaries were established between Jews who followed Jesus and Jews who did not. Therefore, Christianity was increasingly severed from its Jewish roots.

That is why it was inevitable that Marcionism would appear. Marcionism was a second-century heresy associated with Marcion of Sinope. Marcion argued that the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Creator and the God of Israel, was not the same God as the loving Father revealed by Jesus. He rejected the Old Testament and removed from the New Testament writings or passages that he believed were too Jewish.

Even though the church condemned Marcionism, Christianity was soon transformed into a religion based heavily upon obedience to religious rules. Religious Jews had taken the specific law given by God and used it as a tool to control the people. Religious Christians, who had been given the fluid law of love, possessed the additional privilege of being able to improvise and add almost anything they wished to the list of laws that supposedly determined whether someone belonged to God’s family.

Depending on the church and the period, these man-made laws have taken different forms. In some eras, they included complete abstinence from alcohol, prohibitions against dancing, wearing makeup or jewelry, listening to certain music, cutting one’s hair, wearing particular styles of clothing, smoking, using profanity, and so on. Some of these things may be wise or unwise depending upon the circumstances. But none of them determines whether someone belongs to the family of God.

The Protestant Reformation rediscovered the covenant, the message of the gospel, and rejected a works-based system. However, it was only a matter of time before the covenant was forgotten again and laws once more controlled everything. That is why Martin Luther said that we need to hear the message of the gospel every day because we forget it every day.

Throughout much of church history, and even today, the gospel has been treated as the gate through which you enter a relationship with God. After you enter, however, it is supposedly your works, the works of the law, that determine where you really stand. This false gospel reminds me of an old story from the Arabian Peninsula about a man whose camel was constantly giving him trouble. The camel would run away, and the man would have to spend days trying to find it. One time, the man swore to God that when he found the camel, he would sell it for two dinars. When he finally found it, he became upset because he now had to fulfill his oath. His wife was clever and devised a plan. She said, “Tie a cat to the camel, take them both to the market, and announce: ‘The camel is for sale for two dinars, and the cat is for sale for two thousand dinars, but you must buy them together.’”

Religious Jews before the time of Christ tied the law to God’s covenant and said, in effect, “The covenant is free. You belong to God’s family for free. But the law is what keeps you in.” The church did the same thing. It tied the gospel to performance: “You are granted salvation for free, but if you want to keep it, or prove that you really possess it, then you must perform.”

This Christianity is a non-Jewish Christianity. It is a Christianity that looks more like paganism, or more like whatever religion the Pharisees were selling during the time of Christ. It is not Jewish Christianity. It is not the Jewish covenant that Jesus came to globalize.

Sin and Sins

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:18–21).

Listen: You commit sins because you are a sinner. You are not a sinner merely because you commit sins.

The sins you commit and the good works you perform are both filthy rags when you offer them as the basis of your righteousness before God. You perform both for your own sake, and God looks to neither as the ground of your justification. You are dead not because of what you do, you do what you do because you are dead. Death reigned from Adam to Moses even though the Mosaic law had not yet been given to measure and expose sin in the form in which Israel later received it (Romans 5:14).

When Jesus confronted religious Jews and exposed the true depth of God’s demands, their response was: “Who then can be saved?” The disciples explicitly asked this question in Matthew 19:25 after Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler.

What prompted this kind of question? It was the standard Jesus proclaimed throughout his ministry as the true meaning of the Mosaic law.

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.... You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:21–22, 27–28).

God does not merely want you to refrain from committing adultery. He wants you not to look at another person with lust. He does not merely want you to refrain from murder. He wants you not to hate your brother or destroy him with your words. Actually Jesus was repeating what the book of Proverbs had already said: “The devising of folly is sin” (Proverbs 24:9). Basically, Jesus was saying: You think you can obey the law, but you cannot. So stop trying to determine whether you belong to God on the basis of what you accomplish or where you fall short. Trust in God, who is your Father, rather than trusting in your performance.

By his death, Christ justified us from sin even though we were guilty of committing it. But he gave us more than that. He lived in our place the life we should have lived. He obeyed all the commandments of God that we were supposed to obey. Christ came and paid our debt when he died. Just as condemnation fell upon us through the act of Adam, Adam’s fallen nature and corruption were also transmitted to us, leaving us incapable of obeying God as we ought. Christ lived a righteous life before God, and the righteousness of the life he lived was credited to our account. Before God, therefore, we stand as though we had obeyed.

The love of God overwhelmed us and gave us all the privileges that belong to Christ. God took the condemnation we deserved and placed it upon him. Christ stood before God as though he were us, and we stand before God as though we were Christ.

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13).

Dear Christians, Be Real Jews

Of course, I am not asking you to convert to Judaism. I am asking you to become Jewish Christians, people of the covenant. You belong to God not on the basis of what you achieve, but on the basis of what God freely gives. The concept of choosiness is what strikes me most when I listen to Jewish rabbis. They speak as Christian preachers should speak. They speak about God, their Father, who chose them not because of anything good in them, but because of his grace.

Dear Christians, if you are in Christ, then God has grafted you into Israel’s covenantal family. You have become Abraham’s offspring and an heir according to the promise (Romans 11:17–24; Galatians 3:29). Love God’s law because it is based upon his character. But never associate your score in keeping the law with God’s fatherhood or with your belonging to his family. If you do, you will live your life as a pagan.

Without the Hebrew Scriptures, we cannot understand God, Christ, redemption, the nature of the law, righteousness, justification, or imputation. Christianity becomes a pagan religion. To be a Christian, you must first become a Jew. You must belong to God on the basis of a covenant that was established throughout the sacred history of God’s work with Israel. Without the Jewish roots of Christianity, we will become like what I used to be: terrified because we cannot remember which foot we used to enter the bathroom.

Embrace the Jewishness of our gospel because it is the only way to fully comprehend what grace is.

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