by Donna Diorio
Back in 1992 or 3 God began to remove layers
off of the mystery of the indebtedness of the Gentile Christians to financially
aid the body of Messiah in Israel that he speaks of in Romans 15:26-26. It is a
mystery and the nuggets of truth are subtle in Acts and in his letters. God
must open our eyes or we will pass right over them without catching the
relevance.
The first of it was the big recognition of how we
Christians were actually still
indebted to help the Israeli ministries. I received that understanding with joy
and it set me on a course that continues today. I wasn't sure exactly where I
was headed with it but by 2001 many other layers of the mystery had been
revealed to me — right out of Paul’s own letters in the Bible.
It was August 2001 when I launched my first e-list to
encourage the recognition among Christians that in Israel there were many
followers of Jesus, many congregations and ministries and that they needed our help. Our help is REQUIRED in order
to fulfill all the vision God had given each of them for reaching Israelis with
the Good News of Messiah Yeshua.
To me in 2001 it seemed most
Christians did not have a clue there was already a Body of Messiah in Israel
and if they did, they did not seem to care. I have actually had Christians
tell me there was no need to send financial support to the Messianic
congregations in Israel because they already knew the LORD! Their thinking
was that it is only Christians who will make unbelievers in Israel
"jealous" of our faith. They believe this jealousy is going to be
prompted by the overwhelming generosity of financial support of Christians to
Israeli traditional rabbis and government projects. They balk at
understanding how many they were funding were persecutors of any Jew professing
Jesus is LORD. It didn't seem to bother them that none of unsaved Israeli
Jews showed even a smidgen of jealousy of Christian faith. Truly they are too
wrapped up in their own interpretation of "making Israel jealous" to
be bothered with even considering the believers in Israel are significant to
God's plan of the spiritual redemption of Jews.
Over all these years
I have unpacked many times what the Spirit has revealed to me about Christian
indebtedness, Paul's final mission to Jerusalem and "The Collection."
Paul urged the Christian churches he worked with to take up collections over a
several year period. It started after he witnessed events in Jerusalem in Acts
12 when Herod killed James.
Last week I began to write my understanding of these things
again for the Weekly Summary of Prayer Requests from Israeli Ministries and Arrows
from Zion. When I did the Holy Spirit suddenly removed another layer of the
mystery to me: EVEN THOUGH the apostle Paul had been a zealous persecutor of the followers of
Yeshua, something became a REVELATION to him as he witnessed the events
of Acts 12 when Herod executed James and intended also to execute Peter.
It was not until that point that
Paul had a REVELATION that the Jewish believers in Israel were always
going to live and minister in a state of persecution until the time God
removed the veil from the eyes of Jews - as he wrote in Romans
15:25-27 AFTER the fulness of Gentiles had been fulfilled. It
was a REVELATION to Paul that the Jewish believers were going to need the help
of the Gentile Churches because the persecution of the spiritually blinded Jews
was always going to be great against the Jews who came to faith in Yeshua. He
and Barnabas came to town to deliver financial aid because they knew by
prophecy a worldwide famine was coming. That meant the believers in Israel
would experience even greater financial need than they already were under
because of the faith in Yeshua.
To thrive, Paul saw in the events of Acts 12, they were going to
need the financial support of the churches, to whom he said clearly, "For if the Gentiles have shared in their
spiritual blessings, they are obligated to minister to them with material
blessings."
There must be 50 ways to misunderstand this
"mystery" Paul wrote about and acted on when he took up the
collection he delivered in Acts 21. I've seen a lot of them over the
years but found a new one the other day. Doing a search on the passage I
came across a website discussing "The Collection." As I began to read
the opening paragraph or two sounded eerily like the writer lifted them
straight out of my writings. . . but dismissing my explanations of what was
going on.
There was no recognition of why Gentile Christians were
indebted to help the Messianic Jews in Jerusalem or why the Israeli Jewish body
would need help on an ongoing basis. The writer supposed when Paul carried
"The Collection" to Jerusalem in Acts 21 that Israeli believers must
have been going through yet another famine like in Acts 11-12. That was not
what Paul saw in Acts 12 prompting the Apostle in the Acts 21 collection which
was meant to teach the churches to financially support the Israeli ministries.
It was persecution, pure and simple.
The writing I was viewing made so many assumptions about
Paul taking that final trip to Jerusalem with the collection from the churches,
like deciding he took representatives of each church with him because traveling
with such a large amount of money wouldn't be safe except with a large group of
people traveling. It is an explanation that totally misses the point that Paul
was modeling to Christians what should continue to happen among the churches:
the support was to be ongoing.
Another assumption was Paul did this just to prove to the
apostles in Jerusalem that God was working among the churches. The problem with
that is the apostles already knew that and, besides, Paul had no need to
"prove" anything to them. Paul writes in Galatians 2:7-9 of the
Apostles recognition of his anointing to minister among the Gentiles at the
Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.
The writer also assumed that Paul was trying to
"shame" the church in 2 Corinthians 8 to prioritize the collection by
pointing out what generosity the poor churches in Macedonia demonstrated. "How that in a great trial of
affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded unto the
riches of their liberality." Paul was just telling them the facts: the
Corinthians had much more in wealth, but the poor in Macedonia gave much more
than those living in much better circumstances. There are lots of Bible verses
on that common reality that those with wealth are less apt to help those in
need, than others who are much poorer and pressed with persecution
themselves.
History shows that
the churches did not keep up sending aid for very long to the
Jerusalem Apostolic leaders for distribution as needed among the Body of
Messiah. I wish I could give you the documentation that Malachi Martin, a
now deceased Catholic historian with access to the Vatican libraries had when
he wrote what took place seven years prior to the Council of Nicea in 318 AD.
Martin did not document his sources on this portion of his book but it was
probably not as big a deal to him as it was to me when I read what he was
reporting.
Martin's 1983 book, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church" noted that a
contingent of Israeli Messianic Jews came from Jerusalem to Rome to make an
appeal to Pope Sylvester I, the pope from 314 to 335. Part of their mission was
to appeal to the Christian leader to restore the financial assistance to the
Messianic Jews that had been established by the Apostle Paul as told in Acts
21." The pope "curtly dismissed them" and then seven years later
the dismissal of the Messianic Jews was made official at the Council of
Nicea.
That sets the stage
for the terrible Christian history against the Jews that unfolded from that
point on in my opinion. Now as we have clearly entered the period of God's
promise to restore not only the physical State of Israel, but also His promise
to restore Israel spiritually, that
means all of the excuses, misunderstandings, and ignorance of what God is doing
in Israel must come to an end in the Church. We have to grow up now because
God is moving among Jews opening eyes to the truth that Yeshua is the Messiah
of Israel. The timing of "the
fulness of the Gentiles" is upon us.
What is the pleroma, or fulness of the Gentiles? It is
Christians filled with the presence, power, agency, riches of God and
of Messiah. Only those who enter into this state of Christlikeness are going to
understand what Paul was doing when he took that Collection to the apostles in
Jerusalem. We will be the only ones to respond to Paul's call to us across
almost two thousand years that we are STILL indebted to financially assist the
body of Messiah in Israel who are declaring the Good News of the Messiah's
Presence in the midst of Israel today.
In Romans 11:25 he wrote, "For I would not, brethren, that you
should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own
conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the
Gentiles be come in." Will we go on in ignorance, or will we
enter into what is meant to be the mutual blessing of Jew and Gentile becoming
one new man in Messiah?