Were the Jews justified in rejecting Jesus as their long promised Messiah and the kingdom which He in all sincerity offered them? The charge is made that the Jews—who were most competent to judge the issue—denied His claims, while the Gentile Christians received Him. How do you respond to this?
In his book, Israel in Europe, G. F. Abbott, a professing Christian, writes:
The Founder of Christianity, Himself a Jew, had appeared to His own people as the Messiah whom they eagerly expected, and with all the Divine prophecies concerning whose advent they were thoroughly familiar. They investigated His credentials, and, as a nation, they were not satisfied that He was what His followers claimed Him to be. Instead of remembering that His Jewish fellow-countrymen were, after all, the most competent to form a judgment of their new Teacher, as they had done in the case of other inspired Rabbis and prophets, the Christians proceeded to insult and outrage them for having come to the conclusion that He failed to fulfill the conditions required by their Scriptures (p. 43).
I am far from condoning the insults and outrages which have been heaped on Jews by professing Christians. Yet I cannot but protest against such misleading statements as the above. Owing to Israel’s previous alienation from God and the spirit of the prophets, and the long-continued process of self-hardening through which they had passed before His advent, the majority of the nation were far from being competent to form a right judgment of their new Teacher. This is shown by their dealings with the “other inspired Rabbis and prophets.” If the writer had studied Jewish history a little deeper, he would have found that it has always been the misfortune of the Jewish nation not only to follow false prophets and “Rabbis,” but to reject and to persecute God’s true prophets. On the last page of the Jewish Scriptures (2 Chronicles being the last book of the Hebrew Bible) the sacred historian, in summing up the causes of the calamities which ended in the destruction of the first Temple, says:
All the chiefs of the priests and the people trespassed very greatly after all the abominations of the heathen; and they polluted the house of the Lord…And the Lord, the God of their fathers, sent to them by His messengers, rising up early and sending; because He had compassion on His people, and on His dwelling-place: but they mocked the messengers of God, and despised His words, and scoffed at His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against His people, till there was no remedy.
Did they not say of Jeremiah, “This man is worthy to die,” and actually seek his destruction? (Jer. 26:11). Did they not say to Isaiah, “See not…prophesy not…get you out of the way…cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us”? (Isa. 30:10-11). Is it any wonder that they treated the greatest of the prophets in the same way? Of course, the Jews afterwards repented of their attitude to the true prophets, and so also will they yet do regarding Christ.
It was not because Christ “failed to fulfill the conditions required by their Scriptures” that the majority of the Jewish nation, led by their blind leaders, rejected Christ; but because of their alienation from the spirit of this Scripture and because He failed to correspond with their own invented ideas about the Messianic kingdom.
This rejection of Christ was foreknown by God, and foretold in the Scriptures centuries before. Moreover it was the occasion of the fulfillment of God’s purpose in providing a perfect atonement, not only for Israel, but for all. The fact of Israel’s rejection of Jesus, instead of being an argument against His Messiahship, must be regarded as an additional proof that He is indeed the one of whom “Moses in the law and the prophets did write.”
Lastly, remember that not all Israel rejected Christ. The “as many as received Him” were in the first instance men of Israel; and it was through Jewish evangelists and disciples who had all sorts of “insults and outrages heaped upon them” by the majority of their people that the faith of Christ became known among the Gentiles. Considering that it was only through a small remnant of Israel that the purposes of God in and through that people were carried on, we have every right to regard the minority, who did receive and follow Christ—the “remnant according to the election of grace” as Paul calls them—as the true Israel, the link between the faithful in Israel in the past and the “all Israel” which after the great national repentance and conversion, “shall be saved.”