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A unique belief Introduced Into Jewish theology was the idea of a special covenant relationship between god and the Jewish people. On the peoples side, obedience to god is expected and as a consequence, god will grant special favors to them and keep them protected. The paradigm for this special relationship is the covenant between Abraham and god. According to the scriptural book of genesis, god promises to make Abraham’s descendants more numerous than the stars and promised to give ham a land which most believed at the time to be Canaan and/or Mesopotamia.
In order for god to be able to keep this event, the Jewish people must have no other god than WHY and worship him alone. Abraham was Instructed to circumcise every male In his household so that that the circumcision could serve as an outward sign of the Inward covenant they had made with god. At the point when god promised that his descendants would outnumber the stars, Abraham had no children and his wife was approximately ninety years old. Abraham then took his wife Sarah’s maidservant, Hager to have a child and she did.
After Hager had Shame, god spoke to Abraham and said according to the book of genesis that, “she would be the mother of nation” and blessed her womb. Sarah then bore a son whom they named Isaac. When Isaac was a youth, god spoke to him telling him to sacrifice his son as a test to see if Abraham trusted that god would really hold up his side of their covenant. Abraham did as god told him. According the scriptural narrative, while Abraham was in mid swing with the knife to kill his son, a voice said, “stop” at which point a ram came out of the bushes and Abraham sacrificed the ram instead of his son Isaac.
Isaac went on to have two sons, Jacob and Seas. Jacob was a very sneaky, deceptive mamma’s boy and Seas was more of a rugged hunter and outdoors. Jacob managed to convinced is older brother Seas into selling his birth right over a bowl of stew. He then tricked his father into believing that he was Seas and got the blessing. Jacob went on to have twelve sons and two daughters. According to the book of Genesis, an angel came to Jacob In his sleep and Jacob wouldn’t let the angel leave without blessing him. What ensued was and epic wrestling/flitting match in which Jacob had his hip broken. OFF tumultuous relationship and childhood, to put it mildly. At one point, they were so fed up with the way the youngest son at the time Joseph was acting that they sold him to merchants heading to Egypt. They then lied to their father about what happened saying that he was eaten by wild animals. Joseph was sold as a slave to man named Photograph in Egypt. After a few years, Potash’s wife lusted after Joseph and because he wouldn’t sleep with her she claimed that he had raped her which landed him in prison.
After years in prison Joseph encountered the butler and caperer of the Pharaoh and interpreted their dreams, this gained him recognition by the Pharaoh to the point that when the Pharaoh had a disturbing dream, Joseph was called to interpret it. The interpretation of the dreams was essentially that there loud be seven years of prosperity and seven years of famine. Pharaoh immediately appointed Joseph to a position to oversee the stockpiling of food during the seven years of plenty and the distribution of the food during the time of famine.
During the years of famine, Josephs brothers came to Egypt in search of food, after some shenanigans, Joseph revealed himself to them to their great surprise and begged them to come to Egypt during the famine. His brothers went back to Jacob who was really old and begged that they all come back to Egypt because Joseph had kept his younger brother Benjamin as insurance for them to return. Jacob conceded and moved his entire clan to an area of Egypt known as Sheen. This is where the Hebrews/Jews began to solidify as a people.
Christianity is a religion based primarily on the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. During the first and second centuries, men and women had followed a lifestyle outlined by Jesus and perpetuated by his twelve disciples and approximately 120 others who had followed him throughout his ministries. These men and women left their homes to preach the gospel of the messiah and baptize those wanting to be a part of their spiritual revolution. During this time, the “way’, (this is what they called their movement) spread all over the Roman Empire and Mesopotamia becoming largely non-Jewish in membership.
Many Christians were subject to torture and imprisonment because they rejected the polytheistic views of the Romans. When Constantine became the Roman Emperor in SAUCE, God showed him a vision of a cross to be used as a standard in battle. After he used it and won a major battle, he instituted tolerance of the Christians along with the state cult, of which he was a chief priest. Right before his death, Constantine was baptized into the Christian faith. By the end of the fourth century, people began being forced to convert to Christianity and stripped of all of their rights.
By the end of the fifth century, Christianity was the faith claimed by the majority of people in the Roman Empire. Over the course of 500 years Christianity went from a small persecuted sect to the largest organized religion in the world and violently persecuting dissenters Just as they had been persecuted. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, traces its ancestry back to Abraham. However, Islam teaches that Hager, not Sarah was Abraham’s true wife. The Quern, which is the cared book of Islam, says that Abraham took Hager and Shame to the desert of Mecca and built the holiest sanctuary in Islam, the Kasbah.
It was thought to be Adams original place of worship. According to the Quern, God spoke to Abraham and told him that this would be the place of pilgrimage for all of his people. According to from Abraham’s monotheistic views. For many centuries the rest of the world passed it by, aside from contact through trading caravans. The Arabs in the area were nomadic cattle-breeders wandering in search of green pastures for their livestock. The most powerful tribe was there the Quasars.
Because of the nomadic lifestyle, clans were often in contact with each other and maintained somewhat common culture and language. In an unpromising pre-lilacs setting, which Muslims call “the age of ignorance” a child named Muhammad was born into a poor clan of the Quasars tribe. As a young man, Muhammad managed caravans for a beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy woman named Jihad. When she was forty and Muhammad was twenty five, she appreciated his good qualities and offered to marry him. Jihad became Muhammad strongest supporter.
When Muhammad was forty, he made a spiritual retreat during Ramadan. An angel in human like form, named Gabriel came to him and insisted that he recite words that he would speak and Gabriel spoke to him the words of the Quern. When Muhammad returned he was deeply shaken and revealed what had happened to his wife a freed slave in their midst. After three years, Muhammad was instructed by the revelations to preach publicly, he was ridiculed and defamed by his one tribe. After much persecution, he and his followers were banished for three years and survived only what wild leaves they could find.
After three years he returned only to be persecuted even further. According to tradition, he experienced “the night of ascension” in which he was met by teachers of the like of Adam and Jesus, they took him and showed him hell and paradise and received great blessings. Muhammad met some pilgrims from an area known as Heathery who recognized him as a prophet and because of the great persecution he was still receiving from his own tribe he secretly left and moved to Heathery which would later be called Medina.
This migration of Muslims from Mecca to Medina happened in SAUCE. The Muslim era is calculated from the beginning of that year because it marked the change from persecution to an appreciation of the reports message. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the most influential religions and play significant roles in today’s society. Although these religions are in constant dispute with one another, they have more in common than most people know about. All three of these religions trace the genealogy of their beliefs, and the foundation of their beliefs back to Abraham.
He is their physical common denominator. During a time when the majority of society was worshipping many gods, Abraham believed that he had heard the voice of the one true living God; who called Abraham to worship Him and Him alone. That is why Abraham is considered by theologians and scholars to be the father of monotheism; thus the next common denominator between the three religions, the belief in one true and more importantly living God. God had promised Abraham that He would make him the father of many nations.
However Abraham’s wife Sarah was barren. Sarah gave her servant Hager to Abraham so that he could have a child and she gave birth to Shame. Sometime later, Sarah in her old age gave birth to Isaac. Through these two children would be the birth of three religions. God made Abraham a promise concerning his son and this remises can be found in the Bible and the Torah. To sum the promises up in a few words it was that through Isaacs seed would come the Redeemer for mankind. Now children, thus the twelve tribes of Israel.
The Israelites who later become known as the Jewish Nation followed the worship methods that were taught from Isaac to Jacob (Israel) and thus to the twelve tribes. Moses fits into this line in one major way. He is a direct descendant of Isaac and he was the one chosen by God to lead the children of Israel out of bondage into the promise land, and to give the Laws to the children of Israel, this is why it is referred to as the Mosaic Laws. These were not all new Laws, but those Laws that were passed down generation from generation as well as those laws that were not known of until then.
There were many laws and feast days that were to be observed by the Jewish faith. The Passover is a celebration of remembrance of the night before the Israelites were released from slavery in Egypt. After migrating to Egypt from Canaan, the family of Israel grew enormously to the extent that they began to rival the numbers of native Egyptians that lived in the land. Fearful that the Israelites might at some future date ally themselves with its enemies, Egypt forced them to become their slaves.
According to the book of Exodus, Moose’s mother placed him in a basket along the edge of the Nile River in an effort to conceal him from the Egyptians who sought to kill all first born sons of the Hebrews. While the Pharaohs daughter was bathing in the river she discovered the baby and took him as her own child. Moses was then raised in the lap of luxury in the pharaohs palace. As a young man he was wandering around the place where his people, the Hebrews were being forced to work by the Egyptians and saw an Egyptian beat a Hebrew at which point he couldn’t contain his rage and killed the Egyptian.
Out of fear for his own life, he fled to desert where he met up with some Intimidates, married and became a sheepherder for forty years. One day while he was out with his sheep, god appeared to him in the form of a burning bush and instructed him to return to Pharaoh and demand that he set the Hebrews free. Moses was not a good orator so he took his brother Aaron along to speak to Pharaoh. As a consequence, Pharaoh increased the workload on the Hebrews and refused to let them go.
God then caused nine different plagues to come upon the people of Egypt, to no avail. Finally Moses ND Aaron went to pharaoh and told him that if he didn’t let the Hebrews go then god would kill every first born son in the entire land of Egypt. As he had before, Pharaoh refused. God then instructed the Hebrews through Moses to prepare for an exodus by packing up their belongings, killing a young lamb, placing its blood on the doorpost to deter the death angel and eating unleavened bread.
As god had promised, he killed the first born son throughout Egypt and Pharaoh freed the Hebrews. Thus the beginning of the Passover Ritual. Now no matter which religious group you are addressing, the Jews or Christians you can summarize that story in exactly that way; because the story is found in the Bible and the Torah. In the Bible it can be found in the book of Genesis, in the Torah it can be found in the book called Berkshires (which in English means Genesis). To be honest there are a lot of books found in the Torah which are also in the Bible.
Jesus is believed to be “the seed of promise” that was to come through the descendants of Abraham, the awaited Messiah. For that was the initial promise that through Abraham’s seed a Savior, Messiah would come. Everyone of Jewish decent was looking for the Messiah. Followers of Christ believe that Jesus is the Messiah. That he is God manifested in the and taught. Jesus was born of Mary who is believed to have been a virgin. Christians believe that Mary was impregnated by God. Christians believe that Jesus is God in the flesh.
That Jesus Christ came to redeem man back to God; He is the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” Jesus was Jewish he was born of the tribe of Benjamin, and a direct descendant to King David through both his mother Marry bloodline and his earthly father Joseph. He was brought up in and under the Jewish faith and bloodline. He knew all of the laws of Moses. He personalized those laws and ivied them to the point of fulfilling the laws. Jesus himself taught “l did not come to change the law, but to fulfill it”. So what laws did Jesus come to fulfill. Jesus taught that he came to take away the sins of the world.
There is a law that was believed to be taught to him by God. That for the remission of sins there must be the shedding of blood. For death to pass over the Israelites on the original “Passover” evening an innocent lamb had to be killed and the blood of it wiped on the door post and lintel. When Adam was put out of the Garden of Eden, God covered him with animal skin, which means an innocent animal died. Once a year the High Priest had to go into the Holy of Holies to make the atonement offering for sins, they had to kill a lamb and sprinkle its blood on the altar.
And for mankind as a whole to be reconciled back unto God, Jesus had to sacrifice his life. So let’s examine again what was required of the Israelites at the original evening of the Passover. A lamb was to be taken into each household on the 10th of the month, slain on the 14th and subsequently eaten on the 1 5th. The blood was to be applied to both doorposts and lintel for the Lord was to ass through the land that night and slay all the first-born in the houses that hadn’t applied the blood.
He ‘passed over’ those that had applied the blood. Now on the 10th day the Lambs that were going to be sacrificed were to be led into town before all of the Children of Israel. On the 10th day Jesus entered Jerusalem Christian call this his triumphant entry. Because Jesus, Just like the Lamb for the Passover sacrifice was led into the city before the Israelites by the disciples. The Israelites waved palms at him and throw palms before him on the ground and worshipped him. Now the Passover lamb was to be held from the 10th. To the 14th day.
During this time the lamb was being examined by the people to determine if it was free from all spots and blemishes. And as for Jesus what was going on with him from the 10th to the 14th. The Bible tells us that he was being questioned and examined and setup. On the 14th. Day the lamb that was found not to have a spot or a blemish was announced to be pure and it was slain so that its blood could be applied to the doorpost and lintels. On the 14th day Appoints Pilot declared to the crowd “l find no fault with this man. ” In other words he is pure.
Jesus was then led to the Calvary where he was slain so that the blood can be applied to our lives so that death will pass us over. Christian celebrate that as “Good Friday’ and Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that one day he will raise each of them. For almost every Jewish Feast day that you have Christians believe that Jesus is and was the fulfillment of it. They still believe in those days Just as the Jewish faith does. So when you really think of it to say that you are Christian, a follower of Christ; then you are also saying that you are Jewish for he was.