The Gospel Message
The Holy Bible, from cover to cover, as well as reality itself, teach us the same essential spiritual truth...
Something is terribly wrong with this world!
Death, pain, disease and crime. Corruption, hatred, jealousy, and greed. Cruelty, wickedness, sexual immorality and selfishness. So many things in this world are completely broken!
Every so often, someone appears with “new” ideas for curing the world’s ills — strange philosophies, revolutionary political systems and new technologies. Yet, despite all of these and after thousands of years of trying to improve ourselves, the world only seems to grow colder and darker with every passing day, and the inclination of man's heart, despite our education, technology and knowledge, is still evil from his youth.
Why would a good God create a world so full of evil?
Many people are quick - even foolishly hasty, to conclude that there is no God at all, and that the entire universe came into being by mere chance.How else could we explain this world, with all its infinite problems?
But could it be that we forgot a crucial point before we came to such a hasty conclusions?
The Bible teaches us that God did not create the world as it exists today! He created a perfect world — a world in which the relationship between mankind and creation was perfectly balanced - a world without pain or suffering, without corruption and without evil.
But something happened in that Paradise... Something that corrupted this entire world along with mankind that had been entrusted with its care.
The first man and his wife, though created very good, were enticed by an outside being to rebel against the one commandment their Creator had given them. In doing so, despite God's clear warning, they brought death, decay, and corruption into the world.
From that original sin and onwards, human nature became corrupted beyond recognition.
The closeness, innocence, and holiness in which mankind had once walked with God in the Garden of Eden were replaced by alienation, sin, and defilement have corrupted everything that was once good in human nature.
Despite the repeated warnings of Israel's prophets to repent, and despite the Lord's repeated calls for mankind to return to Him with all their heart, mankind cannot seem to lift itself out of the mire or clothe itself in holiness and righteousness by its own power.
Some of the best among us have tried and failed. Our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, despite their good intentions, fell into sin. Even Moses, who is the very face of God's Law failed, despite his great efforts, to overcome the inclination to sin. After forty years in the wilderness with the People of Israel, who never ceased murmuring and complaining, sinned in a moment of anger and was not permitted to enter the Promised Land.
The great kings Saul, David, and Solomon each, in turn, fell into many sins.
Even the great prophet Elijah, despite the special spirit that rested upon him, in a time of weakness, had lost his confidence in the Lord and sinned by unbelief, when he fled in fear to hide in the wilderness.
And if such giants of the faith failed to withstand temptation and sinned, what can be said of us, who sin every day and every hour?
Who among us can honestly say that he or she has never sinned?
Who among us has never lied?
Who among us has never stolen anything?
Who among us has never spoken evil of another person?
Who among us was never tempted by some form of forbidden lust?
Who among us has never coveted what belongs to someone else?
Those among us with a functioning conscience surely know that, measured by the Ten Commandments - that God wrote with His own finger on tablets of stone - we have all failed.
If the Lord was to give each one of us immediately the punishment that we deserve for our sins and evil thoughts, we would all be condemned to hell. But the Lord is merciful to us and is patient with us again and again. In the Torah, the Lord commanded Moses to establish the sacrificial system, in which the pure blood of innocent animals was poured out as an atonement for the sins of guilty men.
The problem, however, is that this system could never remove sin altogether. The blood of pure animals could only "cover" human sin temporarily and symbolically; it could never provide a permanent solution. Every year, at every appointed time, and every day, the priests had to offer more and more sacrifices for our sins, and they were never enough.
The blood of an animal can never fully cover the sin of a human being, simply because the life of a person, created in the image of God, is worth far more than the life of an animal, however pure it may be. Thus, even the sacrificial system established by Moses at the command of the Lord could offer only a temporary, rather than permanent, solution to the problem of sin - the sin that corrupted, and corrupts still, all that is good and pleasant in this world.
The Lord Himself had to provide another solution - a deeper, more thorough solution, one that He had known from the very beginning that He would one day have to provide, to redeem mankind from its sin.
But before I continue and tell you about the astonishing, almost unbelievable solution that the Lord provided to the problem of sin, I would like to challenge you.
If I have failed, so far, in convincing you that mankind is completely lost in sin, and that although our conscience bears witness within us that good and evil are real, we are still unable to do only that which is good, then please try not to sin at all for just one week!
Only seven days in which you make every effort to perfectly keep all the commandments of the Lord written both in the Torah and upon our conscience. One full week in which you do not sin at all - not in your actions, not in your words, and not in your thoughts.
If, after a week of such a sincere effort, you can look back and say:
"I did it! I did not commit a single sin, speak a single idle word, or entertain a single vain thought." then perhaps you don't need the solution I am about to describe.
But if you too, like I do, already understand that sin is stronger than you are, and that you can't defeat it by your own will power, even for a single week, then you too now understand that we have a serious problem that demands a solution. So now, I would like to tell you about the solution that the Lord, in His incomprehensible grace, has provided for us.
The Hebrew Scriptures, with their many prophecies, as well as with the writings of New Testament are both telling us that about two thousand years ago the Lord did something so great and so radical that, to this very day, people are still judged according to how they respond to it.
The Lord took His own living Word - the Word through whom He created the entire universe - and sent Him to earth as a man!
A man who lived among us and suffered with us through heat, cold, and all the other afflictions of this world, yet unlike us, never sinned. A man who was fully human, yet at the same time possessed an incorruptible nature of God Himself - a man whom even Satan himself could not entice into transgression.
Yeshua - Jesus - of Nazareth is that man.
He fulfilled hundreds of prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures which point to Him, and Him alone, as the true Messiah of Israel. For about three years, Yeshua traveled throughout the Land of Israel, teaching the perfect Torah of the LORD, opening the eyes of the blind, healing the sick, casting out demons, and even raising the dead, until many thousands among the People of Israel became fully convinced that He truly is the Messiah, the Son of God.
In fact, so many believed in Him that He became a threat to of the religious leadership - a threat that had to be eliminated.
But the story did not end there... In fact, it was God's own plan of salvation.
The Lord sent that same Yeshua, the innocent and unblemished Lamb, to die as a sacrifice for our sins - to die on a cross like the worst of criminals, rejected and despised, outside the city walls.
The Lord sent His only Son, Yeshua the Messiah, to pay with His own pure blood the wages of the sin of mankind, once and for all. He entered by His lifeblood into the true altar in heaven to redeem us from our sins.
After Yeshua, the Son of God, had completed the purification of our sins, God the Father had raised Him from the dead as a token that His sacrifice had been accepted. After His resurrection, Yeshua appeared to many hundreds of people and remained upon the earth for forty days after which He ascended into heaven in the sught of His disciples, until the time of restoration of all things.
The Holy Scriptures promise us that anyone who believes in Yeshua and in His sacrifice for our sins, and who sincerely repents before God, receives in His name true forgiveness of sins and eternal life in the coming Kingdom of Heaven.
At His first coming, Yeshua the Messiah came to earth to save everyone who repents and believes in Him, in His sacrifice for our sins, and in His resurrection from the dead.
At His next coming, however, the Messiah will no longer come to save, but to judge the world for its refusal to repent and to believe in the Lord and in His amazing grace.
Until then, we live in a time of favor before the Lord - a time in which the Lord calls Jews and Gentiles alike to repent of their sin and place their trust in Yeshua, the promised Messiah, for the forgiveness of their transgressions.
We, who believe in Yeshua with all our hearts, receive the Holy Spirit into our hearts, who works within us every day, teaching us holiness, righteousness, and grace.
This is the gospel Message.
It's good news for those of us who are willing to repent and trust in God's grace revealed in Yeshua our Messiah. But it is very bad news for those who reject the Lord's outstretched hands and, in empty pride, refuse to accept His gift of grace and righteousness on our behalf.God saves all who believe in Yeshua from all their sins, but He rightly condemns all sinners who refuse to accept the sacrifice of His only Son and who refuse to repent and forsake their sin.
We, at Living Hope home-fellowship, truly hope and pray that you too will be saved through simple and wholehearted faith in Yeshua our only Savior, and we want to do our best to tell you about this amazing grace that the God of Israel has shown to His people and to the whole world.
"Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."
(Jer. 31 31-34 NKJV)
Would you like to learn more?
We would gladly to read the Scriptures with you, answer honest questions, and explain the gospel more fully.