Who is your family?
Most of you would right of the bat start naming aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, mom, dad, grandparents, and great grandparents. Even though you would be right, your biological family has nothing to do with Yehovah.
Some of you belong to a church family, so perhaps you would say my family is Pentecostals, baptists, Lutherans? Even though you would be right, your church family has nothing to do with Yehovah.
So let me rephrase my original question, are you a part of Yehovah’s family?
In Matt 15:24, Yeshua (Jesus/Yehoshua) says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
The Greek word used for house is Oikos, which means a family and a lineage. So what Yehoshua is saying in Matt 15:24 is this, He has only come for those who belong to the family of Israel.
Who is your family?
If your family is not Israel, then the Bible says Yehoshua did not come for you.
Where does this leave you, if you are a Gentile born Christian with no Jewish ancestors? You have the choice to become a member of the family of Israel if you want to.
The Bible says, in Isaiah 56:3, Yehovah welcomes everyone who wants to become a member of Israel. You do not have to be born by a Jewish mother; you only have to make a choice to make Israel your family.
How?
Have you ever heard the expression “chip off the old block” or “the spitting image”? It is not uncommon to say a child is a chip off the old block or the spitting image of their parents due to the way the child acts and resembles their parents in mannerism, facial expressions, and choices.
In 1. John 2:6 the Bible says if we claim to be united with Christ, we have to imitate His life in everything He did. Paul, the Apostle, says the same thing in 1. Cor 11, he imitated Christ, and he says we are to do what he did.
What Paul and John are saying here is that if we are to join Israel as our family, we have to become a chip off the old block and a spitting image of our Father in heaven, Yehovah. How? By imitating the life of Christ in everything He did.
As Christians, we believe Jesus did more than just die on the cross for our sins. We know He did miracles, but so did a lot of other people in His time. We know He raised the dead, but so did a lot of other people in His time. The only thing that distinguishes Christ from all the others is His teachings.
Yeshua taught His disciples to reject the traditions of men, and only obey the law of His Father the Torah (the written law of Moses).
If we are His disciples, we will obey what He told us and start living our lives in obedience to Moses. Then people around us will take one look at us and say, “we are a chip off the old block, the spitting image of our Father Yehovah.” Then we will have joined Israel as our family (John 3:16, the book of Romans 1-11), and suddenly we will have become Christians.
In Antioch, the people called the disciples Christians because they imitated Yeshua’s life and His moral choices.
In Antioch, people said of the disciples, “they are a chip off the old block and the spitting image of their Father Yehovah.”