The Truth About Messiah Ben Yosef vs. Ben David - Rabbi Tovia Singer

What about the concept of the suffering servants? I believe in Isaiah it talks about that there will be a servant of God that will come I think at the end end of times and some people talk about that there's a Moshiach a Messiah that's descended from Joseph that will pave the way for the son of um the Messiah descended from David and the Messiah son of Joseph uh may die in sort of one of the final battles and that sounds quite Jesus. >> So here we go again. We're using the same term like Messiah, but we mean something very different. Now, I I'm going to surprise you, the viewer. As it turns out, the Messiah is called many things in the Jewish Bible, except the Messiah. He's never called the Messiah in Tanakh. I know that's very surprising, but for right now, take my word for it. The word Messiah, Messiah, appears many times in Tanakh. In fact, it appears 39 times. In every case, it's referring to priests like me. I'm a coain, descendant of Aaron. That's why the word Messiah appears more frequently in the book of Leviticus than any of the book of the Bible. It's referring to people who are anointed for a certain purpose. Even a non-Jew, Cyrus in Isaiah 45:1 is called God's Messiah. He's not the Messiah, but he's carrying out the will of God. in that case ordering the Jews telling them that they can return to back to the land of Israel from where they were exiled a half a century earlier. So as it turns out the word Messiah just means that someone was anointed for a leadership position. Okay. Now let's just talk about the Messiah the son of Joseph. So the Messiah the son of Joseph has nothing to do with the Messiah the son of David except that they're both esquetological meaning they're both relate to the end of days. We are told in Zechariah 12 that there will be a war with surrounding nations when the Jews have returned to Jerusalem when nations will attack the holy land and God will strengthen the Jewish people and will succeed victoriously in that final war. In that war, we're told that a person gets killed and that causes an enormous constonation and sadness. It ignites a great mourning among the Jewish people and that mourning causes us to repent to do chuva. It is vital for the viewer to understand that it is the repentance of the Jews alone that triggers the coming of Messiah. Isaiah 59:20. We say it in our prayers each day of the Zion will come forth a redeemer only when Jacob repents. So therefore, God can use a military figure. Some hold that it's a series of soldiers, but a a person who dies or soldiers that die in war. And that triggers a mourning. Read the text for yourself. Zechariah 12:9 all the way through the end of the chapter. And that triggers the repentance of the Jewish people, which in turn triggers the coming of of the Messiah, the son of David. Messiah, the son of David doesn't die, doesn't get killed. And he's not related to the Messiah son of Joseph. Messiah son of David is the fulfillment of the promise that God made to King David in 2 Samuel 7:12-16 that the descendants of King David will continue to rule as long as there is a king over the Jewish people and it will never be ripped away from the Davidic house as it was to Saul, David's predecessor. So we have to be very careful in that we're using words and in fact in Jewish literature at times we can use the word Messiach ben David and Mess Messiah the son of David and Messiah the son of Joseph and that could get these things can get conflated and more dangerously it could be abused by our spiritual opponents as a handle as a weapon against us. The source for the Messiah, the son of Joseph, as I told you, Zechariah 12. The term isn't there. If you want to find the term, you'll find it in the Talmud in tractate suka 52b. That's the source for it. So, it has nothing to do with the Messiah and the son of David except its end time. It's a a method, a device that God may use to trigger the repentance of the Jewish people. Now, let's get back to Isaiah where there's a suffering servant. This is where people get in trouble. This is the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. And I I want you, the viewer, to understand this. You could say with certainty that the author of the book of Isaiah anticipated that you had read the chapters that introduced it before you read the 53rd chapter. Imagine picking up any book of 66 chapters and jumping right to the 53rd chapter. This is like a helicopter landing. Like you're landing just right in the middle of a book. You can't engage in what's called salad barmenics. And that's what Christians do routinely. I'm talking about Christian missionaries. I'll take that and I'll ignore that and I'll take that. Can't do that. It is axiomatic that Isaiah anticipated that by time you got to 53, you have already read the chapters that introduce it. Here's the memo. Isaiah 53, as it turns out, is the fourth of four servant songs. The servant has already been identified where in Isaiah 41:8 and 9, the servant is the nation of Israel. Not all the Jews, just those who are loyal to God like Abraham, my friend. That's where it comes from. That term Abraham my friend comes from that passage. Isaiah 42:6. Isaiah 43 10-11. I mentioned that earlier. You are my witnesses. Adai is plural. You are my witnesses declares the Lord. And my servant. Why does Isaiah call the servant witnesses in the plural? Because Isaiah is using a device of speaking of the nation in the singular because not only do we have a singular a joint history but we have a glorious singular destiny. One point for those of you who have not read the book of Isaiah literally 60 chapters in the book are written with dense poetry. Only six chapters are written with using standard pros like a standard narrative like you would expect to find books like Joshua and Judges and and Samuel and Kings. So there you could just read through a story after story and it just reads really easy. I mean you might not know why you're being told the story but you at least understand the story. Isaiah doesn't mean anything remotely like that. Neither does Ezekiel or Jeremiah. But Isaiah by far is the most difficult. I mean, once you know what you're doing, you got to read the context when you're reading a book that's using this dense poetry. And I don't mean Shakespearean poetry. It's not that. It means dense language that's highly symbolic. And there's no question about the message. Isaiah 44:1. Isaiah 44:21. Isaiah 45:4, Isaiah 48 verse20, Isaiah 49:3. You see where this is, you see the trajectory where this is going. If you read all these chapters, the prophet identify his servant, God's servant as the nation of Israel. Not all the nation but the remnant of Israel whose job it is to be a light to the nations and need to gather back those who are those who have lost their way among the Jews the lost tribes of Israel. What happens in Isaiah 53? It's a messianic chapter. The nations the gentile nations are speaking here. For those of you who enjoy Shakespeare and poetry, it's a saliloquy, which means the kings of nations are speaking. How do you know? It says so. Isaiah 52:15, the last passage of the chapter. Kings will be astonished. The kings of the nations will be will not believe what they're encountering because what they're seeing is like nothing they had ever thought about. What they're finally witnessing is like something they never heard. And they ask the question, who would have believed this? That's how Isaiah 53 begins. So the nations of the world are speaking here in those first eight verses of Isaiah 53. The kings of nations are astonished at the end of days and they have two fundamental questions. Why did the Jews suffer so much? Now, this is really important because now until the Messiah comes, the nations of the world attribute Jewish suffering largely because they claim the Jews rejected their prophets. Do you know why the Jews suffer so much? They had it coming. They rejected the Lord. They rejected this prophet. They rejected that prophet. And that's why the Jews suffer so much. That works until the Messiah comes. Once the Messiah comes, the nations of the world discover what to them was unfathomable. And that is that the Jews all this time were correct. If the Jews were worshiping the true God and did not reject prophets who were true prophets, then how then do you explain Jewish suffering? You then revert back to the question to which you thought you had an answer. And therefore, the gentile nations draw two conclusions. One is the most obvious. The Jews suffered for the transgressions of my people. We suffered as a direct transgressions of the Germans and the Austrians and the Poles and Hungarians. Need I say more? We suffered as a direct result of the bad behavior of the non-Jews. That's the first thing they're going to say. The second part is really ecstatic, quite numminous, and really deep. If you could wrap your mind around this, you're going to go places. If you encounter people who are not Jewish, who became Jewish or people who became Ben means they embraced the Jewish faith without converting and you ask them tell me what triggered your curiosity about the Jews. Why do you feel that kinship about the Jews? They will convey to you that in fact it was studying about the suffering of the Jews, the showa, the pain, the the willingness of the Jew to suffer for his faith. The Gentiles will admit that in fact Jewish suffering triggered within us a desire to repent. Turned us around and brought us closer to God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. By his stripes, we are healed. What the church will do to this vulnerable chapter? I say it's vulnerable because it's poet poetic. And whenever a chapter is poetic and using all this imagery, of course, it's much more vulnerable to abuse. We changed our ways because we saw the suffering of the Jewish people. It brought us a healing. We also recognized fully that the Jewish people suffered as a direct result of the bad behavior of non-Jews. Let me share this with you. I served as rabbi for 5 years in Indonesia. Earthquakes in Indonesia were routine as were volcanoes. But that's not typical for Jewish suffering. Jews typically don't suffer from natural disasters. We suffer from non-Jews. They're the ones who to do it. I mean, and they're the ones who cause our misery, our suffering, whether wherever we we suffer as a result of their bad behavior. So, that's what the message is in Isaiah 53. It's acknowledgment of the non-Jew that we suffered, the Jews suffered as a result of the bad behavior of the non-Jew. and we served as a light to the non-Jew. And the term light to the Gentiles, it's unique to Isaiah and it's unique to the servant songs. Isaiah 496 and 42:6. It's unique to that. And then in verse 9, the chapter pivots of 53. God takes over and speaks for the last four verses. There are 12 verses in this chapter. In the last four verses, God speaks or resumes speaking. And God says, "I'm going to make a deal with the servant if my servant will repent, turn to God." And then God promises them long life, have children, and the desire of God will succeed in their hands. This of course doesn't apply to Jesus for a million reasons. Didn't live a long life and just didn't have kids. Why would if the Messiah is God, why would God be promising God that he's going to have kids and long life? I mean, this is completely ridiculous. And the last point is there are places in this chapter where God speaks of the servant in the plural. In the plural. Remember it goes back and forth. It's poetry. So what do you think the Christian Bibles do with the plural pronouns? [snorts] Switches it to the singular so that you don't see that it's speaking about a nation rather than a single individual. And then if you don't read Hebrew, you're finished. You're fried. You have no chance. [music] >> [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] Heat. [music] [music] Heat. [music] >> [music]