A European Odyssey
Yaakov, Béla Orbán
"Don’t worry, look up to the sky!" (from a Hungarian Christian hymn).
My dear friends!
Not long ago, I received a letter containing the speech of a famous professor in theology published in the Reformierter Kirchenblatt newspaper and called: "Hopes and fears".
Let me complete this speech by the vision of a contemporary Jewish man living and serving in the Body of Christ.
The complement I would like to bring to this "pastoral letter" is not a criticism or a judgment nor the fruit of some self-esteem but rather the hope that the testimonies contained in it will be able to help and give strength to many people.
This letter drew my attention since it has been more than 45 years that I know its author. He even played an important role in my faithful life when I started it.
The day before receiving this letter we were praying before God on Friday evening and we really took a new start filled with hope in the Love of Christ.
Our new departure did not lead us towards the unknown and uncertainty but towards new fields of ministry. We turned our eyes towards a new Empire from which we are more and more depending each day physically, psychically and spiritually too. We must face a new problem that reaches more and more our peoples and which absorbs them deeper and deeper steeling their identity and independence of soul.
Hope always implies our wish to see a new era, the release from the evil and the revival of good. For this, it is necessary to know and recognize the mistakes of the past.
Among these mistakes we can distinguish two main components:
- the strengthening of national centralism in the countries
- the strengthening of the neobizantism spirit of the "Throne and the Altar" when the Christian churches are using these words as a tool of propaganda in order to maintain and strengthen their political influence.
However we should not forget that there is a third destructive tendency. This third one is trying to eliminate the two other tendencies above.
While these three tendencies are fighting each other, a fourth one is also coming that wants to assimilate all tendencies in a whole.
This way, we can say that the time of Constantine the Great has expired and that all Christian missions are no more than simple unfulfilled hopes and dreams.
Today, when we are the witnesses or even the actors of this fight of powers, we can see a New Age being outlined.
We can only hope if our faith is strengthened.
However, our distance from God is directly connected with the kind of love we feel towards him.
Without this love, God does not strengthen our faith and even hope ends up fading away some day.
The process of powers fighting between each other described above has also got its promises. The world also promises everything and creates all kind of new hopes in people. Indeed all these promises and hopes are false their only aim is to destroy the faith and the hope of men in God.
The first step has already been made when today; the notion of love became totally independent from God and Christ.
Worry and hope are feelings that are working simultaneously inside of our hearths.
The question is which one of them is dominant in us.
It is necessary to live this eternal internal fight. We also have to profess that our Lord is the only one who can triumph over every kind of fear and anxiety. The testimony of this Victory in us has to be visible for our neighbors.
The reasons of our fears and worries are the enemies of our spirit. These roots can only be destroyed by the Love of Christ.
Then we must start in the following way:
- By bringing the message of Christ to the secularized world. This message is only efficient when it is made of the Word of God which has already been fulfilled in our lives as the living testimony of the Word.
This is the only way our ministry can have a positive impact and reach the religious, sleeping and frozen Christianity.
The western part of the European Union became a new field for our ministry.
Although we should not stop at the limits of Christian traditions but we have to go further.
Through evangelization, we must show the Project and the Word of God together with their fulfillment to the world.
We must restore the unity of the Ancient and the New Testaments. One the most decisive part of this is the knowledge and the acceptance of the Chosen People and its calling.
- In our departure and on our roads, we must never ask questions to each others.
God has given extremely precise plans and limits to all of us concerning our paths. It is then our own responsibility if we get lost or if we cannot see the objective and what our tasks are.
The acceptance and the knowledge of the prophecies is the basic condition to understand the Holy Scriptures.
The refusal of prophecies of the Old Testament can really be the source of anxiousness in the life of this kind of rebellious people.
But this is also true in the case when someone refuses the promises and the prophecies given by Yeshua HaMashiach.
Of course we have to walk ahead on the path. All those who just stand and look to the map will never be able to go further.
- But in order to be able to go further, it is necessary to put our past in order.
I would add to this that the putting in order of our past without the renewing of the present and the future would just be a formal act.
It is obvious that the time has come for Christianity to settle its debts. The time is appropriate for growth and progress.
However it is necessary to stop a moment at the theme of the Holocaust. Many excuses and other kind of repents had been made all over Europe and also in our country. Nevertheless, another kind of Shoah is going on raging at the spiritual level. The discrete Holocaust of spiritual and psychical assimilation of the Chosen People is taking place in silence.
When will Christianity finally understand that they are going against the Will of God by acting this way?
This kind of behavior is nothing else than sawing off the branch on which Christianity itself is sitting.
Christians are avoiding Jews and Gentiles to enjoy all the blessings coming from the prophecy of the Grafting in and back to the olive tree.
Fear comes from weakness. Weakness is the consequence of having been torn out of the "roots" concerning Jews and of never having been grafted into them in the case of Gentiles.
Thus, Christianity is too weak to face the new tasks it should deal with. Christianity is unable to fulfill the calling that has been given to it originally.
Europe does not simply import all kind of dust and garbage in our country. We also export a big amount of the same kind of trash to the west.
Shamanism inherited from the pagan ancestors, the revival of witchcraft and other kind of idolatries are a real army of demons that will go strengthening all those that are yet present in Western Europe.
The same way, by our annexation to the Union, the deep spirit cult of the Virgin Mary that reigns here will go to reinforce the same cult which is still very strong in the western part of the continent.
Here in parallel, the spirits of the Far-East religions are going to spread even more than today together with secularity and of course the Islam.
The increase of anti-Semitism together with the reconciliation of the monotheist religions are no other than the visible signs of New Age spirit’s work. You can see that when Peoples are being misled by false ideas and when they receive just a very superficial knowledge and a false image of God.
Today, people do no longer unify in Christ or God. Today’s men are falsely professing that we must unify in Abraham.
This is no other than the refusal of Grace, Redemption and all the blessings and promises of God and Christ, in the name of "God" while referring to Abraham.
During thousands of years, they were killing and robbing peoples in the name of the Cross. These robbed and slaughtered peoples became insensible to the redemption work of Jesus Christ. But today, the world is going even further: they are going against God with the Bible in their hands.
Hopes and fears in Europe?
The solution and the answer is more than 2000 years old.
There is no other way out of this than becoming the members of Christ’s Body!
Today’s situation is practically the same than at the time when Jesus Christ was living on earth.
A non-Greek people builds up a Hellenic Empire which spirit is ruling over all idols of the peoples that have been gathered under the yoke of a worldly political power.
Today’s Europe claims openly to be the descendant and the heir of this extinct empire. Moreover, it considers Greco-Roman culture and philosophy as being its roots instead of its Judeo-Christian past.
This is how the life of our Lord on earth can be a model for us.
He was the citizen of an Empire that ruled over his own people.
He never denied belonging to the Jewish People. He never confronted nor to the pagan power nor to its servants. He never served Rome and had never been a part of it nor psychically nor spiritually. /This is also true today/.
Nevertheless he brought spiritual, psychical and even physical food to others during his ministry.
When we are pretending to be his disciples, we must walk as he and his disciples did at that time.
This way, our tasks and our calling are also the same as theirs.
The Body of Christ is made of disciples. We must then be independents and above any other spirit and empire.
Our fears and hopes are indeed a big question in our assemblies and churches:
Are we able to put our path, our truth and our life only in the hands of Jesus Christ?
Can we live, work and serve in him. Or do we remain under the yoke of men from which we are excepting rewards and favors.
By interest or tolerance, we often want to belong to powers whose owners are waiting to be definitely judged.
The next stage of our path is very difficult and dangerous since the narrow way is getting narrower.
The time is near when Christianity will have to make a choice.
Will it repent from its past of religiousness and sin? Or will it goes on cheating on itself and its neighborhood and continue to die from this slow death which already eats it for long?
Is there still a chance to see it taking a new departure?
According to our testimonies and experiences in the ministry, I have to say: Yes, there is still a chance!
Our joy and hope is to see how many rejected and denied people have an increasing interest for the Gospel in the whole Carpathian valley.
The peoples that have been disapproved and excluded by Christianity are thirsting for the Word of God. This hunger creates an atmosphere of revivification among their communities.
A new wave of revival is also visible in our country when more and more Muslims are repenting and accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord.
Concerning our personal calling, the fig tree is yet budding among the Jewish community and is ready to blossom!
We can see it through many countries around us.
The situation and the calling of Hungary are very particular.
God is the only one who knows the reason why the Carpathian valley and its surroundings is the cradle of the modern Jewish spirit?
I just know a little fragment of the answer to this question: All wings of Jewry of this region remained faithful to the Torah. No reformed or liberal trends that have misled so many western European Jews towards secularity could never put down any root in this part of the globe.
The same way, Christian reformation had been a very big blessing for the region since people recognized and understood the Holy Scriptures, the Old Testament and the Laws of God. At the beginning, a real reform was taking place here.
However both communities had gone very far from these Roots today. A terrible process began when faith becomes religiousness and when the religious communities turn to be simple socio-cultural institutions instead of fulfilling their callings.
Such a calling and knowledge of the situation obliges us to lead Jewry towards God again and avoid any thoughtless "missions" towards them. The same way, we must reform all the deformed Christian communities by reestablishing the dignity of the Holy Trinity in our lives.
Only the testimony of our lives put in order in Christ is able to bring any change in the life of others when the "veil" will finally fall down from the eyes of Jews according to the will of God. The visible Jesus Christ living in us is only able to reveal the Father to them again.
The disciples who are spiritually and psychically in order and whose faith and identity are in their right place do have a big role to play in Hungary such as anywhere else.
Our weakness often comes from the fact that we refuse the servants of God who are very numerous in this region. It also often comes from the fact that we refuse ourselves too and that we are fleeing from our calling received from God. This rebellious act does freeze us in one place.
Instead we trust all kinds of methods, theologies and other movements and Christian servants that we are importing from abroad. This is how we often create idols instead of examining all things at the light of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God.
Our tasks and ministry will grow once we will be annexed to Europe.
Not long ago, I was sowing the seeds of the Word in Western Europe when I get really upset and deceived.
The state of Christianity in those regions looks like a massive snow coat, a kind of frozen field.
Despite this sad recognition I encourage everybody to "sow the seeds on the water".
Even if this water is frozen, the seeds have to be sown.
I am sure that the warmth and the radiance of the Holy Spirit will melt the frozen hearths and that the sown seeds will one day finally fall in their right place in the ground.
They will surely take roots in the ground that had been already ploughed by some servants of God about 500 years ago when they started the reformation.
But our work does not just limit to the European citizens. A growing work has to be done among those who remained out of the borders of the Union.
More and more people are calling us and inviting us because they are thirsty and they want to receive a "glass of water". They would like some spiritual food.
The denied ones, the little ones, the banished and hated ones, all those that God wants to reach through us!
The response to our fears and hopes has been given to us through the life of our Master which has to be an example for us:
Although we are the registered members of a worldly empire and that we must render to "Cesar the things which are Cesar’s", we have to rise above all spiritual empire which is not conciliable with the Law of God and which is against the example of Jesus Christ.
He never started wars against the Empire but he also never submitted to it.
He just made his ministry and miracles among the poor and the ill persons.
He openly fulfilled his role of teacher in Decapolis, Samaria, among the Sadducees, the Pharisees and among many other branches of Judaism of that time.
In a word, he achieved his task among his people, among Jews and mixed Jews. His ministry was manly to call these people back to God since their faith was mixed, religious or nonexistent.
Our mission also consists in going towards these weak and mixed people who were torn out from their faith. We have to go and search them through evangelizing and teaching them also with prophecies. Our people is no other than the religious Christianity and those who are hybrids in their faith (Sadducees, Samaritans and libertines). They are all waiting for us in order to be woken up and delivered from their idols.
So we have to refrain from building new theologies, new churches and other religious institutions. Our work can only be the building of Christ’s Body which is not to be mistaken with any existing earthly institutional kind of church.
Our return to Europe should not mislead anyone. Don’t be dazzled.
Our experiences and testimonies are showing that the time of Grace turns little by little towards those people who have been denied and hated by Christianity and also towards Muslims to finally return to the Jews themselves.
Grace starts turning towards those that we had been rejected and also towards regions governed by Islam where the Gospel has not been professed yet.
The veil upon the eyes of Jews will be taken off in the moment and in the way God has wanted to. However we can already see the signs of their revival all around the world.
Let us ask God so that he gives us wisdom and so that he prepares us to be the tools of the coming revivals all over the world.
Meanwhile, Christianity should go towards those that they have left on their own, towards Islam and Jewry by repenting and asking for forgiveness for all the sins they have done against these peoples.
Without this, Christianity will never have any mission coming from God among these peoples.
Some pretence of forgiveness, all sorts of reconciliation and other kind of acceptations have already been done as the fruit of cowardice but these will never hold any fruit and will never bring any real peace.
Today God is searching for those who are not able to accept Jesus Christ and thus are unable to become parts of the People of God. God is also calling all religious Christians who are not under the power of the Anointed King and who does not accept the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Our work became bigger than ever. We are not simply responsible for the citizens of our country but also for the citizens of the whole Europe.
To settle our relationship with God proofs that we love him.
The love of God is his Son who came for us and through which faith, hope and love can grow inside of us.
As this love grows inside of us and the spaces around us are getting wider and wider, we can see that only the following tree things remained in our lives: faith, hope and love. These three are no other than the power and the kingdom of Jesus Christ in which there can be absolutely no fear or anguish.
There we can live without having to make any projects of our minds.
Let us go and live as the ambassadors of this Kingdom among this big earthly empire. Let us represent the Kingdom of God having the mandate of our King in hands.
Shalom!(At the occasion of the connection of Hungary to the European Union in 2004)
Translated from hungarian by Richard (Zeev Shlomo)
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