Dispersed But Not Forsaken with Mottel Baleston

Part 2: Mottel Baleston Presentation

Mottel Baleston: While there are many people in churches that want to be favorably disposed toward the Jewish people, they don’t know why. They hear snippets of Bible verses that talk about Israel. Well, there’s Israel in the Bible and in a good Bible believing church, you’re going to hear a lot about that. But then you turn on the news and there’s the current modern-day state of Israel, and there’s confusion as to how the modern state of Israel relates to ancient biblical Israel.

And then to confuse things even further, you look at prophecy and you talk and you read about the fact that there’s going to be a thousand-year Messianic Kingdom, that Jesus is going to establish His Kingdom on the Earth. He will reign from the literal city of Jerusalem, and that’s yet a third Israel. And so people are confused what is our relationship? And then if you go to certain types of churches, they’ll say, oh, ignore all that stuff. We’re now the new Israel. And so no wonder people are confused.

I’m going to direct your attention to the slides in just a moment because the title of our time this morning is that the Jewish people have been “Dispersed,” I’m going to detail a little of that, “but they’ve not been forsaken.” And before you start taking pictures of the slides, I distribute all of my PowerPoints. If you email me, you’ll get this PowerPoint. Happy to share it, because there’s going to be too much detail. Won’t have time for that. But let’s look at the grand sweep of what God has done amongst the Jewish people.

First to establish them as a nation, to call them out as a separate nation, then to give birth to the Scriptures, to give birth to the Savior so that you are all here. And the reason that you’re all here is because of a Jewish baby born in a Jewish town by the name of Bethlehem. And so let’s kind of get those ducks in order so that our Bible knowledge is not random, but rather we have a cogent understanding of how God worked through the covenants of the Bible.

One of my favorite things to teach, I’ve got a series currently on YouTube teaching through the covenants of the Bible. But folks, if you understand those covenants, you’ll understand how God is moving forward in history. So yes, the Jewish people were dispersed but not forsaken. It all starts here with the Abrahamic covenant. And you can read the text very easily. It’s the dividing point of Scripture.

When I first came to faith at the age of 21, I started reading the Scriptures and I was curious. I wasn’t yet a believer. We had no New Testament. I had to go to the Brooklyn Public Library to find a New Testament. And I said, you know, I was always warned by my grandfather not to read this forbidden book. It’s a handbook on antisemitism. And so with trembling fingers, I wasn’t sure what I would find, see, because I grew up in a neighborhood that you were either Jewish or Italian in this neighborhood, entirely.

And I went to both Jewish schools and I went to public schools at various times, Jewish day schools and public schools. But in the public school, there were a lot of Italian fellows. And the only people I knew who believed in Jesus were all Roman Catholic Italians. So of course you understand that that makes Jesus Italian. Growing up as a Jewish kid in Brooklyn, that’s what a lot of us thought, because those were the only people who seemed to be worshiping Him. And then I heard about the Irish, and that was confusing.

But then kind of in into my mid-teens, someone said, “Well, Jesus was Jewish.” And I said, “Well, maybe He was. But then He converted.” And so it sounds humorous to us now, but that’s, you’re starting at zero. You’re starting below zero, you’re starting underwater because you don’t understand the basics of how God has put things together. So let’s look at those basics.

In Genesis 12, you see it on the overhead here. Genesis 12 is the dividing point of Scripture. The man who led me to the Lord said, “Everything up to this point is leading up to it.” And everything from this verse forward, everything from Genesis 12 forward, is outworking and commentary on how these verses are going to be fulfilled. Everything in the Bible after Genesis 12 is a result of this passage. Everything. Nothing excluded.

So, very simple passage. “The Lord said to Avram, ‘Go from your country and from your family and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you, I will curse, for from you, all of the families of the Earth shall be blessed.'” Amazing passage. That is the first mention of a covenant that God is going to make.

Most of the narrative of Scripture, most of the flow and the outworking of Scripture occurs directly as a result of these covenant promises. And so God is going to call this man, Avram. Eventually he would be Abraham. And He would call him to leave a pagan land, the Land of Ur, of the Chaldees. And he would go forward into the Promised Land, and he would go up into what is now Syria and come down along that fertile crescent there and drop into Canaan, the land of Israel.

And so Abraham was called by God to set in motion very important things. Most notably for our understanding, why did God form the Jewish people? You know, it’s interesting, someone pointed out to me a couple of months ago as I was speaking in Church, he said, “You said something incorrect. You said God chose the Jewish people. But not only did He choose them, He actually formed them. It’s not as though they existed before He devised this plan.” So why in the world was Abraham chosen? What was the concern? What was the need?

Well, the need was that the entire world of mankind was in a cycle of sin and death and sin and death from which we could not extricate ourselves. It’s like one of those old cartoons where, you know, someone’s in the washing machine, you’re seeing them going round and round, and you see arms and legs flying. You know, “Tom and Jerry.” And they can’t get out. It’s like they’re in a bundle. Well, we were caught, the Scripture says, in the cycle of sin and death and sin and death from which we could not remove ourselves by our own efforts.

I don’t have it on the overhead here, but there’s a passage that says, “The Lord looked.” Isaiah 59. “Now, the Lord looked and he saw in the entire human race that there was no man who could break this cycle. So his own arm brought salvation.” And one of the alternative titles of Messiah Jesus is the arm of Jehovah. Jehovah Himself looked at our helpless estate. He looked over the edge of the cloud and says, there’s no way that they’re ever going to extricate themselves. They’re sinners by birth and sinners by choice. And they only get better at it.

And thus, God Himself, in His compassion for us, desired to intervene in the only way that could happen. Because we were in that situation because of the sin of Adam and Eve. We’ve inherited their sin; we inherit their sin nature. We then capitalize on that. And so into that situation, God would send a Savior, but the Savior would have to make blood atonement. That’s the principle we see earliest outside the garden as they’re expelled. And so God would send a Jewish nation to be a part.

You know, one of the, again, when you start to preach, you have to understand how many associated verses come in. Why are the Jewish people separate? In fact, that famous old evil man of Haman, boo. I’m glad to hear the boos now. He said, “King Ahasuerus, there is a certain people in your kingdom, and they’re not like everyone else. Their laws are different. They’re separate. It would be in your best interest to allow me to kill them.”

You see, even that evil one could see that the Jewish people, even though they were captive there in Persia, they yet were separate. God called them to be separate because they were to carry out a holy sort of event for God. They were called to do something that was a Divine appointment. They were called to give the world the Scriptures. And Satan hates the Scriptures. And they were called to give the world the Savior. And Satan hates the Savior.

And so God says, no, you need to be a separate nation because otherwise you’ll be contaminated and you’ll be thrown off course from this holy task. And so they were told to be a separate nation. Why? Not because they were any better. We ain’t. I’ll tell you that. All you’ve got to do is to look at some of the white collar crime. Okay? And some of us excel in that. That’s no hit on us because every group has proclivities. So no, the Jewish people are no better and no worse than any other ethnic group in the world.

But the reality of the persecution is we have a target on our back because we are the ones whom God is going to use to ultimately initially bring the Savior, to bring Jesus. Why do you think there are so many wars in the Old Testament? One by one, Satan is taking his shot at trying to cut off the line that is going to birth the Messiah. But he fails. He fails to do it. And so ultimately the Messiah is born, the king is presented to the people of the kingdom. The king walks in their midst.

They keep asking him, where is the kingdom? And in one of the most misunderstood verses in the Bible, Jesus says to them, “The kingdom of God is in your midst.” Not the kingdom of God is within you, you know, Murray, Sam, and Dave. “The kingdom of God is in your midst.” Who was standing in their midst? The King. The King is standing in their midst. The King is representing the kingdom. The King is coming to the kingdom.

The question that remains then is, will the people of the kingdom accept the King? A small group of us do. You read about them in your New Testament. But the majority of the people say, we have no king but Caesar. And ultimately, the King says to the people of the Kingdom, okay, you’re sending me away and I will not return until you say, “Baruch haba b’shem Adonai.” We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

And so there is a reason that this Abrahamic covenant was given. It was given to codify the Jewish people. While the Abrahamic covenant is made with the literal ethnic people of Israel, there are spiritual blessings that overflow from it for all of you. And we’ll talk about that more in relation to the New Covenant. So this Abrahamic Covenant starts us off. Then as they go on, they’re given a law code. And I know that’s very tiny for you to read, but again, email me, you’ll have the entire original PowerPoint.

But very simply what this is talking about, that at Mount Sinai, they’re given their second major covenant, the Mosaic Law. At Mount Sinai, you take this nation, which had originally been founded by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Things were going well. They go down to Egypt. They had a nice Jewish neighborhood in Egypt. Deli’s, they had anything they wanted, but then there arose a pharaoh who knew not Joseph. Tables were turned; the Jewish people were enslaved.

Oftentimes, some of the secular rabbis, when they’re teaching about this, they’ve made a very good point, one that I agree with. They say that the people of Israel went down into Egypt as 12 separate tribes, but they came up from Egypt as one single nation of people (im echad). And so as a result, God brings them to Sinai to give them this law code that was to, once again, kind of keep them separate and would further illustrate several things. The Mosaic Covenant given at Mount Sinai would demonstrate God’s perfect standard of holiness. And very quickly, we would realize we ain’t there. We can’t get to that standard.

It would also give them rules and regulations that would protect them. Very quickly, here are some of the points, that they were to be a kingdom of priests. They were to bring the light of the Creator to a dark world. There would be blessings for faithfulness. There would be an obedience, but there would be cursings if they did not keep their commitment. And here’s where we get into dispersed, but not forsaken, because God gathered them, but here’s what He says in Deuteronomy 28 on the screen. “But it will come about, if you do not obey the Lord your God, to be careful to follow all of his commandments and all of his statutes, which I’m commanding you today, that all of these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Jehovah will disperse you.”

There’s the dispersion, the diaspora. As we say in Hebrew, that is the Galut. We are in Golus, as we say in Yiddish. We are in this dispersion. “Jehovah God will disperse you from among the nations, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth.” The result, the reason, the underpinning for the dispersion today comes back to this very verse. If you read Deuteronomy, the latter chapters there, there are blessings for obedience. But sadly, the list of cursing’s for disobedience are three times as long.

And if you read through some of those curses, they are simply God saying, this is the consequence of you going away from Me. And for myself, knowing that my grandfather had 15 cousins, aunts, uncles who were murdered in the death camp at Treblinka, when I read that passage that these things, you’ll have people dragging you from one place to another. They will be yelling at you in a language you do not understand. You will wish that at day, that it was night, at night, that it was day. Horrible things that were replicated in the concentration camps.

It’s not that God did those things, but that Satan, the enemy of our soul, was always seeking to destroy the Jewish people. And the reason that he does that is to drive a wedge between the Jewish people and the Jewish Savior. You see, if you would’ve talked to my grandfather, he would’ve said, “I came to America to escape persecution and the pogroms in Poland. I came to America because people with crosses around their neck were going to church on Sunday and beating me up on Monday.” That was my grandfather’s statement to my father, which he later had told me.

Don’t ever walk in front of a church. There would be ruffians who would throw rocks at you. That was his experience in Poland. It was my grandmother’s experience in Ukraine. And 10 years after my grandmother came to America, her village in the Ukraine, the village of Felshtin, experienced a horrible pogrom. 600 Jewish people were pulled from their homes by individuals who considered themselves to be Christians. And then those Jewish people were hacked to death. One of the people who was hacked to death was my grandmother’s younger brother, a boy by the name of Mottel. And friends, that’s why I’m named Mottel today, after my grandmother’s youngest brother who was still behind in the Ukraine, killed in a pogrom by people who imagined that they were Christians.

This is the wedge that Satan diabolically has driven between the Jewish people and the Jewish Savior. And so the Jewish people say, why would I ever want to believe in the God of those who have so violently persecuted me? It seems to make sense to them. Let me stay far away. Let me invest in education. Let me become a professional, doctor, attorney, something so that I’m not dependent upon, you know, political circumstances. And all of this is a result of this passage we see in Deuteronomy where the Jewish people initially were unified in their land but then dispersed. And clearly that is the result of this disobedience that the entire human race is under.

Part 3: Transition to Unity

Nathan Jones: Mottel went on to describe the original unity that marked the Jewish people, but how over time Satan was able to divide them and lead many woefully astray. Eventually, they succumbed to the curses Moses had described in Deuteronomy. But Mottel also explained why God never forsook them, because He had given them an unconditional promise.

Part 4: Mottel Baleston Continued

Mottel Baleston: So the bottom line here is that you’re going from a unity to a dispersion. And yet in the midst of this dispersion, God never forsook them. He never turned His back on them. So in this dispersion, you didn’t have God forsaking them. And that’s the important thing to keep in mind here. We’re saying, yes, they went from unity to dispersion, but they were never forsaken. During all of these sad events, during each one of them, God was continuing to go along with His Jewish people.

You know, the very word, Israel, you know, you’re here at a conference for Israel, but do you know what the actual word means? Israel? El obviously is Elohim, but Isra is one who strives with, who wants to keep up with God. Jacob became Israel because he latched on and he said, I will not let you go. I want to keep up with God. And you know, as much as, you know, there’s an old saying in the Jewish community, more than Israel has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel.

And while that would be an interesting discussion, I would say that more than Israel has held God, God has held Israel because of His unwavering Abrahamic Covenant promise. That is an unconditional promise. They could not break it. In contrast to Mosaic Law, which could and was broken, Abrahamic Covenant is still with us. It is eternal.

Part 5: Transition to Church Error

Tim Moore: The continuing tragedy is that many in the Church have been duped into thinking God has washed His hands of the Jewish people, or that Christians should subject Jews to scorn and persecution. Such an attitude is absolutely unbiblical. Obviously, if God’s unconditional promises to the Jews can be nullified by their unbelief, then His promises to Gentile believers in Jesus Christ can also be nullified when we are fickle in our faith. But God never breaks His promises.

Part 6: Mottel Baleston Continued

Mottel Baleston: So yes, the Jewish believers have had a great impact, but at the same time, the vast majority of our Jewish people have rejected the Messiah. And once again, returning to that idea, there are some in the institutional church who believes that that disqualifies them. Well, if that disqualifies them and makes God break His promise, then God can also break His promise to you because you have not been fully faithful. Again, when God makes an unconditional promise, when you’ve entered into His family as His daughters and sons, you’ve entered into an inheritance as daughters and sons of the living God. And so Israel has that place.

Closing

Tim Moore: Mottel makes an important point about being called a son or daughter of God. Once we have been grafted into His family, God does not cast us aside.

Nathan Jones: And yet we’ve got a war between the sons of Ishmael and the sons of Jacob. And we see that where Mottel lives in the New Jersey area. I’ve been there many times, in New York, large concentration of Jewish people, but they might have to decide to vote for an Islamic anti-Semitic mayor.

Tim Moore: You know, and he has proven himself to be not only anti-Semitic, as was his father, but also a communist. It’s shocking that New York City would embrace someone who is so clearly hateful toward the Jews, toward Israel, and even toward the American system.
Well, in the providence of God, many Jews have found refuge in the United States since its founding, although often living amidst latent, if not outright, antisemitism.

Nathan Jones: America had largely avoided some of the outrageous systemic persecution of the Jews seen in Europe for centuries. But in recent months, a vile form of antisemitism has arisen on college campuses and in cities around this country. With the ascension of elected leaders, such as Zohran Mamdani, it is only a matter of time before violence again explodes against the Jews.

Tim Moore: We’ve made it very clear that we stand with Israel and seek to bless Jewish people collectively and individually wherever they are. But we can discern the signs of our times, and we know what the prophetic Word of God says about the rise of hatred against the Jews in the End Times. Simply put, every nation will come against Israel because that has been Satan’s consistent modus operandi.

Nathan Jones: Mottel had much more to share in his presentation, but you’ll have to access the full message on our Christ in Prophecy YouTube channel or call the number on the screen or visit our online store and order a copy of the flash drive or DVD that contains all the Conference presentations, along with bonus material and two Question & Answer sessions. Either format can be yours for only $25, and that includes shipping.

Tim Moore: Join us again in our next episode as we continue sharing messages from our Bible Prophecy Conference. And if you’d like us to bring a prophecy conference to your church or hometown, please reach out to us. We’d be glad to offer a powerful word of encouragement from God’s prophetic Word.

Just remember, all the Signs of the Times, (including the Greatest Sign), are provided by God Himself to alert us to the fact that Jesus is coming soon. With that in mind, keep looking up and being watchful, for our Redemption is drawing near. Godspeed!

End of Program