The first two parts summarize the foundation of how I understand what Jews are doing today, and the wider political currents.
It’s very easy to miss the point that Israel did have a mandate from God as declared in the Old Testament, but surrendered it in favor of a very shallow self-worship. They rejected the deep and mystical truth for worldly advantage. They rejected the God of revelation and defiled themselves, via their worldly desires. Their religion is very worldly, and they are vehement in rejecting the otherworldly viewpoint. Even the Kabbalism they cooked up turns out to be esoteric worldliness.
Individual Jews range over the whole spectrum from the esoteric nonsense all the way down to simple secularism. Some have walked away from their heritage, among them writers like Ron Unz and Israel Shahak. They are the exceptions that prove the rule: Jews as a whole serve Satan, not the God who made them. I saw quite clearly their adoption by Satan long before I ever knew Heiser existed. This adoption should be obvious to anyone, yet American church religion is dominated by various flavors of Zionism. Experientially, I saw the tail end of the process of Zionism hijacking American churches during my youth. It took me a while to realize what I was seeing, but I rejected the Dispensationalist lie long ago.
Basic truth: Satan will offer anything at all to keep us away from the gospel. That includes an awful lot of half-truth, just enough to sound like the Bible, but leaving out the essence of embracing the Covenant of Christ and testifying effectively for God’s claims.
Notice something about the Wilderness Temptations: Satan offered things he could not give. Not that he couldn’t actually provide some semblance of what he promised, but that none of it mattered. He offered economic plenty and physical comfort, but making that your goal is deadly, no matter what flavor you prefer. He offered political stability, but it would have been artificial and wholly outside of God’s revelation. It was a distraction from the real thing. He also offered to feed our heads while letting our hearts die. We would imagine that we could understand reality, but would be kept far away from Eternity.
Jesus rejected this offer, but the Jewish people accepted it. They swore allegiance to a false covenant offered by Satan. They became his special nation, something God had not given him in the allotment at the Tower of Babel. Their flesh belongs to him; that’s all he got. He uses their worldly presence to keep the rest of mankind in the flesh and away from the privileges of the Covenant of Christ.
The fundamental truth of Jewish identity is their commitment to their tribe and the false covenant. The level and kind of commitment they hold determines the worldly benefit they receive, though it’s far more complicated than the mind can imagine. They don’t all share the same political commitments, but the key to their unity is not political or anything else most outsiders would expect. At the core, their unity is purely a matter of ritual and the dark magic on which it is based. The rituals vaguely resemble those commanded via Moses, but have been perverted in the whole so that they now serve Satan.
Did you imagine that the Talmud was purely a matter of intellect? No, it invokes dark powers. It didn’t start out that way, but it developed over the centuries after the New Testament period. The Nephilim spirits (demons) live among them, when Israel once was the nation God raised up to kill the Nephilim. Jewish experts have confessed that what holds them together is the ritual lifestyle, regardless of any intellectual perception of what the rituals mean. Theology is not the point. They worship side by side under any number of varying illusions, but revel in their ritual unity.
Any lingering Jewish loyalty among those who convert to Christian religion is a mark of that dark power still at work. This is part of the reason we teach that humans must renounce their ethnic identity to become part of the Covenant. It’s one thing to be aware of ethnic background intellectually; it’s another to maintain some allegiance or commitment to those who share our fleshly identity. That is the key Satanic influence that keeps us weak in the Covenant.
Keep in mind: The dark magic defiles and fouls your spiritual life. It’s important to keep track of the signature of the dark power of the Nephilim spirits. It’s of somewhat lesser importance to keep track of who maintains a Jewish identity because of the high probability they will serve Satan’s agenda. Jews will get involved in plenty of things that don’t matter in order to hide their real commitments, but as long as they think of themselves as Jews, there is a defiling presence in all they touch. You need to become sensitive to this according to the gifts and talents God has given you.
The whole point of the gospel message is to seek a spiritual identity that transcends flesh.
“Not that he couldn’t actually provide some semblance of what he promised, but that none of it mattered.”
I didn’t have a strong view on this either way, but I had always though Satan actually could have given Him these things, which makes sense to me if you think he controls some part of it. He was offering it to the temporary/earthly part of Him, because Satan would have known He could’ve taken it regardless. Maybe Satan wasn’t sure if all of those earthly powers were something the Father would’ve given Jesus eventually, but I suspect he did know.
I might say it’s ultimately irrelevant whether Satan knew the plan or not, but the point was that Jesus rejected them because He knew it wasn’t the plan.
Satan could deliver a human version of each of these temptations. It would work like that briefly. But Satan was selling these promises as everything the Messiah would need for an everlasting kingdom on earth, and that was the lie. Paul says that the Divine Council was not aware of what Jesus was planning to do, and I simply extrapolated that Satan probably didn’t know or he might have clued in his allies among the elohim.