Monday, January 23, 2012

Michael Rydelnik - The Messianic Hope

I’ve mentioned Dr Michael Rydelnik’s book “The Messianic Hope – Is The Hebrew Bible Really Messianic?” Well Dan Phillips and Tony Garland have two excellent reviews of the book HERE and HERE.

Highly recommended reading!


From the book and Tony's review:

Messianic prophecy was the means God used to bring me to faith in Jesus the Messiah. My parents were Holocaust survivors who raised me in a traditional Jewish home. We were Orthodox in our Jewish beliefs and practices and, as such, I did believe in the future coming of a personal Messiah. Even so, it was not a central issue of my life. However, that changed when my mother announced that she believed in Jesus. This led to my father divorcing her and a radical shift in my life. I decided to study the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Bible and prove my mother wrong in attributing their fulfillment to Jesus of Nazareth. Although I was initially quite confident of my opinion, in time I was surprised to see that there was far more credibility to the messiahship of Jesus than I had first anticipated. After dealing with my fears of ostracism from the Jewish community, based on my new conviction that the Scriptures foretold a suffering Messiah who would be rejected by His own people and provide forgiveness thorough his death and resurrection, I put my trust in Jesus as Messiah and Lord. . . . I would never have made this decision apart from studying messianic prophecy. In fact, apart from messianic prediction and fulfillment, Jesus could not be identified as the Messiah of Israel, and if not that, then He could not be the Messiah of the world. It is for this reason, joined with my commitment to exegetical accuracy, that I believe it is essential to understand the Hebrew Bible as messianic. ~ Dr Rydelnik pp 11-12

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