Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 165:660 (Oct 2008)
Article: The Jewish People and Salvation
Author: Michael A. Rydelnik

BSac 165:660 (October-December 2008) p. 447

The Jewish People and Salvation

Michael A. Rydelnik

Michael A. Rydelnik is Professor of Jewish Studies, Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois.

In 1996 I received a phone call from my cousin in Israel, telling me that my father had just died. A Holocaust survivor and an Orthodox Jew, my father had cut all ties with me when I became a follower of Yeshua (Jesus). He moved to Israel and refused any contact with me. Despite my repeated efforts to reach my father through the years, he would never respond. When he died, his only surviving sibling, my aunt, instructed the entire family not to let me know of his passing. Gratefully one of my Israeli cousins refused this last painful demand and called me.

That was the first time I questioned the particularist1 soteriology I had been taught at Bible college and seminary. I had been taught and believed that apart from conscious faith in Yeshua, all people, including my father, would be lost for eternity. But if someone could have earned his way into heaven on the basis of suffering, certainly my father could have. He lost his first wife, five sons, and an adopted daughter to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He himself had suffered miserably in the Lodz ghetto and then in several concentration camps. After the war he remarried and his new wife died while giving birth to my half brother. Then he married my mother, with whom he had a daughter (my sister Esther), who died in a drowning accident in Berlin when she was two years old. After this tragedy my parents moved to America and tried to rebuild their lives. More than twenty years later my mother, my two

BSac 165:660 (October-December 2008) p. 448

sisters, and I confessed faith in Yeshua, causing my father to disown us and move to Israel.

When my dad, who had suffered so much in life, died, a small voice in my head began to question how God could exclude him from eternal life. In the midst of my doubts I had two firm convictions: that Yeshua is truly the promised Messiah, and that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.

So I turned to the Bible to reexamine my previously held convictions. This is still where I turn when I am pained by the loss of my father and the continuing unbelief of the vast majority of my people. Must Jewish people consciously believe in Yeshua to have eternal life or are there exceptions to this seemingly biblical requirement? In this article I share what I believe the Scriptures say about the Jewish people and salvation.

The Bible addresses this topic in clear terms. The Scriptures affirm four principles regarding Jewish people and salvation.

The Los...

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