Comment on Is The Antichrist Coming? by sandor

sandor · 7/13/2025, 8:26:00 AM · permalink

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tikvah · 7/13/2025, 4:14:50 PM · permalink

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sonatime · 7/13/2025, 11:46:03 PM · permalink

I would argue that Jesus is not an idol and never presented himself as one and made his relationship to God clear.  
But I am open to hearing the arguments. There is only One God YHWH  
  
Genesis 15:6 "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness"  
  
"the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14)  
  
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)  
  
Psalm 110:1  
Of David. A psalm. The LORD says to my lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”  
  
Isaiah 53  
53 Who has believed our message  
    and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  
2   
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,  
    and like a root out of dry ground.  
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,  
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.  
3   
He was despised and rejected by mankind,  
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.  
Like one from whom people hide their faces  
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.  
  
4   
Surely he took up our pain  
    and bore our suffering,  
yet we considered him punished by God,  
    stricken by him, and afflicted.  
5   
But he was pierced for our transgressions,  
    he was crushed for our iniquities;  
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,  
    and by his wounds we are healed.  
6   
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,  
    each of us has turned to our own way;  
and the Lord has laid on him  
    the iniquity of us all.  
  
7   
He was oppressed and afflicted,  
    yet he did not open his mouth;  
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,  
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,  
    so he did not open his mouth.  
8   
By oppression\[a\] and judgment he was taken away.  
    Yet who of his generation protested?  
For he was cut off from the land of the living;  
    for the transgression of my people he was punished.\[b\]  
9   
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,  
    and with the rich in his death,  
though he had done no violence,  
    nor was any deceit in his mouth.  
  
10   
Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,  
    and though the Lord makes\[c\] his life an offering for sin,  
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,  
    and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.  
11   
After he has suffered,  
    he will see the light of life\[d\] and be satisfied\[e\];  
by his knowledge\[f\] my righteous servant will justify many,  
    and he will bear their iniquities.  
12   
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,\[g\]  
    and he will divide the spoils with the strong,\[h\]  
because he poured out his life unto death,  
    and was numbered with the transgressors.  
For he bore the sin of many,  
    and made intercession for the transgressors.

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tikvah · 7/14/2025, 2:14:18 AM · permalink

I will write on what Mishne Tora says about the “Messianic times”.

We explained earlier that the Messiah or Mashiah will be a monarch, a ruler of Israel, a descendant of the dynasty of David, with a position close to that of King David and Bar Kokhba.

His mission: to bring all the Jews back to Israel and rebuild the third and final Bet haMiqdash.

Maimonides also insists again and again that the Messiah will not come to change the laws of the Tora. On the contrary, he will come to teach, implement them and defend them.

This is what Maimonides says when he talks about the ways to identify who is NOT the Messiah (Hilkhot Melakhim 11: 3):..

“Our Torah, its precepts and laws, will never be changed. Nothing will be added to its precepts and none will be void or removed. If anyone suggests \[on behalf of God\] to add or to remove a commandment, or to interpret it out of what our tradition explains \[גילה פנים בתורה והוציא הדברים שלמצוות מפשוטן\], we know that he is an impostor or a heretic “.

In other words, if a candidate to be the Mashiah proposes to change even one single law of the Tora, we know that this is a false Messiah. Here Maimonides refers to the two great biblical religions, who accepted the Hebrew Bible, but tried to change, add or remove from its precepts, and more specifically Maimonides refers here to Yeshu (Jesus), because he was a self-proclaimed Messiah of the Jewish people.

Not everyone knows that there are several rabbinical sources that mention explicitly “Yeshu” and how he tried to change the Tora. The Talmud mentions him for example in Masekhet Sanhedrin. Of course, the comments of the rabbis, many of them were contemporaries of Yeshu, were not received with much enthusiasm by the Church. And numberless times the Talmud was burned publicly, with this pretext. In some exceptional cases the Church allowed to reprint the Talmud, but the paragraphs talking about Yeshu had to be omitted.

With the book of Maimonides something similar happened. Particularly with a paragraph in Chapter 11 of Hilkhot Melachim where Maimonides speaks of the Messiah, and mentions Yeshu. This paragraph was also censured for centuries, but survived in many manuscript editions of the Mishne Tora produced in Arab countries. And only 15 or 20 years ago this paragraph was again reprinted in the new editions of the Mishne Tora.

What does Maimonides say about Yeshu? I quote:

Hilchot Melachim 11: 4a.

“Also Yeshua of Nazaret imagined that he was the Messiah, and he was executed by the order of the court. This had been prophesied by Daniel, who said.” And the children of those indecent among your own people, will rebel in fulfillment of their \[own\] vision, but they will fail “(Daniel 11:14). And, is there any bigger failure than this? All prophets said that the Messiah will redeem the people of Israel and will save them \[from their enemies\], and that the Messiah will bring them back to their homeland, and strengthen the observance of the Torah… and this \[man, Yeshu\] caused \[the opposite\]: the death of the Jews by the sword, the exile of the Jews and their dispersion \[around the world\]; Yeshu tried to replace the Tora, and he deceived most of the world into serving a god who is not HaShem “.

Maimonides explains very clearly why Yeshu represents the opposite of what the Messiah will be for the people of Israel. He attempted to change the Tora, and we were exiled, persecuted and killed, ironically “in the name of Yeshu”… Is this “our” Messiah?.

The true Messiah will lead, and defend the people of Israel from its enemies. With the help of HaShem, he will fight to protect us and he will bring us all back to the land of Israel, where we will live in peace with our neighbors, free to serve HaShem in the Bet haMiqdash, study His Tora and observe HaShem’s eternal commandments.

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mel_gibson_was_right · 7/29/2025, 8:20:48 PM · permalink

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sonatime · 7/14/2025, 1:56:33 PM · permalink

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tikvah · 7/14/2025, 2:12:14 AM · permalink

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sonatime · 7/14/2025, 12:22:01 PM · permalink

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tikvah · 7/14/2025, 6:31:33 PM · permalink

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tikvah · 7/14/2025, 2:15:07 AM · permalink

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tikvah · 7/14/2025, 6:30:18 PM · permalink

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sonatime · 7/14/2025, 1:06:14 PM · permalink

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