The fifth passage of the Sefer Yeshua is based on Mk 1:39a & Lk 4:44 (that Yeshua went around the Galilee preaching), Mt 4:17 (calling for repentance), Mt 16:1-3 (Yeshua’s response to interpreting the signs of the times; there is a similar saying about asking for a sign and refusing to give one in Mk 8:11-13).
5. 1Yeshua` went about the Galilee, warning his fellow countrymen and women of the terrible destruction to come, just as the Message of God had instructed him to do. 2And from that time on, he began to speak out publicly, saying, ‘Repent, for the Kingship of God is fast approaching!’
3But a woman came up to Yeshua` and said, ‘Why do you prophesy these things? Show us a sign that what you say is true!’
4So Yeshua` said to her, ‘When it’s evening, you say, “It’ll be fair weather, because the sky’s red.” And in the morning, “It’ll be stormy today, because the sky’s red and overcast.” 5You know how to interpret the signs in the sky, but you can’t interpret the signs of the times!’
There are several important elements to this passage:
— that Yeshua began his public ministry in his native province of the Galilee, preaching to his fellow Galileans
— that the urgent impetus of this ministry was the imminent tribulation
— that he was engaged in this ministry because God had called him
— that his call was to repentance, because the Kingship of God was fast approaching
— that some people didn’t believe him, and asked for a sign
— that the signs of what was soon to happen were all around them
Yeshua’s calling from God
In Yahwist theology, a prophet is not someone who predicts the future; a prophet is someone who delivers God’s Message. That message will contain both warnings and consolations.
If you go by what Yeshua said and did, his words and actions suggest that he saw himself as a prophet of God, not a messiah. You don’t even need to look at what Yeshua achieved (or didn’t achieve) to come to this conclusion; you only need to look at what he tried to do – or rather, what he didn’t try to do. He didn’t try to gather any army to overthrow their oppressors, he didn’t seek to gather in the exiles, he didn’t seek to restore the Davidic monarchy, and he didn’t try to restore Israel as a sovereign, independent kingdom. He didn’t try to do anything that would suggest what he was doing were the actions of someone who thought he was a messiah.
His actions suggest instead that he thought of himself as a prophet of God – he did everything that was expected of a prophet to do: he preached a message of repentance to his fellow Jews, he exhorted them to return to God’s ways, he warned of a time of tribulation, and of a coming time of vindication for the righteous and the penitent. These are all actions of someone who thought he was a prophet called by God, not of a messiah.
If most ordinary people thought he was a prophet of God (Mt 21:11, 21:46, Lk 7:16), and he himself thought he was a prophet (Mt 10:41, 13:57, Lk 13:33), there was a problem which most commentators and scholars ignore: the fact that the Pharisees had declared that there were no more prophets, and that the only person they would listen to was the one they approved of as the messiah.
While Yeshua was alive, it was enough that ordinary folk accepted him as a prophet of God. However, after his death, it became more difficult for his Jewish followers to get people to listen to Yeshua’s warnings – he was a God-approved prophet, not a Pharisee-approved messiah. These circumstances, I believe, are what prompted his later followers to fatefully start claiming that he was a messiah, solely so that people who followed the Pharisees’ belief-system would listen to Yeshua’s message and heed his urgent warnings. And in order to make him into a messiah, they had to completely redefine what a messiah was – which speaks volumes in and of itself. If you have to redefine the meaning of something in order to force your beliefs to fit the picture, then your beliefs probably aren’t true.
The tribulation as the urgent impetus to Yeshua’s ministry
As a prophet of God, Yeshua would have been made painfully aware of a coming time of tribulation, possibly through prophetic visions, which eventually played out in the Jewish-Roman war of 66-73 CE, and again in the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132–136 CE. These were horrific and devastating wars, most notably in Judea, when the Temple was destroyed and the people exiled from the city – and eventually, from the whole of Judea.
It was Yeshua’s mission to call people to repentance, in order to save the Jewish people from the worst excesses of these wars, and for the time of tribulation to be cut short (Mk 13:20).
Yeshua’s public ministry
Yeshua essentially carried on from the ministry of Yochanan the Immerser (‘John the Baptist’). Yeshua’s message of repentance was the same as that of his master, Yochanan.
Yeshua’s ministry started off in the Galilee. His ministry seems to have been most successful in his home province, in the sense that most people there heeded his call to repentance and to reject the ways of violence preached by the Zealots. As a consequence, the Galilee was spared most of the ravages of the Jewish-Roman war that would strike them within 40 years. In fact, the Galilee became the refuge of the Jewish people when the Romans expelled Jews from Judea.
Who were Yeshua’s audience? If he preached in the synagogues, then that would include every stratum of society: workers and landowners, rich and poor, haves and have-nots. If he preached in public, on hillsides and in villages, he preached to anyone who was willing to listen to him. Because of the content of his message, his message would have resonated with the poor, the forgotten, the outcast, and those who had lost hope in the deteriorating world around them.
Yeshua’s call to repentance
In his call to repentance, he wasn’t doing anything that other Hebrew prophets had not done before him. After all, it was the job of a prophet to call for repentance. In times of national danger – that is, when the impending threat was to the whole of the Jewish people, as it was in his own day – prophets called for national repentance. A prophet would be failing in their job and their calling, if they only preached to a certain select group of people, and left out others. No one was exempt from God’s call to repentance.
So what is repentance? Repentance, in Jewish terms, is a complete turnaround, a return to God and God’s ways. This involves having genuine sorrow for the wrong things one has done, and committing to do better. In Jewish belief, God forgives us as soon as we repent. In pre-Exile Israelite theology, expiation and healing comes with bringing oneself before the Glory of God, so that one’s soul can be restored to its original clean state.
What is involved in the act of repentance? Ultimately, you try to put right what you did wrong, but the most important part to begin with is to stop engaging in behaviours and ways of thinking which keep you away from God – stop being self-destructive, stop being destructive towards others, stop directing your life according to your most base wants and urges, stop hating people, stop being angry at everyone and everything, stop judging other people, stop seeing people who disagree with you as your enemies, stop seeing people who are different from you as your opponents, stop enabling people who are merely leading you by the nose for their own nefarious ends, stop being selfish and thinking that you are the centre of the universe, stop thinking that you alone are right and everyone else is wrong, and so on.
Returning to God means returning to God’s values, God’s way of thinking – try to step into other people’s shoes and understand why they say what they say, and do what they do; speak kindly to those who are different to you; apply your religious faith with compassion instead of anger or judgment; seek to heal your society with your words, rather than divide it; help those in difficulty, and encourage those around you, so that you act like salt which brings out the best in people, instead of behaving like poison which only destroys everything and everyone around you.
‘The Kingship of God is fast approaching’
The traditional translation of this phrase varies, from ‘the Kingdom of God is upon us’ to ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand’.
Let’s start with how to understand the usage of ‘kingdom of God’ in this phrase. The underlying Aramaic phrase would have been malkhūteyh delahā. The Aramaic word malkhūtā doesn’t only mean ‘kingdom’, it can also mean kingship, reign, rule, royal authority, all depending on context.
From analysis of all the occasions when Yeshua used the term, ‘kingdom of God’, we can see that his own use of the phrase malkhūteyh delahā implies that it had four different meanings, and we can gauge which specific meaning he intended from context.
In this particular context here in this saying, the meaning is ‘Kingship of God’ rather than ‘Kingdom of God’. It is referring to the coming of God as King and Judge. It refers to the tribulation, when God’s power is manifested to judge the wicked, and vindicate the righteous. Here, the term ‘righteous’ doesn’t mean a ‘self-righteous’ or perfect person, it means ‘someone who tries their best to live according to God’s righteous ways’.
‘at hand’ / ‘upon us’: Then we have the Greek engiken, from the verb ἐγγίζω engidzo: to approach. Many English translations have ‘at hand’ or ‘is upon us’, but these renderings don’t really give the full sense of what the original Aramaic would have meant. The root-verb in Aramaic would have been qarav (קרב) to draw near, to approach.
To further confuse matters, the Greek has the verb in the perfect indicative (has drawn near), but from context – if we are correct in surmising that malkhūteyh delahā refers to God’s coming Kingship rather than God’s Kingdom – then the verb should have been in the present indicative (‘is drawing near’). This would mean the difference between Aramaic קרבת (qravat: has drawn near) and תקרוב (tiqrov: is drawing near, or even תקריב t’qareiv: ‘is fast drawing near’, which is the intensive pael form of the verb). If your Aramaic is not good (as was the case I suspect with the gospel writers), you can easily get these tenses all mixed up when trying to translate them into Greek. Given what Yeshua was talking about, I think the original Aramaic was תקריב מלכותיה דאלהא t’qareiv malkhūteyh delahā: ‘the Kingship of God is fast approaching’. Basically, this would have meant that ‘the tribulation is imminent / almost upon us’.
Prove it – show us a sign!
Throughout the gospels, it is the Sadducees and Pharisees who keep asking for a sign (an odd combination, since they were diametrically opposed to one another, although I guess most Gentiles outside the Holy Land would not have been aware of this). This double act was mostly put together by the gospel-writers for its anti-Jewish effect – to prove that the Jewish religious authorities were faithless in the face of everything that Yeshua was saying and doing. In the Matthean version of this passage, this teaching is given in the Galilee. It is therefore odd that the Sadducees should be mentioned by Matthew, since they were based in Jerusalem.
My conclusion is that the across-the-board directing of these arguments against the Sadducees and Pharisees is false – a fictional attempt by Matthew to discredit the two groups. It is more likely that one of the ordinary people in the Galilean crowds was asking Yeshua for a sign (hence the SY reconstruction as such).
In those days, influenced by their pagan neighbours, many ordinary Jewish people believed that a prophet’s words could be proved by miracles. If you can perform a miracle, then some people believed that the miracle proved and vindicated what a person was saying.
However, if you look at how God sees things, a miracle proves absolutely nothing. In Dt 13:1-3, God says through Moses,
Now if there should happen to arise among you a prophet, or someone who has predictive dreams, and they give you a promise of a sign or a miracle, and the sign or miracle they told you about actually comes to pass, and then they say, “Let us follow other gods” – which you have never experienced – “and let us worship them,” you must not pay any attention to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams, for Yahveh your God is testing you, in order to ascertain whether you really do love Yahveh your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
Many evangelical Christians believe that seeing miracles being performed in their church services means that their faith and beliefs must therefore be true. However, according to how God sees things, miracles prove nothing, even if such miracles are real.
Yeshua knew all this, and so refused to give people a sign (for a similar refusal, see also Mk 8:11-13).
Why there are no miracles in the Sefer Yeshua
If you read the entirety of the Sefer Yeshua, you might be struck with the fact that there are no miracles contained in it. Having taken note of what I have written above, the principle is that a true message must be able to stand on its own, without any signs and wonders, because miracles do not make a false message true.
If you place the gospels in their probable chronological order (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John), you will notice that the number of miracles in each gospel increases as you proceed with each gospel in time. We would expect this if each writer was inventing miracles to strengthen their message in the eyes of their Gentile audience. For previously pagan Gentiles, who had been raised with stories of divine miracle-workers, a story of a messenger of God who performed no miracles was rather a disappointment; in a pagan environment, miracles were expected of divine beings, hence the inclusion of miracles in the gospels, and likewise, hence the exclusion of them from the Sefer Yeshua. The absence of miracles in the S.Y. encourages us to focus on God‘s message instead.
Why can’t you read the signs of the times?
I’ve mentioned before that there are certain scholars who think that, because it is not possible to predict the future, or to see what is going to happen in the future, then anything which Yeshua is recorded as having predicted must therefore have been written well after his time, at a point after the predicted things have already happened (so, for example, they claim that Yeshua‘s predictions of the destruction of the Temple must have been composed after 70 CE, when the Temple was destroyed) .
In the words Yeshua speaks here, he inadvertently seems to be addressing this very scepticism. In the works of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, on almost every page of his book ‘The Jewish War’, he points out numerous events which took place in the years leading up to the Jewish-Roman War, which were undeniable signs that suggested an impending war would soon take place.
In modern times, there are accomplished and discerning political pundits who can read the signs of what is going on in the world, and can predict with remarkable accuracy that such and such an outcome will take place. Basically, in referring to the ‘signs of the times’, Yeshua was saying that any discerning person should be able to read the awful events that were going on around them, and predict that there would soon be war. The sceptical people he was addressing seemed to be proficient at reading the signs of the weather in the skies, but couldn’t discern the signs in the disturbing events happening around them.
So what were these signs? The Zealots were going round the Galilean countryside, preaching the coming of the messianic kingdom, in order to radicalise the population, and recruit vulnerable, disenfranchised people to their cause. The Roman governors ruled without any concern for the needs of the ordinary people, and often their legal judgments were cruel and unjust; banditry and lawlessness increased in the countryside, so that it wasn’t safe to travel alone; and both Jewish and Samaritan youths engaged in bloody, retaliatory and vengeful attacks on each other – one side would beat up or kill the other, and the other side would visit the same violence in return. All these things are documented by Josephus.
The bottom line of what Yeshua was trying to say was that, even if you don’t believe that God can reveal the future to someone, you would have to be utterly foolish to ignore all the political and social degradation going on around you, to ignore that something really bad is going to happen if people and society don’t change for the better.
Pastoral application
The tribulation of which Yeshua spoke is long past. However, as people of faith, we cannot rest on our laurels. The social and political dangers that threatened the Jewish people of Yeshua’s day can revisit us at any point in history. And they can happen not only to the Jewish people, they can happen to any people or nation. If we are complacent, and are stubbornly untroubled by the disturbing things that are going on in our own society, then we are ignoring the warning signs of coming social upheaval.
There are some people who actually want social unrest, conflict and war, because they believe that these are signs of the end of the world, and the end of the world means that ‘Jesus will come again’, and that means they will be taken into heaven, away from all the troubles and evils of this world. This entire mindset is the fatalistic quagmire of those who are expectantly waiting for Yeshua to come back and return from heaven.
This pointless and utterly futile way of thinking – waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus – causes people to think that we cannot possibly solve our own problems, and that only with the coming of the messiah will all our problems be resolved. Let me tell you this: this is a really unhealthy and unhelpful way of dealing with the difficulties of life and our material world.
YHVH our God has given us a healthy way of life, a noble set of values and ideals, and a decent, humane way of thinking, which were intended to help us deal with and resolve our own problems. God never meant us to abdicate all our personal responsibilities by saying, ‘It will all be solved when moschiach comes’. The messiah is not our saviour, YHVH is – and we don’t have to wait for a saviour to come, because YHVH our Saviour is already with us. With YHVH’s ever-present help, we have the power to shoulder our own responsibilities, by using what God has taught us, and cooperate to help each other deal with the problems that currently beset us, whether they be personal problems, or society-wide.