Synagogue ->Church ->Faithful Bul 41

G. Crowe, Lafayette, IN
Thu Nov 13 11:46:12 MST 2008

                The Old Testament closes with the temple in Jerusalem as the center of Jewish worship. It’s not that the Jewish people always treated their temple right, or that they always bothered to offer the right kind of worship when they went there, or sometimes that they even paid that much attention to it, but when the topic of worship came up, or when they were driven to draw closer to God, it was to the temple that they returned.

            Walk out of the Old Testament, walk into the New Testament, and step into a different Jewish world. The temple is still there, and it’s important if one happens to be in Jerusalem. But elsewhere suddenly there are structures called synagogues. Search the Old Testament diligently, line upon line, and one will never find even a trace of the word synagogue. It is not there didn’t exist. Yet Jesus was entirely comfortable with the synagogue.

            That’s interesting on at least two levels. For one . . . Jesus never said or even intimated that He came to restore Old Testament worship. He came to do His Father’s will, and it apparently concerned Him not in the least that (during what we call the “intertestamental period”. . . the years between the close of Malachi and the opening of Matthew) His ancestors had “added” an entire institution within the framework of Jewish religion and piety.

            Jesus’ attention to the synagogue is interesting on a second level. He gave great allegiance to the synagogue. He never missed an opportunity to be there. He did much of his teaching in and near synagogues. He assumed his followers would frequent their local synagogues. Fast forward to the present, Brian Simmons, in his book, Falling Away, says that one of the ways to ensure that our children will remain faithful to Jesus throughout their lives is, in effect, to provide opportunities for them to hang around their local synagogue (read “church”). Go there often for worship and classes, socialize with people who are also a part of that church, become involved in the ministries of the church—and those children’s chances of remaining faithful unto death increase exponentially. Jesus put a high value on participation in the synagogue. We can do no less for the church.