Why do most Jews reject Jesus as the Messiah?

The tenth and eleventh verses show clearly that the prophecy is yet to be fulfilled and can be only fulfilled in the coming of the Son of Man in His glory. One of the reasons why modern Judaism rejects Jesus of Nazareth, and does not believe Him to be the promised Redeemer, is in this prophecy. Rabbi F. De Sola Mendes, of New York, brings in a little book, "A Hebrew's Reply to the Missionaries," the following argument: "We reject Jesus of Nazareth as our Messiah on account of His deeds. He says of Himself, 'Think not that I am come to send peace on the earth; I came not to send peace but a sword,' etc. But we find that our prophets ascribed to the true Messiah quite different actions. Zechariah says (9:10), He shall speak peace to the nations. Jesus says He came to send the sword on the earth; whereas, Isaiah says of the true Messianic time, 'They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.'"

Of course the Jew is right in expecting the literal fulfillment of this prophecy, and it will be fulfilled when He comes again and the restoration of all things will follow, as spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets.

When He appears again, in like manner as He went into heaven, that is not for His saints but with His saints, there will be peace for Ephraim and for Jerusalem, and the kingdom is then restored to Israel, that is, to the house of Judah and the house of Israel. The chariot, the horse, and the battle-bow will be cut off. Not alone will He bring peace to the covenant people but to the nations. He will speak peace. "And He shall stand, and shall feed His flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of Jehovah His God, and they shall abide; for now shall He be great unto the ends of the earth. And this man shall be our peace" (Micah 5:4, 5). There will be abundance of peace (Psa. 72:7). His dominion will be from sea to sea and to the ends of the earth.

The Jews refuse a suffering Messiah and with carnal expectation look for One who shall restore the land of Israel to a position of glory and supremacy. They look for a Messiah with military genius and brilliant statesmanship. They do not look for the meek inheriting the earth. They do not realise that the sufferings of Christ of necessity must precede the glory of the Kingdom. The crown of thorns must come before the crown of glory.

It seems they had never believed this. The great stumbling block with the Jew is yet, "He made Himself God." Again and again we are being asked by them, "Can God have a Son?" Many of the Jews acknowledge Jesus today as a reformer and a good man, but never as Son of God. They will know Him when He comes, and the nation will fall at His pierced feet and worship Him as the King and Son of the Living God.

1870 119 There is no point perhaps which the Spirit of God takes more pains to press in writing to the Hebrew Christians than the connection of the throne of God with the Lord Jesus. And the immense weight of such a relationship must be evident on the least reflection to one who knows what God is and what man is. There are two things that the Jew as a Jew never acknowledges. It was their great difficulty when unbelief began to overspread the nation, and it is the great lie of Judaism up to the present day.

The one is that God came down to man — God really and truly came down to man and not that He merely made a revelation of Himself. This they could easily believe. All their old polity was founded upon a manifestation of the divine presence; but a real personal presence of God upon earth, to have God becoming a man, truly a man, is foreign to Judaism as such. The system of its Rabbis cannot abide it, utterly refuses it, and perishes in its war against it.

To a Jewish mind, the thought of the Messiah going to the cross would be abhorrent. Their idea of bringing the kingdom in was more by power and glory, not by going to a cross.

Cleopas and his companions were evidently just drifting away from Jerusalem to the old home, utterly disappointed and dejected. They had entertained very fervent expectations which centred in the Messiah, and in Jesus they believed that they had found Him. To them Jesus of Nazareth was "a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people;" and at that point evidently their faith stopped. They did not as yet perceive in Him the Son of God who could not be holden of death, and so to them His death was the mournful end of His story. They did think that "it had been He which should have redeemed Israel," but then that to them meant redeeming them by power from all their national foes, rather than redeeming them to God by His blood. His death had shattered their hopes of this redemption by power and by glory. This disappointment was the fruit of their having cherished expectations which were not warranted by the Word of God. They expected the glory without the sufferings.

In resuming the consideration of this subject, especially now in the light shed upon it by the New Testament, there are several facts and principles of God's ways which need to be borne in mind by us. In the first place, it was in the counsels of God that Messiah should suffer ere He reigned. Nor was this a truth which had been hid in God, as one of the secret things which belong to Him alone. On the contrary, the sufferings of Messiah form the subject of many a distinct prediction, and the theme of many a holy strain of lamentation; besides being prefigured by a great part of the Mosaic sacrifices and ritual. Thus had the law, the psalms, and the prophets, borne witness to the sufferings of Messiah: so largely indeed, that for any who, like my readers, are accustomed to view them in this light, it is needless to bring forward particular passages in proof of it. But to Jewish minds, prior to the accomplishment of the event, this was the deepest difficulty. It was, besides, a subject most unwelcome to the pride of the natural heart in them, just as it is still in us. Sufferings, which the holiness of God makes requisite on account of our sin, cannot but prove an unwelcome subject to hearts that have not been humbled under the sense of sin. Thus it was with the Jews, yea, even the disciples of our Lord themselves. Notwithstanding the plainest declarations on His part that He must suffer and rise from the dead, they seem not to have entertained a thought of it, until the event came upon them, and found them, despite all previous warnings, unprepared.

Isaiah also wrote, seven centuries before the death of Christ, a full and exhaustive prophecy as to that great event. The Jews were willing to have a glorious triumphant Messiah, who should put their little nation at the head of all the nations, and set up a world-wide dominion, a condition of things that their carnal flesh could glory in. They could not and would not entertain the thought of a suffering Messiah. Chapter 53 presents this so vividly that there is no mistaking its meaning. It is the despair of the Jewish theologians, of the rabbis of their synagogues. Their only way out of the difficulty is to ignore it. So when they read consecutively in their roll of the Scriptures, they read Isaiah 52, and then pass on to chapter 54, and ignore chapter 53. But it cannot be ignored, as they will find out in due course to their sorrow.

The humiliation of the Messiah ran so counter to every preconceived thought and wish of the Jew that one can readily understand the advantage which Satan found in urging on the people, leaders and all, to their fatal unbelief and rejection of Him. But there was a deeper ground of aversion in the heart than disappointment in their national ambition, and this charge of dislike to His Person takes in man universally, and not Israel only: "For he was despised and left alone of men." They shrank from One Who sounded and laid bare man's iniquities and enmity to God, Himself the perfection of obeying God and loving man. Hence, notwithstanding the attractiveness of moral beauty and lowly grace, with power that proved itself superior to all the sickness and misery of man, there arose the hatred that grew more intense and deadly as He brought in God to deal with their conscience. To interpret what is predicted of Him as being the state of "that wicked generation" is beyond measure absurd.

But this character of Messiah, although the expectation of the Jews scarcely went beyond it and they looked even at that in their own way, merely as the exaltation of their own nation, having no sense of their sins or of the consequences of their sins—this character of Messiah was not all that the prophetic word, which declared the counsels of God, had announced with respect to the One whom even the world was expecting.