THOSE WHO ARE JEWS IN THE
SIGHT OF GOD
One of the passages of Scripture that
seems to be ignored by many is Romans 2:28-29 where we read, “He is not a Jew,
who is one outwardly… but he is a Jew, who is one inwardly; and circumcision is
that of the heart, in the spirit”. Those words of Paul tell us that in the eyes
of God it is what is in the heart, not lineage or circumcision, that determines
whether a person is a Jew or not. In other words, as far as God is concerned,
those who are not Jews “inwardly” are not really Jews at all, but are instead
hypocrites, even if they are the physical descendants of Abraham. [See, Matthew
23:13, 14, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29.]
Keeping that fact in mind, we need to
realize that only two of the Jewish groups or sects which existed at the time
of Christ have survived to the present day. The first is the Pharisees. All
modern Jewish sects have branched off from the Pharisees, and they keep alive
many of their traditions. The second group can be traced back to the Jews who
believed that Jesus is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,”
(John 1:29), the Jews who spread palm branches before Jesus when He entered
Jerusalem (Mathew 21:8, John 12:13), the Jews who by the thousands were
baptized on the day of Pentecost, and in the months that followed (Acts 2:41,
Acts 4:4). The members of this Jewish group continued to worship in the