“God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.”
Dear readers, if you will indulge me, let me tell you a parable just a very little bit like the one Nathan told David. I trust you may not have cause to be as stricken as David was when the prophet’s point went home into his soul, but if you need it, you need it, just like David did.
If you are not “the man”, all the better, not just for you but for us all.
Growing up in a Christian home has a tendency to normalize things some people might consider quite unusual. This is especially true with respect to Bible reading. My parents made it a practice to familiarize all their children with God’s word from cover to cover. Every morning before school, we gathered in the living room for a few minutes of Bible reading, discussion and prayer. This went on well into our teens, so we covered a lot of scriptural territory.
Guess what? The abnormal became normal from simple familiarity.
A reader writes, “Jew does not mean Israelite and not one verse in scripture says so.”
If you search the words “Israel” or “Israelite” in combination with the word “Jew” in a concordance, you will find no single verse of scripture that contains both. In this, I suppose, our reader is correct when he writes, “Not one verse in scripture says so.”
He’s right: Not one single verse says it. I can absolutely do it in two, though.
In yesterday’s Anonymous Asks post, I promised to delve a little deeper into the wording of God’s covenant with Abraham. In Genesis 15, the Lord promised Abraham’s offspring a significant parcel of territory delimited by two rivers, the Euphrates and the “river of Egypt”, and further specified in terms of land occupied by ten nations of the day. Yesterday’s post explored what, if anything, that covenant means for modern Israel.
I’d like to back it up just a little further and look at that word “offspring”. Who exactly was the Lord referring to?
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“Does Israel have a divine right to ‘much of the Middle East’?”
The shifting borders of modern Israel generate endless public debate. Last Friday, Tucker Carlson referenced a passage from Genesis in an interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. He asked the ambassador if Israel “had a right” to territory outside its current borders. Huckabee responded, “It would be fine if they took it all.”
From the standpoint of American interests, Huckabee was probably correct. But it was a bit of a foot-in-mouth moment. You can’t say that out loud these days. As usual, the media foamed at the mouth. Politico reported the exchange here.
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“When did the Church begin?”
Two answers to this question are common among evangelicals. The Dispensational answer is “At Pentecost in the early first century AD.” The answer of Replacement Theology (“RT”) is “The people of God are one throughout the entire Bible.” Since “church” [ekklēsia] means a congregation (i.e., more than one person), the Church can then be said to have begun with the second human being ever saved, perhaps Eve or Abel. Others argue Abraham is “the father of us all”. Either position adds thousands of years to the age of the Church.
If you think the difference is a mere numeric technicality, think again.
“I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles …”
This might seem a strange statement if the book of Acts did not familiarize readers with the circumstances that led to Paul’s imprisonment in Rome. Moreover, the 12 verses that follow it in Ephesians 3 might seem even stranger to Gentiles raised as supersessionists in the Reformed tradition if they were to pay them serious attention and consider their implications.
The script has most definitely flipped over the last two millennia.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Editor’s Note: This post was our first together, presented over a decade ago. I thought it makes an interesting re-read in view of both the things that have changed since, and the things that have not.
Alex Awad is a professing Christian who leads a Bible school in the town of Bethlehem and wrote 2008’s Palestinian Memories: The Story of a Palestinian Mother and her People.
Tom: Mr. Awad believes the Old Testament promises to Israel are strictly conditional on Israel’s faithfulness and obedience and consequently that “Israel as a nation annulled its privilege as God’s chosen nation.”
Matt Littlefield is posting about the rapture on his Substack account, and I couldn’t let that slip by without a little light commentary.
The post is entitled “Missed Another Rapture?”, and it’s about the false claims and erroneous connections made by some fringe dispensational Bible enthusiasts eager to be assured the Lord’s return will happen in their lifetime.
I don’t generally pay attention to the prediction-makers in Christendom. I truly believe it’s a fool’s errand to presume esoteric knowledge the Lord never intended us to pursue.
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The Powers-That-Be love managing public opinion. They expend
millions of dollars and
After all, the most effective lies are 90% true.
In the process of recounting the circumstances under which a local Hivite lad raped Jacob’s daughter Dinah, the writer of Genesis comments to the effect that her brothers were indignant and angry because this Shechem “had done an outrageous thing in Israel”. Such a thing, they said, must never be.
It should not need saying that rape is always outrageous, in Israel or anywhere else. Yet strangely, the key words in this passage for some critics are “in Israel”. Let me explain.
Sometimes the difference between making yourself clearly understood and leaving yourself open to wild misinterpretation can be measured in minutes.
Picture this. You’re on social media last week checking out the feeds of a couple of evangelicals you follow, and you come across this exchange:
Do you assume Doug Wilson is urging Americans to go to war with Iran in solidarity with Israel? Maybe.
I’m sure Christians other than Doug Wilson are writing about the delayed release of the nastier bits of the Epstein files, but since I’m not familiar with any of them, let’s go with the online post-millennialist whose website I’m most likely to cruise by on any given day of the week. Douglas, you are on!
Until recently, delays in getting the files into the public domain had been persuasively attributed to a lack of cooperation from the FBI, as usual pursuing its own agenda notwithstanding instructions from Attorney General Pam Bondi to come across with everything they’ve got in their records, as her position entitles her.
I was having coffee with an older friend, a well-known Bible teacher for many years, when he surprised me by disclosing that he does not invest a great deal of time in the study of prophecy. Like me, he’s disinclined to do a lot of speculating, and uses his opportunities for platform ministry to exposit areas of scripture about which he can be most confident before the Lord concerning the interpretations he is sharing.
That’s a prudent stewardship of his study time for which he is to be commended. There are times when taking the wrong eschatological position can put you in a very awkward place.
Back in the seventies and eighties, when Marvel Comics had yet to become a cesspool of woke craziness and child propaganda (though parents at the time would probably argue it had other sinister aspects), the imprint published a semi-regular comic entitled What If?
Like the Apocrypha, What If? was non-canonical. Its readers understood its stories were even more imaginary than usual, in the sense that they were not intended to be part of any character’s regular ongoing narrative arc. A What If? story was the Butterfly Effect dramatized. Take a famous comic storyline and make one small change in the circumstances or choices of the characters, then see how it plays out differently with all its unexpected consequences.
Like the multiverse before anyone came up with that nonsensical idea.
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“Where is the increase in anti-Jewish sentiment coming from, and how should Christians respond to it?”
It should be evident from the long history of worldwide antisemitism that there is no single, definitive answer to this question. “The Gazacaust”, as critics labeled the IDF’s siege of Palestine in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, is just one more in a long line of excuses for virulent Jew-hate. Plenty of others exist. If they didn’t, dedicated enemies of Israel would simply make them up.
From the department of straining at gnats and swallowing camels, The Standard Bearer ran a series of posts by David Englesma in 2017 and 2018 criticizing the standard premillennial interpretation of Romans 11, culminating in this one and this one. Based on this chapter (though not exclusively), premillennialists anticipate (in Englesma’s own words), “a mass conversion and salvation of Jews, and their restoration as an earthly kingdom of God in Palestine”.
That’s a fair representation of my beliefs, an exegetical hill I’ll happily die on.
Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976’s The Selfish Gene to describe an idea that spreads by means of imitation from person to person, often carrying symbolic meaning representing a phenomenon or theme. He nicked the word from the Greek mīmēma, meaning “imitated thing”.
Most of us know what’s happened to the “meme” concept since.
Lynette writes:
“If you have time, are you able to post a response to one of [Matt Littlefield’s] latest articles?”
We live to serve, Lynette. The article is entitled “Why Can’t Many Christians See Obvious Evil?”, in which Matt takes to task believers who he says can’t see the “obvious evil” in Israel’s attempt to purge the Gaza Strip of its ability to wage war on Israel.
Isaiah 26 is Judah’s millennial song. The faithful remnant in Israel is looking back to the Lord’s dealings with them, vindicating them among the nations in the great tribulation, and looking forward to the prospect of Jerusalem as a city set apart to God and Israel as the first among the nations during Christ’s millennial reign.
“Open the gates,” cry the remnant, “that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.”
That’s not a Christian sentiment, it’s a Jewish one, and it’s quite a change from what we are seeing today.