Who Is God's "Chosen Nation?"

This is adapted from an article I wrote about three years ago.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all over the news these days, for obvious reasons. Any time you have a real shooting war, people are going to want to know what’s going on. And lots of people have strong opinions about it. Some people are going to say that Israel is wrong, others are going to say they are right. I generally fall into the latter camp, but not for the same reasons as others, like this post I saw on Facebook this morning:

It is not my intention to call anyone out (that’s why I got rid of any personal identifiers in the screen shot). But here’s my main problem with this statement: The modern state of Israel does not necessarily equal the Israel of prophecy. The state of Israel could be wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow and it would not change the certainty of God’s Word. Don’t take that to mean I am not a dispensationalist: I am. I believe that there are numerous Biblical prophecies about Israel and the Jewish people which have yet to be fulfilled. But we cannot know how those prophecies will be fulfilled, and it’s wrong for us to connect dots that God has not necessarily connected.

20th and 21st century conservative Christianity is enamored with Israel. I have seen people wearing Israeli flag pins in church, lots of “Support Israel” bumper stickers, and churches with Israeli flags permanently displayed in the sanctuary. Certainly this is a welcome change from the sad history of anti-semitism which has characterized the majority of church history, but we can't let our excitement for seeing prophecy fulfilled cause us to forget that we are still in the church age. God does not specially bless or protect political nations in this age; He works through the Church.

Most of the prophecies that refer to “Israel” could just as easily refer to all Jewish people living in the world rather than just Palestine. It was less than a decade ago that the Jewish population of Israel actually surpassed the Jewish population of the United States. When we include Jewish people living elsewhere in the world, the majority of Jews do not live in Israel. Of the references specifically to Jerusalem or other geographical locations in Palestine, these do not have to have the Star of David flying over them for the foretold events to happen there.

Maybe I am making mountains out of molehills, but I have heard too many Christians in casual conversation and in some cases from the pulpit blindly defend anything Israel does, even when they mistreat their Arab citizens or blatantly violate treaty agreements. I personally admire their courage to hold onto their land despite decades of attempts by nearly all their neighbors to get rid of them, and I applaud their noble attempts at democracy in a region dominated by dictators. But I don’t think we can say for certain that the modern state of Israel is necessarily the fulfillment of prophecy. We don't know God's time line. God could wait a thousand years or more before He carries out these prophecies.

I hope we understand as believers that in this time God still calls on all people, Gentile and Jew alike, to repent and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A Jew who rejects Jesus is just as much under God’s wrath as a Gentile who rejects Him. There is no “chosen nation” right now, other than the Church, the nation that Christ is building out of every nation, tribe and tongue.

We can debate the rightness or wrongness of Israel’s actions in the current flare-up and in the past. I happen to think they have a mostly positive record, notwithstanding accidents and, more troubling, their continued insistence on building new Jewish settlements in lands set aside for Palestinians. Their record is stellar compared to the record of the various Palestinian authorities and organizations. But let’s not let Christian religious views cloud our judgment of the situation, especially when those views may not actually be as scriptural as we think they may be.

ListMania: Exemplary vs. Exhaustive

First in a series

If you have ever read Paul's epistles (and if you haven't, go here, start reading and don't stop) you know that Paul loves lists. He uses them in practically every epistle. Some of his lists are single words, some are phrases, some are entire verses. Some of Paul's lists are among of the most familiar passages in scripture: "Love is patient, Love is kind...;" the armor of God and the fruit of the Spirit are some examples that jump readily to mind.

But I have noticed as I have studied multiple ones that Paul rarely, if ever, intends for them to be an exhaustive treatment of the subject at hand. For example, there are many more good things one could say about love than one finds in the thirteen verses of I Corinthians 13, although you will be hard pressed to find any text that describes love more beautifully. There are plenty more works of the flesh than one finds in this passage. For most of these lists, we understand this fact.

The problem arises when folks try to make a particular list the final word on the subject. They view the things in the list as exhaustive, the only possible instances that could possibly be addressed. When this happens, they leap to conclusions that Paul never intended for his readers to arrive at. This is a potentially dangerous way to handle the Word of God, and something that we should avoid.

Over the next few days, weeks, whatever, I intend to look at some of Paul's lists I believe are mishandled in this fashion. We will come across a couple where Paul gives us two different lists to describe the same thing. Feel free to comment and ask questions. Hopefully my postings will inspire some good discussion and maybe help you (and me) look at Scripture in a new light.

How Cults are Born

This is something I wrote about three years ago. I have a few of these lying around. I will let you know when I post something that I haven't written about recently.

I try to stay out of theological debates, especially with people I don't trust. I don't feel like it's worth losing a friendship over, and I need all the friends I can get. But in the few I have been involved in, a tactic that comes up too frequently is when a person plays what he or she may think is the ultimate trump card: "No one who reads the Bible by itself would come to your conclusion." This seems to be a valid argument, but when you examine this argument more closely, it reveals a frightening lack of concern for the truth of the Christian faith.

We have a word for people who read the Bible for themselves without any guidance or help from other sources: cult leaders. Every aberrant religious system or idea since the time of the apostles has been the result of one thing: one person (or small group of people) reading the Bible for themselves. They "find" something no one else has come across, and they run with it. They do not heed the warnings of their elders or other faithful church leaders who try to correct them. They view themselves as being persecuted if they are put out of the church. This doesn't happen in every case, of course; sometimes egregious error is embraced immediately by a congregation or even denominations.

Our Christian faith was designed by God to be passed down from person to person. Ephesians 2:19-22 reminds us that we as Christ's body are a building built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Those who try to start a new building somewhere else are disobeying God's plan.

Of course we as believers have the Holy Spirit indwelling us, and a major part of His work in our lives is to guide us in the truth. I am not denying that. But many times our sinful minds get ahead of God, and we may feel like God is leading us a certain way, when in fact it may be the opposite. We must always be accountable to our fellow believers and elders, and we should actively work to hold our fellow believers and elders accountable, as the Berean believers did in Acts 17:10-12.

Is it possible to create false doctrine "straight from the Bible?" Peter seems to think so. He gives his readers a solemn warning in 2 Peter 3:15-16. As he closes his epistle, he reminds his readers to remain true to the faith "as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures."