By Faith Abraham
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and today we’re talking about Abraham.
We have walked through the flood and the world after the flood. We’ve talked about the Tower of Babel and how the nations began. We have the Table of Nations in Genesis that were spreading out and peopling the earth, and out of these nations God calls one man. What’s the important thing to know about Abraham before we start?
Greg: Well, the first thing the Bible says about him, aside from naming his father, is that the Lord spoke to him. After 10 generations of apparent silence, God came to one man, something he hadn’t done since he spoke to Noah, and gave him an order and a promise, or series of promises.
Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee, and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
That’s what we need to know about Abram, and his name was Abram to begin with. It becomes Abraham a bit later.
What that means has been the subject of debate in the church particularly over the past couple hundred years, since someplace in the 1840s or so. Some people came up with the idea that this is a promise to genetic Israel as a people and as a nation, that God is going to use them to bless the world and it involves them being in the Promised Land. And when they’re in the Promised Land doing what they’re supposed to be doing there, that will be a blessing to everybody. And if you want to be in on this, you better support Israel, the Jewish people, because God says he’ll bless those who bless Israel and curse those who don’t.
Emily: This all works very well leading up to the year 0. You have the nation of Israel, and it is a promise to the genetic nation of Israel that when they’re in the land and they’re obeying God and they’re doing what they need to be doing, God is going to bless the world through that, because it’s through that that Messiah came.
Greg: This is where this interpretation doesn’t stop there. It acknowledges maybe that Messiah is part of all this, and eventually he will be very much part of it. But of course 40 years after Jesus went back to heaven Jerusalem fell and the Jewish people were scattered, so obviously Israel is not in the land. They are not blessing the world.
Emily: But Jesus is blessing the world.
Greg: But see it’s talking about the seed of Abraham, and that’s obviously Israel.
Emily: That would be Jesus.
Greg: Okay, this is getting needlessly messianic.
So one day Israel has to go back to the land and then Jesus can come back and rule over them, because he is the Messiah. They didn’t get that the first time, but they’ll get it the next time. Then when they’re in the land and Jesus is sitting on the throne of David in Jerusalem ruling over them, then the world will know peace for 1000 years. What happens after that is something else.
This is called dispensationalism. Were either of you reared in this hermeneutic?
Rachel: Yes.
Greg: Would you like to tell us your perceptions when you were younger of what you thought of Israel or the last times or things like that, that might be relevant here before we go on and talk about what the Bible actually is communicating?
Rachel: I would say most of what I got from it was simply the end is near. I would contemplate as a child, “Am I going to get married or is Jesus going to come back? Am I going to have kids or is Jesus going to come back? I don’t know.”
It’s interesting because at the time I didn’t hear a lot about the nation of Israel until I read a certain fictional series.
Emily: That features in my story, too.
Rachel: Yes. So initially as those books were starting to come out as I was an early teenager, I was beginning to have my ideas of dispensationalism more firmly established. But then it was destroyed by being taught covenant theology. That’s probably my story. It was mainly just the expectation that Jesus was coming at any point in time, and that sense that there wasn’t much time left in the world.
Emily: For me the end times aspect wasn’t a huge feature of my being brought up in dispensationalism. It was more the principle that we need to take the Bible for its word, which was very admirable and was a good foundation to start from. I did see the Left Behind movie when it came out, and my parents didn’t really place a lot of emphasis on it. They were like, “Eh, it’s a movie.” I read a couple of the teen fiction books that came out, not the official Left Behind series, but the young adult version.
Rachel: They had a young adult version that was even simpler?
Emily: It was a spin-off series. It was about the kids that had been left behind. So again it wasn’t a huge emphasis, and honestly the Left Behind series was kind of my first exposure to the eschatology of dispensationalism, and even then it was kind of, “Eh, I don’t know.”
My church did not have an official stance on it, one of the many things my church did not have an official stance on, so we kind of learned a basic overview of pre-mil, post-mil, a-mil – none of them in enough depth for me to actually choose one. So dispensationalism was to me the principle of taking the Bible literally wherever possible, which is not the worst start.
Greg: No, and we do need to commend our dispensational brethren, because for many of them that was exactly the starting point. They were standing up against liberalism in the church, which was turning everything into myth and fantasy and fable, and they were saying, “No, the Bible means what it says.” Unfortunately, their hermeneutic was rather wooden and did not allow for literary genre, literary device even, or even at all times comparing scripture with scripture.
If this passage that I just read was all that we had, then you could make a good argument that the interpretation I gave is not too far off because it sounds like that. But when you come to the New Testament and let the New Testament actually interpret it, Paul spends a good deal of time in Romans 4 and Galatians 3 and 4, and the writer of Hebrews in chapter 11, explaining what was actually going on here.
Then it becomes a question of, “Okay, you want to believe what the Bible says, so look at what Paul says. He’s not saying what you’re saying. He literally is not saying what you’re saying. So does your hermeneutic allow for reading the whole Bible or do we just come to the Old Testament, get an idea of what it says from a cursory glance, and then die on that hill?” The Bible itself does not interpret itself that way.
Rachel: I think one of the core issues we see with their overall approach with the Bible is it segments the Bible too much and sees each time period as a whole in and of itself, rather than this overall continuity from beginning to end.
As I think about the Abrahamic covenant, and covenant in general, I think that’s one of the things I most benefited from learning was to actually see the Bible as one entity and not, “That’s Abraham’s time. That’s Moses’ time. That’s David’s time,” but seeing everything pointing to Jesus, and Jesus pointing back to everything. It gives you this sense of totality.
Emily: As Jesus said on the road to Emmaus, right? He opened the scriptures and showed them how everything was about him.
Greg: And that’s the position we’re going to take tonight as we look at some of what the New Testament says about this. We had a discussion earlier about what do we need to talk about with Abraham, because historically in terms of what he actually did, Abraham is not that impressive.
Three religions claim him as their father, and these three religions have helped shape the world, but he himself ran an admirable cattle business – greater and lesser cattle. He ran a sheikhdom rather competently so that he acquired the admiration of other sheikhs, and only once engaged in any kind of military operation and that was to save his nephew.
He really didn’t do much. He didn’t lead Israel out of Egypt. He didn’t call fire down from heaven. He didn’t raise the dead. He didn’t survive a world flood. He mostly lived out in the wilderness and raised some good sheep and cattle. But God promised to do something incredible through him and his seed, and without him everything afterwards falls apart. He’s the lynch pin. He’s the fountain. He’s the starting point.
He’s the friend of God who walked with God, so that should draw our attention here, but there’s not a lot to say in terms of historical events or times and dates and interaction with other cultures. He was out in the wilderness. But this covenant thing, as we’re going to see, is huge. So with that mind I would like to go to Galatians 3 and look at some of these ideas. We have the seed, but I also want to look at the word ‘blessing.’
In the book of Galatians, Paul is writing to a number of churches in Galatia where he had visited and they had received him and they received the gospel and they were all excited about it, but after he left along came some traveling Jewish preachers. We call them Judaizers, and they said something along the lines of, “So you’ve heard the gospel, have you, from who? Oh, Paul, yeah, yeah. We know Paul. He’s a great guy. I bet he talked to you about faith in Christ? Yeah? Uh-huh, good. Did he tell you about the need for circumcision so that you could be more spiritual? Oh, he didn’t mention it? You know, that’s just like Paul. He’s great at the beginning stuff, but if you really want to get serious about your walk with Christ, if you really want the filling and blessing of the Spirit, then there’s a number of things you need to do. Paul just kind of doesn’t really get that and kind of skips over it, so we’re here to tell you how you can have more of the Spirit, how you can really truly be blessed.”
It really doesn’t matter what they say at that point. They could say “paint your face blue” and the results would be the same, but they did specifically say that you need to be circumcised. That’s the big thing. In other words, you need to become Jewish. And then there’s mention of the feast days and the calendar and a number of other things along the way, but overwhelmingly the big thing is you need to be circumcised. You need to be cut into the Abrahamic covenant in the way Abraham was, and his seed after him and all genetic Israel.
Emily: Interesting argument. We’ll get to that. The way Abraham was… Was that before or after he was circumcised, we’ll ask. That’s a teaser for an upcoming attraction.
Greg: That’s Romans 4. Anyway, Paul is writing to the Galatians and say, “Whoa! Flag on the field – no! I want you to think about how you came to Christ. Did you come by your good works, by keeping the law, by some ceremony? No, you came by hearing the gospel message and believing it. So having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect in the flesh?”
Throughout the book of Galatians flesh will mean not simply our sinful nature, although that’s involved, but particularly here trying to use that sinful nature as a bargaining chip with God. Paul says something similar in Philippians where he says, “We are the circumcision who worship God in the Spirit and rejoice in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh, although I might have confidence in the flesh.” Then he goes on and lists his Jewish credentials. So this is not a unique use of that concept.
It means here as it means in Philippians that yes, man’s sinful nature, but particularly as we try to grab something that we’ve done in our sinful nature, whether it be our bloodline, our DNA, the ceremonies we’ve endured, who our family was, where we grew up, what soil is under our toenails, whatever, and say, “Because of this I’m better spiritually than you are.” Paul says, “That’s not how you came to Christ. Why do you think that’s how you pursue Christ?”
The funny thing is you’re often told that Galatians is a book about justification by faith. That’s true, but a lot of people don’t quite get what that means. If you had asked the Judaizers, “Do you believe in justification by faith?” they would have said, “Yes, absolutely. That’s how you come to Christ, by faith alone. But if you want to go further in your walk with Christ, if you want a second blessing, a higher blessing, a deeper blessing, a more victorious life, a more spiritual life, then you need to…” and again it doesn’t matter what follows. They said circumcision, but they’ve created a two-stage Christianity.
So from the point of view of the Judaizers it’s not about justification by faith. “We absolutely believe that.” But for Paul it is about justification by faith because the faith that gives us the righteousness of Christ also includes with it all of God’s other blessings, including the blessing of the Spirit.
The Galatian heretics had narrowed down justification to the bare act of “believe and go to heaven,” and Paul is saying, “No. With his Son will he not freely give us all things.” To make this point he appeals to Abraham, because the Judaizers kept bringing Abraham forward as the great example of the father of the Jewish people, the father of the covenant people for the last 2,000 years, and this is what he says.
Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.
He’s quoting from Genesis 15 here, when Abraham was worried whether or not the kings would come back and attack him and God says, “Don’t worry. I’ve got your back,” and Abraham takes the time to say, “How about that kid you promised me?” Then God takes him outside and shows him the stars and says, “So shall your seed be,” and Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. That’s the first really clear statement of the doctrine of justification by faith. So Paul here is saying that we’re in the same condition.
Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.
Notice what he’s doing with children. It’s not genetic descent, it’s a shared faith. Now, of course it’s true there’s a sense in which those who are descended from Abraham genetically are the children of Abraham, but that’s the nature of the promise, and Paul develops this in Romans 9 at length. “They are not all Israel which are of Israel.”
Emily: And the definition he’s working with is the definition that comes from Jesus, where Jesus says, “You pride yourself on being sons of Abraham. God can raise up sons for Abraham from these rocks.”
Rachel: Or his other assertion that, “My father and my brother are those who hear my word and do it.”
Greg: “Whereas you are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father you will do. You are a generation of vipers,” so the seed has never been defined by bloodline, although it may tag along near the bloodline at times. The bloodline is not defining. What’s defining is the faith.
Now we don’t use “son of…” so much. In the Old West you would say “son of a gun” and it was originally kind of a compliment. It meant you were really great with a gun. You wore the nature of a gun. We also have ‘son of…’ other things that are not nearly so polite or complimentary.
Emily: Some of which Jesus used.
Greg: Yes, so this is a normal use of the word. Is it literal? What do you mean by literal here? It’s what Jesus actually means. Paul tells us here that those who are of faith, who have the faith of Abraham, are the children of Abraham.
And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.
We just got a whole lot of theology dumped on us in two verses. First of all “the scripture foreseeing…” – the Bible wasn’t actually there, nor does the Bible foresee things, strictly speaking, so again very literal language fails. What he means is that God, who recorded what he said in scripture, foresaw this and put it in scripture, that God would justify the heathens through faith. This is the gospel, that is the gospel that Paul was preaching in that very day. It’s not a different gospel.
Dispensationalism in its classic form had a number of gospels. You can read through the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible and find out all of the gospels that he postulates as out there – good news for different times and different people under different circumstances – but Paul says this is the gospel. We’re using what words? “In thee shall all the nations be blessed,” or all the families of the earth.
So now the question is ‘blessing?’ He just told us in part what the blessing is. The blessing is justification by faith. The blessing is being right with God, having our sins forgiven, propitiated, being reconciled, atonement made, so that we stand in a sonship relationship with Almighty God, and we are now his servants and his stewards and his missionaries.
He’s going to be using us to shed this light, this message to all the nations of the earth. And it’s going to succeed because it doesn’t simply say he will offer blessings to all nations, it will show the potential for blessings to all nations, all people will hear that they could be blessed if they made their freewill decision. It says that all nations of the earth are going to be blessed, and here in this context the blessing is justification by faith. It also does not say some people, some small remnant from every nation. It says the nations.
This has implications for eschatology and for covenant theology and for all kinds of things we can come back to, but notice that in one sense Paul says this is the blessing, and he doesn’t say “And wait, there’s more,” because in a sense there is no more, and this is Paul’s point. Justification, being right with God, it puts you in Christ and Christ in you, and therefore you have everything that Jesus has. There’s not anything else to add to that.
Now, he’s going to look at it front a different perspective in a few verses, but he’s content to say, “This is the blessing, justification by faith.” It’s not the land of Israel, land of Palestine. It’s not having a working temple. It’s not restoring the priesthood. It’s not having genetic Israel regathered to the land. It is people being right with God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and all the blessings that come from that. If you want to consider them one by one there are a great many, but in a sense it’s just having God’s favor, which covers all kinds of things.
Before I lose this let’s look at this – all nations blessed. There are those – and here I’m not talking about dispensationalism in particular, although it shows up there too – but there are other brothers in the faith, evangelicals, who will say, “All right, so the Abrahamic covenant laid the way for Christ to come. But Christ has come, and so that’s done. Christ has come in fulfillment of the promise and he’s here, so none of this continues. It all petered out and collapsed into Christ and that’s it.”
Emily: So this contingent would not sing the song, “Father Abraham had many sons…I am one of them and so are you.”
Greg: No. It would be problematic. They might do it without thinking or they might do it in some metaphorical sense, but not in a covenantal sense because the covenant has dissolved. It’s fallen apart.
It’s important to see what the promise was. The promise was that all nations would be blessed. In case anyone hasn’t read the newspapers lately, that hasn’t happened yet. We do not have all nations standing in a right relationship with God, trusting in Jesus and living out his commandments out of love for him, so this isn’t done.
The promise is intact and has not been fulfilled, so we here. We’ve been called the children of Abraham, we’re part of this process and there are still a lot of nations that need to hear about these promises and need to come to faith in Christ. Until that’s all done, the Abrahamic covenant is not wrapped up. So although we speak of a new covenant, that new covenant is grabbing onto some very important things that God promised Abraham and pulling them forward – no doubt transformed, because it is a new or renewed covenant. But to simply say, “That was Abraham. That doesn’t apply” will not match the theology of what Paul’s talking about.
Furthermore, where he goes next.
For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them. But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for the just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith but the man that doeth them shall live in them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.
We’re addressing that blessing, “In thee will all nations be blessed.” What does it mean. He’s established justification by faith but now he’s saying something else.
That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
Oh, so being justified by faith also guarantees that we have all of the Spirit that God has promised and all that we need to be Spirit-filled, to live a victorious Christian life, a deeper life. So you can look at it as two things – justification emphasizing forgiveness, and the promise of the Spirit emphasizing regeneration and sanctification, the indwelling Spirit – but for Paul they both come together. In a sense they’re bound together as one thing, the blessing of Abraham.
This is not an old covenant thing. This is not a two-level Christianity where you get one now and you get another later. This is simply Christianity, and it is received by faith in Jesus Christ and faith alone, to which the addition of any kind of good works, ceremony, moralism, genetic inheritance, mysticism or mystical experiences does not help. It actually destroys it because at that point you’ve abandoned faith, and faith is the only thing that will tie us to Christ. The moment we put something beside faith we destroy faith.
Paul will go on and talk to the Galatians about the dangers here, that any gospel that is not that of justification by faith is anathema because it destroys souls. You have fallen from grace he says if you pursue this line of thinking.
There’s one other passage I do want to look at. You mentioned it earlier. In Romans 4 we’re told this about Abraham. First of all in verse 1 – so Paul is developing justification by faith again –
What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found? For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly…
Not those who’ve cleaned up their act. Not those who are moral, who’ve met God half-way – he justifies ungodly people. That bothered Rome no end during the Reformation.
…his faith is counted for righteousness. Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.
So there’s this great blessing of being perfectly right with God, no blame, no guilt, not reckoned as sinners at all. In what state did Abraham find this? When he was circumcised or when he was uncircumcised?
Cometh this blessedness then upon the circumcision only, or upon the uncircumcision also? for we say that faith was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness. How was it then reckoned? When he was in circumcision or in uncircumcision?
Going back to Genesis 15, when God said this of him had he been circumcised yet? Circumcision is two chapters in the future, chapter 17. He was functionally a Gentile. He hadn’t been circumcised and yet he believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness.
Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision. And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised; that righteousness might be imputed unto them also, and the father of circumcision to them who are not of the circumcision only, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham, which he had being yet uncircumcised.
Now here’s another verse I want to emphasize -
For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.
You can go back and read Genesis from beginning to end and you will not see any words that say, “Oh, by the way Abraham, you’re going to be heir of the world.” What it says is that, “In you shall all the nations or all the families of the earth be blessed.”
Paul interprets that as being heir of the world; that is, Abraham’s seed, those who are in Christ who is the seed, are going to inherit all of these promises and they are going to fill the world. That’s how Abraham is going to be heir of the world.
Emily: Is that related because of the nature of blessing that it comes from someone of higher station to someone of lower station, so there’s an implication of authority with this concept? “In you shall all the nations of the earth be blessed,” meaning you are going to be over them, or rather your seed is going to be over them.
Greg: Your seed will be over them – “you and your seed.” What we didn’t look at in Galatians 3 because I forgot and stopped too soon is we’re told –
He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, and to thy seed, which is Christ.
Emily: I love the picture that God gives of that in the Levitical law where he says you don’t sow your field with various seeds. It’s one kind of seed. That’s just cool, just a little tidbit to throw in there.
Rachel: One other thing I was going to say in connecting these two passages, though they don’t say them directly, is realizing that one of the things Romans 4 is getting at is that it’s not about Abraham and what he’s done, what his state is, but that was also true when he received the first promise, “In thee shall all the nations be blessed.”
He comes out of the Tables of Nations like everybody else. The New Testament tells us he was pagan. He was a worshiper of false gods, but God reached out and called him and set him apart. It wasn’t Abraham that was the special one there. It was God’s call on him, but also it goes through the entire scripture that anytime God makes somebody a special part of his story, again it’s not the person that has some special value or greater capacity to add to the story, but rather God pulls them out for a purpose and they participate in the story. But if we then elevate them as the end of the story…
I’m thinking of the way that some modern evangelicals from dispensational backgrounds continue to use that first blessing to say it’s all about Abraham, Abraham, Abraham. The people of Israel are special still because they’re the seed of Abraham, but they’re missing the purpose of God’s call for someone to play a particular role.
When you were describing, Greg, that his life wasn’t filled with very many exceptional moments I thought, “Well, the one really big miracle he had was having a son at the age of 100. Great! The biggest miracle is that he had a seed,” and that’s what matters.
Emily: The biggest thing he did to fulfill God’s promises to him was to love his wife.
Greg: Very physically, and Hebrews records her greatest act as letting him do it. “By faith Sarah received strength to conceive seed.”
Emily: At the age of 90.
Greg: The Greek is “for the laying down of seed.” In other words, she received strength to go through a lovemaking process and bearing a child afterwards. You’re right, that’s fantastic, that’s incredible. That’s not something that the flesh could produce, and that was kind of it.
Abraham and Sarah tried to help God out with the surrogate wife and child, and God say, “No, that’s not it. It’s going to be your seed by your lawful wife.” And like you say, you’ve got to love your wife. No intrusions. No distractions. No bigamy to fix things. God has one wife and that’s what you’ve got to have.
Now, what does this have to do with teaching and understanding history? As I said, there’s not a whole lot that we need to understand historically about Abraham, but from this point on we need to see that God has stepped into history in a very dramatic way.
Now, in his providence he’s always there. This is not some deistic version of history where now and then God poofs in and out and does little nifties for us, but he reveals himself supernaturally to Abraham in a promise and in a son. He promises him a land and gives him this sign of circumcision and sets the course of history in terms of what’s going to happen, not so much to Abraham nor so much to Isaac nor even so much to Jacob. But by the time we get down to Jacob’s great-great-grandchildren we have a nation being born in Egypt.
Then God raises up Moses, and then we begin to feel more fully the echoes as they permeate history, from the exodus, the giving of the law at Sinai, the giving of the Torah, and God preserving his revelation, particularly his Word, his worship, and the people through whom Messiah is going to come.
Now it gets narrowed down to the tribe of Judah, so now all eyes on Judah and that bloodline, because this time God is going to use a specific bloodline but we’re not told where the branches are until afterward when we get to David. Oh, it’s going to be David. We think we’re told. “Oh, obviously Solomon. He’s going to be the king.” Yeah, that’s not really the way the bloodline goes, though. It goes through another son, Nathan, but the kingly line is still important.
So as we study history we need to realize, yes, China is a real nation somewhere in here, and Japan, India, the peoples who were settling in North and South America. Yes, that’s all real and a historian eventually has to reckon with that. That’s not the heart of what God’s doing, nor at this point is Great Britain or Gaul or Tarshish, Espanol. Rome isn’t even in the picture yet. God is focusing upon these people because they have his Word, they have his worship, and they have the bloodline or seedline that leads to Messiah.
You read a secular book and you will hear about Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, and “Oh, there was this little nation called Israel. Moving on.” No, our focus needs to be that Israel is the center of history, not because she’s Israel, not because they’re the genetic children of Abraham, but because this is where the covenant is, this is where the promise is, this is where the Word of God is, this is where God is revealing himself.
As this encounters other nations, even in the Old Testament, we begin to see blessing. There’s blessing to Egypt. There’s blessing to Syria. Think of Naaman. There’s blessing to Assyria. Think of the conversion of Nineveh. There’s blessings to Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. To Persia, Cyrus the Great. It keeps going and it does touch all these other nations, but this is not a pro-Western pro-white “old dead white guy” approach to history. This is a Christ-centered approach to history, and we have to be okay with that. We have to look at God’s special grace and say this is the channel God took, and while it’s not the whole story it is the center. We have to interpret everything else in terms of this, so we better know it really well.
Emily: I’m going to be very nerdy and say this reminds me of a role-playing game. There’s a central story and there’s a whole lot else going on that you might find more interesting. The side quests can be more personally interesting to you sometimes than the actual main story, especially if you don’t know where the main story is going.
So to be interested in all these contemporary things that are not Israel – like how were North America and South America populated? – those are very interesting questions that you can go and pursue, and they’re great things to go and pursue, just keeping in mind that the main story that we’ve been told has to do with Jesus, Israel.
I love how you phrased it, that Israel is the center of the story because Israel gets winnowed down. Especially in the book of Isaiah we see the covenant people winnowed down, winnowed down, winnowed down, until it’s one man, and Jesus is the covenant. He as a person is the covenant.
Greg: Yes, so our story is leading to Jesus, and the focus of that story is the one that God actually gave us in the only inspired history book we have. It’s the only book we’ve been able to follow for about the first 2,000 years of human history. Now we’re going to begin to run into other history books and secular records and archeological findings. I think we go next to either Egypt or Phoenicia, so archeology begins to speak to us and there are some memories in written records of these things. Hieroglyphics sometimes we can translate. But still, fundamentally, until we get pretty far into the history, those records are haphazard. They’re not terribly useful.
They’re often not chronological at all. They’re sometimes interwoven with myth, or sometimes, as the narrator in Our Town says, they’re records of slave sales and grain contracts. That’s what was important to them, that and magic. Most of the records we have of Egypt and Assyria are magic spells, because that’s what was important to them. So we’re still dependent upon scripture for most of our knowledge of the ancient world.
That doesn’t mean we need to stop there and that we can’t pursue archeology and we can’t try to put together pieces from old texts and try to get a fuller view. But we do need to remember that the Bible is infallible, and that when our interpretation from other sources differs with the Bible, the Bible’s right.
Emily: We have one infallible history book.
Greg: Yeah, and it’s interesting that God wrote it as an infallible history book, not as an infallible systematic theology. It tells us a lot about who God is and how God values history.
Emily: That is about all the time we have for this evening, so let’s wrap up with some recommendations.
Greg: I have one. Have you ladies discovered the online game Connections yet?
Emily: No, what’s that?
Greg: Once you’ve gotten through Wordle and Worldle, the next thing you have to do is Connections. Just type in Connections. It’s another thing that shows up in the New York Times. They give you 16 words, a number of sets of four words, and at first glance they all look like random words but there’s a connection. There are four sets and you have to discern what the connection is.
Emily: Oh, I like the sound of this.
Greg: Some things are pretty simple like “these things belong to a ship” or “these are chess terms” or “these are major league teams that won the pennant” or whatever, so sometimes it does test your knowledge of trivia. There have been a couple sets where I had no idea. Heavyweight champions? I have no idea. I did get golf because my dad used to be a golfer, so I recognized Nicholas. But then some of them are a little more obscure in their connections.
There was one not long ago where it was something like dog or terrier, top hat, iron, and I forget the other one, but do those ring a bell anywhere?
Emily: It’s the Monopoly pieces.
Greg: Yes, and that was it. You had to make that connection. Then finally after you’ve sorted some of these out, the last one, at least the last one I get to because it’s always a little obscure, is more having to do with either the spelling or the sound of the words, like all of these words have a double vowel or all of these words, if you added a letter, would be a fruit.
You’re allowed four mistakes and it will simply tell you you’re wrong, or if you miss by one you miss but you got all but one right so that helps a little bit, so you can use your guesses. Anyway, it’s fun. It uses different parts of your brain to do different things and it does test the broadness of your trivial knowledge. I’ve had a lot of fun with it and our family has. That’s Connections.
Emily: I would like to recommend an album by Andrew Peterson. I’m not sure if I’ve recommended this before. I kind of find it hard to believe that I haven’t, so it’s a repeat. The album is called Counting Stars. It seems appropriate for our Abrahamic theme.
That’s the funny thing, is God didn’t just say, “Look up at the stars. See? A whole sky full of stars. Count them one by one. Each of them has a story.” So part of the what the album is doing artistically is considering the faithfulness of God in multiple different ways.
My favorite track on the album is probably “God of My Fathers,” which is great and ties into that theme real well. It’s just lovely. It’s folk music, Christian poetry. Andrew Peterson has done a lot of work in the Christian art space to make sure that there’s a space for people who are doing music that is Christian that’s not Christian pop, so that people who are poets and artists and visual artists can get together and glorify God together and praise Him, without necessarily being on a Christian pop label.
Greg: Very nice. Rachel?
Rachel: Mine is one of the books that I collected when I was writing my Master’s thesis, which had a lot to do with the modern interpretation of Genesis 12. It’s called Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism and it’s by a man named Stephen Spector.
There are a couple other books that I could recommend, but I appreciated this one because it documents basically what we’re describing as Christian Zionism as an attempt to support the nation of Israel, because they believe that in blessing Israel they will receive blessing from God, and believing it at a national level, so showing the way that American Christian Zionism has driven foreign policy and just overall American favor for the nation of Israel, because they fear that if they don’t, they will invoke God’s curse from that same chapter.
It's a really interesting look at how that has influenced the Christian church and kept them from appreciating the transition and the continuity between Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church, and instead seeing them as two separate entities completely and, as we said, two separate gospels, two separate ways of salvation.
It’s very fascinating and enlightening to realize because a lot of it sits in the background in the American church and we don’t even really realize that’s what we’re hearing.
Emily: That sounds like a fascinating read. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight and a pleasure. I look forward to our next episode, which will be either Egypt or Phoenicia, one of those.
Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. And thank you, listeners, for listening.
You can subscribe to us on whatever podcast catcher you’re using. If you’d like to send us an email, we’d love to hear from you. Our address is haltingtowardzion@gmail.com. Again, thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
SHOW NOTES
Scripture: Genesis 11, 15; Galatians 3; Romans 4
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Greg: Connections online game
Emily: Counting Stars album by Andrew Peterson
Rachel: Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (Stephen Spector)