The Promised Land
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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 Bryan Broome.
We are talking about the Promised Land today, specifically the land that was promised to Abraham. We have been talking about the children of Israel entering into this land under the leadership of Joshua. We’ve talked about Jericho and Achan and Rahab, and now we’re going to take a step back and look at the land in the broader context of God’s promise and his plan for history.
So let’s start with Abraham. He never inherited the land that God promised him in his lifetime, but he didn’t seem too bothered by that. What does Hebrews 11 say? That he looked for a city – I should have looked this up, I was faking it…
…that hath foundations whose builder and maker is God. He saw things by faith, and that gives a lot of people trouble. For the last couple hundred years in American church circles there’s been this emphasis on the land of Palestine, the land that Israel regained in 1948 when she became a new nation, the belief that this is the fulfillment of prophecy, that this is what Abraham was waiting for, but that has as many problems as any other interpretation.
Abraham is dead, and the prophets, they are dead, as the Jews said to Jesus, so what is all of this about? That’s what we’re going to talk about. What was the whole point of the Promised Land? What is the point of the Promised Land, and ultimately what is the Promised Land?
Clearly the Promised Land was Abraham, the man of faith, waiting for a government that doesn’t recognize him, to be instituted in the 20th century.
We have a nation sitting in Palestine that does not recognize Jesus as Messiah, and therefore has rejected the faith of Abraham, so what exactly are we supposed to do with that? And the church has taken a number of approaches.
“Well, it’s close enough for now. Jesus will fix it,” or “No, it really isn’t close enough, but Jesus will fix it when he comes back.”
I think the “not close enough” is “We need to rebuild the temple and then it will be close enough,” right?
Yeah, for some. Some Christians are actually contributing to rebuilding the temple. My daughter recently was told by her pastor, “And we don’t contribute to that! That’s not a good thing! No money for rebuilding the temple!” He got that one right. He’s actually got a lot right.
There’s still that view of prophecy that seems very fascinated with and centered around Israel, Canaan, the land, and the physical structure, the temple, the tribal divisions, even the sacrifices and priesthood.
When I was a kid, the Schofield Reference Bible was a very popular thing. Most Christians who weren’t explicitly Presbyterian, Reformed, or Lutheran generally had it as their study Bible, and its notes were very clear that Israel is supposed to be back in the land, and once she gets there, sooner or later the temple will be rebuilt, the sacrifices reinstituted, the priesthood reinstalled. And then during the 1,000-year millennium Jesus will rule over that land and from that land over the rest of the world, and this is what Abraham expected. The problem is that’s not what God said, and it’s not what the Bible says Abraham expected.
We keep running into this uncomfortable phrase “forever.” Forever is not 1,000 years. Forever is not even a really long time. What God was promising Abraham was something that defies death, that goes beyond resurrection. It’s something that is most literally eternal. And to think that that prophecy, that promise could be fulfilled in its fullness and in all of its extent, while the matter of death has not been settled, and sin has not been settled, is really to mis-read scripture.
The concern of scripture from the fall of Adam forward is God’s relationship with man. Man is a sinner. Man is a rebel. He’s broken God’s law. He is guilty, deserving of wrath, and he is spiritually polluted. He hates God, hates his neighbor, and wouldn’t like to sit down and have supper with God if he could. That’s the problem, and putting people on a particular piece of real estate and surrounding them by ceremonies and rites isn’t going to fix that.
So when God comes to Abraham in Mesopotamia, in the very shadow of Babel, and says, “I have someplace for you to go. I’ve got something for you to do. You’re going to be great and I’m going to give you a seed, and in that seed all the families of the earth are going to be blessed,” I think the word ‘blessed’ is the thing that gets ignored the most. We don’t stop and say, “Wait. What is blessing?” We’ve talked about this before, so see previous episodes.
If you read through Galatians 3, there are two things that Paul brings to light, a great emphasis he brings. First of all, justification by faith, being righteous with God by faith alone. Abraham, as the father of all who believe, we’re told his faith was accounted for righteousness. “Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham,” so that’s one.
The other is “That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” That’s sanctification, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, with all that implies.
That’s what Abraham was most concerned with, that blessing, because compared with that, inheriting some real estate really doesn’t amount to a whole lot. What Abraham heard was, “In your seed, all the nations of the world are going to be justified and sanctified. They’re going to be declared righteous before me and they’re going to be united to me through the seed and the indwelling Spirit. Oh, there’s a land you need to be in so we can make this work.”
Once you begin to read the Old Testament in that light, things begin to make a whole lot more sense, especially when you get to the New Testament. You’re not suddenly having to learn a brand new religion, with new rules, new principles, and new priorities.
One of the conflicts of the early Church – we were just talking about this recently in Acts – is that what it sounded like to the Jews at the time. “Wait a second. You mean the Gentiles don’t have to be circumcised? You mean they don’t have to keep kosher? You mean this? You mean that? Well, what have we been doing?” It was kind of revolutionary.
Because in fact they did miss the point and they did turn it into another sort of religion. This was Jesus’ constant conflict with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, that they had invented a new religion out of the materials of the old covenant but not in the spirit of the old covenant. The old covenant was looking forward to Messiah and what he would accomplish, and was keeping Israel protected and in a holding pattern until Messiah should come. But the scope of the promise was always “All nations shall be blessed.”
The blessing wasn’t having political power. It wasn’t having mineral resources, oil or gold or any such thing. It wasn’t even peace on earth. It was having a right relationship with God through the Messiah, and having the power of the Holy Spirit within themselves to walk with God. That’s what God was promising, and he was promising it on a worldwide scale.
So why was Abraham not worried that he didn’t get that in his lifetime? He was more patient than we are. We want everything right now, even if it’s the gospel. We want the worldwide revival to begin right now, and we expect it to be done in our lifetime. “C’mon God, get with it here. Here are your great promises. Why is this taking so long?” which of course Israel could have complained about.
“Four generations and my seed is going to be in a land that’s not theirs? They’re going to be oppressed and enslaved?”
Sometimes, looking at the genealogy, I have to think, “Well, whose fault was it that it took ‘so long’?” Specifically I’m thinking of Judah and the begetting of Perez and Zerah, the twins. Now there’s the 10 generations that have to pass, because for 10 generations a bastard child cannot enter into the presence of the Lord, right? So it’s like, “Well, this could have been a quick thing, but now we have to wait 10 generations.”
On the one hand, as good Calvinists we freely admit God’s predestination and sovereign plan and the wisdom of said plan. When we look at human responsibility, yes, God’s people kind of stretched it out unnecessarily. It wasn’t unnecessary from God’s point of view. He had things that needed to happen, stories he wanted to tell, a book he wanted to write that would contain everything that the Bible actually does have, so he knew what he was doing. But that doesn’t excuse God’s people from lameness, any more than it excuses the church in the 21st century from lack of evangelism.
Yeah, we have a job to do. God’s story is going to be great, and part of the greatness will be how we screwed it up and how he rescued us again and again, and how it looked like everything hung by a thread, and he stepped in and did something incredible or something sneaky and the gospel exploded across the planet yet again.
We’ll sit back for all eternity and enjoy the story, and yet we will be like, “You know, it could have happened faster. It could have happened with less bloodshed. It could have happened with less suffering. It could have happened with me being far more faithful than I was, not breaking God’s heart.” We’ve got all that.
So we have Abraham who is told that in God’s good time – and it’s going to be at least four generations before they even get back to the Promised Land – God is going to start this process in which his seed will inherit the land, and in that seed all nations of the earth will be blessed.
That brings us back to Galatians 3, because Paul has something very specific to say about those words “unto thy seed.” This is Galatians 3:16 –
Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.
The word is important because he does add the preposition “unto thy seed.” Every time there’s an “unto” in God’s promises to Abraham, it’s the land that’s in view. “I will give this land unto your seed,” and Paul says, “That seed? That wasn’t Israel as such. That was Messiah. That was Christ,” because it said seed, not seeds. Now, this is a fine point of Hebrew grammar that I’m not fully qualified to speak on, but Paul does a pretty good job for us here.
From what he goes on to say, there is seed in the sense of many individual seeds, and he’s saying that’s not what it says. It doesn’t say many individual seeds. It says one seed, but that seed may be a collective.
A little bit more than that, because here in Galatians 3 he says the seed is Christ, and then this is what he says later on –
For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
In other words, Christ is more than just Jesus of Nazareth. Christ is Christ together with his Body and bride. If we have been baptized into Christ, if we have been united to Christ by his Spirit, then we are extensions of Christ. We are members of Christ, partakers of his anointing, and therefore what is true of Jesus must be true of us. He’s the first fruits, we’re the harvest, and we can think of all the other metaphors that the Bible uses. He’s the chief cornerstone, we’re the temple.
It’s not that we get the blessings individually because of a direct relationship with God. What we get, we get in Jesus and we get because of Jesus. So he’s the seed, and if we’re in him then we’re also the seed. But if we’re not in him…there’s a problem.
This is a good deal of what Paul talks about in what remains of Galatians, and also what he talks about in Romans 9, the grand chapter on predestination and election. Who exactly is Israel? Anybody who’s ever had to deal with arguments about predestination I’m sure has been pointed toward Romans 9 at some point. Whether they’ve dealt with it or not is another issue.
Paul, wrestling with what’s happening in Israel in his day, looks around him and Israel as a nation is apostate. There is a remnant that God is saving, the nucleus of the New Testament church. He says –
I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
All of those are wonderful outward privileges that Israel has had, and Israel is clearly identifiable with history. We know who Israel was. We know who the fathers were. We know the outward privileges. We know the external details of the covenants, and we know the bloodline through whom Jesus came.
So Paul has to face this and say, “What happens to them now? Is God going to let them walk away into darkness? Are they going to stumble and fall forever?” He says –
Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel. Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called.
There he’s referencing the passage in Genesis where Abram is having to decide what to do with Ishmael. We have Ishmael, who is a true bloodline son of Abram. He’s Abraham’s seed – genetically, DNA, however you want to measure it out – and we have Isaac, the child of the promise, the child born by miracle, who was also Abraham’s seed.
That is, the child born by fleshly means, and contrary to the promise, in fact in violation of God’s law because he took a second wife – that child is going to be rejected, and the promise and the covenant line is going to go through Isaac, and this is what Paul says here.
“In Isaac shall thy seed be called. That is, they which are the children of the flesh…” born by purely fleshly means and dependence upon purely fleshly means, “these are not the children of God.” Being physically descended from Abraham does not make you a child of God. That is what Paul is saying. “But the children of the promise are counted for the seed.”
The seed, who ultimately is Christ, those who make up the seed with him are those who are children of the promise, as Isaac was.
For this is the word of promise. At this time will I come, and Sarah shall have a son. And not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father Isaac; (For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth;) it was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.
This has lots to say about divine predestination, election, and all that, but the main avenue of his argument is that Esau was a child of Abraham, but he was rejected. He was rejected from the womb. So God’s grace, it’s bypassing nature, it’s bypassing bloodline, it’s bypassing all the externals, even that of family covenant, and it’s working on another level altogether, that of promise and of faith. The true Israel is the one that receives and believes the promise and trusts God for its fulfillment, rather than resting in its own merits, however noble it may think those merits may be at times.
This is what Paul comes back to in Galatians. Here I’m looking at chapter 4, one of my favorite sections. Paul writes in verse 21 –
Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. Which things are an allegory…
That doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen or that it’s fiction, but that there’s a spiritual lesson involved.
…considered in and of itself as a program of self-righteousness and good works…
which gendereth to bondage, which is Hagar. For this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.
They thought because they had the mark of circumcision and they had these promises and they had these dietary laws and they had these sacrifices and this priesthood and all these ceremonies that they were bound for heaven and they were God’s favorites and nothing could take that away from them, no matter what their personal moral character may be. The Jerusalem of Paul’s day, the Jerusalem of a crucified Christ and kill the prophets, is in the same boat with Ishmael and Hagar and all those who would seek God by works righteousness.
Over against the earthly Jerusalem is a heavenly Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem, which this podcast is kind of named after – Halting Toward Zion. It’s above in the sense that, “Well, our king is above. Our king sits at the right hand of the throne of God,” and given how many Christians that have been in earth’s history, probably the greater population of the city is in heaven as well, but it certainly has outposts on earth.
…and this is a reference to Isaiah 54 which talks about the spread and the growth of God’s people…
Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath a husband.
So he takes Old Testament prophecies that everyone would have thought, “Well, this is for Israel,” – yes, which Israel? Israel according to the flesh or to those who believe the promises because they’re part of the Messiah? They’re grafted in, united to, in communion with the coming Messiah by faith, by the Spirit.
He’s talking to Christians. Yes, there are Jews, Israelites, who are children of the flesh and biologically are children of Abraham, but speaking to Gentile Christians he’s saying, “No, like Isaac, we’re the children of God, not because of our fleshly birth but because of our faith, because we have received the Spirit.
But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.
Jews according to the flesh were persecuting Christians, and the Judaizers within Galatia were persecuting those who were taking a firm stand for the gospel.
Nevertheless, what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.
Cast out the bondwoman and her son – what Paul just did here, if any good Jew actually got this he’d be absolutely horrified and outraged because Paul has basically said that those who are Jews according to the flesh but not according to faith are in the same class as their Arab neighbors. They’re physically descended from Abraham and they don’t know God, so what’s the difference?
“That must be received by faith in the Messiah, which you have steadfastly refused to do, and that puts you outside the camp, outside of your own Messiah.”
We stopped in Romans 9. If we go into Romans 10 and 11, Paul holds out hope that one day Israel will become jealous of the privileges that the churches inherited. Paul uses the figure of the olive tree. One olive tree with its roots in the Father is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Natural branches (unbelieving Israel broken off), foreign alien branches (Gentiles) graft in, branches from a wild olive tree, but only one tree.
He says if God can do that, if God can graft in the Gentiles, couldn’t he graft his own people, those who once were not strangers to the covenants of promise, who once waited for Messiah? Couldn’t he graft them back in? Yes, he could, and if he were to do that, the results would be amazing. But they have to come the same way everyone else comes. They have to come through faith in Christ.
So then back to this whole thing of the Promised Land. What is it that Abraham was looking for? I think first of all we have to say that he was looking for more than Palestine. Palestine had a role to play, and we’ll get to that in a second, but from the beginning, before God even mentioned Palestine – I was reading Genesis 12 before we started, just to make sure I saw the wording, and you know what? The first time he mentions the promise there’s no mention of the land. God says, “Come to a place I’m going to show you,” but he doesn’t promise to give it to him. What he promises is all nations blessed.
That’s the starting promise, and only as Genesis develops does God add in, “Oh, and by the way, your seed [singular] will get this land. Oh, and your seed [collective] will be as numerous as the stars of heaven,” which fits right in with, “In your seed all nations will be blessed.”
Why was Abraham willing to wait? Why did he not expect everything right away? He wanted to see the world saved. He wanted the conversion of all the heathen nations. He wanted all peoples everywhere to receive this good news of justification by faith and sanctification by the Spirit, and he kind of figured it might take a while.
Now, whether he knew exactly how long is something else again. Being human, he may have been a bit short-sighted too, but he realized that even though he might die before he saw it, it doesn’t mean God failed, because Abraham ultimately isn’t dead. He’s going to come back to life. And as he stands in heaven and greets each new convert who comes through the Pearly Gates, as it were – a figure of speech – who dies and goes to be with Jesus, he’s there and sees another son, another daughter. “Hey, three more sons! Hey, 100 more daughters over there!” and he is there rejoicing in how God is working out this promise and handing him the world.
It would be interesting to know how much the saints in glory know what passes on earth. Do they get news as everybody dies and goes to heaven? Does everyone say, “What’s going on? What are the headlines? What’s God doing down there?” or does God just say, “You know what? You must wait until the end of the story, then all will be told.”
We have a radio announcer who’s reading the baseball news off the tickertape.
But in the meantime in this world, and this is important, God did promise him the world, not just the people in it but the planet, and there’s a lot about that. Again, Gnostic bell [ding!]
It is easy, and the Church has sometimes done this, to say, “Well, the Promised Land is heaven, so yeah, he gets heaven.” No, the Promised Land is not heaven. The Promised Land is the fulfillment of the Great Commission. It’s when all nations in earth and in heaven are blessed, are all the seed of Abraham, and all nations are Jesus’ disciples.
In Romans 4 Paul tells us that Abraham knew he would be heir of the world, that that was the promise. Jesus said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Again, earth means land, and land is a symbol of heaven, so it means the meek get to go to heaven – no! The promise is about this world and this reality, and therefore it began in this world and this reality.
So we come to, “So what’s the big deal with the Promised Land?” From the time that Abraham’s story begins to go somewhere, when Isaac is born and then God calls Abraham to sacrifice him and we have that whole resurrection motif, God says, “In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen,” it being God providing the substitute. So what’s kind of implied is this is Emmanuel’s land. This is Messiah’s land.
Now we’re given something concrete. Here’s the place, in these mountains, the mountains of Moriah round about Jerusalem. Somewhere in one of these mountains God will provide a sacrifice. That’s why this land is important.
God has something to work out in time, on earth, and in history, something that physically has to happen to God in the flesh, and that’s what makes the Promised Land so important, and makes it so important that God’s people be there when the time comes.
Canaan is nice and all. There was a time when it was as the garden of the Lord, as the garden of Eden. Not so much anymore, but again that’s trivial compared to what God wrought in that land. He brought his Son into that land to give his life an atonement for sin, and then raised him from the dead. And it was from that land that the gospel began to pour out into the whole world. That’s what’s important.
Does that mean that, “Well, we had Canaan and we don’t need it anymore”? No, we need everything because God owns everything.
Including Palestine, including Canaan. God hasn’t given up any of it. Jesus has not given up his claims.
We all know the Christmas sermon of Isaiah that begins with, “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son and call his name Emmanuel,” and it goes on to, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given.” There are a number of very famous Messianic lines in Isaiah 7-12.
But in the midst of it all, as Isaiah prophesies the coming of the Assyrian armies, he’s describing Assyria as if it’s a great bird that’s sweeping down and spreading out its wings over “thy land, O Emmanuel.” In the middle of Israel’s apostasy and the announcing of the punishment, the Father turns to the Son and says, “Yeah, Assyria’s coming into your land, my Son, into your land, O Emmanuel. It is your land.”
“I better go take care of things!” Jesus is not going to throw away Palestine. Who exactly will live there? We are told one thing. “The nation that will not serve thee will perish,” so whoever holds it in the long run will be a people that believes God, believes in the Messiah, trusts his Word, believes his gospel. How that will work out – God has not given us a detailed roadmap, nor do we need one.
It’s also very interesting to note this land is called Emmanuel’s Land. I believe there’s a hymn in the Trinity Hymnal that has that exact line. It’s really interesting to note how the individuals you mentioned at the start of this podcast are so adamant about ceding it, more or less, to people that don’t acknowledge Emmanuel.
It’s like they take all the promises that are given to Israel, which are Messianic in nature, and just say, “Well, it doesn’t matter that they reject God’s Messiah. They’re children of the promise by birth, so we have to acknowledge that they’re going to get it by that virtue,” even though at every step it’s about the Messiah.
You just said something that threw something into stark relief for me. I’m going to try to be careful, because we don’t want to offend people needlessly, but some of these same people who would say, “But they’re Israelites. By covenant they get the promises automatically,” will turn and look at their own children and say, “Well, yes, they’re my children but they don’t have anything until they themselves personally trust in Jesus,” including the sacrament of initiation.
Jews were circumcised and they get included in all the outward promises, apparently, but they look at their own children sometimes and say, “Yeah, but not until my child reaches the age of accountability, and not until he has made profession of faith himself can he have a relationship with God that God is going to honor.”
That seems to be plain contradictory to me, now that I think about it. I’m not sure why I haven’t thought about it before, but these are real issues, how the externals of the covenant relate to the internal reality.
As Paul was describing Israel’s privileges, he says, “To them belong the covenants of promise.” That isn’t enough. The covenant is in part outward, in part inward, and one can receive the waters of baptism, come to the Lord’s Supper, be a church member, attend worship every Lord’s Day, and his heart can be far from God.
It goes back to Romans 9, where if the Church is the continuation of the covenant community that Israel was, all those who believe in God’s Messiah, then we’re still dealing with the same principle of visible/invisible distinction, where not all who are of the Church are the Church, as well. It applies equally.
Yes, it does. That’s something we try to communicate to our covenant children, and I have found in my experience that we don’t always succeed. It seems that for every time we say “covenant” we need to say “gospel.” In fact, probably for every time we say “covenant” we need to say “gospel” twice, because I have repeatedly run into good covenant children who did it all – Christian school, homeschool, catechism class, confirmation, baptized as an infant, they know their systematics – and yet someplace in their late high school or college years, or maybe as young marrieds, they begin to question their faith and even flatly to turn away from it, or they reject covenant theology in favor of something else that’s Christian, but it’s not what they learned.
You have to ask yourself, “What happened?” Now, we can appeal to divine sovereignty. “Well, God did not ordain that they should come to a proper saving knowledge of Christ.”
But before we get there we should be thinking, “Is there something that we could have corrected that we should be careful of going forward?” – not that it’s all up to us, but we have responsibilities, so one of our first questions should be, should it not, whether we have…
The first question should be, “Did we screw up?” When it starts becoming collective on a large scale, I think it’s more imperative that we ask this question, “Did we thoroughly communicate the gospel?”
I may have used this story already, but I’ll use it again because it’s relevant. I was talking to a fine Christian dad and he told me that his children were still fairly young, but old enough to be capable of rational conversation. He asked them, “So, what does it mean to be a Christian? How are you Christians?”
“Well, because we go to Christian school. We were homeschooled, then we went to Christian school, we have catechism class…”
The funny thing is, you never know how long it’s going to take, how many repetitions it’s going to take for that to click. I can pinpoint the moment in Sunday School when I understood the gospel, and it was not until 6th grade, and I had heard the gospel a lot more times before that.
Because again it’s not something we do for other people, either. “If we had just said it right. If we had just used this text instead of that. If we’d used this phraseology rather than that. Then if we had sat down one to one and looked them in the eye and made sure they were listening, slap them a little maybe, then maybe…” No, it’s what you said.
Our former pastor, quoting a gentleman he had met once upon a time, has this story. The gentleman said, “For years I heard the gospel, then I heard the gospel, then I heard the gospel, then I heard the gospel…then I heard the gospel.”
Yes, God’s sovereign grace, God’s sovereign time, but you know what? If the gospel is not there, then they’re not going to believe it. We can’t compel belief. We can’t initiate regeneration, but at the very least we can make sure that the gospel is right under their noses, something they trip on every time they move. They may attribute it to all kinds of things, and they may not see it for what it is, but at least we have to do that.
There was another young man and we were talking about him disciplining his children in the broad sense, but also in terms of giving spanks. He said, “You know, I tell them what they did wrong and we hug them, then give them a spank, then hug them some more and send them on their way.”
There was a lady who applied for teaching at our school, and our headmaster is very wise, particularly in this area. One of his questions that he asks now is, “How would you present the gospel to a child of the age you’re going to be teaching” – a 10-year-old, 6-year-old, whatever.
And this woman says, “Why would I have to do that? All of these children go to church, right?”
“I’m sure they would pick it up someplace. I don’t know why I would have to be the one to tell them.”
Christian education is first and foremost education of the gospel. Sometimes you let it come up naturally, because it does, and sometimes you say, “All right, we need to talk about the gospel again right now,” because our fleshly nature is so hardened against it. We want something we can do, something that will make us feel good about us, something we can pat ourselves on the back about.
As I’ve said before, if this podcast does nothing else but irritate people on this one point, then we’ve done our job. There’s a lot of things to talk about. There’s a lot of theology and philosophy we enjoy discussing, but if we don’t show people Jesus, if people can walk away from this podcast saying, “Well, that didn’t seem so uniquely Christian to me,” we’ve blown it.
I think we all try every time to bring our discussion back to Jesus, to his perfect righteousness, his shed blood, and to the gospel that must be received by faith alone plus nothing.
Back to the land for a moment, there’s so much comfort in God choosing the land ahead of time, because this is all about Jesus. This is all about the promise. God says, “I’m going to provide a Messiah for you,” and our first question should be, “When and where?” If there’s not a when and there’s not a where, it’s not really happening.
So we see Israel asking through the psalms, through the prophets, all the way through the Old Testament, “How long, O Lord? When are you going to do this? You said… When?” but he already gave us the where. That was never a question. That’s God’s preparation. “This is the place. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Therefore, this place, this physical locale, this geography, this topography on the planet Earth has immense value to God and to all human souls. God would hang everything on a piece of real estate? After a manner of speaking, yes, he did, because if that place isn’t there then there will be no time when anything could happen.
Satan has spent a lot of time trying to bring that place under his dominion, both spiritually and militarily/politically, but God always manages to bring his people back into it and give them just as much as they needed to be there when Messiah came.
And then, of course, the great joke – “But wait, we have this powerful empire that’s controlling it all.”
“Let’s have the powerful empire arrange for Messiah actually to go to Bethlehem.”
No Gnosticism. We’re not emphasizing the Spiritual reality – and Spiritual here is capitalized. We’re emphasizing the work and presence and power of the Holy Spirit through the gospel in all of this, the power to transform a world, to bring a world to Christ.
We’re not leaving the world behind. We’re not turning the promises into phantom ghostly things. We’re simply grabbing it all for Jesus – not for any political entity, whether it be Israel or a theocratic Church. We are saying, “Jesus has claims on this planet and he is putting them into effect. He is subduing the world himself, his way, not ours.” We would do it other ways. Our ways stink. His ways are good, his ways are gracious.
Something you said just reminded me. Think of all the widely-varied cults that have shown up, where you never hear of them until it’s like, “37 people were found dead as they were awaiting a comet to take them away from planet Earth.” Granted, there’s not necessarily that many of those kind, but the idea where it’s like the salvation is found in leaving behind Earth, particularly because it’s bad in some way. There are ways in which it is bad, but it’s not this wholly incorruptible thing by virtue of being made of stuff.
The concept of something being redeemable – and from our perspective, nothing is redeemable. Everything is either incorrupt or corrupt, and if it’s incorrupt it will be corrupt as soon as humans get their hands on it. And yet God created this category of, “Yes, it’s corrupt, and yet I’m not done with it. This is going to be good.”
I remember it scarring me as a child. I haven’t seen it since I was 5 years old.
Nor do you need to see any more, but there is a line where the dwarves pick up the charred remains of what was more or less Satan, and they point at it and say, “It’s concentrated evil!” so evil actually takes on a physical presence in this ash that they’re holding, which they immediately get rid of.
That’s a form of Manichaeism, that physical things are evil, and the American Church has dumped a lot of stuff into that category – playing cards, make-up, DVDs…
You go down the list. “The thing itself is evil.” Things aren’t evil. Even things that we have no good use for, like idols, are not evil because there’s some kind of sinful power wrapped up in them. It’s just that we are so fascinated by them in our depravity that we can’t find a good use for what could otherwise have just been a pretty good painting or something.
Paul is clear about this. There are things that, although the evil is not in them, we can’t find a good use for and therefore they need to be gotten rid of, but that list is real limited. Most things have a good and simple use, and Paul is not afraid to say, “All things are lawful for me,” but lawful doesn’t mean I can use everything any way I want. We have to use things in terms of God’s Word, for God’s glory, for his kingdom, his righteousness.
So Christianity is not Manichaen and it’s not Gnostic. It is in some ways a very worldly religion. I mean God invented food and sex and work and sweat and beauty and art and all kinds of things that are not bad. They have great potential to glorify him, but we would ruin everything if we could. We try really hard, and that’s why Messiah had to come, not because the world was hopeless but because the only hope was God himself, because we had nothing.
That’s another cheery note to end on, except this time it actually is because God did that.
Praise be. Let’s wrap up with some recommendations at this point. Do you have one, Greg?
I’ve got one, thanks to my daughter, Hayley, who is busy cooking in the kitchen beside me. She suggested that I recommend teaching your children to cook. I think this is a wonderful thing. Our oldest daughter started cooking when she was quite young, and for years got up every morning and made breakfast for us, so she’s a master at breakfast. Then for a couple years I turned it over to the other two and they alternated breakfasts, so we have breakfast down. Now they’re all learning in various stages in their expertise to cook wonderful meals. Hayley is working on enchiladas right now for the first time.
I have run into far too many adults, often women, who say, “My mother never taught me anything about cooking, because in the time she could explain it to me she could just as well do it herself,” or “She didn’t want to burden me. She wanted to be responsible for those things.”
If you don’t teach your children to cook, 1) they can’t cook for you, and they love to cook for you. They think it’s fun to cook for you, if it was fun for you to teach them, and 2) they can cook for themselves and they can cook for their friends, and they will never starve.
When my wife and I got married, she cooked everything that went in the oven and I cooked the things largely that went on top of the oven, especially if oil was involved, or grease. If it involves grease that could splatter, I did that.
Now she does it all, but her mother had not really taught her. “How do you flip eggs? How do you turn bacon?” They didn’t do grease so much, so between the two of us we pulled off a pretty good food-making service there at the beginning.
It is a good and profitable thing to teach your children to cook, and then to allow them to cook. Might you get a few kind of weird meals? Yeah, you might, but I’ve tasted more weird meals from adults than I ever have from my girls. Everything my girls have made, I like and I could eat. There have been a few meals made by adults when we were sick – you know, they bring you those meals to take care of you – and into the garbage can they went because they were blech.
My recommendation for the day is going to be T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I don’t actually think it’s his best work. I think The Waste Land is probably his best work, but I really like Four Quartets and it’s rewarding every time you read it. If you read it out loud that’s even better, but it might take a while, but you can read the whole thing silently in probably less than an hour.
It’s just lovely with lots of meditations on history and your place in it and your relation to people who have come before you. It’s just extraordinarily beautiful. That’s T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
As far as my recommendation, I’m going to go very biblical and recommend what St. James recommends, which is religion that is pure and undefiled, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. That feels like a Jesus juke, but it is an excellent reminder to remember that that’s part of the Christian life. It’s not all theology discussions, although it is certainly not devoid of that. And it’s not just fuzzy feelings about God, though it may certainly include those. It is also to visit people who are actually hurting, and to keep yourself holy.
A good reminder, Bryan, thank you. That was convicting somehow. I’m afraid of thinking why it might have been convicting.
Thank you, guys, both so much for this discussion. It’s been such a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.
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