"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;" Romans 9:4
In the
midst of the confounding of the tower of Babel, and as the different families
of the Gentiles head off in their separate directions God chooses, out of all
of humanity, one man for himself. In
Genesis 12:1, he calls Abram. In Genesis
14:13, God calls him Abram the Hebrew, a name which comes from Abram’s father
Eber. The word ‘Jew’ first shows up in the book of Esther to describe the
captured inhabitants of Judea, but the
term appears interchangeably in the New Testament with the word ‘Hebrew’.
From Genesis 12 until the book of Acts, the
God of the Bible deals almost exclusively with the descendants of one man. God absolutely played favorites, and chose to
reveal himself not by writing his will across the sky for all of man to see,
but by giving written scriptures to one group of people exclusively. He makes
promises to this one man Abram that set the course of history for the rest of
mankind, and no matter how stubborn or stiff-necked or idolatrous Abram’s
descendants were (and still are) God keeps his promises to Abram through a
nation which has Abram’s blood running through it’s veins.
Romans 9:4 says that there are six things the Hebrew people received from
God that nobody else received. Some of
these promises are conditional in nature, and some are unconditional, but all
of them are physical and temporal in nature. The promises God made to the Jews
aren’t necessarily for the ‘sweet by and by’, but rather for the ‘nitty gritty
here and now’.
They
were promised adoption by God along family lines. If I were a Hebrew I
could know that not only would God be my God, but he would be my children’s
God. He would not cast us aside to
suddenly show favor on the Greeks or the Indians. Simply put, God chose them,
whether or not they on an individual basis chose him. Deut. 7:6-8 says “For thou art an holy people unto the LORD
thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself,
above all people that are upon the face of the earth” God did not make that
promise to the Chinese, or to the Europeans.
No African received such an adoption.
But the adoption didn’t stop there.
Now that he had chosen a people, God chose
himself a city. The Bible says in “Howbeit I will not rend away all the
kingdom; but will give one tribe to thy son for David my servant's sake, and
for Jerusalem's sake which I have chosen.” Neither Shanghai nor Dubai made the cut. Detroit or New Orleans weren’t even considered.
There are some lovely cities on the earth, but only one of them has ever been
chosen by God to bear his name.
God, having chosen for himself a people and
adopted for himself a city, also picked an habitation. The Bible says in Psalm 132:13-14, “For the LORD hath chosen Zion; he hath
desired it for his habitation. This is
my rest for ever: here will I dwell ; for I have desired it.”
After having called out Abram, God further
narrows it down to which of Abram’s sons will be the adopted line. Will it be
Ishamel, or perhaps one the children he fathered after the death of his
wife? The Bible says in Isaiah 44:1 “Yet now hear , O Jacob my servant; and
Israel, whom I have chosen :”
God is
very specific about which branch of the family tree he is adopting. In Isaiah 41:8-9, the Bible says “But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob
whom I have chosen , the seed of Abraham my friend . Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the
earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, Thou art
my servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away .” It’s not enough to simply be related to
Abraham; you must be related to Abraham though Isaac and then through
Jacob. No one in Ishmael gets the
adoption, neither do any of Esau’s descendants get the adoption. Yet another
proclamation of the exclusivity of this relationship is in Psalm 105 “O ye seed of Abraham his servant, ye
children of Jacob his chosen.”
Furthermore, God refers to Israel in Isaiah
49:14-15 as such; “But Zion said , The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten
me. Can a woman forget her sucking
child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they
may forget , yet will I not forget thee.”
God claims here that his
love and devotion to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob surpasses the
devotion a mother has to her child and that although mothers do sometimes cast
away their own babies, God will not cast away the people he has chosen and
adopted for himself.
This adoption did come with some strings
attached. God would demand to be intricately involved in their lives. As he hid
his face from the Gentiles, he revealed himself to Abraham’s seed. Exodus 19:5
says “Now therefore, if ye will obey my
voice indeed , and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto
me above all people: for all the earth is mine” If you look at this passage carelessly, one
might conclude that their adoption was conditional upon obedience. One might hastily deduce that if they
disobeyed, they would be ‘dis-inherited’ or ‘unadopted’. Having made an incorrect assumption, some
would even go so far as to say that this adoption is up for grabs by another
group of ‘peculiar people’. Let me ask
you to hold off on these conclusions because I maintain that this promise is
not a contradiction with an unconditional adoption, and as we go through the
rest of what the Hebrews received, the singularity of this statement will
become apparent.
These sons of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, were
they to heed to God’s laws, would become the most peculiar people that had ever
lived. Everything about their lives would be different from the nations around
them. They had a peculiar birth in the
Passover (Ex 12), as they are never referred to as a nation until after the
Passover. My nation began in 1776, their
nation began the night of Passover. They
had a peculiar inheritance in Exodus 13, and a peculiar deliverance in Exodus 14. Exodus 15 assigns to them a peculiar joy,
while Exodus 16 and 17 shows us the manna, a most peculiar provision. In Exodus
19 they are given a peculiar revelation. In Exodus chapters 20 through 24 they are
given by God peculiar laws and governments.
Exodus 25 through 40 details their peculiar religion and its peculiar
relationship with the Creator.
Now think about this for a moment. Let’s say
you are a Hittite or a Jebusite living in the land of Canaan. You are trudging
along in the vanity of your own mind, living by your conscience and violating
it on a regular basis. Your ancestors
have wrested the truths of God they knew and have reduced your people to
worshipping the fish god Dagon or Baal the rain god. Just down the road from you is a Jewish
settlement, and those fellows are unusual to say the least. You’ve heard they circumcise their males, and
they wear funny clothes with a border of blue around the bottom. They have a long list of foods they don’t
eat, and a long list of things they aren’t allowed to touch. They are always
worried about being defiled, and once a week, for no apparent reason, they stop
and do absolutely nothing. They don’t even cook or gather wood for a fire. Their houses have borders around the roof and
they don’t trim their beards. They
worship at this strange tent made of dyed badger skins, and they claim God
meets with them inside that tent. They
claim that, generations back, their ancestors came through here with a golden box
and killed scores of your relatives, but they refuse to let anybody see the
golden box. They are always slaying lambs and offering up blood to their
God. They are always washing their
hands. Everything about them makes them stick out like the proverbial sore
thumb, and makes it very hard to marry any of their women. Oh, you or one of
your Jebusite buddies might meet up off with an apostate Hebrew cutie in
rebellion against her parents every now and again, but for the most part, they
want nothing to do with you. They are,
in the purest sense of the word ,peculiar.
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