God Called Israel to Rescue Adam

To many Christians, and actually to many non-Christians as well, one of the truly puzzling features of the whole Bible is its constant concern with the ancient people of Israel.

It’s quite an oddity when so many Christians throughout the world are actually not ethnically, and probably never were religiously, Jewish. What are these “Gentile” Christians, or indeed modern Jews, to make of the Bible’s obsession with the people of Israel?

In the Old Testament, following God’s creation of the world and Adam and Eve’s subsequent sin and expulsion from the garden, God called Abraham (Gen. 12) from among the nations so as to give him a massive family through whom God would bless the nations (Gen. 12:1-4).

And this is certainly not forgotten in the New Testament, but the introductions of both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and much of Galatians and Romans, are emphatic that God called Israel to be His special people.

Fine, but what’s this all about? How are we to make sense of God’s calling of Israel? Indeed, what is the whole point of Jesus’ Jewishness? Does it actually matter in any deep theological sense that the Son of God came as a first-century Jew?

The key lies in the logic of Genesis 12:1-4. God called Adam and Eve to fill the world with his own gracious sovereignty; but, when Adam and Eve sinned, God cast them out of the garden. What, then, was God going to do about the problem—on the one hand—of Adam and Eve’s sin (and the subsequent sin of all humans) and—on the other hand—the fact that the world would spin out of control without wise humans through whom God would run it?

The key is that, in the deep and rich logic of Genesis 12, the rest of the Old Testament, and the New Testament as well, God called Israel as the rescuing answer to Adam and Eve’s sin.

When Israel, the rescuer herself, went into exile and needed rescuing, God sent Israel’s representative Messiah, Jesus, both as God’s means of rescuing Israel and, through Israel’s Messiah, the people of Adam.

So, to say it simply, Israel matters, and Jesus’ Jewishness matters, because God sent Abraham to rescue Adam!

Now, as Jesus and Paul both make clear, those incorporated through baptism into Jesus the Messiah are now Abraham’s family according to faith. We are, as the family of Abraham and on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the people through whom God will rescue the world.

Come join us at Ooltewah United Methodist Church as we seek prayerfully to become, by the grace of God, people through whom God rescues the world.