Allen Jackson - God In Our Midst - Part 1
I want to continue the theme we began couple sessions ago talking about «Why Israel Matters». I think for the most part, the church is largely unaware. And that’s unfortunate because I believe we have a great debt to the Jewish people. And tragically, the greatest persecutor of the Jewish people throughout history has been the Christian church. It’s just, it’s an established fact of history. It’s one that we’re, for the most part, not aware of, but it is the truth, and I assure you that the Jewish community is aware of it. They’re far more comfortable typically with a Muslim on the streets of Jerusalem than they are with a Christian. And I believe we can change that. I believe that is changing.
Many people in modern Israel today understand that the evangelical community are their most stalwart friends in the earth. But it requires a bit of discernment. When you say, «Christian,» they think, «A Christian is a Christian is a Christian». And so, they don’t really make any difference between a fundamentalist very conservative Christian and a Roman Catholic or a Greek Orthodox or an Episcopalian version. And we would say, «Well, there’s a lot of difference». But when we think of someone being Jewish, we think, «If you’re Jewish you’re Jewish you’re Jewish». And there’s as much diversity within the Jewish community as there is within the Christian community. And so, understanding why Israel matters, why the nation matters and why the Jewish people matters, I don’t believe you can properly understand your Bible and it’s implications if you don’t understand the role of the nation of Israel and the Jewish people.
So, we’ve taken a few sessions with this and, so far, I haven’t gotten my maps out, but I’m not above it, it may happen yet. But I’ll just start with…the fundamentals on this are not complicated. They’re a chosen people. God chose the Jewish people for his purposes. He said that. They didn’t choose him, he chose them. And it’s very clear in Scripture. It takes, really, no discernment at all. And in the New Testament, the word Israel occurs 77 times. And those words are never applied to the church. One of the errors that’s rather prominent in evangelicalism even is that where you read Israel in the New Testament, you could just draw a line through it and pencil in church. It’s bad theology, it’s bad exegesis, it’s just bad.
The word Jew occurs 75 times in the Old Testament and 188 times in the New Testament. The term Christian, just for comparison’s sake, appears three times in the New Testament. So, it should allow us to establish some sense of the significance God attaches to the people and the nation of Israel. And if it’s important to God, then by definition it should become important to us. You know, people say that, «I just don’t understand why you think that the Jewish people or the nation of Israel is important». 'Cause my boss said so. You know, I’m not too complicated. I grew up in a barn in Tennessee. And the Jewish people are a unique people. There is no one else like Israel. There’s just, there’s not a comparison set. They are one of one. God chose them, they didn’t choose him.
Israel is not like all the other nations. It’s that sentiment is expressed consistently throughout the Scripture. God established with Abraham and his descendants forever through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, an everlasting covenant. We’ve looked at these scriptures. So, I’ve suggested to you that when we pray, it’s important to pray for the Jewish people in the nation of Israel in accordance with what the scripture says, in alignment with the Word of God, because to pray in contradiction to Scripture is a waste of your energy and it isn’t fruitful. We don’t wanna do that.
So, understanding why Israel matters, understanding why the Jewish people have a unique place in God’s economy, enables us to pray in such a way that we can cooperate with seeing the purposes of God emerge in the earth. And oftentimes it requires us to overcome some biases and some bigotry and some hatred because a lot of that’s been baked into the Christian community. It hasn’t persevered for over 2000 years by accident. And I understand there’s some spiritual motivations behind it, but there’s also just some stubborn, prideful, self-righteous motivations behind it. You know, it’s not unusual to hear Christians say, «Well the Jewish people rejected Jesus, therefore God rejected them. They failed in their assignment».
Well, I would pose a couple of questions to you. We’ve had a 2000 year assignment in which we were supposed to preach the gospel in the whole world, and then the end could come, the boss could come back. It doesn’t seem to me we’ve picked up that assignment with much urgency. We’re to be salt and light and, on the watch of our generation, we don’t have to talk about any other point in history, just our generation, we have witnessed the most precipitous decline of Christian influence in the history of the church. We’ve taken Jesus out of our schools, out of our college campuses, out of the public square. Don’t tell me about separation of church and state. We can debate whether or not it’s constitutional, but it’s not biblical.
So, you mean you’re gonna bend your knee to a secular state and not bend it to the authority of God? That’s not on my notes. This is free and postpaid. «A treasured possession,» God said. In Exodus 19, and verse 5, it says, «If you obey me fully,» this is God, Moses’s message to the people that he’s led from slavery to freedom. God said, «'If you’ll obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you’ll be my treasured possession. And although the whole earth is mine, you’ll be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words you’re to speak to the Israelites».
That’s a pretty powerful message. «Out of all the nations, you’ll be my most treasured possession. I own the earth and everything that’s in it, a cattle on 1000 hills». He said, «Everything is mine. All the gold and all the silver is mine. I call the stars by name, but you are my most treasured possession». That is a very powerful statement. And if you and I are going to do our best to align our heart with the heart of God, we’ve got to grapple with that. «You’ll be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation». Kings and priests in a holy nation.
Now, in the New Testament, Peter, the fisherman that Jesus recruited who’s a very observant religious Jewish man, he keeps kosher, he keeps the Jewish holidays, he observes the Sabbath, all those, the Mosaic rules or many of them. Peter gives that passage an application to the broader world, to the Gentiles, the non-Jews. And even today in modern Hebrew, the Gentile is not really a complimentary term. But our inclusion is because we are in Christ, or more literally, in the Messiah. Because we belong to the Messiah, the book of Romans says, «We have been grafted in to the covenant that God made with Abram».
That we become heirs according to the promise. That our inclusion with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is more significant than our inclusion with the Methodist or the Baptist or the Pentecostals or the Episcopalians or whatever other label you may have been affiliated with. And I don’t find that our emotions or our attitudes really reflect that. I find we typically have a much higher allegiance to those subsets of our Christian faith than we do with the reality that our inclusion in the covenant God made with Abraham gives us a status in the kingdom of God. And that was made possible through an observant Jewish Rabbi, one Jesus of Nazareth.
And Peter reminds us of that in 1 Peter chapter 2, and verse 9. He said, «You’re a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you’re the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul».
See, I would submit to you that the Jewish community understands a great deal about being aliens and strangers in the world. Their diet made them unique. Their form of worship made them unique. Their holy day made them unique. The holidays made them unique. They understood what it was to be apart. They weren’t free to intermingle and to intermarry. They didn’t have the liberty of compromising and still enjoying the blessings of God. And while Peter opens the door and suggests to us that we, too, can be a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people who belong to God, then he reminds us that we have to conduct ourselves as aliens and strangers in the world.
We don’t have the privilege of being unequally yoked with ungodly people. We don’t have the liberty of blending in. We are called to be distinctive. When the Bible says, «You’re salt,» if you put something on the tip of… you know if it’s salt or not. We’ve tried to re-engineer this, genetically modify it. We want to be like a salt substitute. And Peter very clearly, particularly if you put it in the context of his experience and the history of the Jewish people up until this point and then from that point to this, the message is resounding and overwhelming. We’re called to be distinct, different, unique, set apart. And he says to do that, he said, «Understand there is a war against your soul».
Your soul is your mind, your will, and your emotions. To be willing to be an alien and a stranger, you’ve got to grapple with the war that that brings to your emotions and to your thought life. We don’t want to be different. We don’t wanna be excluded because of our faith. Don’t be excluded because you’re weird. I don’t know, at this point in my life, weird just does not impress me. I’ve seen so much weirdness in the name of Jesus. Jesus was not weird. He was holy and righteous and godly. And we substitute sometimes the most odd things for truly letting the character of Christ be formed in us.
Like we think spontaneous is more spiritual than a plan. And yet God tells us in the opening chapters of Genesis that he intends for his Son to come and to crush Satan’s head. God knows the ending at the beginning, and we act like a plan is anathema. God would never have a plan. Well, I’m an advocate for spontaneous, but spontaneous doesn’t make you more spiritual. I believed that at one time in my life. Like it was a real breakthrough for me when it occurred to me that on Tuesday, God might let me know what he wanted me to say on Saturday or Sunday. I thought it was more godly if I said that, you know, «As I walked up the steps tonight, the Lord spoke to me». When I hear that I always wonder, «Why weren’t you listening before you got to the steps»?
We’re called to be aliens and strangers, but just as certainly as the Jewish people are a treasured possession to God, so are you, so are you. If we ever were awakened to what it means to be included in the people of God, it would completely change our existence. We would never be the same again. We would stop quibbling about whether or not we’re gonna tithe or whether or not we would be obedient. We almost completely missed the magnitude, the wonder, the majesty of being included in the people of God. You know, they’re confirming new appointees to a new administration’s cabinet these days in Washington DC. It’s a life-changing event. I suspect your life would never quite be the same if you had an appointment such as that. It would change your resume, your connections, change your future.
One of our friends of our congregation, Mike Huckabee, is on his way to Israel. He’s appointed as an ambassador. That’s a life-changing event. But those are hiccups. They’re minor alterations compared to being included in the chosen people of God. «Who are you»? «I’m a Tennessean». «Oh, that’s nice». «Who are you»? «Well, I’m a man». «Oh, that’s really great. Who are you»? «I’m a child of Almighty God. I belong to him, he knows my name. I’m on record. He keeps a hair count». What’s he know about you? «Well, I hope he knows who I am». Me too. Then God makes this unique statement to the Jewish people. Again, it wasn’t modeled anyplace else. He said, «I will dwell in your midst. I will be in your midst».
The Creator of heaven and earth said, «I’m gonna hang out with you». It’s unimaginable. And Leviticus 26, «I will look on you with favor and make you fruitful and increase your numbers, and I’ll keep my covenant with you. And you’ll be eating last year’s harvest when you will have to move it out to make room for new. I’ll put my dwelling place among you, I’ll not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you’ll be my people. I’m the Lord your God, I brought you out of Egypt so that you’d no longer be slaves; I broke the bars of your bondage and enabled you to walk with heads held high». «I will walk among you». That’s not a promise God made to everybody.
Now yes, there’s a responsibility that comes with it, we’re gonna look at that in a moment. But one of the great, most amazing aspects of the New Testament is God says because of Jesus, when that curtain was torn in two between the holy of holies and the next section in the temple, only the high priest could go into the holy of holies, and it was separated by this very thick curtain. And he could only go in once a year, and then only with the blood of the Passover lamb. And when Jesus said, «It is finished,» on the cross, the scripture, that scripture says that that curtain was torn in two from the top to the bottom, signifying that the way into the presence of God, the Shekinah glory of God, was available to anyone now through the blood of the Passover Lamb, Jesus of Nazareth. But the covenant that made that possible was the covenant God made with Abraham.
The new part of that was that Jesus was the end of the law as a means of righteousness. Not the end of the law as a reflection of holiness and purity. It’s just that now we’re righteous by faith. And we’ve misunderstood and we’ve twisted that around and said, «Well, what the Jewish people had done was not important». Yes, it was. Without them, we’d never get to that point. We’re indebted to them. So, one of the fundamental shifts of thinking in the New Testament, and it precedes Jesus, is that the temple is no longer the center of their worship and their religious life. It’s a lot of the tension you read in the Gospels if you’re reading them with us, «Tear this down and I’ll rebuild it again».
Who do you think you are? «You swear by the gold of the temple and you say it’s sacred». Their point of pride was this amazing, elaborate temple that had been built that separated them from all the other nations. And John the Baptist came. And John preached the message that God used to stir the hearts of the people. Large crowds of people came to John to be baptized. All around the temple in Jerusalem were mikvahs. They looked just like our baptistries, steps leading down into a pool of water and steps leading out. And people were accustomed to immersing themselves in the mikvah before they went up onto the Temple Mount. It was in those very mikvahs on the day of Pentecost where the apostles baptized those thousands of people that wanted to be baptized. They baptized them in the name of Jesus.
But when John began to baptize, he didn’t go to the mikvahs around the temple and said, «Listen, before you go on the temple, why don’t you repent right here and I’ll baptize you». Where did John baptize? In the Jordan River. Again, if you’re not familiar with it, you could miss that a bit. It’s 20 miles from Jerusalem into the desert. It’s hot, it’s difficult, it’s a difficult journey. It’s a much more difficult journey back home. It’s far away from the influence of the temple. It’s very humble. John came wearing humble clothes and eating humble food. And the people came in droves. It’s de-emphasizing, it’s taking authority away from the temple in Jerusalem and focusing the authority on «Show me the fruit of your repentance,» he said.
And then Jesus comes along and he leads kind of this confrontational dialogue because they’ve attached to the wrong value to something. So, you could be in the right place at the right time, presented with an invitation to do the right thing, but if your heart’s wrong and your attitude’s wrong, you will miss it completely. Again, I think we are so casual, so sloppy. Philippians chapter 2, it’s not in your notes, but it is in the book. It says, «Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus». Jesus said, «Oh, you observe the Sabbath, but you observe it in a destructive way». He said, «You’ll search the world over to make a disciple and make him twice the child of hell that you are». He said, «Unless your righteousness succeeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of God».
You’re in the right place doing a lot of the right things, but their motives are so wrong, their attitudes are so poor, they’re gonna forfeit their opportunity in the kingdom of God. It’s a sobering issue. The Jewish people are a tremendous lesson for us. We can learn from them, we can learn with them. If we’ll stop judging and criticizing and looking down our noses in self-righteousness, the Bible says that their story was written down for us upon whom the end of the ages has come. It would be humbling, I know it would be for me, to have the greatest failures of my personal journey put in the book so everybody else could study it and know what not to do.
How about you? How would you like to have the darkest parts of your life, the worst thoughts you’ve had, the worst choices you’ve made written down and then published for everybody to study for a long time. The Jewish people took that space for us so that we could know the character of God, so we could understand the frailty of our own character. And then what’s our response been? «Well, they’re really messed up. Aren’t they stubborn? How could they not see»? Lord, forgive us. Oh, we’re chosen people, but now you need to be aware. You’re special, not because of who you are, because of what’s been done for you, the price paid so that you could be in the kingdom of God. And there’s an expectation that you’ll live as an alien and a stranger, that God dwells in our midst.
Look at 1 Corinthians 6, «Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside of his body, but he who sins sexually against his own body. Do you not know,» and what’s the answer? No, I think we forgot. Could you tell me again? What is it I’m supposed to know? «Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit». Paul is echoing an idea that we saw the roots of in John the Baptist’s ministry, we saw reflected in Jesus’s life and ministry. And now he’s taking the message around the Roman world that «Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you’ve received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body».
How is it that the church has arrived at a place where we will endorse, embrace, and celebrate all sorts of forms of sexual immorality? And we call it open-mindedness, we call it inclusivity, we call it love. It’s not love, folks. Encouraging people towards ungodliness that will bring the judgment of God into their lives is not love. It’s far more about cowardice. And if it’s a part of your own personal journey and you haven’t repented, it’s called disobedience. Mercy and grace will not wash away our willful practice of sin. We cannot choose the practice of sin and think that the mercy of God will neutralize that. If it were true, then we wouldn’t be told to confess our sins.
Before we go today, I wanna pray especially for those of you who have lost hope. It isn’t even up to us to maintain that. We can trust God that he’s watching over our futures. Let’s pray:
Father, I thank you that you’re a God who renews and refreshes and redeems, and I pray especially for those today who are weary, who have grown tired. Lord, refresh them, renew them, give them strength by your spirit today in Jesus’s name, amen.