Embracing Ultimate Dichotomy
Embracing Ultimate Dichotomy
"Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you." (Deuteronomy 8.5)
"I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me; when he commits iniquity, I will correct him with the rod of men and the strokes of the sons of men, but my lovingkindness shall not depart from him." (2 Samuel 7.14-15)
"My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline and do not resent His rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those He loves, as a father the son He delights in." (Proverbs 3.11-12 and Hebrews 12.5-6)
"You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please Him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess. Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations from one end of the earth to the other." (Deuteronomy 28.62-64)
"This is what the Lord says: 'When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill My gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you.' " (Jeremiah 29.10-12)
Because of the absolute almighty-ness of God and our complete minute-ness, faith in Him frequently requires us to embrace dichotomy. We are pressed to come to grips with truths clearly contained and expressed in the Bible which, to all extents and purposes, appear to us to be so far apart as to be disconnected...even contradictory.
Our failure to face and wrestle with such uncomfortable and inconvenient "discrepancies", paves the path to heresy...which is really the distortion and reduction (and destruction) of the Truth, to mere points of view which are rendered intellectually and spiritually convenient, comfortable and inoffensive.
"Our dear brother Paul...his letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do other Scriptures, to their own destruction." (2 Peter 3.16)
For example, the blindingly dazzling mystery of the Trinity (one God who effortlessly encounters us as three distinct Persons, simultaneously! Matthew 3.16-17) is rendered "comprehensible" and thus acceptable to Jehovah's Witnesses and "liberal" Christians alike, by their reduction of Jesus to mere man, and nothing other or more.
"For it pleased...that in (Jesus) should all fulness dwell...For in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." (Colossians 1.19 & 2.9)
Certainly in this life, we need to be humble enough to understand, acknowledge and accept that so far as our comprehension of God is concerned, we are watching colour movies on black and white TVs, and listening to CDs on antique gramophones.
All too often "unbelievable" subjects or issues are like the proverbial "elephant in the room". It takes up most of the space, but everyone studiously ignores its presence.
At this hour, there is just such a Biblical and spiritual "elephant" at large, which is so significant and so important, that I call it the "ultimate dichotomy"! And it is this: God's relationship with the Jews.
The two (humanly speaking) "contradictory" truths which go together to comprise the Truth of this "mystery" (Romans 11.25) of Israel are firstly, that the Jews are God's beloved People. And secondly, they are (and have been for much of their history, most of the past 2000 years) living under the most severe discipline and chastening of God.
1) Still Beloved.
"This is what the Lord says, He who appoints the sun by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar - the Lord Almighty is His name: 'Only if these decrees vanish from My sight,' declares the Lord, 'will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before Me...Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done.' " (Jeremiah 31.35-37)
"I ask then: Did God reject His people? By no means!...Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all!...I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written...As far as the Gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account; but as far as election is concerned they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and His call are irrevocable." (Romans 11.1 & 11, 25-26, 28-29)
The survival of the Jewish People is testimony to God's love for them and His determination to keep and fulfill all of His covenant promises. This He has already done through Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's King and the world's Redeemer. This He has yet to do through that coming spiritual awakening when Abraham's children, en masse, will "look on Me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only child, and grieves for a firstborn son...On that day a fountain will be opened to the House of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity." (Zechariah 12.10 & 13.1)
The Reformed theologian, Karl Barth (1886-1968) - "the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas" - asserts, "If one wanted to ask for a proof of God, for something visible and tangible, that no one could contest, which is unfolded before the eyes of all men, then we should have to turn to the Jews. Quite simply, there they are to the present day...In the person of the Jew there stands a witness before our eyes, the witness of God's covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob...Even one who does not understand Holy Scripture can see this reminder."
2) Under Severe Discipline.
"But if you (Solomon) or your sons turn away from Me and do not observe the commands and decrees I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut off Israel from the Land I have given them and will reject this Temple I have consecrated for My name." (1 Kings 9.6-9)
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see Me again until you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.' " (Matthew 23.37-39)
The historical excoriation of God's Jewish People (vile in the extreme though it be) is likewise equally important testimony to His unchangeable purposes for Israel. For while the whole history of (especially European) antisemitism is satanic in origin and unutterably loathsome and villainous, it has nevertheless been (and is still) converted into an instrument of God's saving discipline.
"You intended to harm me (meant evil against me), but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives." (Genesis 50.20-21)
How could Israel ever hope to escape the carnage of Jewish history, being at one and the same time the object of satan's jealous hatred and rage at their belovedness, and being left uncovered and hedge-less since Calvary and the destruction of Herod's Temple?
"For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement (covering) for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one's life.' (Leviticus 17.11)
"In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness." (Hebrews 9.22)
"What more could have been done for My vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for grapes, why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed...The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel." (Isaiah 5.4-5 & 7)
Addressing the absolutely sinister phenomenon which we call antisemitism (hatred of the Jews simply because they are Jews!), the Jewish prophet without peer, Art Katz, has proposed, "What we construe as antisemitism, and attribute to negative references to the Jews in the New Testament, and to other sociological and historical factors, may have its root in our own failed call...The truer remedy then it not safeguarding against the malevolent, but in our repentance and return to a spurned call and the Lord who gave it.
"That virtually no mention is made of God in every public discussion (about antisemitism) that I have attended, painfully reveals the truth of our Jewish condition, yarmulke wearing or no. We are at best deists if not effectual atheists, and do not expect, or all the more desire a divine intervention.
"Hence we continue to misconstrue the problem (of antisemitism) even as it mounts. For all our clever analysis and critique, only prophetic insight and prophetic proclamation offer the prospect of hope."
And speaking in the same vein, Karl Barth ("Dogmatics in Outline" - 1949) says that the picture which the Old Testament itself gives of the Israelite is "in an utterly shattering way that of the man who resists his own election and consequently the mission given him, who proves himself unworthy and incapable of the mission, and who in consequence, since he is the object of God's grace is continually struck down and broken by the judgement which afflicts him because he withdraws from grace.
"What a problematic people this people Israel is in all stages of its history, is described by almost every book of the Old Testament. It is a grief for all Israelites, to think on what Israel once was, and what has now become of it under the strokes of God, who loved it so much and whose love was so ill requited."
When the Church ignores (and seeks itself to replace) the eternal belovedness of the Jews, and willfully and obstinately overlooks or misinterprets the "strokes of God" upon a backsliding Israel...that is a recipe for genuine disaster. This is the great issue of the hour, as increasingly we shall witness the tide of international opinion and the fortunes of military conflict turning more and more in favour of the enemies of modern Judaism.
Mere emotional fascination with Jewish culture and a romantic attachment to the State of Israel is going to melt beneath the blow-torch of coming prophesied events.
As Art Katz has repeatedly warned and insisted, "There is something about the subject of Israel and the mystery of Israel for the Church that is so intrinsic, so central for its own sake, that the omission of it (which has been unhappily its historical experience) condemns the Church to a decrepit condition.
"There is I believe, something - a missing, crucial dimension - that God intended as normative; and that is the centrality of the people Israel who are out of the Way, out of the faith, blasphemous, and nevertheless yet God's people to whom (through their fathers) He has made great promises of a destiny still to be fulfilled.
"But not before they pass through the severest final testings known as 'the time of Jacob's trouble', to be brought out of it (as a surviving remnant) through the mercy of God extended uniquely through a non-grudging Church."
"If you are not disciplined...then you are illegitimate children and not true sons...Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good that we may share in His holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." (Hebrews 12.8-11)
When we reduce this text from Hebrews to mere pious explanation for personal difficulties and sufferings, it's not a mistake...it's careless, shallow, dangerous and mad! Because this text proposes God's way of salvation for those of His children who have rejected Him, but who He has absolutely every intention of relentlessly pursuing, and no intention whatsoever of abandoning. It is the divine strategy for saving a whole nation.
"Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: 'The deliverer will come from Zion; He will turn godlessness away from Jacob.' " (Romans 11.25-26)
"Just as I watched over them to uproot and tear down, and to overthrow, destroy and bring disaster, so I will watch over them to build and to plant...This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time...No longer will a man teach his neighbour, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord', because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord." (Jeremiah 31.27-34)
That Church which fails to embrace this dichotomy (to the modern mind) of the mystery of Israel, is doomed to stumble over its own Last Days' mission. Time's passing is accelerating and running out. God forbid that history record that we tripped over ourselves; jealous of Israel's belovedness, and fearful that to admit their severe chastening, we thereby acknowledge the necessity of our own.
"You only (O people of Israel) have I chosen of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins." (Amos 3.2)
"For it is time for judgement to begin with the family of God; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God?" (1 Peter 4.17)
There is a Christian clique ("circle of self-applauders") which salivates for and eagerly desires the "destruction of the ungodly". They are not inspired by the Spirit of Christ, who is "not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3.9)
Perhaps they, and we, ought to consider the possibility that our self-preserving unwillingness to admit Israel and the Church's necessary and severe chastening, is itself the "firewall" which is presently hindering God's hand from falling upon our world in judgement...which is not unto destruction, but rather correction unto salvation?
"God our Saviour, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2.3-4)
"For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him." (John 3.17)
