The mystery of the election of the Jews as the chosen people
of God is eclipsed only by the fact that we are chosen. As Moses points out, there was no particular
virtue in the nation that they were chosen by God as His people, the vehicle
through which He would make Himself known in the world. There weren’t many of them, they had no
power, they weren’t pursuing Him, they simply had been chosen for the faith
that proved itself in obedience in their forefather Abraham. The perseverance of the nation for the last
several thousand years is proof that God chose them. There is no reason a tiny nation like Israel
should even exist today as the fact that the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the
Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the
Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites no longer exist ably
testifies. It is all down to the love
and faithfulness of God. Today would be
a good day to thank Him for His election of you.
John says the entire purpose of his ministry of baptism was
that Jesus might be revealed to Israel. He
had been promised that he would, like Simeon, see the Messiah and was given the
sign that when he baptized Messiah a dove would come and rest upon that one and
it happened in Jesus. From that point
forward, John began proclaiming a different message, he began pointing to
Jesus. He refers to Him as the Lamb of
God and I wonder if John had any idea what he meant by that appellation. Did he know that Jesus would be the sacrifice
for the sins of the world and in His death on the cross Jesus would indeed take
away the sins of the world? At Yom
Kippur it is a goat that bears away the sin of the people into the wilderness
to Azazel, not a lamb. Jesus, however,
is the Lamb that John saw, looking like it was slain, appearing before the
throne in Revelation 5 whose blood shed on the cross atones for our sins.
Paul certainly sees things in black and white when he writes
to Titus. There are those who are fit
for eternal life and those who are not. There
are observable patterns of behavior which allow him to determine which is which
and he tells Titus to rebuke those who don’t display those characteristics that
Christians should have. Sin entangles
us, destroys us and the community and needs to be dealt with in our lives. We are to be an alternative community, led by
the Holy Spirit. The perseverance of the
church down the ages is no less a work of the will of God than the perseverance
of the nation. We are both disobedient
and filled with sin and yet He loves us, as individuals and the community, we
are His own and He wants us to act like it.
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