A Carved Stone Block Upends Assumptions About Ancient Judaism

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — The carved stone block is about the size of an occasional table. It has held its secrets for two millenniums. Whoever engraved its enigmatic symbols was apparently depicting the ancient Jewish temples.

But what makes the stone such a rare find in biblical archaeology, according to scholars, is that when it was carved, the Second Temple still stood in Jerusalem for the carver to see. The stone is a kind of ancient snapshot.

And it is upending some long-held scholarly assumptions about ancient synagogues and their relationship with the Temple, a center of Jewish pilgrimage and considered the holiest place of worship for Jews, during a crucial period, when Judaism was on the cusp of the Christian era.

Continue reading at New York Times.

“The guardian’s role is to prevent evil; the judge’s role is to deliver from evil, once it has been allowed in.”

An excerpt from James B. Jordan’s commentary on Judges (47-51) concerning the role of Israel’s Messiahs.

What were the judges? They were civil rulers and deliverers of Israel. God is concerned with all of human life and society. It is false to try to limit His interest only to the institutional Church, though as the sacramental body of Jesus Christ, the Church is the foremost earthly “institution.” The judges show us God delivering His people from His and their enemies, in particular in social and political situations. According to Scripture, the civil magistrate bears the sword of iron (as distinct from the Sword of the Scriptures) as a threat to evildoers. A magistrate is a minister of God, no less than a Church officer is, but the magistrate is a minister of God’s vengeance, while the elder is a minister of redemption. (See Romans 13.)

The judges were civil magistrates. Their normal work was to act as magistrates for Israel, settling disputes (Ex. 18:21 ff.). Their special work was to act as avengers for Israel, destroying the enemies of God. This is still the duty of the magistrate today: to settle disputes in court and to prosecute defensive warfare against aggressors. The book of Judges focuses in on the exceptional work of vengeance and deliverance, because this is what is important for the purpose of revealing and foreshadowing the redemptive work of Christ.

In Scripture there are two offices or official works to which a man may be called beyond his normal capacities as worker, husband, and father. These two offices are those associated with redemption and vengeance. Those called to these offices are ordained for the purpose. Ordination is by the Holy Spirit, as represented by oil. In the Old Testament, the Levites and the kings (the house of David) were ordained regularly by oil, as a rite installing them in their official duties. We do not find such ritual anointing in the case of the judges, however; rather, they were anointed directly by the Spirit.

This does not mean they were not elected officials. E. C. Wines has provided a good commentary on this point: “Four stages may be noted in the proceedings relating to Jephthah; – the preliminary discussion, the nomination, the presentation to the people, and the installation (Judges 10:17, 18 and 11:1-11). The enemy was encamped in Gilead. At this point, the people and their rulers, assembled in convention on the plain, said to one another, ‘Who shall be our chief, to lead us against the foe?’ This was the discussion, in which every citizen seems to have had the right to participate. In the exceedingly brief history of the affair, it is not expressly stated, but it is necessarily implied, that Jephthah, of Gilead, a man of distinguished military genius and reputation, was nominated by the voice of the assembly. But this able captain had been some years before driven out from his native city. It was necessary to soothe his irritated spirit. To this end the elders went in person to seek him, laid before him the urgent necessities of the state, softened his anger by promises of preferment, and brought him to Mizpeh. Here, manifestly, they made a formal presentation of him to the people, for it is added, ‘the people made him head and captain over them.’ That is, they completed the election by giving him their suffrages, recognizing him as their leader, and installing him in his office. Here, then, we have, 1. The free discussion of the people in a popular assembly concerning the selection of a leader; 2. The nomination of Jephthah by the meeting to be chief; 3. The elders’ presentation of him to the people for their suffrages; and 4. His inauguration as prince and leader of Israel. It is to the analysis of such incidental relations as this scattered here and there through the history, that, in default of a more exact account of the primitive order of things, we are compelled to resort, in our study of the Hebrew constitution, for much of the information, which it would be gratifying to find in a more detailed and systematic form.” ¹E. C. Wines, The Hebrew Republic (originally published as Commentary on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews, vol. 2; reprint, Uxbridge, MA: American Presbyterian Press, n.d.), p. 110f.

Thus, the judges were not self-appointed men, but were leaders recognized by the people. This is obvious even if Wines’s analysis be not convincing in its every detail. There was a regular way to appoint judges, then, even if there was no anointing with oil involved. Wines enumerates the political characteristics of the judgeship system in Israel as follows:²Ibid., pp. 148ff.

1. “The Hebrew judges held their office for life.” This was true of Moses and of Joshua, and is presupposed throughout the book of Judges.
2. “The office was not hereditary. Moses took no steps to perpetuate this magistracy in his family, or to leave it as an hereditary honor to his posterity.” We may note that when Samuel tried to set his sons up as judges, it did not work out, and the people demanded a king.
3. “The chief magistracy of Israel was elective. The oracle, the high priest, and all the congregation, are distinctly recorded to have concurred in the elevation of Joshua to this office (Num. 27:18-23). Jephthah was chosen to the chief magistracy by the popular voice. Samuel was elected regent in a general assembly of Israel (1 Sam. 7:5-8 ).” There is nothing to indicate the contrary in the case of any other of the judges.
4. “The authority of these regents extended to affairs of war and peace.” These were their special and general works.
5. “A contumacious resistance of the lawful authority and orders of the Hebrew judges, was treason.” See Joshua 1:18 and Deuteronomy 17:12. This is important is evaluating Jephthah’s response to the rebellion of Ephraim in Judges 12.
6. “The authority of the Israelitish regents was not unlimited and despotic. It was tempered and restrained by the oracle. This is distinctly affirmed, in the history of the appointment of Joshua to the chief magistracy, as the successor of Moses (Num. 27:21). It is there said, that he should stand before Eleazar the priest, who should ask counsel for him, after the judgment of urim before the Lord.” In Christian lands, this means that the state should consult the Church in matters where the Church has competency.

“The power of the Hebrew chief magistrates was further limited by that of the senate and congregation.” They were not bound to consult with the body of elders on every point, but we see that “in important emergencies, they summoned a general assembly of the rulers, to ask their advice and consent. This we find to have been repeatedly done by Moses, Joshua, and Samuel.”

“Still another limitation to the authority of the Hebrew judges was in the law itself. Their power could not be stretched beyond its legal bounds.”

Wines sums it all up this way: “No salary was attached to the chief magistracy in the Hebrew government. No revenues were appropriated to the judges, except, perhaps, a larger share of the spoils taken in war, and the presents spontaneously made to them as testimonials of respect (Jud. 8:24; 1 Sam.9:7; 10:27). No tribute was raised for them. They had no outward badges of dignity. [This may be a bit extreme on Wines’s part, since there probably was some type of robe of office, but Wines is certainly right in what follows.] They did not wear the diadem. They were not surrounded by a crowd of satellites. They were not invested with the sovereign power. They could issue orders; but they could not enact laws. They had not the right of appointing officers, except perhaps in the army. They had no power to lay new burdens upon the people in the form of taxes. They were ministers of justice, protectors of law, defenders of religion, and avengers of crime; particularly the crime of idolatry. But their power was constitutional, not arbitrary. It was kept within due bounds by the barriers of law, the decisions of the oracle, and the advice and consent of the senate and commons of Israel. They were without show, without pomp, without retinue, without equipage; plain republican magistrates.” While Wines may go a bit too far in rejecting all outward symbols of office, since these were common and expected in this period of history, in the main he is clearly correct. As we shall see, the history of the period of Judges shows the regents of Israel gradually aggrandizing to themselves more and more of the trappings of power.

Kings and judges are shepherds. The central section of Judges, at which we have now arrived, is concerned with this. Priests, prophets, ministers, Levites – these are guardians. The two appendices of Judges deal with Levites, and their failure to guard Israel properly. The point of the appendices (Judges 17-21) is to show that the failure of these moral guardians was the basic underlying cause of all the moral problems discussed in the preceding chapters (Judges 3-16). Thus, the ultimate guardians of society are the officers of the Church. Theirs is the powerful, positive work of instruction and worship (Ex. 18:19-20), which must underlie the negative, vengeance work of the judge (Ex. 18:21ff.). The guardian’s role is to prevent evil; the judge’s role is to deliver from evil, once it has been allowed in.

This was a decent introduction to the seven-fold structures of Scripture. The pattern is creation, division, ascension, testing, maturity, conquest, and glorification. Bull walks us through this pattern and its recapitulation in the sacrifices of Israel, in the major characters of Bible history (Adam, Noah, Jacob, etc.) and shows how not only do their lives arc through such a pattern, but that they also go through repeated cycles of the pattern. He then applies it to the history of Israel as a whole, in the life of Jesus, and in the life of the Church.

The major drawback to the book is that he appears to be so excited about the pattern and its repeated appearances that the book becomes like reading a list, often without Scriptural references included. He clearly knows Bible history well, but if you don’t it can look occasionally as though he’s reaching to make one or two points fit the pattern. But as an overall view of the pattern and its expression in Scripture, the book is phenomenal.

bmxreview

Part 1 here.

One thing the Bible Matrix demonstrates is the nature of history. Sure, it repeats itself. Everyone knows that. But our personal histories are microcosms of the lives and deaths of families, churches, nations and empires. Reading the Bible is like looking through a glass onion.

The structure of events in the primeval Garden are replayed in Cain and Abel, then in the sons of God. Garden; Land; World. Most Holy; Holy; Courts. Word; Sacrament; Government. Heaven; Mediator; Earth.

The pattern of creation was repeated in Adam and Eve, Word becoming flesh, but instead of the building of a greater Tabernacle out of raw materials, the dust devil of sin grew into a tornado, multiplying in speed and size, collecting material and taking on a body of its own—the entire race but for Noah.

Jesus reversed the pattern in the Garden. But it took all of the Old Testament to teach us what Jesus would actually do. We need to analyse all the occurrences of the pattern, all the different ways in which it was played out in history, to comprehend His redemptive achievement in all its glorious facets.

Just as death entered the world by the act of one man, it literally took a cast of thousands to portray the work of the Second Man. Cain slew Abel at the cross. Eve bore Seth as a replacement son in the resurrection. Enoch walked with God and was not at the ascension. Jonathan abdicated the Old Covenant and was resurrected as a New Covenant robe in David. Jephthah and David conquered as “Conquest” Land kings but had to die and be resurrected as “Glorification” World kings in Samson and Solomon respectively.

By the time of Jesus, the sin that was dealt with in the exile had again taken on a corporate body. God had divided and then scattered Solomon’s kingdom in judgment, but as God does, He scattered the people like seed. This enlarged His field. Jesus came to harvest this greater field. But the body of sin was also now much larger. The compromise between the Jewish sons of God and the Gentile daughters of men was empire-wide. Just as Lamech’s sin became institutionalised and ended the race, Ahab and Jezebel had again become a draconian church state under the Herods.

Jesus dealt with the cyclone by standing in the eye. His ministry itself took on a body, but in the gospels we see Him whittle it away until He stands alone and rejected. The crowds abandon Him, and then even His band of brothers is scattered. His seamless robe, a symbol of His kingdom, is taken away. It also symbolised the Covenant—the firmament. The firmament is a garment for God, filled with governing lights. No lights (disciples), no robe. Jesus is torn from the Father, and then, more alone than anyone until the final judgment, Jesus’ body itself is torn. All glory, all identity was gone, right down to the most personal, the most precious, the Most Holy.

He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him,
there is no beauty that we should desire Him.

“The guards came again, handing out coats. I could not understand at first why they took away all of our clothes only to give us in return garments that must have been worn by other women entering the [concentration] camp. But as I looked around at the women beside me withdrawn into their meagre, worn rags, I saw that we were no longer the strong women who had been able to endure hard labour, wartime conditions, and separation from our family and friends. The shearing of our heads and vulvas, the stealing of our clothes and everything we had owned, took from us the last traces of who we had been. My knapsack on the train, my mother’s chains and rings, would never be given back. I felt their loss almost as much as the loss of my hair. All I had left was Samuel’s ring.

When the guard reached me she held out a long gray coat. Without thinking I took it from her with my right hand. Immediately the guard circled the ring with her fingers and thumb, giving it a hard yank. My finger felt as if it were being pulled from me. The ring would not come off. Her grip tightened; the flesh around the ring was squeezed tightly. I cried out in pain.

‘Quiet!’ she hissed.

Again she pulled, spitting on the ring twice while she wiggled it back and forth. Finally, in one smooth movement, she scraped it over the ridge of my knuckle and slipped it off the end of my finger and into her pocket. Satisfied that no one had seen her, she shoved her crate of coats forward and moved on.” [1]

Crowds torn away. Family torn away. Disciples torn apart. Robe torn off. Beard torn off. Body torn … veil torn … torn … torn OPEN. And in the most exquisite plot twist in history, the plunderer was plundered. In the eye of the cyclone, in the Most Holy Place, the Gordian knot was cut.

In the eye of the cyclone, in the tomb, Jonathan became David. A new history, begun with this one-Man liturgy, was spoken into the Garden. Over the next forty years, the kingdom of the father of lies began to unravel in the Land. Like the climax of Peter and the Wolf, the more the Cunning Edomite Fox struggled, the tighter became the Apostolic rope around its neck.

Over the next forty years, Jesus took on a new body by His Spirit, and David became Solomon. Both John’s Old Covenant decrease and Jesus’ New Covenant increase became institutional. The headless Jonathan/John had a new Head. [2]

When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed.

The Word that tore open the Garden door began to tear open the Land. Revelation 14 shows Jesus again at the eye of a cyclone. This time He is an Angel with a sickle. The literary structure puts Him right at the centre, between the grain and the grapes [3]. It was time for His new “Land” body to follow Him through death and resurrection. The sickle swings and He harvests the saints as bread and wine. Now it was not just the eye but the whole Roman/Herodian cyclone that was red. What He accomplished on the cross was reenacted—filled up—in a cast of thousands. The empire was filled with violence and the corrupted sons of God disappeared beneath a flood of troops. [4]

The band of brothers we join is one of blood brothers. More Christians were martyred in the twentieth century than in the previous 19 centuries combined. As the victory in the Land continues to tear the World in two, the cast of thousands is now a cast of millions. Thankfully, the blood is always foundational. Spirit follows. [5] But we must be ready with our blood.

Could it take anything less than a cast of millions to picture the work of Christ? And perhaps we are still in the early days.

He shall see the labour of His soul and be satisfied.
By His knowledge My righteous Servant
shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities.

__________________________________________________
[1] Sarah Tuvel Bernstein, The Seamstress, A Memoir of Survival, pp. 198-199.
[2] King Saul, Jonathan’s “head,” was beheaded.
[3] See Totus Christus p. 557.
[4] See Jewish War by Peter Leithart.
[5] See The Whole Bloody Bible.

Promised Land, Holy Land, Holy City—the New Testament knows nothing of such expressions. The Pauline epistles make no reference to the Land. The Word became Flesh and ‘dwelt among us’. Where was it? A mere anecdote. No fleshly attachment to the soil, no supernatural pegging to a plot of land. It is the body of Christ that is the territory and true Temple of the Christian. There are at present many Jews who do not separate their fate from that of Israel. How many Catholics bind their fate to the Holy See as a state? The imaginary space of the former is a radiance surrounding a heart. The space of the latter is centrifugal, dynamic, afocal, the sum of its vanishing points. The Host can be shared anywhere, ‘in spirit and in truth’. Yahweh remains politically competent in a given space (however imprecise it may be, the auspicious ‘between the Nile and the Euphrates’, the maximal option, being subject to many a squeeze of the accordian). The peregrinatory character of Christian existence also makes of the Church a people on the march, like Abraham. The Christian is a man ‘towards’, not a man ‘in’. Yet his march is not orientated towards a magnetic centre (despite the folkloric all-roads-lead-to-Rome). The dispersal of the apostles after Pentecost was without melancholy. For Jesus had left the Temple for good. When Peter, Paul, James, and the others packed their their bags to ‘go teach unto all the nations’, in keeping with Jesus’ plan, it was without the slightest need to see Jerusalem again, for it was a point of departure, not of return.

Regis Debray, God: An Itinerary (translated by Jeffrey Mehlman).

Debray is one of the staunchest atheist Republican intellectuals in France, and was once a guerilla fighter in Latin America. It seems to me so far that his observations on the Bible often put many Christian authors to shame.

The Creation matrix begins with a single mediator and ends with a corporate mediator-nation. The judges were single mediators, corporate only in a progressive way: a new creation.

But there were seven ‘elected’ judges (seven is 3+4 [betrothal] at the centre of a greater pattern). The basic themes of their respective narratives illustrate a new creation, with Gideon’s ‘Pentecost’ flames at the centre, and the great solar bridegroom at the end.

All this adds deeper meaning to the role of Samuel as the last judge, the eighth judge — the one who carried Israel from tribes to kingdom. Son of a barren woman, he was the beginning of a new week.[2]

_________________________________
[1] This also explains the 42 children mauled by Elisha’s bears, 12 x 3 1/2. See Elisha’s Short Fuse.
[2] This fact is slightly more narrative than historical. James Jordan observes that Samson and Samuel, two Nazirites from birth, and Obed, son of Boaz and Ruth, were all born around the same time: two shoulders and a new head. The Nazirites were miraculous births, and Obed was born to Naomi by a Gentile surrogate. See Judges: God’s War Against Humanism [PDF]. Eli the High Priest was also a judge, whose tenure overlapped that of Samson and Samuel. See the chronology in Peter J. Leithart, A Son to Me: : An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel.

Solomon Snubs Ally with Trashy Gift

When I was in sales, I was taught that it takes twelve times as much energy to gain a new client as it does to keep an existing one by letting them know they are not taken for granted. Same goes in geopolitics.

James Jordan writes:

One way to understand the relevance of Egypt [during Solomon's reign] is to contrast Egypt with Tyre. Hiram, king of Tyre, had been a loyal ally of David. He loved David. He clearly was a converted man. When Solomon came to the throne, Hiram could not do enough for him. He volunteered to help build the Temple, because Israel’s God was his God also (1 Kings 5). He showered Solomon with gifts (1 Kings 9:11, 14). If there was any nation Solomon should have allied with, it was Tyre.

Yet, Solomon gave Hiram a cheap and insulting present, and offended him (1 Kings 9:11-12; 2 Chronicles 8:2). Solomon evidently thought his relationship with Hiram was secure, and so did not try to please him. (I am reminded of how the “conservative” Reagan and Bush administrations constantly offend their Christian supporters–evidently because they regard them as “in their pocket–while they pursue the goodwill of liberals and degenerates.)…

Moses had forbidden the kings to engage in horse trading with Egypt (Deuteronomy 17:16). Solomon not only got horses from Egypt, but became a middle-man for horses between Egypt and other nations (1 Kings 10:26-29)… Solomon’s equine enterprise actively supplied the king of Syria with horses (1 Kings 10:29). Shortly thereafter, Syria was taken over by a man who hated the house of David, and who used those horses to plague Israel (1 Kings 11:23-25)…

Solomon ignored his friends (the Lord and Hiram) while he courted and curried favour with his enemies (Syria and Egypt). The result was disastrous to the nation.

Solomon’s Disastrous Geopolitics

“When a man’s ways please the Lord, He maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.” — Proverbs 16:7

“Assyria dominated the ancient world in the centuries before the exile of Judah. Sometime during the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel (832–792 bc), and probably toward the latter part of that reign, the Israelite prophet Jonah had been used by God to convert the city Nineveh and all its citizens to the worship of the true God. Jonah 3:5 and 4:11 indicate that God showed His mercy to the children of the city, so that we are entitled to assume that there were God-fearing people alive for the next seventy or so years in Assyria…

Eventually, however, Assyria returned to the path of war. The great Assyrian warrior Tiglath-Pileser III ruled from 745–727 bc. When he turned westward to conquer the region of Palestine, Rezin of Damascus and Pekah of Northern Israel formed a coalition against him. Evidently they sought to enlist Ahaz (“He Upholds,” probably from Yeho-Ahaz, “Yahweh Upholds”), King of Judah, but Ahaz refused. Rezin and Pekah invaded Judah, and against the advice of Isaiah, Ahaz turned to Tiglath-Pileser for help, sending him a large gift. Tiglath-Pileser immediately responded, conquering Syria and Israel, and making Judah a vassal state (2 Kings 15:29; 16:5–9; Isaiah 7; 2 Chronicles 28). Ahaz was required to introduce some Assyrian religious practices into Judah, and he was happy to do so (2 Kings 16:10–18). Meanwhile, Northern Israel rebelled against Assyria, and in 722/1 bc Tiglath-Pileser’s successors sacked and destroyed Samaria (2 Kings 17).

Notice the position of the people of Judah. They were both religiously and nationalistically disposed to oppose Assyria. Thus, the political conservatives and the religious conservatives could and did join hands against the internationalists and idolaters. The political conservatives wanted national freedom, while the religious conservatives wanted idolatry extirpated. 

This union of nationalistic conservatives and religious conservatives, which can be seen today in the United States, eventually caused the destruction of Judah, for it resulted in the corruption of a large part of the Remnant, leaving only a handful of faithful believers around such men as Jeremiah.”

James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall, p. 39-41.

Anyhow, my friend shared that Piper had made a comment about not ‘getting’ the prophets. As there are so many views on what the prophets are talking about, this is understandable. Based on what I’ve heard from James Jordan and my resulting studies, I would like to offer some helpful hints. They seem to play out, from what I can see.

1. The prophets must all be read as Covenant lawsuits. They are sheriffs knocking on the door because the contract has been broken. The Covenant contained both blessings and curses. The prophets were a reminder, and eventually a promise, of the curses. (See also Rags to Robes.)
2. The prophecies were written to get a reaction. This means that they cannot concern modern nations. They predicted IMMINENT judgments if the generation living at the date of writing did not repent (Matthew 23-24 and Revelation are good New Testament examples of this principle).
3. Because they concern the Covenant, and the Covenant structure goes right back to Genesis 1, many prophecies are recapitulations of the Creation week, and use its language. A New Covenant is a new heavens and a new earth, or more correctly, a New Land. If your translation says “earth” anywhere in the prophets, read it as Land (the same goes for Revelation). God sees the world through His mediator-nation, which is, like the Temple (and Noah’s Ark), the three-level world-in-a-box.
4. Prefiguring Christ, God always dealt through mediators, like the prophets. But the prophets were called because the national Mediator, Israel, was in rebellion. Israel was the Land between the Firmament and the Sea, the four-cornered Altar. And their message is often that God was going to wash the Altar clean by submerging it.
5. So the prophets not only use Creation language, but also use many images from earlier judgments, like the flood. Isaiah even uses Noah’s submissive animals to describe the submission of the Gentiles to Mordecai after the exile in the “new heavens and new earth” Restoration Covenant.
6. The prophetic books sometimes look like they are arranged haphazardly, but are carefully structured. Often they follow the Egypt to wilderness to Canaan pattern. God takes the old rebellious house of Israel, deconstructs it, judgment flows out upon the surrounding nations, then God reconstructs a bigger house which absorbs some of the surrounding nations. Sound familiar? This pattern undergirds the New Testament. This pattern also helps us interpret Ezekiel 37-39 as a prophecy of the return from exile and the events in Esther. 
7. Related to this point, the books often follow the Garden, Land, World pattern established in Genesis (Adam, Cain, sons of God). God anoints His prophet, the judgments are first given as liturgy in the garden (the courthouse – Father), carried out in the Land by the prophet (representing the brother/Son) with huge ramifications upon the Gentile world (Spirit).
8. The prophets that deal intimately with the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Covenant use and modify the furniture and layout of the Tabernacle. The best example of this would be Zechariah’s visions, which follow the pattern of the seven feasts. At the Day of Atonement, there are not two goats but two Arks of the Covenant. The true one has died and ascended to heaven (seen as a flying scroll) and the false one (a round basket) is exiled to the wilderness (Zech. 5). So the missing Ark actually “died and ascended” for the life of Jeremiah’s promised new covenant. As Covenant Lawsuits, the prophets flow directly out of the Torah.
9. When the Apostles quote the prophets concerning Christ and Israel, they are rarely prophecies that concerned the first century directly. Take a look at just about any of the famous Messianic prophecies and you will find it is surrounded by images and conditions that root it firmly in the exile/Restoration era. (And of course, neither does it concern modern Israel!)
10. The secondary, and perhaps most important audience is … us! All these events were for the benefit of the church, so we can understand the foundation of the church laid in the first century. The ‘apocalyptic’ sections of the New Testament are about the end of the Restoration Covenant and the foundation for a better Temple. Just as Israel was executed and resurrected through the exile, the pattern was replayed in the first century (hence the Apostles’ quotes). God works in history in exactly the same way as He did through Israel, but through churches across the world.

If you have any questions or comments on these ideas, I would love to hear from you.

Read the Introduction and Chapter 1 here.