There
is division and confusion within the Christian community today with regards to
the status of The Children of Israel. There are those who claim that God's
promises to The Children of Israel as recorded in the first portion of The
Bible, in The Old Testament, as part of what Christians sometimes refer to as
the Old Covenant, now refer to The Church, to Christians. Other, who come to
this position in part because they may be taking a more literal translation of
Scripture, perhaps also because of giving Old Testament content and messages
equal weight to the New Testament message and what Jesus said, believe that the
promises of the Old Testament to the Children of Israel in terms of geography
and place with the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple in all its Judaic
Solomonic glory is to be fulfilled once again.
I am
not a scholar in any of these areas. Some say that this division really only
took on a significant role in the church's discourse with the 19th century rise
of Zionism. As I understand that, this was a Jewish movement, which received
Anglo-American support. The underpinnings of this doctrine were also in part
promulgated and given further weight through the publication of the Scofield
Bible and the rise of what some refer to as Dispensationalism. On the other
hand, the first view mentioned, came to be known as the doctrine of
Displacement, referring to the belief that Of the Church has
"displaced" the Jews in God's story.
Because
of the influence and lobbying of the Jewish population, particularly in the
USA, and perhaps also the guilt of particularly the evangelical Christians,
along with their interpretation of the Bible as mentioned above, this issue has
yielded an increased murkiness of the church-state separation in recent decades
in North America.
I am
not a scholar of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. However, I sometimes wonder whether
some of the difficulty in this area goes back to the beginning of this story
and where the word "nation" first appears. The first English use of
the word is when God promises Abraham to make of him a great nation in Genesis
12:2. However, there is nothing in the story of the patriarchs to suggest that
God was making a nation here in the geographic location other than in these
promises. Indeed, even when The Children of Israel returned to the area Abraham
had settled in after their 400-year stay in Egypt, and wanted a King, like the
other nations around them, it is recorded that God, through the prophet Samuel,
expressed his displeasure with this idea.
I
can't help but wonder if what God had in mind all along was not simply a
people. The whole story of the Bible, especially the messages of Jesus himself
in the New Testament, do not really suggest that God was interested in
establishing a nation for any particular reason. Everything that the prophets
talk about has to do with a people's and their leaders’ obedience to God and
what the results of that could be, and what the results of disobedience are.
However,
one way or another, what passed for a nation by worldly standards, occurred
with Abraham's descendants. This is not to say this was the original plan.
Jesus did not support that. The rest of the New Testament writers for the most
part, except for Paul's tortured arguments in chapters 9-11 of Romans, do not
really support that concept. In fact, Paul argues strongly that the people God
is interested in are those who believe in him. Faith is the mark of this
nation, nothing racial or geographic.
My
point with this entire here though is not so much to study this issue further.
It is rather to come back to the issue of church-state separation that I
mentioned had become intertwined with this in recent years. We in Canada had
often prided ourselves that we did a better job of keeping this separation than
our American cousins in large measure. However, suddenly we find ourselves with
a Prime Minister who, like former US Pres. George Bush and others, was at times
doing things like ending his speeches with "God bless Canada."
Now,
at one level, I am all for that. However, I am equally in favor of God blessing
the rest of the world just as much as Canada. Now let me take a turn in the
development of my theme and get to the crux of the matter that I want to lead
into.
Prime
Minister Harper wants God to bless Canada. If he reads his Old Testament
carefully, he would see that one of the regularly repeated commands to the Children
of Israel, from Moses on through the prophets, is to look after the aliens,
orphans, widows, sojourners etc. Jesus himself said, as recorded in Luke
chapter 4:18-19, quoting the Prophet Isaiah (61:1-2), that he came to preach
the gospel, the good news, to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, preach
deliverance to the captives, set prisoners free, restore sight to the blind and
set at liberty those who were bruised.
One
could point to many areas where the current Conservative government's ideology
and programs are not accomplishing this. However, I think the area where our
government continues to fail most grievously in this area, covering all of the
categories in Jesus' message above, is in Canada's dealings with our First
Nations fellow inhabitants of this land.
I do
not believe that God can bless this land as much as he might like to as long as
we continue to fail to treat the first Nations as equals, making sure that they
have living conditions as good as or better than the rest of us. Now, given my
beliefs about church and state, I am not so much ultimately concerned though about
God blessing the state. However, we have in the last 30 odd years heard
increasingly about how the church has been very complicit in this, particularly
in the past. I refer to the whole saga of the Indian Residential Schools, which
is now being dealt with through the traveling Truth and Reconciliation Commission
and its hearings. It is God's blessing of the church that concerns me more than
anything else. I do not believe that God can bless the church in this land,
unless we as the church do more to carry out Jesus' message as it pertains to
the first Nations.
Now,
do not get me wrong. I am not calling for a renewed evangelical missionary
effort directed at our neighbors. They can tell you that they have been the
most “missionized” group of people in this country. No, what we need to do is
get to know these neighbors of ours, listen to them and their stories, walk
with them and see what they have to tell us about how we together can move to
living in equality and harmony in this land. We European colonizers and
settlers have long thought we knew best and had the best way, but we do not
have a monopoly on the truth. God has not only revealed himself to the white
men. God has revealed and is revealing himself to the red man too, and we need
to take note of what they understand. God wants one church. There will not be
one church, one unity, in this land, until the First Nations are as much a
member of the church as the rest of us.
These
are my thoughts on this matter. This is not intended as a researched paper or
thesis. It is simply another viewpoint on what I hope we can travel together on
in a good way.
All
my relations,
2013-8-16
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