Twenty Principles We Can Derive from the Old Testament of the Bible

XI. A. Recap: what did we learn from the Old Testament?

 HOW DID WE GET HERE? OUR^* CHURCH IN THE 21^ST CENTURY

*Mennonite/Anabaptist

The Story of the Bible Becomes the Story of Our Church

2016 11 13 Review

If I were to ask you, what are some of the key things that concern you as a member of your church today I think one of them would be, How do we do church? Another would be, How do we turn seekers into disciples? We might also ask, What does it mean to be the people of God, the Church?

Now, there are others in our modern world who are concerned with these topics and have even written books and give speeches and hold workshops and conferences, teach courses, on contemporary applications of them. However, sometimes I think we do well to look at the past and see how things were done then, what worked then.

When I started teaching the class which forms the background to these blog installments, one of my aims was to re-visit the origins of the people of God, the church, going all the way back to the beginning, to creation. Then I wanted to move forward through time, coming eventually to focus particularly on the Reformation and the Anabaptist/Mennonite branch of Christianity of which I am a member and how it fits into the big picture.

From January to June 2016, we completed a survey of the Old Testament. We learned some key concepts of what God was doing with his people, how he created this group and what he gave them. These were reviewed in our first class of Season II held at Peace Mennonite Church on November 13, 2016 and are summarized in 20 points below.

Now, we want to learn what was changed or added to this in the New Testament and subsequently. Since June, I have been led by the Spirit, I believe, to a number of readings on what happened in The Early Church after the New Testament era. This has been most enlightening and I think has a lot to offer us as to the answers of those questions we spoke of above. Some of what we will learn might surprise us.

I would invite you again to come and join in this exploration of what was happening with the people of God in the New Testament, and what is happening with them up until today.

From last January to June [2016], some of you attended Season I of this series, in which we went through the Old Testament from Genesis to the Malachi. As you will recall, the purpose of these classes was:

1.    To trace the fundamental principles that the Bible introduces in terms of what it means to be the people of God, or as we now often also refer to ourselves, the church.

2.    A second purpose was to try and see what in the Old Testament spoke to the New Testament teachings of Jesus and the apostles that we as Anabaptists in particular

have taken as instruction for what it means to be the church, the people of God. In the Old Testament, of course, the people of God largely referred to The Children of Israel, or the Jews or Hebrews.

I wanted to be clear to the student and reader that I am not saying that what I am putting forth is the only understanding or interpretation of all of this material. I'm always open to your contributions and insights. The Bible is interpreted by all of us together as a community. That is another Anabaptist or Mennonite viewpoint. That is because we believe that we all have the Holy Spirit living within us, if we are Christians, and we understand that the Holy Spirit played a role in providing us this Bible, and therefore in helping us understand it now.

Now, we will turn our attention to the New Testament, and ultimately, to the history of the church after the New Testament. We will look at the same concepts we learned in Season I as well as see if there are any really entirely new concepts introduced in the New Testament and possibly even subsequently. Before we did that though, especially since it has been a number of months since we ended Season I, and because not all of you were not able to attend all of the classes, we did do a review.

I should say that in this review, we will not be referring that much if at all to any specific biblical passages. We did a lot of that in every lesson last year and will continue to do that once we get into the New Testament. So, let us look at where I believe we have come so far, before we move on.

1.    There is one God.

2.    Everything begins with God.

3.    God created everything.

4.    God created everything in order.

5.    God created everything good, as in beautiful.

6.    God also created everything different. Not only is there incredible diversity, no one unit is like another.

7.    God created mankind in his image.

8.    God created us to be in relationship with him and one another.

9.    God created us because of his love and desire for fellowship with us.

10. God is Love.

11. Man made a poor choice and God's perfect creation was spoiled by sin.

12. God was ready with Plan B, offering man away out of what he had fallen into.

13. God is our Redeemer. He redeems individuals and their cultures and will someday redeem the world.

14. God calls individuals to be a new people set apart from this fallen world.

15. God makes covenants and keeps his promises.

16. God is Faithful.

17. God gave The Law to show people what was expected of them in terms of their behavior.

18. God gave instructions as to what was expected in terms of worship.

19. God gave instructions in regards to building a place of worship.

20. God makes accommodations for humans in their weakness, e.g. allowing divorce, allowing his people to have a king, and a temple in their capital city.

A Brief Introduction to the Problems with Zionism

I am a Christian, and as such, quite familiar with the Jewish Scriptures, which Christians refer to as the Old Testament. Therefore, I am well-acquainted with God's calls to Abraham and his descendants, and the covenants and promises he made to them. The most important of these are that God would make of Abraham's descendants a great people and that he would give them the area of land we sometimes refer to as The Holy Land as their home. He would make them a light and a blessing to the nations and because of them all nations would be blessed. This seems to be where many Christians in the last century or so stop in their understanding of the Jewish people and their place in history. This has thus become a particularly thorny and sometimes divisive issue between some Christians and between  some Christians and Jews, particularly in the last 125 years or so.

This is because it has been during this time that certain individuals gained influence for their belief that Jews should still be in the lands now known as Israel and Palestine, a belief that came to be known as Zionism, as Jerusalem, the putative capital, is seen by some as being on Mt. Zion. This was initially a political agenda but when its proponents got some of the Christians on board, thanks to a contemporaneous reinterpretation of Scripture to support their beliefs, Zionism was augmented by Christian Zionism.  

This relatively recent understanding of the history of God's people within certain more conservative  or fundamentalistic branches of the Christian church sees Israel's living in this land as a necessary prerequisite for the end of history as we know it and the dawning of God's new heaven and earth. This led people of this persuasion to promote and support Israel's becoming a nation. When this happened in 1948, almost 2000 years after Israel's defeat by the Romans around AD 70, these Christian Zionists, as they have come to be called, were elated. The passage of time and some subsequent aspects of history such as what the early Israeli settlers and their Army did to the Palestinian occupants of the land at the time dampened the enthusiasm for this cause somewhat. However, when Arab nations attacked Israel in 1967 to support the Palestinian cause, and Israel handily won the famous so-called “Six-Day War” against them,” Zionism received a great boost. This thinking has continued to be fueled ever since, particularly with the ongoing and recently increasing hostilities of increasingly radicalized Muslims and the predominantly Muslim nations around Israel in the last 30 years or so.

There are a couple of points that we need to remember at this time. The first is that these promises of God to Abraham's descendants, the covenant, were always conditional. That is, there is an ‘if’ attached. This is not spelled out in every instance in which some of these promises are mentioned in the Bible and those texts are then often then misused in such a way as to make the reader forget the conditions. The condition was acceptance and belief in the one God and obedience to God's commands. We know even from their own Scriptures how many times the Jews were punished by the God the true Jews worship for their disobedience to God and the conditions of the covenant from the time they left Egypt, known as The Exodus, when the first Passover was instituted, until the great exile of 587 BC to Babylon. The Old Testament Scriptures were closed shortly after that time, so there is no such accepted and canonical authoritative source to evaluate subsequent historical events that have affected the Jewish people, e.g. the Roman defeat mentioned above, the Holocaust of World War II and even the current events mentioned above.

However, if we apply the same expectations with respect to the covenant that were repeated over and over again in the Old Testament, I think it is quite clear to see that they are certainly not being kept today. As a Christian, who believes in the same God and shares part of the same Scriptures as the Jewish people, from whence comes our Lord and Savior, I love the Jewish people. One has to look at their successes in spite of the odds against them over time and see how successful in many ways they are, as the world judges it. This makes one still wonder about their status as Chosen People, given their stature in the world. But given what follows, I think we have to leave that to God at this point and not to this detailed time-framed understanding of history that has come out of some branches of The Church since the late 19th century, known to some as ‘dispensationalism.’

The point that I want to remind some readers of, which I know is very contentious for many, is that the Christian church, by and large, and officially, seems to have taken the view spelled out by New Testament writers such as The Apostle Paul in Romans. This understanding was that, based on the teachings of Jesus and New Testament writers, Abraham's status and being the recipient of the covenant with all of its promises, including conditions, was because of his faith and that all of those who have the same faith in God, are also equally part of God's people. Essentially, the view was that The Church, whether Jew or Gentile, to use the New Testament Language, now embodied The People of God and the same promises that were given to the Jews in the Old Testament are given to The Church.

Indeed, The Apostle Paul, being a devout Jew, anguished greatly over this whole affair, as we can see especially in chapters 9-11 of Romans. However, even though he appeared to be unable to let go of the idea that God still had a special affinity for the Jews and a special place for them in the outcome of history, he settled with that on “the back burner,” as it were. This is a question that to some extent though has continued to challenge many in the church ever since. Of course, for those who espoused Zionism in the late 19th century and subsequently, there is no trouble for them. This is because they would appear to interpret the Old Testament as being equally applicable in all of its "inerrant and literal" presentation, as they would say, as to what the New Testament says. This is not how The Church over most of its history and in most of its branches understood the Bible and certainly not how Anabaptists/Mennonites have historically understood the Bible. We believe that Jesus was the ultimate representation of God and transmitter of his teachings and values and therefore try to look at the Old Testament as it appears that Jesus did. As I suggested above, this has historically been taken to mean that the promises of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants may no longer be as literally applicable as they were prior to Jesus' coming. It is not as clear at all, based on the New Testament, what the place of the Jews now is in God’s plans, if they are not Christian, as it appears to be to the Zionists, if you still interpret the Old Testament with equal weight to the new.

The Zionists like to criticize the Christians who do not espouse their views as being anti-Jew, anti-Semitic. They accuse them of being guilty of ‘replacement theology.’ Actually, the accused are just continuing to believe what the Church has understood the Bible as a whole to say since the time of Jesus. They have not adopted any new theology. The Zionists have just given traditional orthodox beliefs a new name to look as though the non-Zionists are erring and have adopted something new. This is not necessarily the case. We non-Zionist Christians are just opposed to the injustices and propaganda they perpetrate and how they let themselves be used by the Israeli state for its own purposes. We should remember that not all of the Jews in Israel even support their own government's anti-Palestinian policies. We non-Zionist Christians are just trying to  point out to our brothers and sisters that they err, often unknowingly, in being drawn into a propaganda war against Palestinians, both Christians and Muslims, in the name of their interpretation of Scripture, or for their political ends. That leads me to another blog instalment about the importance of names and words used in this area. Come back for that another day.