The Gospel in Stars and Sand
On a quiet night in the ancient Near East, an old man stood beneath a sky filled with stars he could never count and staked everything on a promise he could not see.
On a quiet night in the ancient Near East, an old man stood beneath a sky filled with stars he could never count and staked everything on a promise he could not see. The silence broke with God’s voice: “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them… so shall your offspring be” (Gen. 15:5).
Abraham could not number them. Who could? Yet beneath the stars, he relied on God's promise that he and his barren wife would have a family so abundant, it would bless all others. Scripture records it simply: “And he believed the LORD, and He counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6).
That was the gospel Abraham heard.
Not a three-step formula.
Not an altar call or a fiery warning to avoid hell.
It was the announcement of God’s intention to bless the nations through his family, and the invitation to believe that promise.
The Gospel of Personal Salvation
The message that first brought me to faith sounded very different:
Admit you are a sinner. Believe in Jesus. Commit your life to serving him.
I am deeply grateful for that message. It pointed me to Jesus and started me on the path of following him. But it is not the same gospel Abraham believed.
Throughout the New Testament, Abraham is held up as the model of faith. Again and again, the apostles return to him as the benchmark of righteousness. Abraham was counted righteous not because of who he was or what he did, but because of his belief.
Which raises the question: What, precisely, did Abraham believe?
The Gospel Preached in Advance
It was not belief in Jesus as we know him. Abraham did not pray to Jesus, worship him, or believe in his future sacrifice. Yet God counted him righteous.
Why? Because Abraham trusted the promise God proclaimed to him: that through his family, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. He believed God would do what he said.
Paul later reflects on this moment in Galatians:
“The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Gal. 3:8).
Paul is unmistakably clear: Abraham heard the gospel.
That same gospel runs like a thread through Israel’s story—reiterated at Sinai, expanded in David’s kingdom, and carried forward as hope through the many exiles the Jewish people have endured. Jesus himself tied Abraham’s faith to his own mission:
“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).
Abraham never saw Jesus of Nazareth. Yet he rejoiced in the day—the era when God’s promises would reach fulfillment. He trusted the one who spoke, without knowing every detail of how the promise would unfold. That lack of detail did not diminish his joy.
Abraham’s faith rested in the confidence that God’s word could not fail.
When the Gospel Gets Too Small
The standard Evangelical gospel of salvation is sincere and well-intentioned. It has transformed countless lives, including my own.
But it reduces the story of God to begin and end with the individual. In this telling, Jesus appears almost out of thin air, detached from Israel’s identity, offering a faith centered primarily on personal improvement—Jesus as a motivating best friend, God as a life-coach, Scripture as a self-help book.
Severed from Abraham’s promise, Jesus is reduced to past accomplishments, as though dying for sin and improving our lives is the total sum of his mission.
That gospel collapses under the weight of Scripture’s story.
If our gospel no longer begins with the God of Abraham—the God who bound himself by covenant to people, land, and the restoration of all things—then we are falling for a different gospel and placing our faith a God Abraham never knew.
God alone cut the covenant with Abraham, passing between the pieces of flesh severed beneath the oaks of Mamre, in the shadow of Jerusalem—God’s holy hill. From that moment forward, the future of the world was tethered to a promise God alone swore to keep. And when Jesus arrived announcing the closeness of that promise, he taught of a specific kingdom—a kingdom anchored fully in Israel’s covenant story and eschatological hope. He commanded this good news be proclaimed from Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Any message that ignores that kingdom’s covenantal center has drifted from the gospel Jesus preached and misrepresents the God it claims to reveal.
Through Abraham’s seed, on Abraham’s land, Abraham’s blessing would heal the world. Even Ishmael and Esau stood within the horizon of that mercy—brothers invited to reconciliation, blessed by the promises sworn to their fathers.
Justified by Trust in God’s Promises
No one is declared righteous by bloodline, legal status, or even vague belief in Jesus. What does it mean to “believe in Jesus as your personal savior”? Savior of what? Salvation to what? Evidenced by what? This is why Paul grounds justification in faith like Abraham’s.
The apostles’ taught that like Abraham, we are counted righteous not by who we are, but by trusting in God’s promises. We believe God will do what he said. Today these promises are still unfolding, moving toward ultimate fulfillment in the reign of Messiah, Abraham’s seed, through whom the nations will be blessed. And we cannot believe these things if we do not first know them.
Jesus is not the conclusion of these promises. He is their guarantee.
His resurrection stands as living proof that God’s word to Abraham cannot fail. Faith in that is the faith Scripture calls righteousness.
Recovering the Full Gospel
A gospel centered on God’s enduring oath to Abraham substantiates our faith. It declares—without apology—that God will keep his covenant and that the promised descendant will lead Abraham’s family into faithfulness.
That message carries a sharpness disciples of Jesus desperately need as we divide truth from error in a world struggling to locate its hope.
The standard gospel, though familiar and winsome, collapses under the weight of Abraham’s story. It leaves large portions of Scripture unopened and has little use for the oath God sealed by blood beneath the stars of Canaan.
Worst of all, it teaches us to believe salvation is about us—that Jesus exists primarily to meet our needs and carry us to heaven when we die.
But the gospel is not about us.
God’s promise was not given to me. It was given to Abraham. Real faith trusts that God intends to keep all his promises—to Abraham, to Israel, and to the nations. Not vaguely. Not merely “spiritually.” Not in some distant world foreign to the prophets and apostles. But here—through the people God chose, in the land he named, led by the Messiah he promised, who will raise his people to immortality and lead the restoration of all things.
If this is not the message we are proclaiming to our friends and neighbors, we must recalibrate toward Abraham’s hope. Otherwise, we find ourselves bearing false witness to the Most High God and having so quickly deserted the truth for a different gospel.
Under the Starry Sky
Beneath the stars, with nothing to his name and no proof to go on, Abraham believed—not only in Messiah’s birth, death, or resurrection, but in the day when God would do what he said.
We live on the other side of the cross, with more clarity than Abraham could have imagined. Yet God’s work in the world is still unfinished. We wait, aching for the peace envisioned by the prophets.
Different gospels will not survive these darkening days.
The world we inhabit—and our participation in the blessings still to come—requires more. It demands the kind of faith that stakes everything on a future yet unseen.
Our hope is in the day Abraham’s starry sky is split open, when the great Cloud-Rider comes bringing every promise with him.
Like Abraham, we number the stars and sift the sand. We order our lives around the certainty that God will keep his word.
That promise is very good news.
Repentance from Dead Works
Hebrews 6 contains one of the most overlooked lists in the New Testament: the elementary principles of faith in Christ.
The following essay is adapted from a message I recently shared at Friends Community Church. What began as a teaching for a gathered local body has been revised here for readers beyond that setting, though the heart of the teaching remains the same.
As I considered what to share today, I found it difficult to ignore the wider moment in which we are living. Ours is a fractured and unsettled generation—marked by division and a steady erosion of trust. It is a season that demands discernment. And in such moments, novelty is not what the church most needs. There are times when Christians do not require new ideas so much as a renewed grasp of old ones.
Wouldn’t it be something if Scripture offered a clear list of the foundational elements of our faith—those teachings so basic that they form the backbone of what it means to follow Jesus? Well, we are in luck. Hebrews 6 provides precisely such a list.
The chapter opens with an arresting claim. The author urges his readers to “leave the elementary teaching of the Christ and go on to maturity,” then proceeds to list what he considers foundational aspects of faith in Christ:
repentance from dead works
faith toward God
instruction about washings
laying on of hands
resurrection of the dead
and eternal judgment.
These were not considered advanced theological concepts meant for scholars. They are described as basic—assumed knowledge for first-century believers who are trying to follow Christ. That assumption should give modern readers pause.
Most Christians today can articulate personal salvation, God’s grace, and God’s love. But repentance from dead works? Washings? Escatology? These are not typically things we explicitly teach to new believers. Maybe we should.
Hebrews is not scolding ignorance for ignorance’s sake, but it is diagnosing a problem: maturity is impossible when foundations haven’t been mastered. Yet the times we live in call for maturity. As believers, we are expected to not simply know the things on this list, but to be able to teach them to others. The author of Hebrews was particularly frusterated by this, “By now you should be teachers, yet you have need of someone to feed you milk and not solid food!”
If repentance from dead works stands first in this list of elementary principles, then it deserves our careful attention today. Repentance was the primary message of Jesus and of John the Baptist. They seemed to understand that repentance was critical to the coming kingdom and to faith in the Messiah who rules that kingdom. So today, we too head back to basics. Our focus will be to ask and answer this question: what does repentance from dead works mean to this author and his audience?
What is Repentance?
Repentance in Scripture is not primarily emotional. The Hebrew word, shuv, simply means “to turn.” It describes a reorientation of direction, allegiance, and future. Repentance is not about remorse or feeling bad; it is about changing course.
John the Baptist preached repentance as his core message, a tradition our Master adopted as well. John’s call was urgent and concrete: Repent! Turn around, quit sining, obey God, align your life with his Torah, because the kingdom is drawing near.
One of the best biblical examples of repentance comes to us from Jonah 3.
Jonah is an Israelite prophet to the nations. God sends him to Nineveh, a city famous for violence and wickedness. The city’s outcry had reach God, and he needed to confront it with judgement and justics. So God tasks Jonah with giving the Ninevite’s a stark warning: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overturned.”
Jonah goes through the city announcing this, with no promise of mercy attached to the message. Amazingly, the people of Nineveh respond:
“The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed…’Let everyone urgently call on God. Let them turn from their wicknedness and from the violence in their hands. Who knows? Maybe God will turn and have compassion and relent from his feirce anger so that we will not perish.’” Jon. 3, selected verses
They fast. They abandon violence. They turn from their evil ways. Their repentance, in this account, is public, behavioral, and communal.
Then comes the surprising turn: God repents!
Jonah 3 states plainly that when God saw what the Ninevites did—how they turned from their evil ways—he turned from the destruction he had planned. The Hebrew verb used here, nacham, is often translated “relent,” “be moved to compassion,” or even “repent.” This is not an isolated occurrence. The same language is used of God after Moses’ intercession in Exodus 32. Jeremiah 18 explicitly lays out the principle: if a nation turns from evil, God relents of judgment; if it turns toward evil, He relents of blessing. Joel describes God as gracious and merciful, “relenting from disaster.”
This is not an embarrassment in Scripture. It is a declared covenant pattern.
God’s character does not change.
God’s purposes do not change.
God’s righteous standards do not change.
But God is responsive to human behavior. We can change. He can change us.
What changes is the relational outcome when human beings alter their direction. God is responsive—not because he was wrong, but because obedience and repentance are always his preference.
Jonah understands this perfectly, which is why he is furious in the following chapter. “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,” he protests. Jonah is not surprised by God’s mercy; he is angry because God has been faithful to his character.
Repentance, then, is directional. It asks not whether sufficient remorse has been generated, but where a given path leads. This brings us back to Hebrews and its phrase: “repentance from dead works.” If repentance means to turn, what dead works are we meant to turn from?
What are “Dead Works?
Modern readers often assume that “dead works” refers to Jewish law, ritual, or Torah observance—a legacy of post-Reformation, supersessionist categories rather than first-century realities. When the author of Hebrews speaks of “repentance from dead works,” we should resist the assumption that he is criticizing Torah or Jewish obedience.
The audience of this letter was made up largely of Jewish believers in Jesus—people who had grown up shaped by the Scriptures of Israel. They were still praying, gathering at the temple, and living within those rhythms. They did not view God’s instruction as lifeless or obsolete. We know all this from Acts. Luke does not even try to hide this information from us. In the first-century world of faith in the Messiah, the Torah was described as the way of life. And Jesus did not contradict this.
So when Hebrews speaks of “dead works,” it’s not attacking covenant faithfulness or Jewish practices. It’s referring to actions and ways of living that lead to death—patterns shaped by sin, injustice, idolatry, or rebellion. And repentance is about turning from one road to the other.
The Scriptures themselves are unambiguous on this point. Deuteronomy 30 records God’s declaration: “I have set before you life and good, death and evil… therefore choose life.” Life and death in the Torah are not merely destinations after death. They are covenantal trajectories. Life is alignment with God’s instruction; death is the consequence of turning away from it—often experienced long before physical death occurs.
The book of Proverbs develops this framework with relentless consistency. It speaks of paths, ways, and roads. “The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn,” growing brighter with time, while “the way of the wicked is deep darkness.” There is a way that seems right, Proverbs warns, but its end is death. Death is not merely imposed later as punishment; it is embedded in certain ways of living. Actions carry trajectories. Habits form destinations.
Crucially, Proverbs describes God’s instruction itself as the way of life. “The commandment is a lamp… and the reproofs of discipline are the way of life.” Turning away from Torah is not portrayed as liberation but as corruption. Even prayer, Proverbs insists, becomes distorted when God’s instruction is rejected.
Against this backdrop, the phrase “dead works” becomes clearer. Dead works are not acts of obedience, earning one’s salvation, or even participating in Jewish worship. They are actions, habits, and allegiances that carry death within them—ways of living that align with injustice, idolatry, violence, or rebellion, even when they appear productive, respectable, or religious. Something can look righteous and still lead away from life.
This is why repentance is foundational. It is the act of leaving a road whose end is death and turning toward the path of life God has revealed.
The Kingdom and Repentance—Why It Matters
Jesus’ own preaching confirms this orientation. “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.” Repentance is not the result of the kingdom’s arrival, but the doorway into it. The kingdom Jesus proclaimed was not an abstract spiritual realm but a promised future marked by restoration, healing, resurrection, judgment, and blessing to the nations. Hebrews shares this vision. Its elementary principles all concern a real, tangible future world promised to those who place faith in the Messiah.
Repentance from things that lead to death prepares people to inherit what is coming.
This raises uncomfortable but necessary questions for us. We need to ask ourselves what ways of life hasour culture normalized that lead us toward death? Are there paths we are walking now that we need to repent of and change direction?
What’s on our screens and speaks? What images and voices shape our day? After scrolling, are we walking away with more love and wisdom? Or more anger, anxiety, and division? Do we put down our phones and feel like we love our enemies even more?
What about the pace of life have we accepted as “normal”? Is it producing patience and love—or exhaustion and irritability? Personally, this is an area I have to constantly evaluate in my own life. Have I weighed the costs of hustle-culture against the structure required to go deep into understanding who we are as images of God? To raising children within that structure? Things can look good and well-intentioned on my schedule, but is it robbing me of the valuable time I need to build a family-culture around these things? Do I need to repent and make changes there?
What do our financial habits suggest we believe life actually is—and have those beliefs delivered what they promised?
These questions extend even into Christian culture. Are there habits we cling to because they are perceived as “religious” or “Christian” that are not leading us into God’s ways? Are we showing up to services, studies, or events—but remaining unchanged in our behaviors? In an age of nearly endless information, wre we blindly consuming sermons, podcasts, or books at the expensive of personal study and meditation on the Bible? Psalm 1 says blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night, not blessed is the one who has a pastor that meditates on the Torah day and night. Are we truly committing ourselves to becoming disciples of the Word of God? What about prayer? Are we using prayer primarily to manage our own anxieties rather than to seek and agree with God’s will and purposes? Does how we pray agree with Scripture, and how God plans to make his name great among the nations?
None of these questions are accusations, but we do ourselves no favors by ignoring the hard truths. These are diagnostic questions God invites us to ask. The biblical concern is not whether something looks faithful on the surface, but whether it leads to life.
Hebrews reminds its readers—and us—that the first step in following Jesus is repentance from anything that leads away from life and toward death. Turning from obvious sin matters. But repentnance is not a one-time thing. Maturity involves more than that.
As believers, we are offered the gift to keep turning, again and again, as we follow the Messiah and become people fit and ready for the kingdom he is bringing.
Minneapolis and the Collapse of Moral Consensus
The catastrophe in Minneapolis has been narrated, predictably, as a failure of politics by the media and as a failure of love by Christian leadership. But it is something far more unsettling.
“If we are going to figure out how to make it through the storm and the fog to safe harbor, we have to understand how we got here. Ideas . . . have consequences.”
The catastrophe in Minneapolis has been narrated, predictably, as a failure of politics by the media and as a failure of love by Christian leadership. It is neither.
It is something far more unsettling: a moral collapse.
A man is dead after an encounter that, under the strain and disorder of a few seconds, escalated into a fatal use of force that should never have occurred. Others have been injured and killed amidst similar circumstances. A major American city was thrown into turmoil while its leaders, both local and federal, appeared either unable or unwilling to restore order. Justice has been perverted for years, leading up to this recent flare. As always, innocent people are left to count the cost.
A civilization that cannot enforce the law without cruelty, or protest injustice without destroying itself, is not suffering from a policy problem. It is suffering from the loss of the moral framework that once made both law and liberty possible. This did not happen overnight. It is the fruit of a long civilizational unraveling.
More than two centuries ago, John Adams warned that the American Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people” and was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” This was not his personal opinion. Adams stated a political fact: free societies do not survive on rules alone. They depend on citizens self-governed by restraint, duty, and a shared understanding of right and wrong.
Alexis de Tocqueville agreed. In his famous work Democracy in America, he observed that democratic societies naturally drift toward equality, but not necessarily toward virtue. Democracy, he warned, favors majority rule and risks eroding the virtues that make self-rule possible. America, he believed, could not survive the loss of its religious inheritance—not because the state requires Christian religion, but because self-government requires a shared moral horizon.
For a long time, Western civilization lived in the Judeo-Christian worldview of its origins. It no longer does.
Over the last century, the West has steadily replaced duty with desire and tradition with self-expression. The sexual revolution that rose in the 1960’s did not merely change private behavior; it dealt a final blow to the idea that there is a given moral order to which human beings must conform. Family, gender, authority, and even human nature itself became matters of preference rather than binding features of civilization.
The result is not liberation, but moral bankruptcy. We have constructed a society that still demands rights but no longer knows where rights come from—or why anyone should accept them. We insist on dignity and equity, while rejecting any shared account of what makes human life dignified or equitable. We invoke justice while denying any stable definition of what is just. This is the world in which our institutions are now asked to function.
Minneapolis has forced longstanding questions into the open at devasting cost. How should law enforcement exercise authority? How ought citizens protest injustice? What limits should be placed on force, resistance, speech, guns, or assembly? What obligations do leaders owe the governed—and the governed one another? What is the responsibility of the media and of the those who consume it?
In a healthy society, these questions remain difficult but not paralyzing because they are argued within a shared moral language. Ours no longer has one.
Our laws and policies have not failed because they are inadequate, or because they are enforced by despicable people. They have failed because the people subject to those laws no longer share the moral assumptions those laws presuppose.
This is why politics cannot repair what is breaking. A society that has lost the virtues of moral formation and forfeited its moral authority will not be rescued by stronger men or progressive reforms. We are living through the consequences of a civilizational choice. Many want the fruits of a Christian moral order without the faith that produces them. Others want the authority of that order without the moral restraints that once gave it legitimacy. That experiment is ending exactly as history suggests it would: a strange and dangerous paradox.
We are richer, more comfortable, and freer than any people in history, yet we possess no shared understanding of what that freedom is intended for. We have succeeded not in creating a culture where everyone wins, but an anti-culture in which stability is impossible.
This has left much of the country trapped between two increasingly untenable options: following political leaders openly hostile to the basic Christian virtues and religious liberty that has long governed the West; or to follow a strongman of no particular religious commitment who will impose order—just or not—by force of sheer will.
Christians must come to understand that if a moral consensus is to be rebuilt, it will not begin in Washington. It must begin in households—where families are formed in the moral inheritance of our civilization and where daily life is ordered toward something higher than personal comfort and consumption. But it will also require the church and its leaders to recover the courage to teach moral substance, not merely moral sentiment—to move beyond vague appeals to “love” and recover the roots that gave those words meaning.
Jesus did not leave love undefined. He rooted it in a Torah-centric a way of life and a concrete vision of obedience. This is not a plea for nostalgia or some cultish withdrawal from modern life. But the future cannot be survived on moral fumes.
For years, Western Christianity has reduced moral formation to “Be kind.” “Love people.” It has too rarely explained what those commands require in practice. In a moment of cultural fracture, that vagueness has left the church unable to lead in the public square. Preaching “love God and love others” without moral specificity is no longer sufficient to form people capable of a faithful and virtuous life in the age now before us. If the church is to serve our culture in this time of upheaval, it will have to repent of its contribution to this vacuum and recover that clarity—without cruelty and without fear.
The American experiment has always depended on more than laws. Our Declaration of Independence grounds human rights not in government, but in a Creator. Severed from that moral vision, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” will not remain rights for long.
Minneapolis is not an anomaly. It is a preview.
As the moral consensus continues to dissolve, it will become harder to distinguish truth from lies, authority from domination, and to safeguard the image of God in any coherent way. We are not merely watching a system fail. We are watching a culture reap what it has spent generations sowing. I believe the church must now reckon honestly with its own contribution to the blood in our streets.
When I was fifteen, a stranger kindly gifted me a copy of Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law. I still have it. As a teenager, I underlined his closing words, written more than 175 years ago, still painfully relevant today:
“And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society...may they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.”
Bastiat understood that liberty must be stewarded by a people capable of acknowledging God. Minneapolis is another grim test result in a long civilizational diagnosis of a people no longer capable of doing so.
May God grant comfort to the families who have lost loved ones in this tragedy, and mercy to all who were caught up in it.
Letter to the Gentile Church
Dear friends,
I write to you as a Jewish follower of Jesus, our Jewish Messiah, and as a teaching pastor who has spent years inside the modern American church. I love the Church. I have given my life to her. And because I love her, I need to speak plainly.
The words below belong to my friend Matt Davis, a Jewish believer and the co-founder of The Jewish Road. Matt has dedicated many years to helping others better understand Israel, the Jewish people, and the Jewish roots of our shared faith—work that has positioned him as a trusted and leading voice on these questions. I asked him to write a letter to the Christian church, sharing what was on his heart in this moment. It is a privilege to publish his letter here, and I invite you to read it prayerfully and with an open heart.
Dear friends,
I write to you as a Jewish follower of Jesus, our Jewish Messiah, and as a teaching pastor who has spent years inside the modern American church. I love the Church. I have given my life to her. And because I love her, I need to speak plainly.
We are living in biblical times again. Not as metaphor. Not as hype. In the same sense the prophets, apostles, and early believers lived with the awareness that God was actively moving history toward His promises. The pages of Scripture are no longer distant. They are pressing in.
Here is what I see.
The Church loves the Israel of the Bible. We teach the stories. We preach the promises. We quote the prophets. We sing the psalms.
But when it comes to the Israel of today—the Jewish people who are still here, still scattered, still returning, and still contested—things get uncomfortable. The storyline that once felt clear now feels debated. Redefined. Complicated. Safer to keep at arm’s length.
Somewhere along the way, the solid line between Scripture and history became dashed. Then dotted. Then faint. And for many, it has all but disappeared. But God has not broken the line.
From the inside, covenant is not an idea. It is not a theological category. It is identity. It is memory carried in the body. It is promise passed down through generations that have known exile, survival, hatred, and hope all at once. When the Bible speaks about Israel, it is not speaking about a concept. It is speaking about a people God refuses to forget.
This is why Paul’s words in Romans 9 are not academic to me. His anguish is familiar. “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.” That tension, love for his people, faith in Messiah, grief over blindness, hope for restoration, never goes away. It lives in me, too.
And I will tell you something that may be hard to hear.
It is painful to watch others define or redefine Israel while standing at a distance from the people themselves.
It is painful when Jewish identity is flattened into symbols, headlines, or arguments.
It is painful when the people of the Book are discussed endlessly but rarely listened to.
And yet, I remain hopeful. Because I also see Gentile believers who genuinely want to understand. Who sense that something matters here, even if they cannot yet articulate it. Who feel the weight of Scripture and refuse to dismiss what God has said, simply because it no longer fits neatly into modern categories.
So how do you love Israel rightly, from afar?
You start by refusing shortcuts.
You let Scripture speak before social media does.
You resist the urge to rush to conclusions without first sitting with the story.
You remember that God’s faithfulness to Israel is not a side issue. It is evidence that He keeps His word.
And you make room for Jewish believers like me, who walk between worlds.
I live in that tension every day. I know the language of the Church. I know her systems, her strengths, and her blind spots. I also know what it is to carry Jewish identity in a Western world that does not quite know what to do with it. I stand in Messiah, yet I remain Jewish. Those things are not opposed. They never were.
What gives me hope is this: the same Messiah who tore down the dividing wall is still doing that work. Not by erasing difference, but by redeeming it. Unity does not require sameness. It requires truth, humility, and faithfulness.
As the end draws nearer, clarity will matter more than comfort. The Church will need to remember her roots, not out of nostalgia, but out of obedience. The God who keeps covenant with Israel is the same God who grafted the nations in. If He can forget Israel, He can forget anyone.
But He will not. He never has.
My prayer is not that you would take a side, but that you would take God at His word. That you would hold fast to the storyline even when it feels costly. That you would love both the Jewish people and the Gentile Church enough to seek truth instead of ease.
The line is still there. God is still writing the story. And we are living in the middle of it.
With respect, urgency, and hope,
Matt
If Matt’s words resonated with you as they have with me, you can continue listening and learning through the The Jewish Road’s blog or latest podcast episode, and learn more about supporting their important work here.
The True Israel
Paul’s words, “not all Israel is Israel,” have been widely misread, leading many to redefine Israel rather than defend God’s faithfulness. As a Gentile follower of Jesus, I feel the weight of answering a question that isn’t mine to settle.
People sat scattered across the sofas and armchairs in my living room, Bibles open. We were wrapping up two years of studying the Torah together. The room felt thick with both accomplishment and unfinished business, like like we had reached a summit only to realize there was another massive ridge beyond it.
Then someone finally asked the question that we had been circling for weeks—maybe months:
“Okay, I get that this is about ancient Israel. I get that the Torah is their story. But where are these people today? Who is the true Israel? Who are these people now?”
It was an important and heartfelt question, and one that has seen heated debate by popular commentators. I swallowed, and opened my Bible to Romans 9, trying my best to help a room full of Christians make sense of a letter we’ve so often treated like a theology textbook. But as I began to guide us through the passage, something unexpected happened.
I felt anguish.
Paul’s words “not all Israel is Israel,” have come to mean so many different things and unleashed devastating outcomes he never intended. While the question itself was good and asked by someone sincerely searching for an answer, the fact that we even have to ask it left me deeply bothered me.
I was grieved that I—a Gentile follower of Jesus, disconnected from any Jewish community—was the one trying to answer it. What right do I have?
It doesn’t matter who I say Israel is. It matters who God says Israel is—and who the Jewish people themselves say they are. I felt that absence of a Jewish voice so sharply. But since I had no better option, I read Romans 9:2 aloud, feeling every word of Paul in my bones.
“I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.”
The Tears Behind Romans
One of the most theological books in the New Testament contains a guttural lament.
Behind Paul’s careful reasoning stands a man with tears running down his face. A Jew born into Israel’s story, he now watched many of his own people reject the Messiah he believed was promised to them. The pain ran so deep that Paul said he would trade his own salvation if it could mean their redemption.
Romans, for all its theology, is still a letter—written to real people by a real person at a real moment in history. Like my small group, the believers in Rome were mostly Gentiles. Years earlier, Emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from the city (around AD 49), scattering the Jews and Jewish followers of Jesus. By the time Paul wrote, the Roman house churches were Gentile-majority communities. That shift shaped how they saw themselves in God’s plan. They wondered, was God done with the Jews who had been run out of town?
So when Paul confronts this and asks, “Has God’s word failed?” (Rom. 9:6), he’s not condemning Israel’s disobedience. He’s defending God’s faithfulness in the face of Israel’s unbelief.
The Famous Line
“For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.” — Romans 9:6
Few lines in the New Testament have shaped Christian theology more—and perhaps few have been more misunderstood.
Over time, many interpretations have taken root:
“Ethnic Israel isn’t the true Israel; the Church is.”
“The modern state of Israel is different than the biblical nation of Israel. The true Israel is spiritual, believers in Christ.”
“Israel is a symbol of God’s people—Christians.”
“The true Israel is a lost group, scattered among the nations—not the Jewish people today.”
And on the sayings go. Together, these kinds ideas form what’s known as Replacement Theology—the belief that faith in Jesus replaces Israel’s covenantal election.
Toward the end of the first century, the Jew/Gentile house-churches in the Roman world became increasingly Gentile-majority. Over time, and for a variety of reasons, these Gentiles began to reinterpret Israel’s story as their own, recasting the Hebrew Scriptures through a distinctly Christian lens. Gradually, this led to a theology that redirected Israel’s promises to the Church—until “true Israel” came to mean believers in Jesus, and the Jewish people were seen as rejected, replaced, or set aside.
This shift left a deep interpretive scar that the Church has struggled to move past. Even today, most of us have inherited a story that strips of Israel of her biblical identity, and that has affected nearly every area of modern life and faith.
Our reasoning assumes Israel’s covenant identity depends on spiritual performance or political ideologies rather than divine promise. Yet Paul’s whole argument in Romans 9–11 rejects that idea.
Paul’s line, “Not all Israel is Israel,” doesn’t pit Israel against the Church. In his day, there was no “Church” to oppose Israel.
Instead, Paul was distinguishing between Israel—the unbelieving majority—and Israel—the faithful remnant within. Throughout Israel’s history, a faithful remnant preserved the covenant while others rebelled (see Elijah in 1 Kings 19, Isa. 10:22, Deut. 30:1–6).
The contrast Paul refers to is within Israel, not between Israel and the Church, or Israel and some other group. When Paul grieved over Israel, he wasn’t lamenting the faithful remnant but the unbelieving majority of his own people, the same covenant people still scattered among the nations and within the land today.
His hope was not in human persuasion or missionary effort, but in God’s faithfulness to redeem them. Israel’s story, in Paul’s view, is unfinished, but not forsaken.
That’s the part Christians so easily miss. It seems we have so easily allowed our doctrines and geopolitics to define Israel, rather than take God’s word for what he says about them.
Who Israel Says She Is
That’s why I felt anguish that day in my living room. I have no right to answer the question.
For too long, Christians like me have done most of the talking about Israel. We interpret her Scriptures, stories, and prophecies. We define her identity, usually without hearing from the people to whom the story actually belongs. The Jewish people wrote and preserved the Scriptures we stake our lives on. Maybe we ought to listen to what they have to say about them, before forming our own conclusions.
If Paul’s words about the remnant are true, then that remnant still exists today.
So rather than simply explain what Paul meant in this article, I want to let someone who embodies Paul’s message do the talking.
My friend Matt Davis is a Jewish follower of Jesus and co-founder of The Jewish Road. He carries this tension in his own life. Matt feels the deep joy of knowing Messiah, a pastoral love for the Christian church, and the ache of longing for his people to know the Messiah too. Like Paul, Matt believes Israel’s story doesn’t end in rejection, but in redemption.
Here’s how Matt explains who the Jewish people are and what hope still burns for Israel’s future:
“The Jewish people, including those living in Israel today, are still part of that covenant family God chose through Abraham. But I understand why the question [of Jewish identity] comes up.
Some people assume that because most Jews today don’t believe in Jesus (about 98%), they must have forfeited their status as God’s chosen people. Others have heard conspiracy theories, that the modern State of Israel is just a political project, even a plot funded by wealthy families like the Rothschilds. Still others look at the return of Jewish people from all over the world and say, “How can these scattered, mixed-heritage people possibly be the same as the Israelites in the Bible? Too much time has passed. The diaspora has blurred it all.”
From there, it’s an easy leap for some to say, “Well, if the question of Jewish identity is that muddled, maybe the only real answer is that all the promises God made to the Jewish people now belong to a ‘new Israel’ - the church.”
But before you accept that conclusion, you have to ask: If the Jews living in Israel today are not the ‘real’ Jews…then who is?
History itself seems to have no confusion on this point. From the early church’s persecution to the Crusades, from the pogroms of Europe to the Holocaust, and even to the attacks of October 7, the Jewish people have carried a unique mark since the days of Abraham. If they are not the covenant people, why has the enemy - whether spiritual or human - been so consistent in identifying them as such? The Jewish people have been singled out again and again as those Jews, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
God’s covenant was never based on flawless genealogy or perfect faith. It was based on His own promise. Throughout history, Israel has been exiled, scattered, and regathered - just as the prophets said would happen (Isaiah 43:5–6; Ezekiel 36:24). That scattering didn’t dissolve the covenant, it fulfilled the very warnings God gave through Moses. And the regathering we see today isn’t a random political accident - it’s part of the long, slow return that God Himself said He would accomplish.
As for unbelief, Paul is clear: “As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake, but as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Romans 11:28).
The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. Unbelief may break fellowship, but it cannot break the covenant.
So when you see Jewish people in the land of Israel today - whether they came from Ethiopia, Russia, America, or Yemen - you are looking at living evidence that God keeps His word. The covenant conversation is not about who holds the most pure DNA or whether the state of Israel’s politics are perfect. It’s about the faithfulness of the God who made an everlasting promise and has not gone back on it.[1]”
Listening to the Voice of the Remnant
Matt’s words humble me, “Unbelief may break fellowship, but it cannot break the covenant.” I spent many years believing the deception because I was too naive and complacent in my own faith to go meditate in the Scriptures for myself. I believed because of my faith in Jesus I was “in,” and that was all I cared about. I tuned out in Romans. I did not heed the voice of the remnant God has so mercifully preserved. I read Paul, but I didn’t listen to Paul.
That was terribly wrong.
Now, I sit in repentance. God has been so merciful to bring me along. People like Matt have been so kind. They’ve helped me grow and welcomed me to the table to learn with them. But anguish still washes over me.
I grieve because I didn’t know God’s promises to Israel were still alive.
Paul grieved because he knew God’s promises to Israel were still alive.
Matt grieves, and also rejoices, because he knows those promises still reach into the present.
As Gentile believers, we must learn to carry that grief with the faithful remnant like Matt—not by speaking over Israel’s story, but by learning to honor the root that supports us.
Romans 9–11 is not an academic puzzle. It is a window into God’s heart.
A heart that refuses to abandon his people.
A heart that gathers the nations without discarding the firstborn son.
A heart that binds Jew and Gentile into one olive tree rooted in Abraham’s covenant.
We must find the humility to hear story of Israel as told by the faithful remnant today. To believe in who God says Israel is.
The Messiah of Israel will complete what he began—here, in the world he made, among the people he chose, for the sake of every nation he longs to bless.
This is the hope we stake our lives on. This is the gospel of the kingdom going out to the nations.
Up Next: Matt’s words, and the questions that emerged in our small group, moved me so deeply that I knew the conversation couldn’t end there. I asked him to write a letter sharing what was on his heart for the non-Jewish American church. His words are honest, powerful, and carry a message we can’t afford to ignore. I’ll be publishing his letter here next week. Stay tuned and subscribe to stay up-to-date.
Notes
[1] The Jewish Road, Are the Jews in Israel Today Still the People of Promise?, accessed December 10, 2025, https://thejewishroad.com/blog/are-the-jews-in-israel-today-still-the-people-of-promise.
The Irrevocable Calling
Why Israel still matters—and the Church must care.
“Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are continually before me.”
— Isaiah 49:16
Every Christian has an answer to the question of Israel—even if they’ve never thought about it.
Silence is an answer.
Indifference is an answer.
The erasure, absorption, or recategorization of Israel are all answers.
And history shows us that the Church’s answers, regardless of how begign or “Christian” they appear, have never been neutral.
The question of Israel is not a political problem or a modern distraction that will fade away. I believe it will be the issue that decides the future of the American Church. Israel is a test case—the proof of God’s faithfulness. As the physician to Frederick the Great of Prussia once observed, “the proof that God exists is that the Jews exist.” What we believe about Israel reveals what we truly believe about God: whether he keeps his word when it costs him something—or whether he pivots on a whim, reallocating his promises and rewriting his definition of fidelity.
Zion is the central conflict of a story that runs from Abraham’s tent to David’s throne to the day the Son of Man rides the clouds. If we lose this thread, we do not merely misread a few passages. We mislocate the gospel itself.
The year 2026 will prove pivotal for the Church and the world. I write this piece with both trembling and hope: to call us back to the root that supports us, to the promises God swore by himself, to the humility apostles demanded of the nations, and to the awe that rises when we finally understand: the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29).
What is the Controversy of Zion?
The controversy of Zion is Gentile strife over—and divine jealousy for—the land and people of Israel, and the city of Jerusalem.
Isaiah names it bluntly:
“The LORD has a day of vengeance, a year of recompense for the controversy of Zion” (Isa. 34:8).
Jeremiah says Jerusalem will be “a cup that makes all the nations stagger,” a heavy stone that injures those who try to lift it (Jer. 25; Zech. 12).
Why such disproportionate fury over such a small strip of earth? Because God attached his name there.
From the beginning, the nations have resisted this divine attachment. Scripture records a long history of rulers and empires who sought, by force or by strategy, to pry God’s promises from this people and this land: Pharaoh, the Canaanite kings, Assyria and Babylon, Antiochus in the days remembered at Hanukkah, Caesar and Herod under Rome.
History has not outgrown this pattern. The names change; the aim does not.
Whatever the language—empire, security, progress, resistance—the goal of the hostility is always the same: to erase the Jewish people or to evacuate Jerusalem and the land itself of any future promised by God.
Many of us inherited a theology that prizes people while sidelining land, but Scripture does not make that move. In the Bible, land is not neutral backdrop—it is holy space. God set apart a specific strip of earth and a specific city as the stage on which he would reveal his character, enact his covenant purposes, and ultimately display his victory over the powers of evil.
That land is Zion, and that city is Jerusalem.
Scripture is not sentimental about this conflict. It does not predict a painless path to peace, nor does it imagine that diplomacy alone can resolve a hatred rooted deeper than politics. Instead, it promises something better—and far more unsettling: a divine-human king who will settle the controversy himself.
Election: The Offense and the Glory
The controversy over Zion is not a random accident of modern geopolitics that we simply happen to be alive to witness. It exists precisely because God’s choice of Israel still stands. He elected a people and a place through which he would reveal himself to the world.
The rage of the nations is the evidence of that choice.
We often stumble at the word election because we personalize it before letting Scripture define it. Biblically, election is not God playing favorites with isolated souls—it is God choosing one out of the many for the sake of the many. He chose Abraham’s family to bless all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1–3). He attached land, Torah, worship, and promises to Israel so that his mercy and blessing could spill into the nations. And he raised up Israel’s Messiah—Jesus of Nazareth—to embody, represent, and secure those promises.
Paul feels the strain of this mystery in his bones:
“I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish… I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Messiah for the sake of my brothers… They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises… and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Messiah” (Rom. 9:2–5).
Tradition has often treated Romans 9–11 as a prelude to erasing Israel—or, more commonly in dispensational theology, temporarily setting her aside. Paul says nothing of the sort. These are the words of a man gripped by the conviction that God has not abandoned—nor postponed—what he swore.
Paul’s thunderclap about Israel comes in Romans 11:
“As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake; but as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (vv. 28–29).
Irrevocable—not canceled, not fulfilled in Christ, transferred to another, and certainly not spiritualized away. Paul believes Israel’s present hardness is partial and temporary for the sake of God’s mercy toward the Gentiles, and that their future mercy is guaranteed by God’s fidelity (Rom. 11:25–26). If God can discard Israel, none of us are safe. But he cannot—and he will not.
Paul trusts that mercy that grafted Gentiles in will graft God’s people in again. Grace joins our story with the Israels’; it doesn’t erase her.
This is why Paul’s “no distinction” texts level the ground of access to salvation (Rom. 10:12; Gal. 3:28). The nations are to find life in Israel’s story while retaining the ethnic distinctions God has creatively ordained. Gentiles enter the covenant family by faith in its mediator, the Messiah, just as Jews trust the promises he upholds. But God’s mercy does not erase the distinct identities he has woven into his human creations. Male and female remain. Jew and Gentile remain. The ecclesia of the nations does not become “the new Israel.”
We have Jesus, we tell ourselves—we do not need Israel. We have heaven—we do not need the land. We have grace—we do not need the Torah. These errors, by whatever names they travel under, have haunted the Church for centuries. Their fruit is bitter: arrogance toward all things Jewish, contempt for God’s firstborn, disregard for the land, city, and people he set apart for himself, and fertile soil in which antisemitism has repeatedly taken root—even in the Christian West.
Paul’s warning could not be sharper: “Do not be arrogant toward the branches… remember: it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you” (Rom. 11:18).
Sadly, Paul’s fears about Gentile pride have come true. Even among loving Christians, the belief that Israel still matters—that the land and people are chosen, and the fulfillment of God’s promises through them central to our hope in Jesus—receives almost no attention. And so, whether by our outright rejection or silent complacency, we join the controversy of Zion ourselves.
The Timeline of Mercy—and the Cost
Scripture names a season when the controversy of Zion crests like a black wave: “the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jer. 30:7).
The texts are not evasive. The Jewish people are the “you” in Jesus’s Mount of Olives discourse; Jerusalem is the epicenter; the nations rage with wrath against her, and God, like a mighty warrior, arises.
I do not write this lightly. After the centuries of European violence and the horrors of our own day, the claim that more trouble lies ahead is an unbearable one to admit. I struggle with the ethics of such a message. But faithfulness to Scripture need not end in despair. It produces watchfulness and compassion.
The same passages that speak of Jacob’s trouble also promise ultimate deliverance:
“At that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book” (Dan. 12:1).
And Jesus anchors his warnings of this time with great hope:
“When these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).
As believers in God’s promises, we should not be surprised if we come under fire for this confession. God will redeem the land of Israel and the Jewish people, vindicate his covenant, and reign from Zion through his Messiah. Persecution will not come to Christians because we love Jesus abstractly—no one is killed for being nice to their neighbor. It will come because of our identification with Israel, our belief in her vindication, and our allegiance to her Messiah.
Revelation 12 portrays this conflict with unsettling clarity. When the dragon cannot destroy the Messiah, he turns his fury on the woman—a clear allusion to Israel—and then on “the rest of her offspring,” those “who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 12:17). These are the Jewish people, set apart by Torah and covenant, and also are those who bear witness to the gospel Jesus proclaimed—the reign of God’s kingdom and the restoration of his land and people.
To confess that gospel publicly puts our lives where our theology is. Faithfulness means loving what God loves and standing with the people and land at the heart of his Messiah’s mission.
It’s easy to believe in God’s irrevocable calling of Israel when your heart is anchored in his Word. But standing by that same calling when you have a lukewarm knowledge of the Bible and have kneeled to the spirit of the age is impossible.
When we know what Scripture says about Israel and the covenant Jesus sealed with his own blood, we can love both the Jewish people and their enemies rightly. With our prayers, our resources, and actions, we can live as though God meant what he said—and endure without surprise when that love costs us something.
Why Israel Still Matters—And Why the Church Must Care
Israel still matters because God’s choice of them is irrevocable. The survival of the Jewish people is a living testimony to God’s ongoing covenant fidelity. Paul dares to say that Israel’s reconciliation will mean “life from the dead” (Rom. 11:15). The resurrection that began in one Jewish body will blossom into a resurrection that fills the earth. The land of Israel and the Jewish people remain the undeniable linchpin of God’s redemptive plan—a plan that graciously, includes us all.
If the Church is to stand in the days ahead, she must recalibrate to this message.
We must recover our roots—not as a sentimental return, but as an act of obedience. Left in our current apathy, we are easily discipled by the age, carried along by every persuasive current of respectable-sounding doctrine we’ve never actually held against the standard of God’s irrecovable promises. We become Cain—resentful of God’s favor toward our brother, offended by the Father’s feast for the son who returns. Or we become Jacob, scheming and grasping for a blessing we were never excluded from.
God’s choice of Israel not about us; it is for us. It is about the God who keeps his word—to Abraham and his descendants, to Israel and the nations, to Zion and the ends of the earth—through Jesus the Messiah, the crucified and risen Son who will rule from Zion with a rod of iron (Ps. 2; 110).
I believe a great sifting is upon us. It will not be decided by theological debates or peace treaties in the Middle East, but by the question of Zion. Will we in the Church yawn with the nations—“It’s just Zion; no one cares” (Jer. 30:17)—or will we become watchmen who do not keep silent until he establishes Jerusalem and makes her a praise in the earth (Isa. 62:6–7)?
Jesus’s words in Revelation are a sharp warning to his followers in a generation on the brink of the redemption:
To Ephesus: return to first love—and remember from where you have come.
To Smyrna: be faithful unto death.
To Pergamum and Thyatira: refuse the seductive speech that normalizes covenant infidelity and takes what belongs to someone else for greedy gain.
To Sardis: wake up; strengthen what remains while it’s still there.
To Philadelphia: hold fast to the messianic confession.
To Laodicea: repent of indifference—choose who Jesus is. Know him, or he will not know you.
Our Master does not call his followers to activism but to faithful allegiance to the God he represents—the God of Abraham. Our posture toward Israel must end not in Christian pride or political zeal, but in praise to God. The kind of worship that steadies our hands to pray, to stand, to suffer if necessary, and to hope without shame.
Israel still matters because God is faithful.
He has engraved them on his hands; he will not forsake them. Until then, we love our neighbor and hold to the testimony of Jesus—the Jewish Messiah, the Cloud-Rider and king whose scepter goes out from Zion.
And we whisper the oldest Christian prayer, which is also Israel’s greatest longing:
Come, Lord Jesus.
Glory in Zion
On the night the Messiah was born, the heavens burst open—heavy with the weight of glory. This was no soft shimmer of stars, but the crushing nearness of heaven itself invading the earth.
This reflection is the conclusion of “A Messianic Advent,” a series exploring the first songs of the Messiah’s coming through the words of those who waited — and still wait — for Israel’s redemption.
Heavy with the Weight of Glory
On the night the Messiah was born, the heavens burst open, heavy with the weight of glory.
This was no soft shimmer of stars, but the crushing nearness of heaven itself invading the earth.
No wonder the shepherds trembled.
An angel’s voice thundered through the hills: “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you.”
Before the shepherds could even blink, the sky erupted. A multitude of the heavenly host appeared all around them—soldiers of light declaring victory before the battle had even begun:
“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom His favor rests.”
In the biblical mind, to find favor in someone’s eyes is to be seen with affection—to be chosen, welcomed, embraced. In the birth of Messiah, the favor of God had come to rest again on his people through the covenant child.
The angels declared that the glory of the heavenly Zion had become the glory of the earthly Zion.
Heaven touched earth, and for one holy night, the two became one.
Heavy under the Weight of Transgression
Two thousand years later, we live beneath another kind of weight. Christmas calls us to joy, yet the world outside our doors trembles.
The earth, Isaiah said, “staggers like a drunkard… it sways like a hut in the wind; its transgression lies heavy upon it.” The same creation that once rang with angelic praise still groans under the weight of its rebellion.
We celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, yet we are surrounded by wars and rumors of wars.
We light candles for hope while violence and hatred spread across continents like wildfire.
We hang lights in our homes while nations sit in darkness and call it progress.
Our carols rise through tears and experiences that are anything but joy-filled.
This is the heaviness of Advent: holding the weight of transgression in one hand and the weight of glory in the other. We live between what has been promised and what has not yet come to pass.
Heavy with the Hope of Zion
The songs of the messianic Advent are about the Messiah who was, is, and will yet be. The birth of Jesus, told through the voices of those who first received him, is not merely the story of a baby born to bring us some measure of personal comfort, peace, or joy.
These four faithful Jews standing at the opening of Luke’s gospel testify of a story that reached far beyond them, one that is still unfolding toward its finale. It’s a story that stretches into our day, yet remains unfinished.
God does not ask us to hold the full weight of his glory—we have not yet been remade to bear it.
Nor does he ask us to carry the weight of our transgression—the one seated at his right hand has already lowered himself to bear that burden for us.
Instead, I believe the advent of Messiah asks us to hold the weight of hope—a hope heavy with the glory of Zion. The songs of Zechariah, Mary, Simeon, and Anna remind us that Advent is a joyful, painful, forward-reaching ache before renewal.
We live between two Zions: one above, blazing with glory, and one below, desolate and longing for light.
But each declares what the angels above and the shepherds below experienced that holy night—
that heaven and earth will one day sing in unison,
and that God himself will dwell among his people forever.
The songs of the Messianic Advent still echo across the sanctuary of eternity, calling every heart to join the same refrain:
“Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth, shalom, on whom his favor rests.”
The covenant has been remembered, the promise made flesh, the consolation of Israel in motion, and the redemption of creation has begun.
May we too join the song of heaven. The king has been born, and in only a little while, the weight of glory will rest again in Zion.
Anna’s Witness | The Redemption of Jerusalem
The priesthood must have grown familiar with her presence. An old widow, maybe wrapped in shawls, her eyes bright with unspent fire.
This reflection is part 4 of “A Messianic Advent,” a series exploring the first songs of the Messiah’s coming through the songs and words of those who waited — and still wait — for Israel’s redemption.
Luke 2:37-38
She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying.
Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God
and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward
to the redemption of Jerusalem.
The Prophetess Who Refused to Leave
The priesthood must have grown familiar with her presence. An old widow, maybe wrapped in shawls, her eyes bright with unspent fire. Did they see her with reverence and respect like Deborah? Or did they assume she was drunk, like Hannah?
Anna, daughter of Phanuel, tribe of Asher—one of Israel’s lost tribes, scattered in exile—still waited, still prayed.
Luke tells us she was “very old,” that she had lived with her husband seven years and then remained a widow until the age of eighty-four. In truth, that is nearly all we are told. Luke devotes only a few verses to Anna, and she never even speaks. And yet he considers her presence essential to the birth narrative of Jesus. Why?
Anna’s actions assume a whole world of Scripture, memory, and Jewish expectation that Luke does not stop to explain—because he assumes his audience already knows it. That world is essential to understanding why Jesus was born at all. It is also a world many of us were never taught how to enter. It has taken me many years of study to learn how to imagine Anna’s story faithfully within first-century Judaism, and to place her hope where it belongs: within Israel’s long and faithful waiting for redemption.
Anna never abandoned her post: “She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying.”
Others came and went. But Anna stayed in the temple.
The prophets had promised that one day the Lord would return to Zion, that comfort would come to his people, that redemption would rise again from Jerusalem. Anna believed that glory would burst right through the eastern gate. She wanted to be there when it happened. So she waited.
Waiting as Worship
Waiting, to Anna, was not wasted time. It was worship. She had learned that the God of Israel fulfills his word in his time. The same God who brought Israel out of Egypt, who returned them from exile, would send his Redeemer. For Anna, waiting was an act of faithfulness. It was her way of keeping the lamp burning, of guarding hope when the night was long.
Then, one ordinary day, her waiting ended.
A young couple entered the temple with their infant son—too poor to afford a lamb, offering instead two turtledoves. The Spirit stirred, and Anna saw what very few could see: the Redeemer had come to his temple.
Simeon had just spoken his blessing when she approached. Her fasting turning to feasting in a heartbeat. She gave thanks to God and “spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.”
That phrase—the redemption of Jerusalem—was charged with prophetic meaning.
It echoed Isaiah 52:9: “The Lord has comforted His people; He has redeemed Jerusalem.”
It was the promise that God himself would return, restore his dwelling, and reign again from Zion.
A Hope that Looks Forward
Luke says Anna spoke of the child to all who were looking forward—the remnant within Israel who had not lost hope. My guess is their number was small. The remnant usually is. In what was probably a crowded, busy temple-complex, Anna recognized the baby Messiah because she had been looking forward.
She had studied and prayed; she had given her life to being a watcher on the walls, a guardian of the House of the Lord. Unlike Zechariah, who likely knew of her, Anna did not waver. She believed. She waited for the Lord to restore Jerusalem—and when she saw the child, she ran to spread the news.
It’s strange to me that our celebrations of Jesus’s birth is often the opposite of Anna’s. Where our messages are anchored in remembering the past—what already happened back in Bethlehem—Anna’s announcement is eschatological. She looked forward in this child to the dawn of Israel’s restoration and the beginning of the world’s renewal.
Today, Jerusalem still waits. Its stones and people still cry out for peace. The nations still rage, and creation still groans. Yet Anna’s testimony remains: the Redeemer has come once, and He will come again.
In his first coming, he entered his temple as a child; in his next, he will enter as King. The same eyes that looked up at Simeon in wonder will one day look upon Zion with great rejoicing. The same baby Anna beheld beside the pillars of the Temple will one day make her a pillar in his own.
Anna’s faith bridges those two horizons. Her witness reminds us that the story of salvation does not begin at the manger and end at the cross—it moves forward toward a coming kingdom.
The redemption she longed for was not merely for herself, but national restoration and cosmic renewal. This was the same hope the prophets foresaw:
the day when righteousness and peace would kiss,
when Torah would go forth from Zion,
when the nations would stream to Jerusalem to learn the ways of the Lord.
Advent Reflection: Waiting and Witness
Advent is about hope, joy, peace, and love. But it isn’t only those things. Advent is the spirit of Anna.
When the Messiah appeared, she testified to all who were already looking forward. In an instant, every year of patient waiting became prophetic witness.
In every generation, God raises up Annas—those who refuse to abandon their post, who intercede through long nights, who believe that the King of glory will return through the eastern gate. Anna’s story asks the question: do we have a faith that looks forward, too?
Anna’s story anchors our Advent in both patience and prophecy. She reminds us that worship is not only magnifying what God has done, but bearing witness to what He has promised yet to do.
The Redeemer has come—and the redemption of Jerusalem, and of the world, unfolds in His hands.
And so, as we light our Advent candles and trim our trees, Anna invites us to keep watch with her. To make our hearts a temple of waiting.
To pray for peace, to face the east, and to wait—
with Anna,
and with all creation,
for the final redemption.
This reflection is part of “A Messianic Advent,” a five-part series tracing the songs and voices surrounding the Messiah’s birth. Up next the conclusion to the series: Glory in Zion.