Hanging Beside a King

There is a moment that seems to come, sooner or later, in every conversation about salvation. It comes when the questions stop being about ideas and start being about names. Theology slips out of the big words and sits down beside us, wearing the face of someone we love.

“But are they really saved?”

The person in question is almost always a loved one—a close friend or family member who perhaps has made some sort of profession of faith, or been recently baptized, or at least begun attending church regularly, but who has yet to show a life marked by change.

“She gave her life to Christ, but in the months since, there’s been little visible growth. She used to pray and go to church, but now she’s just drifting from God and I’m so worried!”

All of this comes tumbling out in Bible study or a home group. Tangled up in fear, hope, and panic-stricken confusion, someone listening reaches for the story that has soothed a thousand anxious hearts:

“Well, remember the thief on the cross.”

Relief floods the room. The thief. The last-minute miracle. The proof that faith can be simple and the reassurance that God doesn’t require too much of us, especially if the end is near.

No one in the room bothers to go look up the story and read it aloud. They don’t need to. They’ve memorized a one-liner that has stood the test of time: a common criminal, ignorant of God, ignorant of Scripture, ignorant of Jesus—who, in his final moments, whispers a simple “I believe” and slips quietly into paradise.

It’s a good story; gentle, merciful, and comforting to many a worried friend by someone who sincerely wants to help.

But it is almost certainly false.

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Not a Clueless Convert

The thief on the cross comes to most Evangelicals as a man with a spiritually blank slate—a random sinner who happened to be in the right place at the right time. “Praise God he heard the gospel and believed before he died!” we say.

Historically, that’s an unlikely scenario. Rome did not crucify pickpockets. Crucifixion was typical for traitors, rebels, and insurrectionists—men who had become a problem for the empire. This sentence was a common one for Zealots, who raised much internal havoc in Israel in the days of Jesus. Whatever else this man was, he was not harmless. More importantly, he was not theologically illiterate.

Listen again to what he actually says:

“We are receiving the due reward of our deeds… but this man has done nothing wrong… Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:41-42

Those are loaded words coming from a man who is not grasping at straws in the dark.

·       He believes Jesus is a king—and not the sort who merely reigns in hearts, but one whose rule can be entered.

·       He believes Jesus will still receive a kingdom, even though he’s dying on the stake right next to him.

·       He believes Jesus’ story does not end at death. This man has a category for understanding the impossibility of a life beyond the grave.

·       And he believes Jesus has authority to include others in this future.

This is not the content of “simple faith.” This is eschatological, messianic faith.

This man is making a Jewish, hope-soaked confession at the worst possible moment to do so. And he can do this because he is not starting from nothing. The simple-minded thief we cherish actually seems to possess a robust set of expectations about God, kingship, and the future of the world. He already has a framework for these claims.

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“Remember me” is Covenant Language

In the Scriptures, God “remembers” when he is about to act to keep his promises, rescue people, or restore order to his world. God remembers Noah. He remembers Abraham. He remembers Israel in Egypt, the prayers of Hannah. To be remembered is to be delivered; to be gathered back into the story when redemption is finally on the brink of occurring.

What this man is really saying is something like: When God vindicates you and your kingdom finally comes, let me be counted as yours.

And notice where he wants to be remembered: in your kingdom.

He does not seem primarily concerned with his own salvation or his destination in the moments following his death. He’s concerned with belonging to a very real and specific future in this world—a kingdom associated with the reign of God finally setting the world right. This is a stubborn faith that says: God is not finished yet. Not with you. Not with Israel. Not with the world. And not with me.

We have no way of knowing this man’s ethnic background for certain, but it is very possible that he was Jewish, or at the very least, someone very familiar with the Jewish hope that was electrifying Israel in those years: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

The backdrop of his crucifixion is Passover in Jerusalem. In that setting, this man…

• acknowledges Jesus’ innocence

• rebukes the other criminal

• publicly aligns himself with a condemned “messianic pretender”

• and entrusts himself to Jesus’ future reign.

That is repentance in the deepest biblical sense: a total change of allegiance.

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The Courage to Defect

As hard as it is for my worried friends to accept, this is not a story about a man who knows nothing about God or Jesus and stumbles his way to salvation at the last minute.

It is a story about a man who, at the very end of his life, chooses sides—sides he probably had at least some familiarity with long before his crucifixion.

It’s true: he does not have time to make restitution, join a crew of disciples, keep the Torah better, or fix his life.

But he does repent.

While everyone else is mocking or denying Jesus, he does something astonishing: he entrusts himself to a dying king of a not-yet-visible kingdom.

He publicly defects to Jesus’ side when Jesus looks least like a winner—and when he himself has no hope of Jesus fixing anything regarding his current circumstances.

I think, if he had lived, everything suggests that this new allegiance would have recalibrated his entire life.

Somewhere along the way, we turned this story into proof that biblical literacy and repentance don’t really matter. The thief is our evidence that simple faith is what counts most, and living righteously or having some understanding the Jesus we give our lives to doesn’t count much in the end.

“Just believe in Jesus,” we say—without asking what belief in Jesus means, what we think he’s asking of us, or what kind of kingdom we imagine he brings.

I don’t think the thief believed in a vague, generic savior ready to carry him off to heaven. It seems to me he believed in a dying Messiah, a rejected king, and an invisible kingdom that would—against all appearances—still come, in the very city where he was nailed to a stake on a hill.

His faith, it seems, was anchored in that hope.

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Stealing from the Thief

The poor thief on the cross.

We have left him there, hanging beside a king, forever enthroning a story about simple faith instead of the identity of the man who died beside him.

We’re afraid of our own shortcomings, worried for the people we love who confess without real allegiance. We’re so desperate to avoid being held accountable to worshipping a God we know, we become thieves ourselves—guilty of stealing the testimony of a repentant rebel and recycling him into a clueless criminal who “got saved” at the last second by a kind king who asks almost nothing.

It’s a retelling that exposes something about the condition of our own hearts.

Maybe we are all just thieves, hanging beside a king on crosses of our own—looking at the crucified man next to us, and deciding what we want him to be.

I usually let these conversations run their course. I save my thoughts for another time, perhaps, when people are less panicked. I’ll try, as gently and honestly as I can, to recover what’s been lost. Maybe they’ll see.

In our doubts and questions, I think we are finally standing where the story has always placed us: at the place of the skull—sifting through the rubble of what we think we know, trying to see who the man in the middle really is.

And just hoping, like the thief, that he will look down from his throne one day and remember us.

Why I Wrote a Book About Leviticus (Of All Things)

If you had asked me a few years ago—hypothetically—what book of the Bible I would one day write about, Leviticus would not have made the list.

Not even close.

Leviticus is the book most of us skim or skip entirely. It’s where Bible reading plans go to die somewhere around mid-February. It’s strange, repetitive, and heavy with details that don’t seem to connect to modern faith.

Yet there it sits at the very center of the Torah, the center of Israel’s Scriptures, and the center of the story that defines Jesus.

So why write a book about it?

The short answer is this: I came to see that Leviticus is essential to the gospel, and I couldn’t not share what I had learned.

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Jesus said he came to fulfill the Torah—and Leviticus is at the heart of it.

In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

It’s a familiar verse. One we tend to read and nod along with, and then move past.

But I began to wonder: do we actually take Jesus at his word?

Because if he did not come to abolish the Torah, then we have to wrestle with what it means that he came to fulfill it. And that question becomes especially pressing when we arrive at Leviticus—the book that sits at the center of the Torah’s main tension: how can a holy God dwell among unholy people?

Leviticus is not a side note. It is the core of the good news. It’s where we learn what it means for a holy God to draw near to unholy people—what that looks like and what it costs to make it possible.

And when you start paying attention, you begin to notice something: Jesus lives and speaks as if Leviticus still matters.

He operates within categories of clean and unclean.
He spends a huge amount of time in and around the temple.
He is deeply moved by the fate of Jerusalem—the place of God’s dwelling.

And he seems to believe that its story is not over.

That realization alone was enough to stop me in my tracks.

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“Fulfilled” does not mean “replaced”—and that changes how we read everything.

Somewhere along the way, many of us inherited an assumption: that once Jesus came, Leviticus—and much of the Torah—was effectively finished.

Not abolished, exactly. But completed (past tense) in a way that no longer holds real weight. As though Jesus arrived, died, rose again, and poof—the Torah was fulfilled and done. But the more I sat with Jesus’ words, the less that assumption held up.

He goes on to say that those who set aside even the least of these commandments—and teach others to do the same—will be called least in the kingdom. To me, that didn’t sound like a system that’s been rendered irrelevant.

And it raised uncomfortable questions:

• If Leviticus is“fulfilled” by him basically doing away with it, why insist he didn’t come to abolish it?

• If the Torah is complete and already behind us, why warn against setting its commands aside?

That tension forced me to ask deeper questions: what if I’ve been reading all of this wrong?

That shift changed everything.

Instead of reading Leviticus as a dry relic—something that once mattered but no longer does—I began to read it for what it was actually saying. I tried to see it as Jesus did: a framework that points forward. One that finds its depth and future in the work of Messiah, but is not discarded by him. I asked,

What if the categories still matter?
What if the vision still matters?
What if the priesthood, the sacrifices, the rhythms of worship all still matter?

And what if its story is still unfolding?

Suddenly, Leviticus became impossible to ignore. I began to realize that a book that was central to the life and mission of my Savior was not central to me.

That needed to change.

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I had questions no one seemed to be answering.

Once those first two realizations settled in, they opened up a flood of questions.

If Leviticus still matters, how does it matter?
If it hasn’t been replaced, how should we read it now?
What do we do with sacrifice, priesthood, ritual, the Day of Atonement?
How did Jesus understand these things? And how did his first followers hold these things alongside faith in him?

And what about the New Testament? The temple?

Paul, Galatians, Hebrews? The new covenant? “You’re free from the Law!” I went looking for answers.

I read books, articles, and journals. I listened to sermons and podcasts. I took classes. I searched for voices asking these same questions. And I found…very little.

There were excellent scholars writing about Leviticus in its ancient context. There were thoughtful theologians explaining how Jesus relates to the law. But usually, the conversation seemed to stop too soon. Leviticus was either reduced to metaphor, absorbed into church tradition, or ultimately dismissed as something Jesus came to transcend.

None of them could answer the question I was asking: what does it mean to take Jesus at his word—that he didn’t come to abolish the Torah—and take Leviticus seriously at the same time?

I couldn’t shake the sense that Jesus didn’t read Leviticus the way I did. He didn’t stand over it, deciding how he’d render it all obsolete. He stepped into it. He let it shape his mission. His identity. His understanding of what he came to do—and what God is still doing.

For him.
For the Jewish people.
And for the world.

And that left me with a decision. I could set those questions aside, or I could follow them wherever they led.

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So I wrote the book I couldn’t find.

I didn’t start with a plan to write a book.

I started with a growing, gnawing sense that I had missed something.

So I began tracing the threads, from Leviticus into the Prophets, the Gospels, and the letters. From the tent at Sinai to the heavenly tabernacle still destined, one day, to descend to the land.

I stopped trying to read Leviticus backwards—starting with conclusions about Jesus and forcing the text to fit them—and instead tried to read it the way Jesus knew it: as a living part of the story he was stepping into.

What I found was not a disconnected system of ancient rituals that Jesus replaced with himself at the cross. I found a vision of a people and a tent that are at the very center of everything God still intends to do.

And I found that without Leviticus, I completely misunderstood almost everything about Jesus and his mission.

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Why this book—and why now?

I wrote this book because I think we’ve lost something.

Not just a book of the Bible, but a critical piece of the story that most of us don’t even know.

We’ve learned to read the New Testament without its foundation.
To talk about Jesus without the categories he lived within.
To celebrate fulfillment without understanding what is being fulfilled.

And in doing so, we’ve emptied the gospel of Leviticus—and our future hope of its promises.

The Forgotten Gospel is my attempt to recover that missing piece.

Not by discovering something new, but by returning to something old.

As old as Sinai.
As old as covenant.
As old as the gospel itself.

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An Invitation to Reimagine Leviticus

If Leviticus has ever felt distant to you, you’re not alone. If you’ve wondered why it’s there, or what it has to do with Jesus, you’re asking the right questions.

And if you’ve assumed it no longer matters, because no one has ever shown you why it would—I understand.

But what if that assumption is wrong?

What if the book we forgot is the one that helps us see the gospel more clearly? What if, instead of leaving Leviticus behind, we’re meant to grow into it? What if we need to reimagine Leviticus?

That’s the question that started this journey, and it’s the one that led me to write The Forgotten Gospel.

Some stories deserve to be remembered. Leviticus is one of them.

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. 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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The Irrevocable Calling

“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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The Story of Shalom

This is spoken-word liturgy, originally shared as a testimony at my church, December 2025.

The Story of Shalom

By Brianna Tittel

Creation

In the beginning—
when the world was wild and waste,
and darkness covered the face of the deep—
the Spirit hovered over the waters,
and the voice of God drew shalom out of chaos.¹

In the ancient days—
when giants walked the land
and violence devoured man and beast—
God sent a flood to cleanse the blood-soaked earth.
The Spirit hovered once more over the waters,
and His favor rested on Noah.
As the offering rose from the mountain of curse,
God hung His shalom in the sky
like a banner of promise.²

---

Fathers

In the days of the Fathers— Abraham, Isaac, Jacob—
a promise followed the covenant family wherever they wandered:
blessing in the field, blessing in the womb;
thunder in the heavens, wrestling in the dust.
Yet the gospel of shalom glittered in the stars
and whispered in the sand.³

In the wilderness, Aaron the anointed one
lifted his face toward Israel and declared,
“Yahweh bless you and keep you;
Yahweh make His face shine upon you
and give you shalom.”²

To Israel God said,
“I will bless you… and I will give you shalom.”³
To them He promised,
*shalom in the land;
and shalom when you lie down
None will make you afraid.”⁴
He said,
“My presence will go with you,
and I will give you rest.”⁵

In the days of the holy tent,
He taught us through the shelamim—
the offering of peace—
that shalom is communion,
shalom is worship,
shalom is life in his presence.⁶

In the days of David,
he vowed a covenant of shalom,⁷
a promise stronger than exile,
wider than the wilderness.
Even the weary were told,
“You shall go to your fathers in shalom.”⁸

---

Seers

And in the days of the great seers,
they lifted their voices and cried of Messiah:
“He shall be called the Prince of Shalom.”⁹
“Of the increase of His shalom there will be no end.”¹⁰

They gazed toward the mountains and proclaimed,
“How beautiful upon the hills
are the feet of the one who brings good news,
who proclaims shalom in Zion…”¹¹

They lamented Israel’s rebellion:
“You cry ‘shalom, shalom’—
but there is no shalom.”¹²

Yet even in grief they foretold hope:
“Upon messiah will fall the chastisement
that brings us shalom.”¹³
God’s covenant of shalom shall not be removed.¹⁴
“You shall go out in joy
and be led forth in shalom.”¹⁵

They promised a Shepherd
who would stand and guard flock of Yahweh—
and He would be their shalom.¹⁶ ¹⁷
And in this place—
this land of war and desolation—
the Most High God declared,
“In this place I will give shalom.”¹⁸

In the days of the psalmists,
days of exile and insecurity, they sang:
“In shalom I will lie down and sleep,
for You alone make me dwell in safety.”¹⁹
“Yahweh will bless his people with shalom.”²⁰
“Seek shalom and pursue it,”*²¹ they sang.
“The meek will inherit the land
and delight in abundant shalom,”²² they sang.
“In the days of Messiah may shalom abound
till the moon is no more.”²³
“He will speak shalom to His people.”²⁴
“Righteousness and shalom shall kiss.”²⁵ “And great shalom have those who love Your Torah.”²⁶

---

Son

And then—
there was silence. Centuries of silence.
No seers. No songs.
No voice.
No shalom in Zion.

Until one night,
angels burst through the sky like radiant diamonds and declared,
“Glory to God in the highest, and shalom on the land
upon those on whom His favor rests.”³¹

A priest trembled in the temple as heaven broke in:
“Do not be afraid, Zechariah…
your son will prepare a people for Yahweh—
feet fitted with the gospel of shalom.”²⁷

A young woman in Nazareth
received a greeting of impossible peace:
“Shalom Mary, for Yahweh is with you.”²⁸

A child leapt in the womb,
and a mother cried blessing.²⁹
And an old priest prophesied
that the rising dawn from on high
would guide Israel’s feet
into the everlasting way of shalom.³⁰

An old man in the temple held the baby Yeshua
and whispered,
“Now dismiss Your servant in shalom—
for my eyes have seen Your salvation.”³²

And a prophetess watching nearby proclaimed
that the redemption of Israel had drawn near.³³

---

Messiah

When that baby grew into a rabbi—
he looked out on a sea of brokenness from a dusty hillside,
and saw souls who knew more of oppression than exaltation,
more of hunger than fullness,
more of conflict than calm—
he lifted His voice and said,
“Blessed are the shalom-makers,
for they shall be called sons of God.”³⁴

And when He entered the city of peace—
Jeru-shalem—
He wept with holy anguish:
“If only you had known
for the things that would make for your shalom.”³⁵

At the table before His death, He said,
“My shalom I give you—
but not as the world gives.”³⁶

And at the stake of His execution—
when the serpent of old stirred the wild and waste in the hardened hearts of the rebellious,
when the powers of darkness surged and surrounded like dogs
to mock, mar, and make ruin of the Chosen One—
He made shalom
by the blood of His life.³⁷

He reconciled Israel,
and sprinkled clean the many from among the nations,
making us one family,
tearing down our walls of hostility,
preaching shalom to those near
and shalom to those far.³⁸

And after rising from the dead—
in rooms thick with fear,
in hearts sinking beneath the face of the deep—
He came and said:
“Shalom.”³⁹

---

Until the Day

In the unsteady waters of our own lives, in the chaos waters of our own world—
we are able to look with great courage
for the day of the shalom of our God to visit us from on high.

For we know of His shalom there will be no end—
no end to the forever He brings.

He will soon crush the adversary under our feet,⁴⁰ because his shalom guards our hearts and minds,⁴¹
and shods our feet
to steady us for what is yet to come.⁴²

Even at Christmastime,
the present powers of darkness do not relent outside these church doors.
The wars do not stop.
The innocent find no reprieve.
They are plundered and preyed upon
while the great ones of the world say,
“Peace and safety—shalom is here.”

But the wise among us see their empty words for the delusion that they are.
For sudden travail will seize the foolish
like a thief in the night;
as a rider on a red horse awakens,
and it is given to him
to take shalom from the land.⁴³

But we—we who know the story of shalom—we who dwell in the shadow of the Most High and hold heavy the hope of Zion—we will not be moved.
The earth may quake,
the hills may melt,
and the hearts of the mighty may fail.
Though arrows fly by day
and the powers of the heavens are shaken,
we stand firm—
planted in the shalom that has been
since the foundations of the earth.

So we will not be surprised when a great harvest of righteousness
comes to those who have sown faithfully in shalom.
It grows right in the places
that today
are anything but peaceful.⁴⁴

So even when there is no fruit on the vine,
even when we tremble in the night,
our delight is in the shalom of the Lord—
the One who makes our burden light,
the One who makes our feet
to walk upon the heights.⁴⁵

NOTES (Scripture References)

1.      Gen. 1:2.

2.      Gen. 9:8–17.

3.      Gen. 12:1–3; 15:5; 22:17.

4.      Lev. 26:6.

5.      Exod. 33:14.

6.      Lev. 3; Lev. 7:11–21.

7.      2 Sam. 7:11; Ps. 89:3–4; cf. Ezek. 34:25; 37:26.

8.      Gen. 15:15.

9.      Isa. 9:6.

10.     Isa. 9:7.

11.     Isa. 52:7.

12.     Jer. 6:14; 8:11.

13.     Isa. 53:5.

14.     Isa. 54:10.

15.     Isa. 55:12.

16.     Mic. 5:4–5.

17.     Jer. 33:6.

18.     Hag. 2:9.

19.     Ps. 4:8.

20.     Ps. 29:11.

21.     Ps. 34:14.

22.     Ps. 37:11.

23.     Ps. 72:7.

24.     Ps. 85:8.

25.     Ps. 85:10.

26.     Ps. 119:165.

27.     Luke 1:13–17.

28.     Luke 1:28.

29.     Luke 1:41–45.

30.     Luke 1:78–79.

31.     Luke 2:14.

32.     Luke 2:29–32.

33.     Luke 2:36–38.

34.     Matt. 5:9.

35.     Luke 19:42.

36.     John 14:27.

37.     Col. 1:20.

38.     Eph. 2:14–17.

39.     John 20:19, 21, 26.

40.     Rom. 16:20.

41.     Phil. 4:7.

42.     Eph. 6:15.

43.     Rev. 6:4; 1 Thess. 5:2–3.

44.     James 3:18

45.     Hab. 3:17–19.

Who Do You Say I Am?

Who Do You Say That I Am?

In the Gospels, Jesus presses his disciples with a question that still echoes today: “Who do you say that I am?”

It wasn’t a question for strangers. It was for those who had walked with him, eaten with him, witnessed miracles, and heard him teach. They had plenty of material to work with. And yet, his question cuts deeper than facts. It searched for loyalty, recognition, and faith.

It asks whether the Jesus they thought they knew was the Messiah he claimed to be.

I have a friend who lives in that question every day. He searches for Jesus everywhere, unsure what to believe about him. His beliefs are a murky mixture. There’s some liturgy from childhood that feels empty now, some fragments from passionate sermons, some cultural clichés about Jesus as nothing more than a moral example. He weighs them all against each other, confused and unsatisfied, groping for something real. He wants a straight answer.

Well-meaning Christians tell him to just believe. Jesus loves you. He died for you. He wants to be Lord of your life. But what “Lord of your life” means looks different for every person he meets. The standard is all over the place. Some assure him that everything good is from God, every bad thing from Satan, and that we all have little agency in between. Nature whispers a different story—beauty, goodness, pulsing life—but he wonders: is that God, or something else?

So he is left searching, repeating the question: Who do you say Jesus is?

He sees only the versions others offer—the Jesus they’ve pieced together from their own journeys. And since no two versions look the same, he’s left to build his own collage, with no trustworthy standard to measure it against.

Worse, it has left him under the impression that Jesus is whoever someone says he is.

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The Jesus We Build

When we describe Jesus to others, our testimony often reflects how we first encountered him. And while that’s not unimportant, it’s crucial to recognize that it’s not necessarily the same as who he claims to be.

•                To the beggar, he’s a provider.

•                To the addict, a chain-breaker.

•                To the brokenhearted, a miracle-worker.

•                To the lonely, a friend.

•                To the confused, an answer.

•                To the desperate, a way-maker.

•                To the abused, a savior.

And he is all these things. Our Lord is deeply relational, attentive to the smallest hair on our heads. Our personal testimonies matter deeply to the world. They are first-hand accounts of the goodness of God in our lives.

But if that is all we ever say—if these are the only stories we tell—we shrink Jesus into a reflection of our own needs. Our witness becomes a patchwork stitched from wounds and proof-texts: bits of comfort, snippets of rescue, fragments of help. None of them are wrong, but few present the full figure that Scripture gives.

Faith can’t rest on a Jesus defined only by our experiences mixed with some popular stories about him.

Our witness may begin with our own story, but it must grow into the story Jesus told about himself—or else we end up worshiping our own reflection in a pool of a million others.

And what does that say to those watching? When they peer in, they don’t see the Messiah of Scripture—they see a different Jesus for everyone.

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The Messiah We Ignore

Most of us read the Gospels as if the story of Jesus begins in Matthew 1, climaxes in John 3:16, and resolves at the empty tomb. But the Gospels were never meant to stand alone. They were written as a radical claim—eyewitness proof that this man named Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah the Hebrew Scriptures had been promising all along.

Yet, how many of us could honestly say we could explain what Messiah even means? Could we outline a biblical job description of the Messiah’s tasks and responsibilities? Not a Jesus-colored mockup, but the real, robust portrait the Old Testament actually gives?

Jesus could.

He saw himself through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. He explained his mission through books most of us barely know and seldom read. Like every Jewish boy, he wasn’t born with the Scriptures preloaded into his mind. He learned them through sitting in synagogue, listening to his parents tell the stories, sing the psalms, and celebrate the holy days. Year after year, the words of Moses, Isaiah, David, and Jeremiah poured into his ears. He prayed the shema. He repeated the laws. He wrestled with the promises. He heard of Abraham’s covenant, David’s throne, God’s dwelling in the midst of his people.

Those words didn’t just instruct him. They shaped him. Jesus used the Hebrew Scriptures to understand who he was and why the world needed the Messiah these Scriptures outlined. So when he stood up on shabbat in Galilee and declared, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the captives and to declare the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18), he knew exactly what he was saying.

But do we? Who were the captives he had in mind? What “year of favor” was he referring to? Could we answer with the same clarity his first audience would have known, let alone the clarity Jesus himself had?

That day in the synagogue, Jesus wasn’t improvising. He was stepping into an office the Scriptures had described for centuries. That is the Messiah he claimed to be—not only our personal Savior, but the Anointed One with a mission that stretches beyond a sacrificial death.

---

 A Thin Gospel

If we’re honest, the Old Testament Messiah does not neatly fit into the standard gospel message. A descendant of Abraham ruling on David’s throne from Jerusalem? How exactly do we present that as good news to our lost friends asking the hard questions? Truth be told, we are unprepared to. Which is why so often, we don’t.

Instead, we present the Jesus we think we know and leave the rest to pastors, churches, or theologians to fill in. We’re all sinners, and sinners need Jesus. That message feels solid enough. Messiah of the Old Testament? That can wait.

But the gospel stripped of its messianic foundation is frail. It may soothe for a moment, but it will not withstand the pressures of a darkening world.

---

Who Do You Say He Is?

And so question presses in again: Who do you say I am?

Have we leaned too long on a Jesus shaped only by our own journeys, pain points, and Christian imaginations? Do we actually live as though he is who he says he is?

The Messiah is not a neutral figure. His role comes with specific tasks, responsibilities, and expectations that will cut across our traditions and challenge our culture. The kingdom he proclaimed was never meant to be reduced to mere kindness or spiritual platitudes. It was the kingdom promised to Eve, to Abraham, to David, and declared by the Prophets. A kingdom already breaking in through Jesus’s spirit living in his followers, yet not fully here.

The world is not drifting towards peace. The days grow darker, more polarized, more hostile. And people who don’t know Jesus can sense it. My friend sees right through the thin claim that “Jesus saves.”

The prophets described the coming kingdom as labor pains—waves growing sharper, stronger, and closer together until God’s reign invades the land through the Messiah he anointed. This is the story Scripture actually anticipates, even if it’s a story we haven’t always had ears to hear.

To follow Jesus in such times requires growing in the knowledge of the Messiah he claimed to be. That means adopting a messianic stance toward Scripture—reading the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings the way he did. Most of us were never taught to do that. No wonder we avoid his question. It’s easier to stick with the Jesus we’ve inherited or experienced than to measure our version of him against the Messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures.

But this can change. Jesus invites us to make his story part of our own. And he is faithful to open our eyes and help us understand it.

---

 At the Mountain’s Foot

Right now, our Lord stands at the right hand of the Father, enthroned on the heavenly mountain, veiled from our sight. Are we waiting in trust, filling our lamps with the oil of the Word, ready to recognize him when he comes? Do we know him well enough to describe his story to others—not only a “Savior who forgives sins,” but the Messiah who reigns, who rides the clouds, who will restore all broken things?

Today, believers stand at the mountain’s foot with two options. We can lift our eyes to the Messiah Scripture foretells. Or we can bow to an image of Jesus pieced together from gospel fragments, personal pain, and cultural tradition.

Who do you say that I am?

Your answer doesn’t change who he is. But it does shape the gospel you live, the Jesus you proclaim, and the hope you offer a world still searching for the truth.

Who do you say that he is?

---

This piece is the first of my Four Anchors series. Next, we’ll turn to God’s enduring promises to Abraham. Until then, may this anchor hold you steady in a world adrift.

A God I Have Not Known

The headlines flicker like static on a broken radio: Israel accused, Gaza in ruins, the Middle East a tinderbox waiting for a spark. At first, urgency stirred prayer. But as the rage simmers on, prayer drifts to the background. It’s easy to grow numb while the war groans on.

In the static, I asked the Lord what he was saying in this season. He led me not to prophecy or psalms, but to four quiet chapters in the Hebrew Bible: Ruth.

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More Than a Love Story

The first time I studied Ruth, it was sold to me as a dating manual: “Wait for your Boaz, girls!” Later, I heard it taught as a Cinderella story of struggle and grace, or a women’s guide to friendship and redemption. Those readings aren’t wrong, but they are small.

Ruth’s story reveals something far deeper—and more dangerous.

The story begins with tragedy. A family from Bethlehem flees famine and resettles in Moab, enemy territory. There, the father and both sons die, leaving Naomi and her daughters-in-law destitute.

It’s a grim outlook for the vulnerable women bereft of their husbands. Naomi decides to head back home, perhaps hopeful that she can somehow scrape out an existence within the borders of her homeland. But as a displaced, aging widow, she’s in a dangerous position. In order to avoid dragging her daughters-in-law into it, she releases them from familial obligation, charging them to go back home to their own families and their own gods. Naomi implies “I’m a lost cause. Save yourselves while you still can.”

One daughter-in-law, Orpah, departs. But Ruth clings to her.

The Hebrew word for “cling” is the same as in Genesis 2: “a man shall cling to his wife.” Ruth utters the famous vow to Naomi:
“Where you go I will go, your people will be my people, and your God my God.”

The passage rings with the echos of Eden: bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. Ruth welds herself to Naomi, willing to accept whatever lies ahead: poverty, debt, humiliation, danger, possibly even death. United as one, they head back to Israel. 

---

Faith in the God of Israel

Those familiar with the story know how it goes. After returning to the land, Ruth, the young and able-bodied member of the impoverished duo, gathers leftover scraps from the barley harvest in a relative’s field. Boaz notices Ruth’s devotion. He blesses her, not merely for kindness, but for seeking refuge under the wings of Israel’s God. Her loyalty to Naomi is evidence of faith in the covenant-keeping God.

“She asked him, ‘Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me – a foreigner?’

Boaz replied, ‘I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband – how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the LORD repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.’”

Boaz blesses Ruth—an average, Gentile woman—because of her faithfulness to a powerless, wandering, Jewish refugee. He doesn’t just praise her benevolence and compassion. Instead, Boaz proclaims Ruth’s wisdom to stand by Naomi even when things looked bleak, trusting that Naomi’s God—the God of Israel—would come through for them both. Later in the story, Boaz comes through for Naomi by marrying Ruth, effectively saving both women from a life of misery and probable death.

But curiously, this time reading through Ruth I noticed it’s not the women that are the focus of the salvation narrative. It’s actually Naomi’s property and the family name that become the object of attention.

“Then Boaz announced to the elders and all the people, ‘Today you are witnesses that I have bought from Naomi all the property of Elimelek, Kilion and Mahlon. I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, Mahlon’s widow, as my wife, in order to maintain the name of the dead with his property, so that his name will not disappear from among his family or from his home town. Today you are witnesses!’

The story ends with the birth of Obed, Ruth and Boaz’s son, grandfather of King David. But the true redemption rests with Naomi—her land restored, her family name secured, her hope renewed. And all because a Gentile woman refused to abandon her.

Ruth is not just a tale of romance or personal friendship. It is a call to the nations: love the Jewish people in their darkest hour, and trust the God who promised to bless the world through them.

---

The Question Ruth Sets Before Us

In times of war and rising hostility, Ruth’s story pierces me. Am I willing to love a people—and a God—I perhaps do not fully understand? Am I willing to cling to their story, even when it costs me comfort, reputation, or safety?

Too often I’ve read Ruth as if it were about me—my needs, my redemption. But Ruth confronts me with something larger: faith in Israel’s God revealed through love for Israel’s people. This dainty, often trivialized book is, in fact, a powerhouse of wisdom for Gentiles in an age of love grown cold.

The world still trembles like a tinderbox. Israel’s neighbors rage. The nations plot. And the family of Messiah suffers in the shadows of our indifference.

In Israel’s dark days—much like today—when the world was hostile and everything seemed broken, the book of Ruth revealed truth and human inadequacy. It forces us to look plainly at our hearts, prayers, commitment to scripture, and the role God expects of those who bear His name. To read Ruth responsibly, to pray rightly for neighbor and foe alike, requires humility to take ourselves out of the center.

That preaches well. But it lives hard.

Love was hard in the days of Cain, harder in the days of Noah. It was hard in Naomi’s day, and it remains hard now.

Too often, I have read Ruth in a way that remakes God in my image. I’ve settled her story into my own framework, quick to dismiss Proverbs 3:5, quick to follow Orpah’s path—turning away from a God and a people I did not know. But as scholar John Walton reminds us,

“[God] has given us sufficient revelation so we might have some sense of his plans and purposes and trust him sufficiently to become participants in those plans and purposes...Our response ought to be to acknowledge the wisdom and authority of God...our response is to trust him.”

— John Walton

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Ruth—a powerhouse of wisdom for Gentiles in an age of love grown cold.

Meanwhile the nations reel, and the family of Messiah withers in the shade of Jonah’s tree. Like Jonah sulking under his vine, I sometimes find myself nursing resentment there too. Yet our God is faith to meet broken people under the trees. He asks: “Should I not have compassion on them too—the people I’ve loved and named as my own? If you are not willing to embrace them, you are not willing to embrace me. Am I a God you do not know?”

The chance to love like Ruth is now. The book of Ruth insists that Gentile faith is proven not by words alone, but by loyal love for the people God calls his own. Will I look on God’s people with compassion? Will I look on their enemies this way?

Give us the eyes to see, oh Lord. Give us the ears to hear. Awaken us to the call of your word and prepare our hearts for the frontier that awaits.

Don’t let our love grow cold.