The Apocalypse of October 7
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you … and are turning to a different gospel.” —Galatians 1:6
Three years after October 7, 2023, I am still reckoning with how that day changed me.
Having come to faith in mostly Reformed, evangelical Christian circles, I had always heard Paul’s words here as a warning against legalism—as though the Galatians were trying to earn salvation through effort or keep random laws. But later in life, when I went back to Acts and truly tried to understand what actually happened in Galatia, I realized that's not what Paul was addressing at all.
The Galatians were not trying to earn salvation. Obedience to the Torah was never the debate. They were asking whether Gentiles needed to become legally Jewish in order to belong to the covenant family of God. Paul's answer was charged and emphatic: no.
God had made a promise to Abraham that the nations would be brought into his family, and for Paul, that meant Gentiles from among the nations remained Gentiles from among the nations. Jesus didn't come to replace that promise or dissolve those roles. He came to bring them to their fullness and lead humanity into the restoration of all things within those distinctions. It took me many years to realize Paul wasn't guarding a Reformed conversation about faith vs. good works to earn God’s favor. He was preserving a story—and defending the faithfulness of a God who keeps his promises.
In Paul's mind, the gospel was about the God of Israel, a redemption rooted in Israel, now unfolding toward the nations. Jesus preached the same message: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The gospel was that the time had come for the long-awaited promises of Israel’s prophets to begin unfolding. We might paraphrase his announcement:
Good news! It’s time! Everything God has promised to do for Israel is about to happen. So repent! Return to God and live by his ways, because his kingdom brings reward for the righteous but judgment upon wickedness. Turn around! Stop sinning! Change your behavior! There is forgiveness for those who repent.
Jesus believed the promises Israel had awaited for centuries were being offered to his generation. The apostles pick up this same urgent announcement and carry it beyond Israel to the nations:
God has acted through Jesus the Messiah, the promised age is approaching, and you too are being invited to participate in its salvation. Turn from idols and wickedness to the living God. Receive his instruction. Learn his ways. Prepare for the return of his King!
The nations did not need to remain hopeless, awaiting the judgment of God; through Jesus, they too were invited to repent and come into alignment with Israel’s God before the coming day of judgment. The apostles became convinced that the promised age had already begun breaking into the present through Jesus’s resurrection and the unprecedented activity of the Holy Spirit. As such, they devoted their lives to proclaiming the good news of the messianic era and teaching different communities how to live as people of the coming Davidic kingdom when God would fulfill all his promises to redeem and restore Israel—her people and land. They wrote and ministered with the expectation that these events could happen within their generation.
While many heeded their words, the fullness of Israel’s redemption did not come. Israel did not corporately repent, nor did the nations. The “labor pains” visible in the first century did not culminate in the birth of God’s kingdom. Peter called this “God’s patience,” and it seems his patience continues to this day.
I believe the urgency of the redemption is still good news: should widespread repentance occur, the kingdom could still arrive imminently, particularly if the chosen nation (Israel) leads a global repentance movement. But if repentance does not occur, God will still bring his kingdom—whether we’re ready or not. The visions John records in Revelation appear to be a snapshot of how that pattern could play out. God is still being patient, so we should pray for repentance, but also be prepared for the redemption to come the hard way.
Paul and the other apostles did not know how long God’s patience would last. They died in the first century, without seeing the redemption for which they hoped. Like Moses, they glimpsed the land of promise from afar. But they trusted God’s promise, believed what had happened in Jesus, and responded to those things. They hoped that if repentance and “the obedience of the faith” spread among the nations, Israel too would recognize her Messiah and the restoration of all things would arrive. For them, this was very good news.
Very few Christians have been taught this gospel. I wasn’t.
In a crisis of faith during my late twenties, I stumbled into it accidentally and spent years sorting it all out. The problem, I now see, was that I had only ever heard a message that placed me and my salvation at the center, while abandoning the story, people, and land Jesus laid down his life for.
When I realized this, like Paul, I was astonished. Because like the Galatians, I had fallen for a different gospel.
Gradually, I began to see the gospel entirely differently. What Jesus, the prophets, and the apostles preached is a continuing trajectory—a story moving somewhere specific, unflinchingly centered on God's promises to Israel and what he intends to do for the world through them.
Then October 7 happened.
Suddenly, a message I had been slowly recovering for years was no longer theoretical. It was real—on my phone, in the headlines, in the faces of Jewish children, and in the questions people began bringing to me when they didn't know where else to turn.
That day forced into focus a truth I had been circling for years: my generation of Christianity does not understand the story it claims to affirm—not in the way Scripture tells it, not in the way that holds together Israel, God's promises, and the trajectory of messianic redemption.
In the years that have followed, that chasm in the church has become increasingly evident. The silence from Christian leadership and lack of response exposed a grave weakness in the moral and spiritual foundation of believers. When the foundation is off, everything begins to crumble. I can no longer participate in handling Scripture—or the gospel—that way. What settled on my heart during that time was both heavy and exhilarating: a responsibility to contend for a story I believe the church can no longer afford to misunderstand and to invite others into recovering a gospel we have too long ignored.
That message comes with a cost. It doesn't fit neatly inside familiar Christian interpretations or structures. Today I write and teach as someone who genuinely loves the church, yet is deeply anguished by the direction much of it has taken, and by the role it has played in the broader reckoning American Christianity now finds itself facing. I refuse to throw stones, but I carry forward the call to repentance that Jesus and John the Immerser proclaimed in the wilderness.
October 7 was a horrific and gruesome revelation of the face of evil. Against the backdrop of God’s enduring promises, I saw with terrible clarity Satan’s hatred of God’s chosen people. The church has been given a gracious chance to repent—to stand where God stands and recalibrate toward the gospel of the kingdom as Israel and the nations move toward the prophetic destiny described in Scripture.
In reckoning with that dreadful day, I also came to understand that we don’t fall for a different gospel all at once. We drift into other versions of it, ones easier to explain, more comfortable to live with, ones centered on us that don’t ask very much of us in the end. Those gospels are dangerously untethered from the story our Lord gave his life to fulfill. And when we believe them, I'm afraid we lose more than just doctrine and theology. We lose our place in the story itself.
On October 7, amid a horrific and historic sifting, we stood before the tree into which we had been grafted, faced with a choice about our posture toward its root. We now live in the world of October 8—with Paul’s warning knocking at our doors: Do not be proud. Fear. He can cut you out. (Romans 11:20–21). Too many Christians have ignored that warning. They have left Paul out in the cold, remaining “untaught and unstable” as they distort his words, just as Peter warned against (2 Peter 3:15–18).
For me, each October 7 is a renewed commitment to a life of repentance—both corporate and personal. That day changed what I understood my faith in Jesus to require of me.
I must repent of my arrogance toward the root. I must change my behavior in how I read and study the Bible, how I write, pray, teach, and how I live out my faith.
We must renounce false gospels that are severed from the root, creating fertile soil for Jew-hatred to flourish. We must stop proclaiming a gospel message that warps and relocates the promises of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus. We must do better, and refuse to let our jealous pride hinder us in being our brother’s keeper. We must refuse to keep drifting, lest we bear false witness to the testimony of Scripture. We must commit ourselves, through the regenerating power of the Spirit of God and meditation on the Bible, to recovering the gospel Jesus and his apostles proclaimed.
We must repent—the kingdom of God is still being offered. And the judgment day is still ahead.
Three years later, I am still astonished that we would so quickly allow the weight of our history and traditions to throw us into confusion and distort the gospel of Jesus.
“If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what we [apostles] taught you, let them be under God’s curse!” (Galatians 1:9).
God help us all.