Month: March 2024

The unchanging world of God’s interest

eejoseph

You probably never noticed that the Old and New Testaments have different frames of reference for the world.  I am not talking about the cosmos, but the inhabited world and its people and the natural world.  The assertion that God intended the sons of Israel to spread their way of life to all corners of the globe comes apart at the seams of Jewish tribalism and the holy nation above all others doctrine.  There is no way that nations and peoples all over the world are going to emulate Israel’s genealogy developments and its kingdom institutions. 

“The world” appears 44 times in the Old Testament and over 100 times in the New Testament.  It is no secret that God is interested in all of the world’s people without reference to the traditions of the sons of Israel. Go figure! Do we dare to imagine that God cares little for any of the world’s people?

Why Iran hates everyone

eejoseph

Fareed Zakaria constructs one of his diplomatic and quasi scholarly articles about why Iran hates America, but he forgets that America is Israel’s figleaf and bunker against having to face international justice.  The hostility goes much from the back than modern politics. We have the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine by the Persian king Cyrus.  The person government had seen the light, or so it seems, when it  authorized Jewish people to pillage Persian homes in retaliation for the Persian threat of annihilation against the Jewish during their in exile.

Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and He has appointed me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah.”

Ezra 1:2

Israeli government policy in the modern era ignores the cosmopolitan character of the Jewish mission.  Succeeding generations of Jewish people have pretended that they are independent of international interest and fellowship.  Similarly, Iranian policy has been fueled by the need for revenge.  The God of the Jewish people had made the ancient Persian king an agent of his, and the Islamic religion, Iran’s new religion, makes no pretense of being the corrector of rebellious Jews.  So Iran is as hardline anti-Israel and as hardline anti-everything related to Israel as hardline one can be.

The use of the veto by the United States at the United Nations to shelter Israel from scrutiny looms large on the horizon of Iranian  venom and energy.