History repeats. The saying is popular.  The stories about Daniel and the three Hebrew lads have replayed or are about to be.  So they say.   The election of Israel as recorded in the call of Abraham does not have and does not need a revision or replay.  The levitical priesthood has no fulfillment in the unveiling of global reckoning by God.  The uprooting of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah has no repeat in the career of Yeshua’s church. Even as we watch Africans clamouring to prosper in distant and foreign lands “history repeats” is bad and lazy thinking.

The call of Abraham

Mixing metaphors is always bad.  The church’s rise can only be attributed to Christ.  He builds it by calling the elect into it.  It is he who gives the Holy Spirit to the ones he invites and justifies. The church never depends on a single human agent.  There are no stars who are the approved and accredited workers in the gospel field. Abraham and the patriarchs all had to take leaps of faith to enter into God’s rest. There is no Abraham figure in the church’s Genesis and destiny.  Abraham’s call, his possession of the promises and covenants, and his justification are unique to him.

The Levitical priesthood and the temple

Christians can be found using terms like sanctuary, altar, atonement with little regard to their biblical foundations.  A church building can have a worship area but it is not a holy place, neither is that place a location designed for atonement.   In the same way we find the worship area at home or in the church building having a section designated as an altar.  Biblical altars were not just areas devoted to worship. They were constructed to meet certain specifications and people roasted animals on altars and poured drink offerings on them

The church of God has only episodes of legitimacy unlike the Sinai Covenant.

The church is not like ancient Israel, passing from loyalty to Yahweh to domination by Canaanite Baalism. 

E. E. Joseph

Two survivors of the Exodus reaching Canaan is a failure of faith.  Moses breaking the tablets of the covenant and the whole history of Israelite resistance to God cannot be exemplary.  Having the power to move mountains, kill giants and raise the dead might seem like a continuation of Yeshua’s life, but we will always face the sobering fact that the vital connection to Christ and God is not decided by those kinds of power.

Death via covenant fantasy

It is ever more fascinating to see how many people are in the grip of the delusion that they are in covenant with the God of Abraham in the same way as the descendants of Abraham were through Moses at Sinai.  If, like me, you signed up to be a commandment keeper, you are on death row.  If, like me, you have come to realize that faith in the Crucified is the basis for the new life of unhypocritical love, the fantasy is slain.

The fantasy produces traditions peculiar to several sets of doctrinal badges.  It makes crocodiles who are perpetually in a ravenous death roll, annihilating the lawless outsider Gentile.  The fantasy further commits the fantasizer to become less than farm animals who do not recognize their food source and feeding trough, and servants who do not recognize their master.  Isaiah (1:2-4) was not intoxicated or bewitched.  Neither were the Galilean fishermen, the tax collector, the zealot men who lost their minds when they threw their ancestral tradition under the bus.

Modern Israel’s attempts to claim high moral ground is misleading. Israel, since the Iron age, has given the world more than a few exceptionally sage and courageous women and men, and yet fills the cup of homicidal plots and resistance to the divine will.

Alas, sinful nation, People weighed down with iniquity, Offspring of evildoers, Sons who act corruptly! They have abandoned the Lord, They have despised the Holy One of Israel, They have turned away from Him. (Isaiah 1:4, NASB)

Yahweh is the source whom the people have abandoned and provoked.  Abandoned and provoked are not simple events; they are resultant conditions.

You want to be Israel?  Step up, naked, bruised, bleeding and totally ill.

From the sole of the foot even to the head There is nothing sound in it, Only bruises, welts and raw wounds, Not pressed out or bandaged, Nor softened with oil. (Isaiah 1:6, NASB)