The LORD God says to the house of Israel, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name.”
Ez 36:22
In the Fall of 2015, Sarah and I were invited to Israel for our first visit. Travel is always exciting, but traveling in the land where 99% of the Bible took place is a whole other level. For one week, we drove through the land of Israel, seeing with our own eyes the very places where the stories we learned as kids actually took place. Our tour guide was incredible, but after each snippet of information given, David Kiern, one of the videographers filming the trip and now a dear friend, would lean forward and whisper something like, “What he didn’t mention about those vineyards we just passed, was that the prophet Jeremiah said in chapter 31 ‘Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria’ and for 2,000 years, nothing would grow here, but now that Israel is a nation again, everything is beginning to flourish. Prophesy is being fulfilled!”
You can’t simply un-hear things like that. That trip began my reintroduction to The Book that was already so precious to me. I had to read through it again, cover to cover. This time, I couldn’t ignore all the passages that reference God’s bringing His people home to the Land He promised Abraham and his descendants with an everlasting covenant, beginning in Genesis 12. “To your offspring I will give this land.” (Gen 12:7) And to his grandson Jacob, “The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south…behold I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” (Gen 28:13-15) The examples are myriad.
I was challenged to consider that every promise God made to Israel in the Bible, was actually addressed to Israel: the sons and daughters of Abraham. Paul says in Romans 11 that God has not rejected His people, but that the call of God is irrevocable. “I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries and will bring you to your own land”, God tells Israel in Ezekiel 36, and He continues by saying He will give them a new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone. How quick I had been to make such verses about me and only me. Such generosity reveals the heart of the Father who adopted me into His family. But I’m discovering the profoundly deep beauty that such verses were initially addressed to God’s firstborn son, Israel.
Is God a man that He should lie?
Or a son of man that He should change His mind?
Has He said, and will He not do it?
Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?
Numbers 23:19
