I closed yesterday’s post with a comment on the flotilla en route to Gaza; this morning I read that, ‘The Israeli navy has intercepted boats carrying aid to Gaza and detained the activists aboard, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.’
Not all ‘prophetic acts’ have a ‘successful’ outcome. Jesus’ key protest act in the Temple when he turned over the tables did not end in a permanent table-free Temple, but the effects are ongoing – an eternal protest whenever God’s house is turned into a money-making venture that in particular exploits the vulnerable (see my post https://3generations.eu/posts/2024/12/a-time-to-protest/ where I highlight the focus on the ‘dove sellers’).
Back to Israel… their land promised for ever. So complex: promised the land for ever,
And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding, and I will be their God.” (Gen. 17:8).
´Olam translated here as ‘a perpetual holding’ has the meaning of a long or indefinite time. Achish (Philistine king) believed David would always (´olam) serve him in other words during his lifetime. It could mean during the entire life-time of all descendants of Abraham, but I think Paul (again! he does have so many perspectives, that man) throws a curve ball when he says that Abraham was promised that he would inherit the ‘world’ (kosmos; Rom.4:13).
That curve ball rather changes (for me) the trajectory we look for. The re-gathering of Israel (a bigger term than ‘Jews’… gather all Jews would not gather all Israel) as a result of Pentecost (Acts 1:8; Rom. 11:28) is because the Gospel is gathering all peoples across the planet into the one olive tree, and so as that happens ‘in this way all Israel will be saved’.
Anyway all of the above is probably going to fuel my next longer article.
Back to flotillas, Israel of today (and I don’t think there is a straight line from OT Israel to the modern state), Palestine and Gaza. By any standards what is taking place today is genocide and the deep issue is we have two peoples who are reacting from trauma and peoples who are being exploited by those who claim to represent them.
Maybe an aside – maybe more than an aside – the route to the Middle East (Israel if you like) is through the Islamic world. The three Abrahamic faiths (allow me to suggest, one that was not able to make the step into the era initiated through the death and resurrection of their Messiah, the truly human One; another that has taken the Abrahamic story in a different direction; and one that sees fulfilment through the Son of Man) are, I think, central to where we are. A key principle if ever we need help to see where God is at work we can look to where the devil is at work – and vice versa. Look at the conflicts and the rhetoric that is in the public space to fuel suspicion, fear and hatred.
I hold that God is motivated by love that seeks to reconcile all. The choice of Abraham was not to damn the world (wrong view of salvation); Israel in her land was never to blanket exclude all others based on ethnicity (Rahab, Ruth, two half-Egyptian sons of Joseph et al); and post-the-resurrection a whole new creation was brought into being.
So here is my take. Political solutions go so far. The healing of historic trauma is needed, but if there is one place on the planet that should be open to being a land for all peoples it is the place where the cross demonstrated that God’s arms are outstretched to all. Breaking the curse of the law from ‘us’ (Jews) so that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles (Gal. 3:13,14). A two-state solution might indeed be a step toward. A step. Prayer and protest can establish steps.