Three Reasons for Jewish-Gentile Distinction

Have you ever wondered when you read the Bible, why God makes a distinction between Jewish people and non-Jewish people? Most people don’t realize that the Bible actually is a book about Jews and Gentiles or about Israel and the nations. It’s not a book about races. It’s not a book about gender. It’s a book about those two categories. And when God called Abraham, he made a choice to create a people that would be covenanted to him, who would be then called the Jewish people. So what was his purpose in all this? Why did God create a distinction between Jew and Gentile? I believe there’s three reasons.

The first is mutual interdependence. God knew that just as he created man and woman or day and night, that there was a mutual interdependence, a needing of one another that would occur in a relationship between Israel and the nations, where one would serve the other, would serve the other.

And in that, secondly, there would be mutual blessing that because of the service and interdependence of one another in relationship, there would be a blessing that would come out of that, that as Israel blesses the nations, it says, even in Revelation, the nations will come and bless Israel or the Jewish people.

And lastly, and probably the one that is the trickiest to live out is called mutual humbling. There’s something about being in relationship as a Gentile with a Jewish person, where you have to submit yourself and lower yourself in relationship to learn from them, to serve them, and they in turn do the same thing. I believe that when we model this mutual blessing, mutual interdependence, and mutual humbling, that we are touching God’s intended design for relating to one another as Israel and the nations, and that ultimately we will see this one new man, a supernatural display of God’s uniting power when we do that.