Covenant & Conflict: A New Gateway Center for Israel Podcast

But the way that Gentiles typically worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is we tear down anything that is common to Israel. And we make the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the creator of the universe, and we make his covenant with Israel just the precursor to his covenant with the church. And so we worship God in a way that is foreign to Israel that they believe rightfully so in many cases, you’re worshiping a different God.

Hey everybody. Welcome to the first episode of the Brand New Covenant and Conflict podcast. I’m your host today, pastor Nick Lesmeister. Just call me Nick along with Pastor David Blease. And we want to tell you a little bit about why we wanted to do this podcast. So we’ve been calling it the Covenant and Conflict Podcast, where we look at ancient truths and modern issues and how they sit with one another in conflict sometimes. And I feel like part of what the ministry that we do, right, David, is that we look at this ancient covenantal idea of God having a purposeful plan and promise for the Jewish people. And then we look at the arc of history with the Christian Church, with a lot of the modern issues geopolitically related to Israel. And we’re like, how do we put these two things together because there’s this covenant and then there’s all this conflict my theology does.

It sits in conflict with what I believe God’s words says. So, so much of what we’re doing is trying to help people walk through that and find a path that merges the tension into a peaceful place that is in alignment with God’s word. That’s healthy, that’s fruitful. So we wanted to talk today just about our heart behind wanting to start this podcast. And I wanted to start with you, David. You’ve always interviewed me. So we’re flipping the coin here. So you and I have been having this kind of conversation living in a post October 7th World where every day Israel is in the media. It’s on everybody’s minds. In the past, we’d produce a lot of content to help people understand God’s heart for Israel and the Jewish people. And it’s sort of like obscure, no one’s thinking about Israel. It’s very niche. You’re like, oh, you guys are talking about the, okay, we’re deep into it, aren’t you? The Jewish thing? You must be deep into the scriptures.

And then October 7th happens and it’s like everyone’s searching for stuff all the time. We get asked questions all the time. And what we’re realizing though is that with our name being Gateway Center for Israel, a lot of times people just sort of collapse a way of thinking about us into something very simplistic where it’s like, oh, they only talk about Israel. So I don’t really have a question about Israel today, so I’ll just move on. And not that we’re ever going to wander from that, but I believe that we think the Bible presents a good case that actually we know that God sees the world through Israel and the nations Jews and Gentiles talked about that in a lot of content. So actually, how do you use an understanding of Israel to actually understand your whole faith as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus? And we know that the Bible is a Jewish book written to Jewish people by Jewish people. Totally. So there is this level of understanding our own faith more as we understand Israel, but we really wanted to start this podcast to have more of an ongoing conversation about things that come up in the here and now and in between.

Yeah. I think it’s so important that we have an expectation that we got to where we are today, our framework, our theology, our understanding of the Bible and the world. Over time, we developed these theologies and these ideas over time. They don’t change overnight. And I think sometimes we have this idea that, well, if I’m presented with the truth, then I just insert the truth in my ideology when typically we want to hold on hard and fast to whatever we have believed in the past because it’s comforting. And it’s this idea of cognitive dissonance. We don’t want to uproot our beliefs. No one does. And I have to remember that I’m the same way too.

I had an interview or a conversation, definitely wasn’t recorded, a conversation the other day with a gentleman who was very concerned about our heart for Israel and our love for Israel. And he didn’t like it. Yeah. He was very against it. And I was talking to my wife about it, and it’s easy for me to say like, man, this guy’s not going to change his mind. There’s nothing I’m going to say that’s going to change his perception or his perspective. But then I had to have a moment and say, but I’m kind of the same way I went in that conversation. He wasn’t going to change my mind about Israel and God’s heart for the Jewish people. So I can’t just demonize him and vilify his theology because we all want to hold on to what we believe. And I think our only hope in truly growing is little by little, step by step, conversation by conversation, question after question, these little seeds that we can plant. And I think that’s why conversations like this are so important is because things get teased out over time and questions begin to stir as you start to think more deeply.

Sometimes not even in the conversation, but that night when I’m talking to my wife about a conversation I had yesterday, which now I’m struggling with because it’s reworking my theology. And I think that’s what we do a lot and we see a lot in the conversations we have is very seldom do people walk away from a conversation where they didn’t have a heart for Israel and they walk away and they have a heart for Israel, or they were replacement theology, and after one conversation, they’re not replacement theology. It’s typically a probing or a planting in time allows the Lord to work his magic and allows God to soften our hearts.

And I think what you’re saying, it ties so directly into what our heart is behind this podcast even. We’re not trying to just be catchy and say, oh, covenant and conflict, doesn’t that sound great? It does, but it’s deeper than that because it’s true. There are these ancient objective truths in scripture and how do we merge those into some of these things? I feel like what you just explained, that’s the gap between an ancient truth and a modern issue. How do those things sync? Part of that is how do we grow our perspective? How does our perspective change by learning from someone else, by reevaluating a belief that we had given new sets of information or given something new, the Holy Spirit spoke to us. And that’s really the heart behind what we’re wanting to do here is not to say we have some new revelation, but actually say in that really tense in-between place, I would say so much comes out of that space where it’s tense and especially related to Israel, but more at large, just like the whole world right now, there’s a lot of tension in the world and you can’t understand something necessarily as very black or very white – that in-between space of like, okay, I know this to be true, but I know this to be a pressing issue. Where do we merge these two things? Yeah.

Well, and something you said is this idea of what does Israel have to do with me? And that’s I think a question that Christians were maybe faced with a little bit more after October 7th. And I don’t think it’s a bad question. I think it should be a secondary question because I think that is the same question that got us to replacement theology, which is what does this have to do with me though?

I was listening to an interview where this girl was talking about her first time reading the Bible cover to cover, and she read the Bible cover to cover and she was walking through scripture with this pastor, and she got to the end of it and she was like, I don’t like it. I don’t like the decisions that God made. They were a conflict in my ideology and what I believe, and God’s supposed to be this, but he’s doing that and the Jewish people in Israel. And he said, her pastor said, okay, I’ve heard your questions for the past year going through the scriptures. I think you tried to find yourself in the scriptures. Go back and read it again, and this time look for God. And she said, on my second time through the scripture, I just looked for God and stopped trying to find myself. And she said, within the first couple chapters, I fell in love with the God of the Bible. And I think that is kind of the missing element because we’re so selfish, and so our quiet times are about God, what do you want to say to me? And then our devotionals are, how can God help me through my day? And our Bible studies are how can God help me through my conflict? And all of those are good, and we should do all of them, but they have to kind of be secondary to what is God doing? What is God’s character? Who is God? What is he trying to do on earth in his kingdom? And then secondarily, how do I play a part in that? You say all the time, how do we link ourselves to what God is doing? Not what am I doing and how do I make that just at least within God’s stream, God’s wind, just kind of find like He’s going in this direction. I’ll just make sure I’m going a little bit towards that direction. We should find God. What is God attaching himself to? What is God anointing or blowing on in the spiritual word? And then how do we link ourselves to that?

Yeah, it’s true. Very just simplistically, the Bible begins in Israel, obviously. Well, okay, some of you people are going to nerd out on me, Mesopotamia. All right, whatever. You get the point. And ultimately, not America. Not America, that’s for sure. Alright, we broaden up just the Middle East, the near East even. I’m even widening it further, and then it ends there. So it starts there and ends there. And you say this a lot, we are in the pages of the Bible and that we live before Revelation is going to be fulfilled post-Acts and pre-Revelation. Yeah, maybe that should have been the name of our podcast. That’s a good one. That is a good subtitle. Sub somebody out, they’res going to steal that. We’re going to see that in a few months. But it’s true that that’s why it’s so important to understand what Israel is, why it matters, what God is doing by explaining himself through the story of the Jewish people and then adding us into that story through faith in Jesus, Israel’s Messiah. Because what started there will end there and we’re moving towards that. Whether most people understand that or not, we’re moving towards a new Jerusalem or a renewed Jerusalem where Jesus is crowned as king and well, he’s already crowned as king, but he’s established as king of the earth, on the earth of every nation in Jerusalem. And so that’s why these things matter because we’re going that direction. So it’s like you said, God’s doing that. That’s happening. It’s going to happen. It’s in scripture.

So are we aware of it? How do we interact with it? How do we understand it? But I want to ask you since I’m the interviewer this time, so you were working at one of our conferences recently and you had a conversation with someone that you know and just in a personal conversation you were just talking to him about, he had some questions about Israel and what was going on in Israel with the Jewish people, etc. And you began to explain this to him and he was like, you guys should do content on this. And you were like, that’s all we do. You already followed me on social media endlessly.

So that was part of what led us to want to do this podcast is just so talk about that. What were you thinking about? What was the aha you had?

Well, I think that we can Google things when we desire to learn specific information, but the gap is I don’t know what I don’t know. And if I don’t know what questions to ask, then I’m not going to get the answers that I maybe really need. And so I think that’s what I come across a lot when I have conversations about Israel is their questions about Israel. They’re not bad questions or unimportant questions, but they maybe don’t realize they’re missing a huge framework about the role of Jews and Gentiles and God’s plan of redemption for Jews and Gentiles. And that distinction didn’t go away. And you’re actually a gentile, just kind of basic understanding, which we experience a lot when people are like, okay, so how did the Jewish people do this? Okay, why did the Jewish people do this? And then they’re like, wait, what makes someone Jewish?

And they’re realizing, wait, I’m asking questions that are maybe up here and I need to develop the foundation first. And I think that’s the hard part that you, again, you understand more as you talk it out and as you converse and as you hear conversations, you start to realize, I didn’t think of it that way. And so that’s what that conversation was is I don’t remember his original question, but we ended up saying, well, let’s take a step back. When God created mankind, he created two distinctions, male and female. And those are God-given distinctions. They didn’t decide themselves, I’ll be a male. God gave them those distinctions and we continue to live in those distinctions. Well, there’s another distinction that every single person fits into no matter where you’re from, where you were born, what color your skin is, you are male and female, one of the two, and biblically speaking, you are Jew or Gentile.

That’s another distinction God made in Genesis 12. And he told Abraham, I’m going to bless you and your descendants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He reaffirms that covenant with his son and his grandson. And the whole reason I’m going to establish you as my people is because I’m going to bless the nations, which is the Gentiles. So right there we see the distinction, Jews and Gentiles. So it was always in God’s heart that he was going to bring us all into this redemptive plan, but he chooses the Jewish people who we now know as the Jewish people. And it’s crazy that God identifies himself as the God of those people, which kind of breaks our brain because we learn about God as creator of the universe, as Jesus savior of the world, for God to love the world. But that’s not how God self-identified through the pages of what we would call the Old Testament.

He didn’t say, I’m the God of the universe. He said, I’m the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So he again attaches himself to this family, which is not what, if we were writing the Bible, we would make it way more universal. But he makes it very particular, which you always talk about. And so this distinction, we then think, okay, yeah, I see that in the Old Testament, but it stops at Jesus. And it’s like, well, it doesn’t stop at Jesus because do you remember when he said, I came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel? And we’re like, oh, maybe he stops at Paul. Maybe he stops at Paul. Alright, yeah. So we keep on kind of pushing it back. Well, I guess he didn’t stop at Jesus because even Gabriel said, name him Yeshua, for he’ll be the savior of his people.

So even his mission from the beginning was for his people, he reestablishes that by saying, I only came for the lost of Israel. And then there’s this really kind of narrative motif that we see in the gospel of John where John always says about Jesus or Jesus himself says, my time has not yet come. My time has not yet come. My time has not yet come. And most Christians I talk to, they’ve heard this, they tried to kill him, but he slipped through the crowd for his time is not yet come. Why are you not going into Judah? Well, my time has not yet come. Well, when is it that Jesus says, my time has come? Those words should shoot off the page because like you typically do in narrative in movies, you tease something that’s going to, there’s going to be fulfillment here. I’m a superhero fan. When no one can lift Thor’s hammer, but in movie 10, captain America just tilts it a little bit and you’re like, whoa, when is this coming back? Well, 10 movies later, he picks up the hammer. So there’s this motif of like, Hey, watch out for this. I didn’t know that he could pick it up. Thanks for ruining it. I’m just going to skip to Endgame.

So John’s doing the same thing. He’s saying, my time is not come. My time is not come. My time is not yet come. My time is not yet come four times. So Jesus says, because there’s a scripture in John where he says, my time has come and I’ve asked so many Christians over the years, when does Jesus say those words? They’re like last supper on the cross. They’re trying to figure it out. I’ve never had someone tell me yet. So in our framework, it’s such a minor conversation, it just goes over our head. It’s when the Greeks come to, I think it was Philip, and say, we want to talk to Jesus. Philip says, Hey, Jesus, the Greeks want to talk to you. He says, my time has come. We read past it because we don’t understand it because we’re not viewing the gospels through this framework of Jew and Gentile. But Jesus understands that Gentiles can’t be adopted into this family until I complete my mission, which was Israel going back to him saying, I came only for the lost sheep of Israel. But when you don’t understand that framework, you’re just like, why didn’t he answer their question? Why didn’t he talk to the Greeks is because he realized now the Gentiles are wanting to come in.

And so then you get to the resurrection and then the ascension, and we think, well now that’s where Jew and Gentile folded into this new thing called Christian, and people use the book of Acts, the persecution that many of the disciples had from the Jewish community or the Jewish leadership. And we don’t stop to think about what they’re still Jews though. So it’s an inner family argument. But we superimpose that the disciples are Christians. They were the first set of Christians. And then we read things like Galatians 3 that says there’s no longer Jew and Gentile. And we’re like, see, we don’t like to read the next verse. It also says there’s no longer male or female. Again, there’s these two distinctions. And then you get Paul writing in the book of Romans saying, now I’m speaking to you Gentiles because they’re still Gentiles. And it’s such a beautiful story when you realize that God adopted the Gentiles into the family of God.

And we say that a lot as Christians, I’m in the family of God. Who’s the family of God, and they’re like God’s family. You’re like, no, no, no, no. Who is the family of God? All the children. Yeah, exactly. People try to make it universal. Anyone that accepts Jesus is like what is a woman? Anyone who defines themselves as a woman, you’re like, that’s not a definition. It’s like, who is God’s family? Anybody who’s in God’s family? That’s not a definition. The definition of who’s God’s family is Israel, the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which is why you get to this olive tree, the roots of which are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The natural branches are the Jewish people, and the Gentiles are grafted onto that tree. And yet we have this understanding. No, no, there’s a new tree. It’s a new covenant. And I remember sitting with a pastor, and again, he loves God’s word, he loves Israel, he loves Jewish people. And yeah, because a new tree now. And I was like, no, there’s not a new tree. It’s the same tree. And he’s like, oh yeah, you’re right. Same tree. And then you get into the final, I think kind of beautiful ending, which is Gentiles serve the Jewish people and the Jewish people serve the Gentiles. Which again, bringing it back to this analogy of male female, you have male and female and they come together and they make one flesh. That’s what the Bible says. And pretty much every Christian knows and understands that when male and female become one flesh, there’s still male and female, but there’s a new covenant now. And that covenant is for them to serve one another, which is why Paul says, husbands love your wives. Wives honor your husbands, because they’re serving each other. There’s a new unity there, but they’re still distinct. Jew and Gentile come together, and the Bible says they’re one new man. And we’re like, aha, Christian, new thing. Third distinction. It’s like, no, no, no. Same distinction. Jew, Gentile, but new unity and what are they supposed to do? Serve one another. And I think the Jewish people, when you go to Israel, I think they understand this better than we do because I’ve talked to many Israelis and they’re like, yeah, this is what we’re doing because we’re supposed to be elected to the nations. You got to be a light to the nations, a light to the nations. They’re quoting Genesis 12, I am supposed to be a light to the nations. The only reason God chose us was to be a light to the nations.

But you rarely hear Gentiles who would, again, they don’t even refer to themselves as Gentiles, they’re Christians. But we would argue that you’re still Gentile, but you rarely hear Gentile Christians say, oh yeah, because our role is we got to provoke them to jealousy to come back home. I’ve never heard a pastor say like, oh, we’re just doing our calling, man, provoke Israel to jealousy so they come back home. So true. But that’s supposed to be our, that’s Romans 11, is the Jews were called by God to bring the Gentiles into the family. And now we’re in a different part of history where the Gentiles are supposed to provoke Israel to jealousy, to come back to be a part of the tree, that it’s their tree. We’re the ones that are the foreigners that by God’s grace are on the tree. And then Paul even says in Romans 11 don’t boast against the branches almost like he knew we would, because most Christians think it’s our tree now. And the Jews lost it, and now it’s ours. It’s not. We are grafted in. And that’s why Paul says, you should be aware of the severity of God. If he can not spare the natural branches, how much more could he not spare you?

And I think we also struggle with this word, jealousy. We think jealousy is a bad thing. Jealousy is a sin. But emotions like jealousy and anger aren’t inherently bad. God gets angry. God gets jealous. God’s a jealous God, right? Yeah. And I think Ezra from Jewish voice shared at a Gateway service, jealousy at its core is when someone has something that belongs to you. So that’s why I get jealous if someone’s flirting with my wife because because she’s my wife. She belongs to me. And that’s why God gets jealous of you. And that’s why God gets jealous at Israel too. We just dialed back to the 1800’s there. Mikayla is David’s right? Yeah. But that’s why God gets jealous when Israel goes after other gods because he is like, you guys are mine. We’re in covenant together, which is why I can say that about my wife because we’re in covenant together. Exactly. And in the same way, she would get jealous if someone was flirting with me. I belong to her. And we are supposed to worship God in such a way that Israel says, that’s ours, right? You’re worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You’re not even related to Abraham. I’m related to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And we should say, you’re right. You should come back home. You should come back into this family. But the way that Gentiles typically worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is we tear down anything that is common to Israel. And we make the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the creator of the universe, and we make his covenant with Israel just the precursor to his covenant with the church.

And so we worship God in a way that is foreign to Israel, that they believe, rightfully so in many cases, you’re worshiping a different God. I know you think that it’s the same God, but the way that you’re worshiping him is not the God that you’re claiming of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so I think that’s something that the church has to wrestle with, that we have to worship God in a way that is true to God’s identity, that he identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and that Jesus, Yeshua, the Messiah of Israel as coming back to Jerusalem. We have to live in this tension and be okay that we are the adopted children. And anytime in scripture you have a chosen one, what are the ones that are not chosen on the forefront? What do they try to do? They try to kill the chosen one. That’s what Joseph’s brothers did. And so we’re very much like Joseph’s brothers. We’re like, why is Israel so special? Why did he choose them? Why can’t he choose me? And I think that’s a deep seated root of antisemitism that still exists today. Why do the nations rage at Israel? Why did the brothers rage at Joseph? Because they knew Joseph was special. And it doesn’t make us not special, but it makes him special. And rather than dealing with that insecurity and coming to God like the prodigal son has the two brothers, similar analogy, how do we deal with this and not take up the offense, but rather blessed what our father’s blessing? What would happen if Joseph’s brothers would have blessed Joseph? They would’ve been closer to their father, but instead they tried to cut Joseph off of the family thinking that then God would give them what he gave Joseph. So true.

It’s amazing how many times in scriptures you see that, you see to a degree with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, each one of them, God makes a choice and that it leads to some level of animosity between the person or whatever wasn’t chosen that ends in conflicts. Even thinking back to the name of our podcast, you have covenant in conflict because that in a lot of ways is where the church finds itself. It’s like we kind of have this conflict in our hearts and our souls and our theology towards the covenantal people of God, because deep down we’re probably a little bit upset at God. And the other thing is when you look at all the people that God chooses, they don’t necessarily right away act in a way that’s very chosen. So it makes it easier to actually say, see, they are illegitimate, you chose wrong.

Absolutely. Think about this, Jacob, for sure, right? Joseph, same way. He goes around bragging, look at this coat. It’s so amazing. And he kind of brings it on himself. Moses does the same thing. He goes and kills an Egyptian. There’s just so many examples of this. Even Jesus, I mean, ultimately the reason why there was so much conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leadership was because he was audaciously saying, I’m the chosen one of God. I am the Messiah. I’m the anointed one. And they’re like, oh, no, you’re not because you’re not acting the way we think the Messiah should act. And same thing with Paul, right? Paul, even with some of the disciples right away, there’s a little animosity between Paul and Peter because Peter’s with Jesus the whole time, and then Paul comes riding in off of the road to Damascus. It’s like, okay, Jesus gave me a revelation.

So I know our dear buddy, David Hoffbrand, I was with him in London recently, and we were just talking over breakfast and he said, Nick, God is asking humility from Jews and Gentiles. The humility of the Gentiles is that we must accept that God still has a covenant with the Jewish people, even if they aren’t acting in a way that’s deserving of that covenant. The humility of the Jews is that they have to accept that God has chosen the Gentiles through Jesus and that they have an equal seat at the table as Gentiles, that they don’t have to become Jewish and that God’s working among them, and that Jesus is the sign of that. It’s like it takes humility from both people in order to get to that place of harmony. And that’s any healthy marriage, you would tell any healthy marriage. If both of you aren’t humble, the marriage won’t work. If you have one humble and one prideful, well then that’s going to be a very parasitic relationship because the prideful one is going to demand while the humble one takes the hit.

Yeah, you’re right. Well, what are some of the topics we’re going to cover in this podcast? Have we decided yet things that are conflicting?

Definitely conflict. Lots of conflict. Something I thought about as you were talking, the Christian world has to deal with this offense or this thing that’s inherently conflicting, which is God chose Israel. God chose the Jewish people. And we were like, no, that’s too narrow. It was the world for God to love the world, which again is true, but it was through Israel and his covenant to Israel. His ongoing, or his scripture says, everlasting, which I like to joke in the Greek, Hebrew means lasts forever covenant with Israel. But then the world has the same offense with Christianity, which is how could a loving God send anyone to hell? How come you can say Jesus is the only way? How closed-minded and narrow is that? So it’s like the same offense is happening in smaller and smaller circles, but it’s the same offense the world has with Christianity, which is you can’t say that Jesus is the only way. How narrow is that? And then it’s like the Christian community then turns around and tells the Jewish people, how can you say that God has a special covenant with Israel? How narrow is that? But it’s the same conflict at the root. It’s that someone has something that is narrow and particular, and we don’t want it to be particular. We want everything to be like you always say universal.

And we do want it to be particular when it applies and benefits us though, right? That’s the funny thing about human nature is that if it benefits me particularly, I’m totally good with it. If you’re the one person that gets a bonus and no one else does, you’re like, I’m good with that. I’m good with that. And the outside looking in, you’re like, oh, come on that’s only ones who got a bonus? And so I think it’s true that this is, again, not to just keep beating this drum, but coming back to the name of this podcast, these are the kinds of things we want to mine out. Because I think as we’ve gone through the years now, we’ve begun to learn where are the points people are stuck?

And a lot of times it does come back to the heart. A couple of years ago we had this sort of revelation from the Lord that we need to start touching the heart. We had been really working to touch the head, right? Theology, smart wise, teaching, etc. And then we realized that where change really happens is in people’s hearts. And yes, you have to have theology that interacts with people’s hearts, but ultimately, as it relates to Israel, there is this deep seated conflict, this controversial feeling that we start to feel where it’s like, yeah, but I don’t think God’s like that. When, as you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, when we read scripture and say, God, what are you like? Show me what you’re like. I’m going to read this book to try to find out about you, not about me. Then you start to realize, oh, that is what he’s like. And it’s actually a kind of unsettling feeling because we know that he’s a loving father and he’s a God that multiplies, that adds. And so just because he has this covenant with the Jewish people, he added us to it so we don’t have to be jealous of what they have because we have a place at the table too in our own distinction.

Yeah, I think that, again, dunno why I’m calling out Ezra so much in this podcast, but something else he said that was so good is he said, we sometimes believe that if God gives something to you, that means that there’s less for me. But that doesn’t work in God’s economy. It’s such a shallow understanding of an infinite God who has the cattle on a thousand hills. But yet we have that human mentality that says, well, if you chose them, it means you didn’t choose me and therefore I’m lesser. You don’t have a plan for me. These scriptures aren’t about me, where that’s not true in God’s economy. There’s a reality that he chooses, but he chooses for the benefit of everyone. But we still have to deal with the fact that he chose. I think a good place, if you want to end here, I have it on my heart just to pray for anyone who’s still listening to have their heart soften and for us as well, because I had a professor told me once, and it kind of created conflict in me. She said, we like to think that we can just come to the text plainly as open blank pages. She said, none of us can. We all come to the text with a specific lens, a specific ideology, theology, understanding that we will read into the text. So just accept that and try your best to take things off the table and ask the question, who is God revealing himself to be through this? And that’s the closest we can get to I think, the blank page. And that’s why I love what you say. So many times just we’re not saying that we have all the answers or that we’re right. And as the founding charter of the Gateway Center for Israel is we reserve the right to change our minds based on new things we learned through the Holy Spirit’s help. Yeah. We are not going to pretend that at the age of 30, at the age of 40, we landed on all truth. We’re set. We’ve got to figure it out and we can just ancient ancient truth, locked it in. Yeah, just cement that in. But we are on a constant journey. And so I think that’s what we’re inviting our listeners into is this journey of saying, okay, God. Odds are, if I think back to my 20-year-old self, there was some things that he was drastically off on theologically.

I had a very common belief that when I die, I’m going to go to heaven and that’s my eternal resting place heaven. And then as I understood more, it’s like, oh wait, new heaven and new earth, God’s redeeming Eden, we’re going to be on earth. It’s such a silly thing. But I was off, I had this understanding that was kind of just portrayed to me, when you die, you’re going to go to heaven or hell. And so I thought heaven was the eternal resting place, and I thought that we were going to have wings and we were going to be angels. And people were like, no, you’re going to have a body. So if I thought that in my twenties or whenever I thought that, what do you think 40-year-old David or 50-year-old David is going to look back on 30-year-old David man, 30-year-old David did not understand this. So it’s easy retroactively to say, I used to struggle with this. I used to be ignorant of this. But odds are, we’re all still ignorant of something. And we need the Holy Spirit. We need God’s word, and we need community to come around us and reshape our understanding. I mean, how blessed are we to have Messianic Jewish friends in our life and orthodox Jewish friends in our life that can conflict our understanding? And sometimes we fall back to where we previously were. But typically we take a step in a direction, so true, a more healthy direction, sometimes a more complicated direction where we have to hold in tension, these two ideas.

And then sometimes we have to throw our hands in the air and say, I have no idea. Now I’m just confused and I need the Holy Spirit to take it from here. And maybe I’ll land somewhere. But I think that’s a good place for all of us as we start this journey and as our listeners start this journey with us just praying that we’d have a soft and open heart. Realize we don’t have all the answers totally. But through this journey, we’ll hopefully get a closer look at who God is and who he reveals himself to be in scripture, and that we attach ourselves to that. Amen.

Yeah. Well, let’s pray.

Lord, we just thank you that you’re going to show us, you’re going to open up our hearts, open up our minds. We thank you, Jesus, that you said in John 14:6, you are the way, you are the truth, you are the life. And that’s what we’re asking for is to show us your way for us, Lord, show us the truth. And Lord, just show us how to have abundant life like you say in John 10. So we give you thanks, we pray, each listener in Jesus name, amen. Amen.