Between Yesterday And Tomorrow Series

As Paul says, the good news - the gospel - was promised a long time ago. The first hint that God would defeat evil one day comes - according to many scholars - right there in the beginning, in the third chapter of Genesis. I’m a little dubious about that interpretation, myself, but certainly by Isaiah’s time people were expecting something more than just a restoration of David’s kingdom. They were expecting that God would send someone who would finally, once and for all, straighten out the terrible mess the world was in. They needed more than just a temporary fix. They had discovered that not just any old king would do. It would have to be someone “after God’s own heart”, someone like David himself.

And that’s what Isaiah promised them. He promised that a child would be born who would know the difference between good and evil by the time he was eating curds and honey - another way of saying by the time he was weaned and eating solid food. He promised that it would be someone from David’s line. He promised wisdom, and justice, and prosperity, and peace. But it had taken a long time.

Fourteen generations, Matthew said, from Abraham to David. Fourteen more from David to the exile. And another Fourteen generations before Jesus came. And the way the Hebrews counted, at forty years per generation, that was 4 * 14 * 3 = 1,680 years. That’s actually pretty close to what archeologists have figured... But however you count it, it was a long, long time.

God’s covenant with Abraham was the start of the official countdown on the promise - that through Abraham’s descendants, all the people of the world would be blessed. The next covenant - the next promise - came with the giving of the law to Moses, when the Israelites were promised that God would give them a “prophet like Moses” [Dt 18:15] who would, presumably, once again free them from slavery and/or bring them back from exile. The last covenant was when God promised that there would always be a King from the line of David sitting on the throne. Well, they came back from exile and rebuilt the temple and there still wasn’t any such king. Herod was hardly the stuff of prophecy. Nightmares, more like. And after he had died, the Romans had taken over, and if anything, that was even worse.

But finally the king had come, even though it was nothing like any of them had expected, and even though there still wasn’t any peace, there still wasn’t any prosperity, and there still wasn’t any justice, it was starting to make sense. All they had to do, they thought, was hunker down there in Jerusalem and wait for Jesus to come back. The angels had said, after all, that “Jesus... will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” [Acts 1:11]

But then it all seemed to start falling apart. Saul and some other Pharisees had gotten the go-ahead from the temple authorities to chase down the brethren, put in prison and flogged, and John’s brother James had actually been beheaded. So when Saul – now renamed Paul - came back from Damascus, saying that he had seen Jesus and that Jesus had told him to go and preach the good news to the Gentiles, well, that was simply too much to swallow. They didn’t lay a hand on him, no, they weren’t going to descend to his level - but he wasn’t welcome. No, sirree, not after what he had done.

And now there was Paul again, out there somewhere in Greece or Asia or somewhere, watering down what Moses had given them so many years ago, just so the Gentiles could swallow it! Why, if they didn’t care enough about God to get circumcised and follow the dietary laws, why should they be accepted? What was with Paul, anyway? He couldn’t destroy the church the first time around, so now he was making it so easy to join that just anybody could call themselves a Christian nowadays and they - who had been decent, law-abiding, God-fearing Jews all their lives were supposed to call them brother and sister and have fellowship with them? Why couldn’t they go back to the way things used to be, when Jews were Jews and Greeks were Greeks and you knew what was what?

Yes, yes, Peter and James had said it was ok, all the Gentiles had to do was abstain from blood and sexual immorality and idols. So they’d have to swallow it, even though it went down hard. But it didn’t seem fair. After all, they’d been protecting and keeping the covenant for over a thousand years. And the church in Judea was just barely hanging on, while everywhere Paul and his cronies went churches sprang up as if they were grown from seed. Things just weren’t the way they used to be. Why didn’t Jesus come back before they lost everything?