Crumbs!

11/14/18               Charlie  (see video)

My absolute favorite Bible passage is the story of the gentile woman who sought Jesus out to heal her son.  Jesus responded that “one shouldn’t take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”, and as a fellow gentile myself I relate to the woman’s response that she would “take whatever crumbs she could get”.  (Mark 7)

I know my place as a non-Jew who has been “grafted in” to the family of God as Paul described in Romans 11: “…you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root”    I owe a debt of gratitude to the generations of Jewish faithful who have carried out God’s plan in shining the light of salvation to the world through His chosen people.

It is with this in mind that I reach out to people like Charlie at a coffeeshop, who warned me ahead of time that I might not want to record a religious conversation with him because of his Jewish background.  He also let me know he only had five minutes to talk, so we had a short but enlightening conversation nonetheless.

As is typical with other Jews I have met, Charlie doesn’t believe in the concepts of heaven and hell, and his concept of God Himself is more like an impersonal force for good rather than a personal being to whom we are accountable.  As a result, Charlie was quick to deny personal accountability or guilt, choosing instead to focus on his corporate guilt as a member of an unjust society, with the source of evil in the world being attributed to an evil world system rather than the evil hearts of ourselves as individuals. 

As Christians we understand the sources of evil to be the world, the flesh and the devil (see Ephesians 2:2-3), so while we are indeed corporately responsible as part of an evil world system, we are also personally responsible for the sin we commit in response to both spiritual and fleshly temptations.  It seems to me that eliminating the concept of a personal God, as Charlie and others have done, also eliminates personal responsibility to obey that God.  Unfortunately, it also eliminates the joy of personally experiencing the love of our Heavenly Father, whom Jesus reconciles us to and taught us to pray to.

While Charlie’s hard heart toward a personal God concerns me, I see it as part of God’s larger plan as described by Paul in Romans 11: “Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in”.  The Jewish lack of faith and denial of personal responsibility toward God has a purpose.  The story isn’t over for them.  God has by no means rejected His people.

Paul ends the chapter by explaining that God saves everyone by His mercy: “Just as you (gentiles) who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their (Jews) disobedience, so they (Jews) too have now become disobedient in order that they (Jews) too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you (gentiles). For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all (Jews and Gentiles).

Praise be to God!

Thank you, Charlie, for allowing me to record our conversation.  It can be viewed HERE