Replies

“Then you might as well take the advice from Job’s wife “Curse God and die.” I am well aware of passages where one person passes on his blessings on to another. The passages I was interested in were those where the one making the blessing was God Himself. I can say “Bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you” to anyone, or I may even be selective, but the fact remains, the only one to have the power to make that alive is God… Quite literally I don’t see it for the historical and empirical record don’t support this bolt thrown down from heaven paradigm.”

Quite literally, it is there.

By reading post #252 & this one, I see that your argument rests on your belief that God did not extend blessings & curses to those nations/individuals who dealt with Israel. That the promise made to Jacob was only to be fulfilled by Isaac (ON HIS DEATHBED). He further went on to bless Jacob with:

Gen. 28:3-4: “May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples. May he give you and your descendants the blessing given to Abraham, so that you may take possession of the land where you now reside as a foreigner, the land God gave to Abraham.”

Looks to me like God meant the blessing for all of Jacob’s descendants. That would include what are now the Jews living in Israel.

If God’s blessing/cursing promise was only for Abraham, why did He indeed fulfill that to the Israelites throughout the OT?

We have Exodus 15 where God dealt with Pharaoh.

Exodus 17 where the Amalekites attacked Israel and were defeated. God declared war on them “from generation to generation.” Where are they now?

Isaiah 47 speaks of how God said He would deal with Babylon because of their treatment of Israel:

“I will take vengeance;
I will spare no one.”
4 Our Redeemer—the LORD Almighty is his name—
is the Holy One of Israel.
5 “Sit in silence, go into darkness,
queen city of the Babylonians;
no more will you be called
queen of kingdoms.
6 I was angry with my people
and desecrated my inheritance;
I gave them into your hand,
and you showed them no mercy.
Even on the aged
you laid a very heavy yoke.
7 You said, ‘I am forever—
the eternal queen!’
But you did not consider these things
or reflect on what might happen.
8 “Now then, listen, you lover of pleasure,
lounging in your security
and saying to yourself,
‘I am, and there is none besides me.
I will never be a widow
or suffer the loss of children.’
9 Both of these will overtake you
in a moment, on a single day:
loss of children and widowhood.
They will come upon you in full measure...
11 Disaster will come upon you,
and you will not know how to conjure it away.
A calamity will fall upon you
that you cannot ward off with a ransom;
a catastrophe you cannot foresee
will suddenly come upon you.

This was because of how they treated “my people”. Of course this was fulfilled only after God used Nebuchadnezzar to nearly destroy the Ammonites, the Edomites, the Moabites and the Philistines because of their attacks on Israel. There are many other examples of how God punished the enemies of Israel.

“On the other-hand, have you been to Dubai? I have had the pleasure of being there a few times and if that is cursing, bring it on.”

We serve a Holy, Almighty God. We should be careful that we don’t speak carelessly or foolishly about what concerns Him. Check out Matthew 12:36-37.

Back to your comments:

“While speaking of the Middle East, and Islam in particular, it has long been a tradition of that culture to see success and failure directly a component of Allah’s [capricious] Will. When I heard that message by TM, the mechanics, inspiration and consequences sounded remarkably similar to what the Muslims believe; replace “God” with “Allah” and swap the beneficiaries and you have Islamic doctrine. Just saying.”

There is nothing that the speaker in that video spoke of that is inconsistent with the way God dealt with nations/individuals in the OT. If you want to compare how God dealt with Israel’s enemies with the way “Allah” is portrayed in Islam, then go ahead. We are not the ones that are into “replacement”.

“I think what we would be more appropriate here is to get to the heart of the matter, and that is to recognize that the LORD protects His own:

Zech 2:8-9 “For thus says the Lord of hosts: “He sent Me after glory, to the nations which plunder you; for he who touches you touches the apple of His eye.”

Absolutely. Glad we can agree on something!

“Now to where we would disagree is to whom does God claim as His own. Dispensationalists have no love for the Church of God and thus do not see God caring for the Church, rather that love and affection is attributed to ethnic Jews who hate God and blaspheme His Son. The rest of Faith see the Church as the “apple of God’s eye”. So where the ethnic sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob benefited until the promises were fulfilled in His Son in the first century, the apple of God’s eye has always been those of Faith in His Son since Abel.”

This is just silly. All through the OT God refers to the Israelites as His people. That is a fact. He speaks of how He will judge them, disperse them throughout the nations, and at some point bring them back to their land – yet in their sin. Redemption comes when the Messiah Jesus is revealed to them, and they mourn in their repentance.

Nowhere can you possibly find in anything that I have posted (or likely anyone else) that I do not love the Church, do not see God caring for the Church, and that His love is reserved only for the Jews. Just not so. And yes, because of adoption, we are also the “apple of God’s eye”.

It’s so simple, and so clear! God called unto Himself a people – the Jews. Salvation was extended to them first, they (by and large) rejected Him, then salvation was extended to the Gentiles. Meanwhile God set the Jews aside in judgment, with the plan to re-graft them in – yet to come. This is what the scripture says, and this is what God has, is, and will do. And yet He fulfills His promise to the Jews that “I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you,” as this was unconditional.

Here’s an interesting quote I found pulled out of the article, “Concerning the Jews” from Mark Twain, published in Harper’s Magazine, 1899:

“…If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendour, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal to the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

“In fact, reading the second chapter of Romans and elsewhere we know that God stores up His Wrath for the Day of Judgment, rather than having it come out in drips and drabs unexpectedly.”

Romans 2 is talking about the final judgment. Not about how God has dealt with the nations in the past, present and in the future up to the final judgment. We cannot put God in a box. We cannot minimize His power, His authority, His wisdom. He is God. We are not. It doesn’t matter if He doesn’t fit into our theology. He makes the rules; He punishes the nations as He sees fit. He does not bow to reformed theology. Sorry.