The Israel of God
Through Christ and the outpoured Spirit, we experience a fullness that Abraham rejoiced to see only from afar. The word hope is often used flippantly, carrying little more weight than a flimsy wish. But biblical hope is firm and sturdy. Biblical hope is squarely centered on the character of God, the truth of His Word, His great and very precious promises, and above all, Christ Himself, the hope of glory.
Texts such as Romans 11 and Galatians 6:16 indicate that Jesus’ disciples are, in fact, the true Israel of God, the people whom He has chosen to bring blessing on the world and to dwell with forever. Knowing that we are the Israel of God encourages us to cling to God for blessing just as our forefather Jacob did (Gen. 32:22–32). Let us consider the significance and great hope that disciples have as the true Israel of God.
“Are you the teacher of Israel?” (John 3:10). Such was the nature of the question posed by our Lord Jesus to Nicodemus. Yet it was much more than a simple inquiry. The rhetorical effect should have awakened the Pharisee to seriously ponder how he could instruct God’s people if he himself did not understand the things above. Even more profoundly, how could he teach Israel if he did not know of the true Israel?
Some of Nicodemus’ responses seem quite reasonable. After all, how can a man be born when he is old? It is the dawning of the new covenant that sublimely answers this question. But we do well to remember that the new covenant answers that question out of the resources of the old covenant. Christ compels Nicodemus to see that he must possess the very thing that the ancient sacrament always called for: a circumcised heart. Who is the true Jew but he who is one inwardly? And now, standing before his very eyes, is the sum and substance of all the promises of old—the Messiah himself, the true Israel.
From the very outset, the Gospels unveil for us the many ways that the Christ is “the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1). We are meant to see that He would succeed where Israel had failed.
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I Remember Your Name in the Night, O Lord | Psalm 119:55
We ought also to remember God’s name whenever night falls upon the soul, whenever sorrows or trials seem to have obscured the very light of God’s face. In such moments, we are to remember God’s character as expressed by His holy name. Today, we are to remember particularly that we now call God our Father because of our adoption through His Son. If He has given us so great a gift, how much more will He be steadfastly with us even through the long nights of the soul?
I remember your name in the night, O LORD,and keep your law.
Psalm 119:55 ESVHere the psalmist declares that his nightly meditation is upon the name of the LORD. As he lay in his bed, he thinks upon the nature and goodness of his God, for God’s name reflects His character. We observed this, of course, in Exodus with the LORD revealing and then displaying the grandeur of His name to both the Israelites and the Egyptians, and that declaration (“I am the LORD”) continues to be one of the great refrains throughout the remainder of the Old Testament.
This bears two applications.
First, we ought to have God’s name in mind whenever we are most alone. It is common that in the night people face, because of the stillness and solitude, the existential realities that they distract themselves from throughout the day.
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The Way of God in the Gathering Storm
Let us consider that it is far better to suffer than to be disgraced; that it is better to strive against evil than to succumb to it effetely; that loyalty and unity of heart are virtues for which no transient prosperity could make up to us if haply they were lost; that when the soul of a people moves as it does, thank God today with one strong impulse toward that which is just and right, that our soul is growing every hour to true nobility and to the worthiness of its mission.
The following excerpts were selected from a sermon preached by Morgan Dix just a few days after the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861. Considering the turmoil presently found in our stormy social and political climate, both here and abroad, it seems fitting that these words might likewise find some resonance in our day. — Editor.
The Way of God in the Storm
“The Lord hath His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet,” saith the prophet (Nahum 1:3). And the way of the Lord, whether it be in the whirlwind or in the summer’s breeze, in the storm or in the fair weather, is a way of justice, of mercy, and of truth. If a storm arises and blows, be it lighter or heavier, we need not fear if we know that the way of the Lord is there. Even in the whirlwind and in the storm “let the people praise Thee, O God, yea, let all the people praise Thee” (Psalm 67:5).
Storms are not the worst and greatest evils. Ask the sailor which he will choose, a mere storm or the dead calm of windless waters; and do not doubt his reply. Ask the wretched inhabitant of some pestilential climate, on which the stillness of the curse lies heavy day after day, what he would give for a storm from the cool, healthy north to blow upon the fever swamps and drive the destroyer from before it.
Yes, brethren, the words of the prophet are true, and the way of the Lord is in the storm. The storm is His minister of mercy and benefit, though in a rough, fierce way of its own. The storm does us good service in keeping the equilibrium among the elements, and it ministers beneficial discipline in its time — just as God appoints. This is the mission of the stormy wind and tempest in the firmament above: angry of face, but full of benefit and good; stern and sharp, but profitable also.
And that which is true in the firmament is just as true beneath it. Here, upon the way of this life, rises storm after storm. Here, also, the winds blow and beat upon the earthly house of this tabernacle. Here are blast and tempest along the way of each man, and of each community, and of all the nations upon earth. But the way of God is in them here below as well as up there over our heads.
Here, likewise, the clouds of strife and struggle are the “dust of His feet.” Here, also, have storm and tempest found their needful place and their healthful mission. It is so with them all. All are but God’s means of castigation which we need, and of advancement of which we have when we have been deemed worthy. This is true of the storms of life, whether they eddy in a narrow radius around one man, or around each one of us in his turn; or whether they gather into notable volume around some whole community; or whether, lastly, they expand to the compass of the round cyclone, and getting leverage below, through the strong arms of the earthquake, where it might shake the mighty nation and the ancient and honorable people to its center.
Finding the Virtue in the Storm
It is not the part of men to fly from the storm every time it falls upon them, but to look it full in the face; to search amid its folds and its rising fury for the mysterious way of the Lord which is surely therein. And, by doing so, to draw from it the virtue and the strength which are lodged there; thus rising, with added security from the temporary shock, to be taught by the event and gain a reverence and fear of the Lord.
Brethren, there is a deep and divine philosophy, crystallized into visible shape in nature, illustrated in all the inner history of man, and assented to by the convictions of the heart wherever that heart beats. It is a teaching, one and the same for every place, every age and every time. This philosophy runs thus: that all things are purified by trial. “Every one,” saith our Lord, “shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt” (Mark 9:49, KJV).
The whirlwind and the storm must come; and men must meet them. There is no exemption from this law; and the philosophy of which we speak is probably the simplest and the most universal that ever was taught. Advancement and honor come by the pathway of trial.
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The Changing Face of Social Breakdown
No single cause can explain this growing challenge of passivity. It is thoroughly global, for one thing. The decline of marriage and child-bearing is much further along in much of Europe and Asia, and can be seen not only in the developed world but also in some of the poorest nations on the planet.
Last month, two of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone), along with co-authors from the Wheatley Foundation and the Institute for Family Studies, published an important new paper on the state of family formation in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a fascinating study, well worth your while, which reviews new data about American attitudes toward marriage and child-bearing and puts them in some historical context.
What struck the authors most about the trends they discerned was their bifurcation along economic, cultural, and political lines. Wealthier Americans are more interested in marriage and kids than those with lower incomes. And, maybe less surprisingly, religious Americans and those inclined to vote Republican are also more interested in forming traditional families than those who are secular and on the left. These aren’t new trends, but the pandemic looks to be reinforcing them, for reasons the authors discuss.
But I was most struck by something else about the portrait they paint. The report embodies a significant change in how we think about the basic character of social breakdown in America, and what we take to be the obstacles to human flourishing in our time. This different understanding isn’t quite new either, but it is often left implicit, so its full significance has been slow to hit us.
Not long ago, it would have been taken for granted that social order in our free society is a function of our capacity to restrain and govern our most intense longings. Human beings are moved by passionate desires for things like pleasure, status, wealth, and power. But these intense desires can deform our lives if we don’t subject them to some structure and moderation through marriage, schooling, work, religion, and other binding commitments. Disordered lives are a product of rushing in recklessly, so that sex or children come too soon while responsibility comes too late if at all.
But a lot of contemporary social science, like this important new report, has come to be quietly premised in a different understanding of disorder. Rather than seeing the drive to have children as a force to be channeled and domesticated by marriage, for instance, we have come to see both the desire for marriage and the desire for kids as endangered and in decline. And more broadly, the challenges to America’s social order now seem less like exorbitant human desires driving people’s lives out of control and more like an absence of energy and drive leaving people languishing and enervated. These are very different kinds of social problems that call for different sorts of responses. We can all perceive the shift from one toward the other in this century, but our cultural and political thinking has been slow to catch up.
The shift is evident in what the report, like a great deal of other social science in recent years, describes as a mix of good and bad news about American society. The good news is that some of the most troubling social trends of the second half of the 20th century have been abating in our time. Last year, for instance, the U.S. divorce rate hit a 50-year low. Teen pregnancies are at the lowest rate seen since they began to be systematically tracked in the 1930s, and the rate continues to plummet: In 2018, the teen-pregnancy rate was half of what it was in 2008. Even the rate of out-of-wedlock births, which had been climbing steadily since the 1950s, peaked around 2008 and has been declining modestly since—from 52 births per 1,000 unmarried women that year to 40 in 2019. The abortion rate has also been steadily falling, and is now probably lower than it was before the Supreme Court nullified all state abortion restrictions in 1973.
The bad news is that rates of more positive behaviors are declining too. Most notably, both marriage rates and fertility rates are at all-time lows in the United States. Total fertility in our country is now about 1.7 births per woman, well below the population-replacement rate. Younger Americans are having trouble pairing off—so that not only teen sex but also teen dating have dipped dramatically.
This mix of seemingly good and bad news is no paradox. The good news is often just one consequence of the bad. There are fewer divorces because there are fewer marriages, and so more of those that begin survive. There are fewer abortions because there are fewer pregnancies, and so more of those that happen are wanted. There are fewer out-of-wedlock births because there are fewer births in general. The same pattern is evident beyond sexuality and family too. Fewer teenagers are dying in car accidents because fewer teenagers are getting driver’s licenses. There is less social disorder, we might say, because there is less social life. We are doing less of everything together, so that what we do is a little more tidy and controlled.
There’s a case for welcoming all this on net. If social dysfunction is essentially a breakdown of discipline—if the core social problem is unruliness—then American life is getting better. We should want fewer people suffering the consequences of disorder, and it’s a good thing that more people’s lives answer to their own choices and preferences.
But that case is ultimately unpersuasive because the greatest virtues of a social order are not functions of its ability to restrain commotion or even to empower choice but of its capacity to enable human flourishing. To opt for perfect peace and quiet is to opt for death. The problem with broken families and communities is not that they are unchosen but that they are unhealthy and unsuited to making us happy. And we are finding now that there is more than one way to be unhappy.
This is not so much a change in our definition of social dysfunction, but a change in the real-life experience of our society. For many decades in America, it seemed like the chief obstacle to human flourishing was our impulsive recalcitrance—an excess of dynamism and energy that our society failed to shape into responsibility and constructive action. Chaos broke down the lives of millions and denied the promise of the free society to countless children, who then seemed destined to fall into chaos for another generation. Too many Americans were living their lives out of order—having sex too soon, becoming parents too early, jumping into life too quickly and without restraint or preparation.
That is certainly a dangerous kind of disorder, and one that is still very much with us too. It has not gone away by any means. But it has been joined by a more profound and fundamental problem that might be best described as a disordered passivity—a failure to launch, which leaves too many Americans on the sidelines of life, unwilling or unable to jump in.
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