Israel

Romans 9:4a

Second Title: Israelites – The Purpose of the Chosen People

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Do you know what our inflation rate was this past year? I think it was somewhere between 8 and 12
percent. It depends when you check it. We all felt things were pretty tight. How would you feel if
it was 20 percent? How would you feel if it was 30 percent? Probably there would be revolution if it
was 40 percent. Yet, that’s what it is in Israel at the moment. Inflation is running at around 40
percent. So in a way, financially, life is almost unliveable in the nation of Israel at the present
time. On top of that, of course, strikes and crippling taxes have almost destroyed the economy of
Israel. Then when you look at the situation with the leaders, you feel that it is even more
pathetic.

Many of us might feel like the woman who made a comment about Begin when he declared that Judea and
Samaria are part of biblical Israel, and they would never surrender them. The woman whispered, “The
days of the Messiah have come.” Many of us might feel that way, but many others feel Begin, the new
prime minister, is just an inflexible hulk, who will either have to withdraw from his present
aggressive stance or will have to commit himself to a war without America’s support.

It is even worse when you think of how he got into power. He really got in due to the general
disgust that everybody felt for the majority of the leaders in the previous government. One of them
was prosecuted for bribery and tax evasion and another committed suicide after he was accused of
illegal land deals. The Prime Minister Rabin had to resign when they discovered he had an illegal
bank account in the States. It is a far cry from the great leaders that we read about in Israel.
Some of us tend to think, “But they did have some great leaders. Think of the Six Day War and Golda
Meir and Moshe Dayan.” Yes, until you realize that Golda Meir didn’t believe in God at all.

Loved ones, the continued existence of Israel as a nation is one of the greatest arguments for
believing that our Creator is as He is described in the Bible. Those of us who have begun to allow
the Spirit of Jesus to run our lives, and certainly those of us who have not, all of us occasionally
wonder, “Is this a perfect description of reality? Is this a perfect description of the Maker of the
universe? I listen to it Sunday after Sunday, but there are other scriptures–the Koran, the
Buddhist scriptures and the Book of Mormon — that claim to tell us what the Creator of the universe
is like. Why should we believe that this one is the only perfect picture? Why should we believe that
Moses is right in what he says about God, and Joseph Smith, Mohammed and Buddha are wrong? After
all, they all spoke about miraculous events and they all said that God spoke to them. Why believe
this Moses above them? Why believe he is right and they are wrong?

Of course, the real issue is what really did happen when Moses said that God spoke to him. Was it
actual fact or was it subjective fantasy? When Buddha sat under the bow tree, was it just a
subjective vision or was it solid historical fact, God showing himself in a way that was undoubtedly
God? When Mohammed had a vision, was that a historical fact or was it a subjective fantasy or
illusion? When Joseph Smith claims to have received those golden plates that the Mormons base their
religion on, is that historical fact or just a subjective fantasy? Loved ones, in our present age we
are tending more and more towards irrationality. More and more men and women are saying there is no

rationalism anywhere, there is no reason anywhere. All you can have is some kind of experience under
drugs, or some kind of experience that is hedonistic; that is all a man or woman can hope for for
reality. You can’t find reason anywhere now in our universe. You can’t find reality by reason. At a
time like this it is really important for us to hold solidly to reason. If you do, it will become
clearer and clearer to you that the God who is behind our universe is exactly like the God who is
revealed in the Bible.

Let me share with you what one of the old theologians said, a man called Leslie. He said there are
certain common-sense guidelines to help people to determine what is historical fact and what is
subjective fantasy. There are four criteria that a fact ought to satisfy if it is a historical fact.
First of all, it should be such as can be judged by the senses, by eyes and ears. That eliminates
all purely subjective visions that people have. Secondly, it should be something that is done
publicly before the world. It should not be something that is done only in the presence of a small
group who have a vested interest in believing it. It should be something that is done publicly for
the world to see. Thirdly, and this is kind of interesting in regard to ancient history, there
should be not only monuments and memorials to this fact, but there should be acts that have been
performed down through the centuries to ensure that the public memory has never been distorted. That
eliminates most of the myths and legends that gathered around the non-Christian religious leaders
down through the centuries after their deaths. Fourthly, these memorials and monuments, or these
customs, habits and practices should have been present ever from the time when the original fact
took place. If you examine these books in this Bible under those four criteria, you will become
convinced that the revelation of
our Creator that you get here is the truth and the things actually happened as they are recorded
here.

I went to a liberal seminary and we were taught to take this book [the Bible] apart. One of the
methods we had was to suggest that Moses never received those miraculously, advance laws, because
they were too advanced for that time. The state of New York only caught up with the laws of hygiene
about forty years ago, as far as washing hands in hospitals is concerned. We used to argue that
Moses didn’t receive those miraculously advanced laws as he said he did from God, but they developed
gradually over years and years and then someone gathered them together and forged his name to them
years after he had lived. So it was really a very natural kind of creation.

Now brothers and sisters, the transmission of the law of God by Moses to the Israelites has so many
civil and political connections that it couldn’t have happened any other way than the way outlined
by Moses. Look at Deuteronomy 17:18. Moses is talking about when there is a king in Israel. “And
when he sits on the throne of the kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law,
from that which is in charge of the Levitical priests; and it shall be with him, and he shall read
in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, by keeping all the words
of this law, and these statutes, and doing them; that his law may not be lifted up above his
brethren, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the
left; so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.”

The laws that Moses gave were not little religious laws. They were to be the laws of the whole
nation. They were to be the civil and municipal laws that governed all the people of Israel. They
weren’t just little religious laws that were to be practiced by a few priests. Look at Deuteronomy
31:24: “When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book, to the very end, Moses
commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, ‘Take this book of the law,
and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a

witness against you.'” If someone in Israel wrote these laws for the first time or collated them for
the first time, all the people of Israel had to say was, “Listen, let’s open the ark and look. Are
they there? It says the king has them; has he got them? Are these the laws that govern our land?” In
other words, it is like me trying to pass off a book on America. I’ll write a whole lot of laws that
every guy ought to have four leprechauns in his house, and he ought to feed them very well, and
every woman should take a trip to Ireland every other year. Then I say these are always the laws
that have governed America. You know I would not last long. You would send me off to be examined
because you would say, “Listen, look at the laws. These are the laws that govern us, they are not
these laws that you talk about.” You would show me the Constitution and the other civil laws. In
other words, loved ones, it is really difficult to argue that these laws were created in later
years, by forgers, because these are the laws that the people of Israel regarded as the civil and
the municipal laws in their land. You would have to bluff a whole people to persuade them.

Not only that, but when the laws were initiated Moses explained why they were initiated. He says,
“You have to do this in memory of what God did for us.” Turn to Exodus regarding the Passover feast.
Exodus 12:21: “Then Moses called all the elders of Israel, and said to them, ‘Select lambs for
yourselves according to your families, and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it
in the blood which is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood which
is in the basin; and none of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. For the
Lord will pass through to slay the Egyptians; and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the
two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not allow the destroyer to enter your
houses to slay you. You shall observe this rite as an ordinance for you and for your sons forever.
And when you come to the land which the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this
service. And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ you shall say, ‘It
is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in
Egypt, when he slew the Egyptians but spared our house.’ And the people bowed their heads and
worshipped. Then the people of Israel went and did so; as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron, so
they did.”

If that wasn’t so, all the people had to say was, “We are not observing that feast. That never
happened. God never slew all the firstborn in Egypt and passed over our houses. That is a fantasy
that you are writing about there.” Loved ones, it didn’t matter when that forgery would have taken
place. You can take it right from 1400 B.C. when Moses wrote the laws right up to 300 B.C. which is
the latest time it could have taken place, because after that the law was being translated into
Greek and being spread among other peoples who had no interest in keeping a conspiracy.

It is like me saying we are going to observe the seventeenth of August as Brazil Day in memory of
the day that we annexed Brazil as the fifty-first state. You would say, “We are not keeping a dumb
memorial like that. We never annexed Brazil. Our history books don’t say that, the history books of
Brazil don’t say that.” The Israelites would say, “No, we’re not keeping the feast. We are not
circumcising our children.” How could you persuade a whole nation to circumcise the children in
memory of something that they knew had not taken place? Especially when we regard the Jews as some
of the shrewdest and most intelligent, most down-to-earth and practical people in our world.

You can’t persuade a people like that to cut the bodies of their own children for a reason that they
do not understand. Loved ones, it is impossible. We used to say, “Maybe these feasts and memorials
did exist among the people of Israel. Moses, or some forger that used Moses’ name, came along and
made up a whole story to tell them why they were observing them.” Well, it is just as impossible to
believe as to believe that some con man forced them to observe them in the first place, because it

presupposes that they were practicing circumcision, they were observing the feast of Pentecost, they
were observing the feast of Tabernacles, they were involved in all kinds of offerings in their
temple service, they were governing their lives through the civil judgments of the priests, and yet
they had no reason for doing all those things. You would have to assume that the Jewish people were
doing all those things and had no reason for it.

Then suddenly this man comes along and says, “I will tell you the reasons for all these things.”
Then he concocts a whole
story, beginning with the deliverance from the land of Egypt and the wanderings in the Wilderness,
the entrance into the Promised Land and the capture of Canaan and then the exiles into Babylon, and
says, “All these events took place and you have these twelve stones in the Jordan because this
happened. It is because this happened that you circumcise your children. It is because this happened
that you observe the feast of Pentecost.”

Loved ones, do you see the impossibility of it? You have to persuade a whole people of a history
that they never heard of before and that utterly contradicts all the history books they had. Not
only would you have to say that their national archives had the details in them, but you would have
to say that the Egyptian archives had the details as well. The contemporary histories of other
nations would have to detail these things too.

Loved ones, it’s like the explanation of the Resurrection is harder to believe than the actual
history itself. That is why the Israelites, however pitiful and pathetic they are in this present
day, however far removed they are from God, are the best possible argument for the existence of God,
outside Jesus, that we have. The acts of God are written in their life-blood, in their ceremonies,
monuments, customs, feast days, and in the habits and civil laws that they have observed for
centuries. You can wipe out one page, you can wipe out a million pages, you might be able to burn
two or three million pages — but you cannot wipe out the millions of Jewish lives that have been
lived for hundreds and thousands of years. It was those dear lives and customs that have come down
to today that assure us that the things that happened according to Moses really happened. The things
that God did in those days, He really did do. That is why Paul emphasises in Romans 9:4: “They are
Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the
worship, and the promises.” We need to thank God that He wrote His own existence so clearly and
plainly as that.

I’d encourage you who have doubts about God’s existence to see that you don’t wipe out a book, which
is difficult enough; you have to wipe out a whole nation, and it is one of the oldest nations in the
world.