America as type of the New Israel

The New Israel is the body of Christ, which is to say the Spirit-born believers.

America's miraculous birth and many rescues from mortal peril imply that God has something special in mind for America, though it is true now and has always been true that the forces of darkness strive to destroy America from within, sometimes doing horrific things that no American can be proud of.

America at its best reflects the ideals of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood as espoused in the New Testament. That includes the concept of equality among brothers and sisters and freedom to seek God in spirit and in truth, rather than by some church-state system handed down from the Roman era. This libertarian streak within Protestant America had a beneficial effect on Catholicism and Judaism.

America is a nation that, under God's control, abolished the foul practice of slavery even though that practice had become entrenched. America was able to, despite great mistrust, accept the need for change as embodied in Martin Luther King, who, in the spirit of his namesake, the apostle Martin Luther, blazed a trail through a thicket of blindness.

America is a worldly projection, and type, of the New Israel, to whom all the promises of the Old Testament belong. As Jesus said, God is able to raise up children of Abraham from the stones. Those who put their trust in the God of Jesus are the true children of Abraham.

It should also be noted that Jesus warned that it was a bad idea to curse anyone, no matter what injustice had been suffered. So the promise concerning blessing and cursing associated with Israel actually applies in general. You reap what you sow, Jesus said.

Yet, perhaps that promise carries more heft when Israel is blessed or cursed. So then, if one curses America, one is on the brink of cursing the New Israel. And the Bible says that he who curses Israel will pay for that wrong. As the New Testament makes clear, that, and other, promises now apply to the true Israel, the New Israel.

A curse need not be merely an unkind word. It might be a plot to undermine America's democratic process. The Soviet Union committed such a curse, and, as a consequence, it collapsed after seven decades. Who knocked down the Soviet empire? It was the Lord, acting to shield the New Israel and preserve the New Israel in America. Even if the state of Israel were to commit a curse against America, the shadow of the New Israel, a severe consequence must follow.

Is Saul among the prophets?

On I Samuel

There was an old saying among the Israelis: "Is Saul among the prophets?"

This is surely an ancient witticism and idiom which is invoked to indicate a person being out of character or showing a change of outlook and behavior. It might have even been used to focus on an apparent social contradiction.

However, this clever saying eventually was made literal, as when parables meant to instruct were, over generations, eventually taken to be literal dogma.

It seems quite plausible that two stories about Saul being filled with the Spirit and prophesying -- in one case against his will -- were folk tales meant for campfire entertainment that were handed down orally until eventually being written down on a scroll filled with such yarns. The stories answered the question: "How did the saying 'Is Saul among the prophets?' come about?" The saying itself however was likely originally a shrewd comment that drew on the fact that the worldly king was known to have been at odds with the prophet Samuel. Even if in fact Saul did go into an ecstasy of the Spirit at some point, that fact doesn't seem to be the real origin of the saying.

So then, what we have is that the stories are intertwined with another account of the story of Saul and David. Those returning to Jerusalem under the Persian mandate were required to draw up the religious traditions and codify them to satisfy Persian bureaucracy. It is possible that at this point stories that had circulated in Jerusalem were combined with a more serious account. (Of course there had been other redactions and compilations before the Exile.) At any rate, these stories ("pericopes"), if eliminated along with a few other interpolated pericopes, leave a very plausible account of a rising military star, David, who excited the envy of the king.

As for the story of David the shepherd boy slaying Goliath of Gath, this pericope seems asynchronous with the account of David the military leader. Curiously, at another point, not David but one of his soldiers is credited with killing the giant Goliath (whose height has been estimated at six-feet-nine). It seems likely that this fact was expanded and applied to David because David was the star the campfire crowds wanted to hear about. One can see how it would be, in the beginning, metaphorically true. David was the young commander who rescued tiny Israel from the giant Philistine power through his cunning and daring. He did kill a giant. The giant of Philistine power. Later the Goliath story was woven in.

On Exodus

Quite interesting that the tribe of Levi has many Egyptian names, a fact tending to bolster the idea that the Levites may have been the 6,000 led by Moses from Egypt. Perhaps later they became the priestly tribe -- when the exilics joined with other Hebrew tribes, who already had shares of land. The Levites, who had been border guards in the buffer zone of Goshen, fled Egypt after they were pressed into corvee service for building projects, something the Indian-like tribesmen looked upon as slavery. Having lost their land holdings in Goshen, they were accorded priestly status in an arrangement with the confederation of Hebrew tribes, which all traced their lineage to Jacob/Israel.

Aaron may represent a rival priestly tradition, perhaps one that had existed among those tribes that had not been living in Goshen. When the arrangement was made, it was decided that Aaron should be considered a brother of Moses, so that the two priestly casts could coexist. Later, folk tales about Moses and Aaron were popular entertainment around the campfires and eventually these tales were written down. On the other hand, there seems to be a strong thread of historicity running through the Exodus story. For example, it has been shown that the Egyptian plagues are the sort of natural disasters that would happen in that region, and that the plagues came in the correct order, where one event triggered the next. Even the statement that the last plague killed "the firstborn" may be a metaphorical way of saying that the plague struck down the best and the brightest, the young and the healthy. On occasion, plagues select the young and vibrant -- as in the 1918 influenza pandemic -- because that generation has not been immunized by exposure to related viruses.

I find some of Freud's speculations concerning the Exodus, as told in Moses and Monotheism, to be quite interesting. Especially when it comes to the Egyptian, Moses, insisting that the Hebrew refugees refrain from any form of representation of their god. Moses, thought Freud, was reacting to the traditional representational idolatry of Egypt and wanted a completely stripped down form of worship, where God, as Spirit -- rather than a thing representing a god -- was worshiped.

A prayer for nonsectarian groups

The following combines the Serenity Prayer with
a few verses reflective of well-known spiritual truths.

God, grant us the serenity
to accept the things we cannot change,
courage to change the things we can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

Meet our needs for this day that you
have given us, and help us to take life
one day at a time.

Forgive us our wrongs,
as we forgive those who wrong us,
and help us reflect on the many positives in life.

God, help us under your guidance be part
of the solution, and not part of the problem.




Revamped Nov. 3, 2013.