What the Bible says about Israel's Relationship with God
(From Forerunner Commentary)
God made His covenant with Old Testament Israel, a type of the church (Galatians 6:16). God's focus and concern were overwhelmingly on them, and He dealt with other nations only as they came in contact with Israel. Though God makes provision in His law to accept non-Israelites who wanted to join Israel and worship the true God, He nowhere commands the Israelites to go out and make disciples of other nations. Rather, His approach is to attract outsiders by the example of obedient Israel being blessed by Him.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Who Is Doing the Work of God?
God succinctly expresses that the basis of His and Israel's relationship is found in His faithfulness to His promises. At the same time, He openly declares His love for her, adding that she could add nothing to Him. In other words, He did not seek her out to "get" something from her as humans do. This passage also stipulates that Israel's responsibility in the relationship was to be faithful to Him by keeping His commandments, statutes, and judgments.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Beast and Babylon (Part Six): The Woman's Character
That Israel was a holy nation is far more important than is generally realized, and it affects our understanding of wavesheaf requirements. As a prelude to better understanding and properly appreciating many aspects of waving the sheaf, it is helpful to know that God specifically designated Israel a sanctified people. He set the entire nation apart as distinctive from the rest of the world's nations. As such, He gave them responsibilities to perform before the rest of the world as a testimony of their obedient service to God.
God's declaration of certain things as "clean" and others as "unclean" helped to define this holiness to them. Some things declared unclean could not even be touched without making a person ceremonially defiled until he performed the prescribed rituals. Among the things declared polluted or unclean were the Gentiles, whose uncleanness was not inherent but lay in their idolatry: They did not worship the God of Creation who set the Israelites apart. As such, even a marriage between an Israelite and a Gentile was forbidden except within very narrow parameters.
The ceremonial aspects of the Israelites' responsibilities are quite detailed, and God expected them to be followed exactly as instructed because each detail fits precisely within His purposes for His relationship with His sanctified people. Are we wiser than He is? God is not the author of meaningless regulations. Waving the sheaf of grain is one of these ceremonial duties, containing explicit instructions with spiritual ramifications.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Pentecost Revisited (Part Two): Joshua 5Related Topics: Canaanite Grain | Ceremonially Defiled | Ceremonially Unclean | Clean/ Unclean Distinction | Covenant Relationship | Grain Offering, Requirements for | Holy People | Israel's Relationship with God | Offerings, Polluted | Pentecost | Sacrifice, Polluted | Wavesheaf | Wavesheaf Offering | Wavesheaf Offering, Requirements of
God commands in Psalm 50:5, 22, "Gather My saints together to Me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice. . . . Now consider this, you who forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver." Especially interesting is that Psalm 50 is directly addressed to those who have made a covenant with God, yet some, perhaps many, suffer from forgetfulness regarding His importance to their well-being.
Could we be guilty of such a thing?
Psalm 78:39-42 reveals ancient Israel's forgetfulness:
For He remembered that they were but flesh, a breath that passes away and does not come again. How often they provoked Him in the wilderness, and grieved Him in the desert! Yes, again and again they tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel. They did not remember His power; the day when He redeemed them from the enemy.
This serves as a warning. Notice the contrast between God, who remembers and keeps His part of the covenant, and men, who so easily forget Him. Our forgetting triggers neglect of the responsibilities that we acquired in making the New Covenant, as Hebrews shows. The next step in the decline of responsibility is to forsake all accountability. However, to seek God diligently by faith is the opposite of Israel's destructive process. When we come to God, the process of forsaking the world begins. Forgetting God ultimately draws us right back into what we originally came out of!
In what way must we come to God? In Proverbs 8:17, personified wisdom reminds us, "I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently will find me." The Hebrew word translated as diligently means "busily; with persistent, persevering effort; industriously." In Psalm 119:10, the psalmist declares, "With my whole heart I have sought You; oh, let me not wander from Your commandments!" He pursued God wholeheartedly and steadfastly. In Psalm 27:4, David adds that he did this "all the days of my life."
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Christian Fight (Part Five)Related Topics: Covenant | Covenant Relationship | Covenant, Rejecting God's | Israel's Faithlessness | Israel's Fickleness | Israel's Forgetfulness | Israel's Privileged Position | Israel's Rejection of God | Israel's Rejection of God's Law | Israel's Relationship with God | Israel's Unfaithfulness
Psalm 78 gives a clear and concise history of Israel's relationship with God. The psalmist illustrates four steps that led to their rebellion:
1. They forgot God's goodness (verse 11).
2. They tested God by insisting that He satisfy their lusts (verses 18-19).
3. They played moral hide-and-seek with God, which is hypocrisy; they served Him only when they discovered for the moment they could not escape Him (verses 35-37).
4. Finally, they substituted idols for God at the center of their lives (verses 57-58).
Israel never got the true picture. Because they were walking by sight, and not by faith, they were so impressed with what they saw that they limited God's ability to create His heart and mind in them (verse 41).
John W. Ritenbaugh
Preparing for the Feast
A deceitful bow is one that gives every appearance of being good and true to its purpose until put to the test. In the pressure of battle, it fails to shoot arrows where the archer aims them.
This illustration is one of the many ways God describes His marriage relationship with Israel. He describes her in Ezekiel 16 as being like a beautiful woman, full of promise, who eagerly entered into marriage with Him, vowing to Him as she agreed to the covenant, "All that the LORD has said we will do and be obedient" (Exodus 24:7). However, under the tests of life, she did not behave like a faithful wife. She quickly broke her vows to be submissive to Him and Him only, unfaithfully behaving worse than a common street harlot (see Ezekiel 16:27-30)!
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Beast and Babylon (Part Six): The Woman's Character
Jeremiah speaks in detail about the relationship between God and Israel when Moses sprinkled the blood of animals to confirm the Old Covenant (see Exodus 24:8). In these verses, He speaks to a highly apostate, corrupt Judah some 850 years after the construction of the Tabernacle. The house of Israel was already in exile, and soon Nebuchadnezzar would carry the house of Judah captive into Babylon. Jeremiah quotes God as He fondly—almost wistfully—looks back in time, remembering Mount Sinai, remembering when the Old Covenant was confirmed.
God actually says that, "Israel was holiness" to Him! When they built the Tabernacle of meeting, physical Israel was probably closer to God than they ever were or would be in their history. In fact, they were in their first love! One of the fruits of their extremely close relationship with God was the properly finished Tabernacle. Israel submitted to its husband, Yahweh Jireh.
Charles Whitaker
God Our ProviderRelated Topics: Apostasy | Babylonian Captivity | Exile | First Love | Israel's Relationship with God | Mount Sinai | Nebuchadnezzar | Old Covenant | Tabernacle | Yahweh Jireh | YHWH-Jireh
Jeremiah wrote this over 400 years after Israel's rejection of God as King and about 840 years after making the covenant at Mount Sinai. Even though by the time of this writing God had divorced the Great Harlot Israel, He still continued to have a fractious relationship with her in order to continue the outworking of His purpose and to fulfill His promises to Abraham, including all the end-time prophecies. In other words, He was not yet finished with Israel.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Beast and Babylon (Part Eight): God, Israel, and the BibleRelated Topics: Fickleness of Israel | Harlot, Israel as | Israel as Babylon | Israel as Great Whore | Israel as Harlot | Israel as Prostitute | Israel's Adultery | Israel's Faithlessness | Israel's Fickleness | Israel's Rebelliousness | Israel's Rejection of God | Israel's Rejection of God's Law | Israel's Relationship with God | Israel's Unfaithfulness
After God performs the intents of His heart, as it says at the end of the previous chapter, and His wrath has consumed those He will consume, then peace in the relationship between Israel and God becomes possible because all of those who declared war on God through their conduct are dead. God does not believe in "peace at any price." He works toward repentance, but if there is no repentance, the only solution is to destroy those in rebellion against Him. Yet, after the destruction, He promises once again to be the God of all of Israel, and Israel will again be His people.
Verse 2 provides the qualifier that the remnant will be those who have survived the sword. Ezekiel 5:1-4 illustrates this time:
And you, son of man, take a sharp sword, take it as a barber's razor, and pass it over your head and your beard; then take scales to weigh and divide the hair. You shall burn with fire one-third in the midst of the city, when the days of the siege are finished; then you shall take one-third and strike around it with the sword, and one-third you shall scatter in the wind: I will draw out a sword after them. You shall also take a small number of them and bind them in the edge of your garment. Then take some of them again and throw them into the midst of the fire, and burn them in the fire. From there a fire will go out into all the house of Israel.
From these verses and the remainder of Ezekiel 5, it is evident that a great deal of violence will be done to the peoples of Israel, but when it is over, God will give them rest (Jeremiah 31:2). The people who survive the sword will find grace. God begins to demonstrate His lovingkindness and to rebuild and restore Israel. Jeremiah 31:4 contains the imagery of a festive occasion with dancing, something that the Israelites probably will not have felt like doing for quite some time. There will be food in abundance, and the time of famine will be over (verse 5). On all counts, Israel's outlook is brightening.
David C. Grabbe
The Second Exodus (Part Two)
God is describing His relationship with a specific woman, Jerusalem, which stands for all Israel. In this context, "you became Mine" is the language of marriage, a covenant relationship to One to whom she was to be faithful.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Beast and Babylon (Part Five): The Great Harlot
These verses introduce a panoramic view of Israel's relationship with God from God's perspective. Ezekiel's charge from God is to judge (to pronounce judgments on Israel on God's behalf), to tell them plainly why they went into captivity.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Sabbathkeeping (Part 1)
God is referring to Israel's Sabbath-breaking in their wilderness journey, quite early in their relationship with Him. In addition, if there was any time—in all of the history of Israel's relationship with God—this was a time during which they had no excuse for breaking the Sabbath. He was with them at all times in the cloud and the pillar of fire. They were also a completely closed society. There should have been no other God to worship.
All of the people were gathered in one general location. There was no place to go. Double manna fell each Friday, and no manna fell on the Sabbath. They had no excuse for losing track of what day it was. God, jarringly, had a man executed for Sabbath-breaking to remind them how important the day is and to instill in them respect for it. Yet, God says they still rebelled, suggesting that God was mostly concerned with how they were keeping it.
They undoubtedly gave lip-service to the Sabbath, setting it aside on the calendar. When that day came around, any commercial business in the wilderness probably came to a halt on that day. They did not travel. It was what they were doing or not doing personally and individually on that day that harmed their relationship with God. That was the issue.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Sabbathkeeping (Part 1)
God specifically draws attention to idolatry and Sabbath-breaking as powerful irritants to His relationship with Israel. The Israelites began breaking these commandments right from the get-go in the wilderness, and they apparently never really understood what He wanted from them regarding them.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Sabbathkeeping (Part 1)
Hosea's dominant theme is Israel's faithlessness in contrast to God's patience, mercy, and faithfulness. The prophet is especially creative in metaphorically describing Israel's spiritual condition and relationship with God. He introduces two dominant ones in the book's second verse.
The primary metaphor is Israel as a faithless wife, and the second is Israel as a child of adultery or faithlessness. A child is the fruit or product of a relationship. Hosea implies that Israel, as a child of an adulterous relationship, manifests its characteristics because the next generation tends to continue the traits of the former and perhaps even increase their effects. A primary characteristic of adultery is faithlessness.
In the first metaphor, God is a faithful husband, and in the second, a loving and long-suffering parent. Israel is faithless in carrying out her responsibilities in both cases. God bluntly calls her actions adultery, harlotry, or whoredom because she did not fulfill the duties she had promised in a contract, a covenant. In more intimate terms, this contract is a marriage.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Seventh Commandment (1997)Related Topics: Adultery | Faithlessness | God as Faithful Husband | God as Long-Suffering Parent | Hosea | Hosea's Marriage | Israel as a Faithless Wife | Israel's Adultery | Israel's Faithlessness | Israel's Harlotry | Israel's Relationship with God | Israel's Unfaithfulness | Israel's Whoredom | Marriage Analogy | Marriage Covenant
The book of Hosea's dominant theme is Israel's faithlessness. Hosea is especially creative in his use of metaphors to describe the relationship between Israel and God, but the two dominant ones are suggested in this verse. The primary one is Israel as a faithless wife, and the secondary one is Israel as a rebellious child (rebelling against God's law). Harlotry indicates sexual wantonness. If the person committing harlotry were married, it would suggest extreme faithlessness to his or her vows of marriage. In a spiritual covenant relationship with God, however, it indicates idolatry.
In tandem with the metaphors regarding Israel, the prophet uses two main family-relationship themes. In the first, God is shown as a faithful Husband, and in the second, as a loving and longsuffering Parent. In each case, Israel is faithless in carrying out responsibilities within the relationship, which God calls adultery and harlotry. God's judgment was occasioned by Israel departing from duties agreed to in a contract, the Covenant.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Seventh CommandmentRelated Topics: Adultery | God as Faithful Husband | God as Long-Suffering Parent | Idolatry | Israel as a Faithless Wife | Israel's Adultery | Israel's Faithlessness | Israel's Harlotry | Israel's Idolatry | Israel's Rebelliousness | Israel's Relationship with God | Israel's Unfaithfulness | Seventh Commandment | Spiritual Adultery | The Seventh Commandment
The basis of God's accusation and judgment against the people of Israel is their special relationship. From the beginning of His dealings with them, God has stressed their higher responsibility because of their knowledge of Him (Deuteronomy 4:5-10).
As used here, known can be cognitive, involving the thinking process, or it can be relational, indicating experience with someone else. The word is used in this latter sense in Genesis 4:1: "Adam knew Eve his wife." He had an intimate, caring relationship with her. So with God. Of all the world's nations, He had been intimate only with Israel, watching over and caring for her in a very personal way (Ezekiel 16:1-14). Israel was so dear to Him that He called her "the apple of His eye" (Deuteronomy 32:10)!
John W. Ritenbaugh
Prepare to Meet Your God! (The Book of Amos) (Part One)
God entered into no other like relationship with any other nation or people in all the history of mankind.
A person may have many friends, many family members, many business, fraternal, and professional relationships, but the biblical standard for marriage is one spouse until death. The relationship God entered into with Israel—and now with us—involved an intimacy normally associated only within marriage. Yes, God had relationships with other nations and people, but none even close to what He entered into with Israel and us. We are favored with gifts greater than any other nation or people because of that intimacy. Our judgment is therefore sterner.
Perhaps the greatest gift of all is the revelation of God Himself and the knowledge of His purpose and how to live life at its fullest. But because of these gifts, Israel's responsibility and deviancy were also the greatest on earth. This is the basis for understanding Israel to be the Great Whore of the Bible.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Beast and Babylon (Part Seven): How Can Israel Be the Great Whore?Related Topics: Great Harlot | Great Whore | Israel as Great Whore | Israel as Harlot | Israel as Prostitute | Israel's Capriciousness | Israel's Faithlessness | Israel's Fickleness | Israel's Immorality | Israel's Privileged Position | Israel's Rejection of God | Israel's Relationship with God | Israel's Unfaithfulness | Israel's Worldliness | Marriage Analogy | Marriage Covenant
Essentially, Jesus tells them that Israel had had its chance but had failed miserably. He would now create a nation that would be worthy of entering His Kingdom, a people who would produce the fruits that prove they would follow His laws and keep His covenant. This is similar to what He, as the God of the Old Testament, had said to ancient Israel in II Kings 17, Isaiah 50, Jeremiah 3, Ezekiel 16, and Hosea 2, where He declares He was putting them away. No longer would He be Israel's Husband.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Why Israel? (Part One)
We begin to see a major reason why God chose to provide salvation as He has. In short, He feels that more can be produced toward His purpose by doing it this way than by Him entering into another covenant with another group of people.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Covenants, Grace, and Law (Part Eleven)
If we see things happening within the body of Christ, the Old Testament is a great reservoir of instruction regarding God's relationship with those who have made a covenant with Him.
God faithfully recorded the way the Israelites acted and reacted to Him, as well as the way He reacted to them. He had people like Moses, Samuel, David, and Ezra to write these things down. When the time came for His Son to come, die for the sins of the world, and start the church, His people had at their fingertips all the instruction they needed to find out what was happening, why, and what to do about it.
John W. Ritenbaugh
What Is the Work of God Now? (Part Two)
We need to expand our thinking on the word "earth" and understand that it figuratively, metaphorically, represents all of creation. It is not just the earth, the orb that is spinning around through space on its appointed path, but all of the things that are on the earth. Above all, it refers to mankind, which lives on the earth.
God says He will destroy those who destroy the creation, and that includes themselves. When man does that, he is telling God that we do not appreciate what He has given us. We have a love of beauty without the love of doing what is right in order to maintain correctly what He has given to us.
By far and away, the most important abuse in all of creation deals with man's relationships with God and fellow man. We abuse our relationships because we do not love righteousness along with beauty. Rather than dressing and keeping the relationships through a love of righteousness, we use and abuse them, too.
We can see this in the divorce rate. People do not get divorces because they love one another. It is because one or the other spouse, or both, have abused the relationship. So the marriage, which was created by God to be the environment in which His spiritual creation would be carried out, is destroyed! Again, God is going to destroy those who destroy the earth, His creation.
The basic reason this occurs is addressed in I John. It is the lack of love for God and of God that is causing this. Loving God is a choice that is open to all Christians. If one does not consider God beautiful and choose to love Him, the only alternative is self-centeredness.
We turn our love in on ourselves, and instead of seeking to please God within a relationship with Him, we instead choose unrighteousness or sin, abusing the relationship between Him and us. All love for fellow man begins first with the love for God. This is why I John tells us it is impossible to love man without loving God first.
We must start thinking about what are we doing in our lives to build our relationship with God, because that relationship is salvation! Is God beautiful to us? Is God's way beautiful to us? If it is not, the self-centeredness will lead to abuse. Self-centeredness is the hallmark of worldliness.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Laodiceanism
In the past, we have been taught that this refers to the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, does this truly refer only to a church, or is it something more politically, economically, and militarily powerful and influential? Notice her identification contains the name "Mystery." (I Corinthians 2:7-9 also uses this term.)
A biblical mystery is something that God must reveal for one to understand. It is not something right on the surface that anybody looking into Revelation can stumble across and quickly understand. This Woman's identification is not something easily seen. Of "mystery," William Barclay's The Letters to the Corinthians says: "The Greek word musterion means something whose meaning is hidden from those who have not been initiated, but crystal clear to those who have" (p. 26). Thus, commentaries are of virtually no help in identifying the Woman of these chapters.
Protestant biblical commentators pay little or no attention to the end-time twelve tribes of Israel. To them, that Israel does not exist! Conversely, evangelical writers and a few mainstream groups focus exclusively on the tiny nation of Israel in the Middle East. However, the Mystery Woman of Revelation 17 and 18 is much more than what that nation displays.
Commentators wholly disregard God's promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to make Israel into a populous, powerhouse nation both physically and spiritually—promises that affect both race and grace. Ignoring the race aspect altogether, they teach that the promises of grace were fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
However, God, as a blessing to His church, revealed the knowledge of the end-time location of Israel to Herbert Armstrong through other men who were seeking to find the "lost ten tribes." God did this so the church can make better sense of what is happening regarding the fulfillment of prophecy as the return of Christ approaches. In Daniel 12:10, God promises that the wise would understand, and the wise are those who keep the ways of the Lord (Hosea 14:9).
Almost all Protestants claim, as Herbert Armstrong did, that the Woman is the Roman Catholic Church, against which they have a prejudice. But Revelation 17 and 18 are a continued revelation of the same Woman, Israel, who appears in chapter 12!
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Beast and Babylon (Part Five): The Great HarlotRelated Topics: Babylon | Babylon as a Spiritual Entity | Babylon as a Woman | Babylon as a World Power | Babylon as Israel | Babylon the Great | Babylon, End-Time | Babylonish System | Covenant Relationship | Covenant, Rejecting God's | Great Harlot | Great Whore | Israel | Israel as Babylon | Israel as Great Whore | Israel as Harlot | Israel as Prostitute | Israel as Woman | Israel's Apostasy | Israel's Faithlessness | Israel's Immorality | Israel's Rebelliousness | Israel's Rejection of God | Israel's Rejection of God's Law | Israel's Relationship with God | Israel's Unfaithfulness | Israel's Worldliness | Jerusalem as Sodom and Egypt | Mother of Harlots | Musterion | Mystery | Woman as Symbol | Woman as Symbol of Israel | Woman as Symbol of System of Beliefs | Woman as Symbol of Babylon | Woman in Revelation 12 | Woman of Revelation 17-18 | Woman Riding the Beast