Question:  Dear Greg,

            So many friends of mine say we need to be good to the nation of Israel because God tells us to.  I side with Israel in the war going on over there now, but is Israel any more God’s friend than any other nation?

            Thanks,

            Ron

Answer:  Dear Ron,

            According to the new covenant, we are all one in Christ (Galatians 3:28).  Christ has broken down the “dividing wall of hostility” (see Ephesians 2:11-22) in the old covenant worship of God that had Jews as the special people of God and all other peoples as “gentiles”.  The Christian worldview is that Jesus accepts us all—color, gender, race and creed not being an issue.  The king and the pauper, the rich man and the poor man, the child and the aged, the powerful and the weak, the male and the female, the sick and the healthy—we are all his children, all able to come to him.  The cross of Christ leveled the playing field—we all have equal opportunity to come to him, and as Paul tells us, “God does not show favoritism” (Romans 2:11).  That teaching and that lesson were powerfully given in the vision given to Peter and the conversion of Cornelius (see especially Acts 11:34-35).  That vision invites Peter to eat animal flesh deemed “unclean” by old covenant dietary laws to enforce the power of what the cross had done.

            So we should avoid assuming that God loves Israel more than he does the Arab peoples.  Such a view is grounded in politics more than it is in biblical Christianity.

            In Christ,

            Greg Albrecht