Sermon Illustrations on Israel
Background
The Land of Israel
The land of Israel is a small country. You can walk its length, north to south, in a few days, and from its central mountains you can see its lateral boundaries, the sea to the west and the river to the east. But it has had an importance out of all proportion to its size. Empires have fought over it.
Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of it as the natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead. There are many places which, once beautiful, are now battered and mangled with the legacies of war. And yet it has remained a beautiful land, still producing grapes and figs, milk and honey.
N.T. Wright and Michael Bird, The New Testament in Its World, Zondervan Academic, 2019, pp. 57-58.
Location, Location, Location
As in buying real estate, three principles are crucial to understanding a person’s words: location, location, and location. We cannot make sense of what someone says unless we understand the context in which his or her words were uttered.
To use the real estate comparison, Jesus—in his speaking—did not just move into an empty part of town and begin to build all the houses himself. He moved into a neighborhood already built up: in fact, one that had been occupied for many centuries by the same people—his people, the Jews.
Meeting Face to Face with God
While many world religions worship gods in temples, Israel’s claim was unique. Theirs wasn’t simply a consecrated center for worship; it was a meeting place where the Lord of the creation actually met face-to-face with humans. G. K. Beale points out that much of the language that describes the temple echoes descriptions of life in the garden.
The continuity is no accident: these two places serve the same purpose. The garden was meant to be the hub of worship, a meeting place wherein the goodness of creation was gathered up and offered to God in the perfect lives of Adam and Eve. Outside the garden was the wilderness, an unkempt place that Adam and his children would ultimately subdue and fill, incorporating it all in the worshiping life of Eden.
The temple is a redemptive step toward restoring all that was lost when Adam and Eve fell. Here, God will meet again with his people (under profoundly different conditions), and they’ll serve as a beacon to the nations, a ringing invitation for the broken world to return to worshiping its Maker.
Rather than subduing and filling the uninhabited wilderness of a perfect world, Israel is charged with subduing the populated wilderness of a fallen world, where Satan and the sons of men collude in a project of death and decay. Through Israel, God means to turn back that project and shine light into the darkness of the world, and that light’s bright epicenter is the temple.
Taken from Rhythms of Grace by Mike Cosper, © 2013, pp.52-53. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Patrilineal & Patrilocal Life in Ancient Israel
The term patrilineal has to do with tracing ancestral descent (and therefore tribal affiliation and inheritance) through the male line. In Israel the possessions of a particular lineage were carefully passed down through the generations, family by family, according to gender and birth order, in order to provide for the family members to come and to preserve “the name” of those gone before.
The genealogies of the Old Testament make this legal structure obvious—women are typically not named. When women are named, something unusual is afoot and we should be asking why. A woman might be named in a genealogy if a man had several wives who each had sons, as is the case with Jacob and Esau’s genealogies in Genesis 35 and Genesis 36. A woman might be named in the rare and extreme cases in which she might inherit land or goods (Num 26:33; 27:1-11; cf. Num 36:1-12; Josh 17:3-6). But most often, women are named when the biblical writer has something to say.
The term patrilocal has to do with the living space of the family unit which, as we have come to expect, was built around the oldest living male. Corresponding to the make-up of the bêt ʾāb as an extended family, the architectural structure in which the Israelite family lived was not so much a house as it was a compound.
Nuclear families were housed in individual units which were clustered together within a larger, walled enclosure, and this living space was also known as the bêt ʾāb. The integration of data gathered via archaeology, modern ethnographic study and the biblical text leaves us with a surprisingly clear picture of this Israelite family compound.
Here the individual dwelling places circled a shared courtyard in which the necessary domestic chores were carried out by family members. At any given daytime hour, one might find the women of the household in this courtyard grinding grain into flour, preparing food or baking bread in the standard domed oven known as a tannûr; all of this was done with the small children close at hand.
A pergola of grapevines for the family’s use and animals who had been brought in from the fields to be watered and housed would also be typical courtyard residents. At day’s end the family would regather within the security of the walled compound for the evening meal and sleep.
The individual dwelling units of the Israelite bêt ʾāb are especially characteristic of Israelite culture and are so consistent in their design that they have come to be known as the “four-room, pillared house.” In the States, you might call them the “two-bedroom Cape” of the average Israelite neighborhood. In a rural setting, the houses might be free standing, but frequently (especially in more crowded, urban settings) these houses were more like townhomes—sharing their exterior walls, with their rear walls sometimes doing double-duty as the wall around the compound and/or village.
Taken from The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament by Sandra L. Richter Copyright (c) 2008 by Sandra L. Richter. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Stories
Mark Twain & The Ruthless Businessman
A businessman known for his ruthlessness, arrogance, and religiosity told Mark Twain that before he died he intended to visit the Holy Land, climb Mount Sinai, and read the Ten Commandments aloud. ‘I have a better idea,’ Twain replied. ‘Just stay here in Boston and keep them!’ We’d rather cogitate on what we don’t know, than act on what we know we need to do.
Source Unknown
Analogies
Location, Location, Location
As in buying real estate, three principles are crucial to understanding a person’s words: location, location, and location. We cannot make sense of what someone says unless we understand the context in which his or her words were uttered.
To use the real estate comparison, Jesus—in his speaking—did not just move into an empty part of town and begin to build all the houses himself. He moved into a neighborhood already built up: in fact, one that had been occupied for many centuries by the same people—his people, the Jews.
Humor
Buried in the Holy Land?
A man went on vacation to the Holy Land with his wife and her mother. While in Israel, the mother-in-law died from a heart attack. The couple went to a local undertaker, who explained that they could either ship the body home which would cost more than $1500, or they could bury her right there in the Holy Land for only $150.
The man said, “We’ll ship her home. “Surprised, the undertaker responded, “Are you sure? That’s an awfully big expense, and we can do a very nice burial here. “The man said, “Look, 2000 years ago they buried a guy here and three days later He rose from the dead. I just can’t take that chance.”
Source Unknown
Mark Twain & The Ruthless Businessman
A businessman known for his ruthlessness, arrogance, and religiosity told Mark Twain that before he died he intended to visit the Holy Land, climb Mount Sinai, and read the Ten Commandments aloud. ‘I have a better idea,’ Twain replied. ‘Just stay here in Boston and keep them!’ We’d rather cogitate on what we don’t know, than act on what we know we need to do.
Source Unknown
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