The God of Everyone
And many peoples will come and say, “Come, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; so that He may teach us about His ways, and that we may walk in His paths.” For the law will go out from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Isaiah 2:3 NASB
Many peoples – The eschatological emphasis of this verse and the next introduces something new into the paradigm of Israel’s faith, namely, God is the God of everyone. You might have thought that this was always true. If God is the creator of all humanity, then He is everyone’s God. But most of the Hebrew Bible doesn’t portray Him that way. He is exclusively Israel’s God. His covenant is with the chosen people—Israel. If you want to be connected to Him, you need to become part of His people—Israel. In fact, until the pre-exilic prophets there is hardly any mention of God’s actions with non-Israelite groups. Of course, there are some hints. Nineveh, Cyrus, even Egypt are folded into God’s purposes, but the focus is Israel. Kaufmann writes:
Monumental testimony to the conception of YHWH as a universal God of justice and morality is the fact that purely moral questions, unrelated to the destiny of Israel, are always discussed against non-Israelite background. This is the case with the early legends of Genesis, the story of Sodom, the book of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, the sapiential psalms, the book of Jonah, and Ezekiel 14:13-20. Since in biblical thought such questions were essentially bound up with the view of God, this means that the idea of YHWH as a universal judge was primary and ancient.[1]
Until now. Now the Hebrew ʿammim describes God’s universal intention. rabbim (many) doesn’t mean “some of a larger group.” Here it means “multitude.” All the nations of the earth. Suddenly the evangelistic character of God’s involvement with Israel becomes quite clear. Yehezkel Kaufmann contrasts the thinking of Torah (the Pentateuch) and the prophets: “At the end of days all men shall worship YHWH. In contrast, the faith of the Torah sees no end to his division [Israel and the nations]. It has no dream of a universal kingdom of YHWH at the end of days, nor does it look for the end of idolatry.”[2]
This has some important implications.
The universalism of prophecy is eschatological; for the present, it could fulfil its task of speaking on behalf of YHWH only in Israel. Accordingly, no missionary tendency is to be found in biblical religion. No prophet was ever sent to preach monotheism to the nations. The task of being ‘a witness’ to the nations (Isa. 55:4) is the people’s; through Israel, the name of God will be made known to men. Israel, then, is sent to the nations; the prophet is sent only to Israel. So deeply rooted was this idea that even Jesus, who considered himself an apostle of God, declares himself sent only ‘to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt. 15:21-8; cf. Mark 7:27).[3]
In this sense, Israel itself is the Messiah. It is to act in such a way that all men are aware of God’s call upon them. It is to demonstrate holiness and grace in the world. It is to be the intercessor between God and the nations. And its actions are to show that “History is one, and it moves toward the kingdom of God, when idolatry will be utterly cut off.”[4]
When the Church appropriated the title “the New Israel” to itself, it adopted an evangelical role that God had assigned to Israel. Its presumption of manifest destiny has interfered with God’s purposes for His chosen people, so much so that evangelism has ceased to be a recognized goal of Israel at large. Isaiah’s vision will not come about because the Church brings the salvation message to the world. That isn’t the purpose of eschatological universalism. The purpose is for Israel to bring the world to the God of the Torah, and until then swords will not be beaten into plows. Zionism is a philosophy of national protection, not national outreach.
Topical Index: universalism, evangelism, Torah, people, nations, Isaiah 2:3
[1] Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, p. 297.
[2] Ibid., p. 164.
[3] Ibid., p. 214.
[4] Ibid., p. 359.
“Zionism is a philosophy of national protection, not national outreach.”
True. Yet it is national only because its ground is the history of the covenant of God’s eternal purpose of love and fellowship whereby God in his grace bound himself with a particular people for the continuation and preservation of the creation that was directed by the fulfillment of that covenant in the order of redemption. In this relationship the purposed (yet utterly contingent) coexistence of God with the world as his own creation was preserved through the exercise of God’s mighty acts, “redemptively” and graciously effecting its preservation through Israel as he freely made himself present to Israel.
“In the fulness of time” God sent out his Son, “born of a woman, born under the law,” in whom the fulness of deity was embodied, “because God was well pleased for all the fullness to dwell on him.” This was that we (all mankind) might “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, in order that [we too] may be filled up to all the fullness of God.”
“The purpose is for Israel to bring the world to the God of the Torah, and until then swords will not be beaten into plows.”
Indeed… God does not abandon the world… not to blind chance, or determinist law, impersonal necessity, or any other irrationality or malevolent forces. Rather, he correlates his utterly free acts of his work and operations as Creator and Redeemer correspondingly through our personal relations with him by which he makes everything to serve his ultimate purpose of love and fellowship with himself. “By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God sent his one and only Son into the world in order that we may live through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:9-10)