“All flesh is grass…the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” Isaiah 40:6-8
We have inherited a priceless Scroll that was paid for dearly by its custodians, has survived the fires and the persecutions of a very long history, the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jerusalem, the lions in the arenas and the gas chambers and murders of the Nazi and Communist perversions of man as the image of God, a Scroll which gives us a very good idea of who and why we should love, and how we should exercise our freedoms. But Freedom is like love, when you abuse it you lose it, which is what is unraveling in the USA as we speak, and could become worse as the entire planet is being shaken in our days.
That Scroll has been called the Word of God. From that Scroll was poured the solid foundations of the free world, based on the principle that it is God who endows certain unalienable rights, including free will to choose, and requires human behavior to respect certain parameters to maintain a healthy society. The founders of the Great Experiment of America knew well those principles.
The Scroll is an unrolling progressive vision with a beginning, an outworking, and an end. That end not as a cessation, but as a finale and an objective, which is hope and renewal of all Creation. Its scriptures speak of a purpose and a defining line dividing between good and evil, right and wrong, clean and unclean, indeed between Life and death.
The Jews were chosen and entrusted with the Scroll and its contents, with the historic mission of living according to it and bringing its light into a fallen and darkened world, pronouncing that there is but one living Creator of all. It was a challenging message to carry into an overwhelming world of the jealous multi-gods of the cruel paganism of great and powerful civilizations, as well as the ever-changing knowledge of science, philosophy, and politics. But that scroll and its message can be a heavy burden to bear, as was the Roman cross carried by the Rabbi from Nazareth, of the tribe of Judah. And yet it was he whose life carried the message of the Scroll beyond the boundaries of Israel to the ends of the Earth.
In the bound pages of the Scroll it is written of the messengers, the House of Israel – the Jews – as the living witnesses of YHVH in this world, bearing in them His covenants and promises , including the work of Yeshua of Nazareth, the Jewish Messiah. Though a very small people, and having been decimated many times and driven from nation to nation they, against the odds and the currents, once again are now back after nearly two millennia in the Land of Promise according to the covenants and promises of YHVH. And they still carry that Hebrew Scroll, the most ancient of which was discovered waiting two thousand years their return in a cave by the Dead Sea in 1947, in which is written their history and their destiny. ‘For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable’ (Romans 11:29).