"Christ the Lord," Indeed!

Jeremiah 23:7–8 “So then, the days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when people will no longer say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’ but they will say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the descendants of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.’ Then they will live in their own land.”

If you’ve been following the news in the world of fiction, you know that best-selling author, Anne Rice, known for her vampire novels, now states publicly her belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. She states it right out there for God and everybody to see on her web site. And when I shot her an e-mail to tell her I planned to play a CD of her testimony (thanks to Barney and Karen Giesen for sending it) and discuss it with my seminary writing students, she wrote right back.

Want to know what was and is a big deal for Anne Rice? She couldn’t get over the miracle of the Jewish nation.

About ten years ago when I attended the board meeting of a non-profit organization, the Jewish members told me they could generally tell simply by looking at people whether they were Jew or Gentile. “Somehow” the descendants of Jacob have managed to retain so much of their Jewishness in far away lands for two millennia that they are still recognizable as such. What other people group has been re-gathered from all over the world to re-form their nation after two thousand years?

Twice in Jeremiah’s book in the Hebrew Bible we read that Israel in Jeremiah’s future will be known not as “the nation brought up from Egypt” but as “the nation gathered from the far corners of the earth.” And here they are—having been handed the keys to Jerusalem by the British in 1948, inhabiting Israel once again.

What? Several thousand years after they’re scattered, they return to become a nation again?

Who could have predicted that?