Well, let's pray again, and then we'll start with the study. Father, I pray as always, I understand our weakness, I know. it to be a weakness in myself as well. Our sense of the richness and the preciousness, the glory of your church. It's so easily lost upon us. It's so easily minimized in our thinking, in our understanding, certainly in the orientation of our days and our hearts. But it is truly the fullness of him who fills all in all. And Father, I know I've said it many times, but it is so importantly true that your intent was never to save a bunch of individual people to have their souls go off to heaven, but your intent was to build a human community, a human organism that is the fullness of the Messiah himself. So that through that human community, you might manifest and carry out your own loving and wise lordship over the works of your hands. You do not save us to go off individually to a distant, ethereal place. You make us stones in Christ, the living stone to be built into a spiritual house. That as the new Abrahamic family, the new people of the last Adam, that we will inhabit and joyfully rule over this world, this creation that you love so much, that you made very good. Father, give us that sort of vision. Give us that sense of even our relation with one another. Help us to move beyond the notions of individuality and personal lives with you, personal salvation, to see The glory of being a part of a work that sums up everything in the heavens and the earth in Jesus, our Lord. Help us to recognize and to understand that in your spirit, we are truly members of one another. And as members of one another, we are members of Christ. The Christ who is one is the Christ who is many. The one Christ has many members in whom he has his fullness. And we together individually members of Christ are together that fullness. I pray that you will help us in this time of consideration to see the glory that is your church, the mystery that was hidden for ages and generations but has now been made manifest through the apostles, through the prophets, but most specifically through the outpouring of the spirit at Pentecost and the beginning of a new household of faith determined by the principle of all things in common, one heart, one mind, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of us all, one spirit. So bless us in this time, build up each according to his faith, build us up together into Christ our Lord, for it's for his sake that we pray these things, amen. Well, as I said last time, we talked about Pentecost and really as the climax of this thing I'm calling the Christ event. And when I use that expression, I'm referring to everything that began with the incarnation through the life of Jesus, through his passion, his ministry, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his enthronement at the right hand of God. Pentecost brings that whole Christ event to its climax, and Jesus spoke in that way. Even as his disciples were lamenting and really struggling to come to grips with the fact that he was going to be dying and leaving them, he said, it's necessary and good that I go. Unless I go, the Comforter will not come. But when I go, I will send him to you, and in that way, I will return to you. And I will take you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also. In that day, you will understand that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me, and you are in me. And my Father and I will come and make our abode with you. We will dwell with you, because I send you the Spirit. And through the Spirit now, you will inhabit that place, of your eternal habitation, as Paul said, seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. And then through the Spirit, you will be witnesses of me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. And in that way, through you, the Spirit will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. So Jesus very much made Pentecost the climax, the apex of his own the goal towards which his own sacrificial death was moving. And I think so often, certainly in my experience, having been in the faith many, many years, we tend as Christians to minimize Pentecost. It's not really on our radar that much, or if it is, it tends to be more in certain circles where Pentecostals, or people who are all about the gifts of the Spirit and speaking in tongues, and they want to use Pentecost as simply a historical proof text for the fact that, yes, we should be speaking in tongues and praying for that gift of the Spirit. But apart from that, it tends to not really be that big of a deal in our thinking, and it really does need to be, because it's through the lens of Pentecost that we understand this thing called the Christian faith, the Christian life, compositely in terms of this thing of the Church. in the forming of a new human family. And this becomes important in all of the kinds of questions that are very much even in the forefront today. How do we think about the church in relation to Israel? We have a whole swath of Americans, Christians and otherwise, who are of this notion that we defend the people of Israel at all costs because if we bless Abraham, we'll be blessed, right? We do whatever it takes to contend for the Jews because they're the people of God. Or there are other views that basically say, okay, well, ancient Israel, Israel up to the time of Christ was the church. and all that the church is is just the same basic phenomenon now on this side of Jesus' coming. But Israel and the church are two dimensions of the same reality, the people of God. How does the church understand itself in relation to the Jew-Gentile question, to the multiplicity and unity question? All of these things are a part of even contemporary thought. in contemporary questions that we often face as Christians as well. So I think that this is very foundational and hopefully as we move forward in the coming weeks we'll have a better framework for even thinking about how to address those sorts of questions, not only in our own minds but maybe even to those who raise them. So Pentecost becomes very, very important in terms of this thing of testifying to Jesus' enthronement. When he goes to the Father, he sends forth the Spirit. And that's because, again, through this, as I said last time, through Pentecost comes the formal establishing of a kingdom. A kingdom has a ruler, but it has subjects. There are sons of the kingdom. And what Pentecost shows is that these subjects will be loyal, they will be devoted citizens, devoted subjects of the king but as his brethren. The Spirit sits at the center of this new collection of people who are citizens of the kingdom and especially in terms of their relationship with the King himself. They are sons of the Father by being sons in the Son, bound together as mutual shares in Jesus' life and likeness by the renewing, transforming power of the Spirit, who now acts as the Spirit of Jesus. Remember, Paul said to the Romans, we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if any man does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, then though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is alive because of righteousness. Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, Christ himself. The spirit of Yahweh, the spirit of God who was in the midst of Israel has now, in the light of the Christ event, become functionally the spirit of Jesus. The spirit who forms a new community, who binds them to God, who binds them together, who makes them brethren, who makes them brethren of the Messiah, sons in the Son. And so this thing of Pentecost shows us that God's work of renewal, God's work of liberation, of gathering to himself a people was going to be something different than what Israel had expected. This was going to be a unity, a community that would not be defined by any human or natural considerations. If you think about that, that is something that's never existed in the history of the world. What forms human societies or cultures or communities? Well, I'm a member of the Elks Club, right? Or I'm a member of this group, or I'm an American, or I'm a this, or I'm a Chiefs fan, or whatever things cause us to be associated with one another. They're always based on something under the sun. This is my family. This is my background. This is my city. This is my community. This is the college I went to. I'm an alumnus of this, right? And now you have a community that's defined by none of that. Not ethnicity, not gender, not biology, not culture, not language, not dress. And that was a radical thing, certainly in terms of Israel's own expectation of what was coming, and what it would mean for God to restore His covenant people. So that's the sense, even as I alluded last time, that Pentecost is God's final answer to Babel. We considered the Tower of Babel last time, where God took a human unity, men saying, we can all come together and united and of one heart and mind, there's nothing that we can't accomplish. And God said, you will never be of one heart and mind in truth. You might have a common agenda that's under your own designs of self-aggrandizement, but you will never be truly united in a human sense under the sun. And he testified to that by what? Scattering mankind and confusing their language. He imposed and enforced division and separateness, a fracturing of the human race. That's the explanation for nations and language and cultures and peoples who are distinct and differentiated from one another. But God's intent was at a future time to bring mankind back together. but not by giving them a common language. And that's what you see at Pentecost. What they're united by is their embrace of the mighty works of God in the Messiah, but each hearing of that and embracing it in his own language, according to his own culture, right? That's what's happening at Pentecost. God forming a new kind of unified humanity, not by giving them all the same language. but by giving them a common, united bond of faith in the Messiah. And what flows out of that is what Luke talks about at the end of chapter two. All of them were together, filled with awe, filled with joy, having all things in common. And as I've commented before, that idea of all things in common doesn't mean they were communists. It means that they were upon the same, bound by the same purposes, intent, love, sense of their community, sense of their purpose, sense of what their lives were really about. And that caused them to be sharers of their material goods. They were upon the same, epito alto, same mind, same heart, same longing, same purposes. So Pentecost, as I said, has crucial implications for understanding the promise that we saw God building throughout the Israelite history in the Old Testament scriptures that he was going to one day arise and he was going to end Israel's exile. He was going to end the alienation, end the estrangement, bring about liberation, restore them from exile, gather them back, restore the covenant, bring forgiveness, cleansing, and he would once again take his place in their midst. And Pentecost showed that God had done exactly what he had pledged, but not at all according to Israel's understanding and expectation. This was something they didn't expect, but it was exactly what God had had in mind all along. He was restoring Israel for the sake of its election, its ministration to the nations, but in a most astonishing way, in a completely unto a completely unexpected outcome. So I want to consider this thing then of the sons of the kingdom. How are they identified? What do we see Pentecost doing in terms of showing this restoration to be what God had promised but in a way that nobody was expecting? As Paul said, the mystery of the church, hidden for ages and generations. So first of all, what did Israel's scriptures and Israel's history lead them to expect? Then secondly, what did Jesus begin to show the people of Israel through his own work, through his own ministration? And then finally, what did come from Pentecost and what are the implications of that? That's what I'd like for us to consider today. So hopefully through all these months as we've been going through the Old Testament, we understand at this point that Israel's history its Scriptures pointed very much towards what God had promised or pointed towards what God accomplished at Pentecost, but yet there was a mystery. There was an obscurity to how this was all going to come about. God had chosen Abraham and then the descendants of Abraham for the sake of bringing his blessing to all the families of the earth. And God promised that when he restored Israel that they would then be enabled to fulfill their purposes on behalf of the nations of the earth. But what exactly that would mean and what it would look like is what was not clear. In Israel's history from the time of Abraham, there were Gentiles who came into the covenant household, but it was always by becoming proselytes to Judaism. I say Judaism in the sense of the Mosaic covenant relationship that the Jewish people had with God. A Gentile became a part of the people of God by becoming a son of Abraham, and that looked like circumcision and Torah. a Gentile would be circumcised, have the sign of the covenant in his flesh, and he would own for himself and pledge his fidelity to Israel's God by owning Israel's covenant, Torah. That was the way in which Gentiles came into the Israelite household. You see that from the beginning even with Abraham. When God gave him the sign of circumcision, He told him to take all of the men of his household, even the ones that weren't his descendants. At that point he only had one son, Ishmael, but take these servants in your household and circumcise them. Already there was this idea that non-Israelites would be brought in. And when God took them out into the wilderness, when he gave them the Passover as the sign of their liberation and the establishing of this new relationship with him, Passover kind of served as the birth of the nation. He said the Gentiles can partake in that Passover if they are circumcised. They have to become into the household. And even as the Israelite kingdom progressed and came to its high point in David, it still involved the Gentiles. There was even an indication at that point that the kingdom of God, the kingdom as God intended, the Abrahamic kingdom, would involve Gentiles as Gentiles. The scripture says that David, through Solomon, presided over all of the lands from the Euphrates River to the River of Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea, just as God had promised Abraham. And the sons of Israel were as numerous as the stars of the sky, the sand of the seashore. That was the language of the Abrahamic Covenant. That's what God had promised the kingdom would be. Well, how did David preside over all that land all the way to the Euphrates River? He didn't annex it. He didn't turn it all into the land of Israel. He didn't convert all of those Gentiles to become Israelites. They pledged their fealty to him as Yahweh's king. They brought their tribute to him. So David ruled over the Abrahamic kingdom as a composite kingdom consisting of Jews and Gentiles. So there's a hint of where this is going even in Israel's history. The prophets themselves, as we've seen, spoke of the fact that Israel's election, Israel's being chosen by God, was that they would be the instrument of blessing to all the nations. God's intent was not just this little people called the people of Israel, but that he would make Avram, the father of a people, Avraham, the father of many peoples, Genesis 17. Abraham would become the father of many nations. So the scriptures were building the case for the fact that this was to be a global and, in some sense, a composite kingdom. But the exact nature and the outcome of Israel's work among the nations wasn't entirely clear. If you look back historically during the time of the exile, that second temple period from Babylon to the coming of the Messiah, the Jews had various views of what it would mean for them to fulfill their role when the day of Yahweh came and this day when God would return and liberate them and renew the covenant. and take his place again in their midst. What would that mean for the nations? What would that mean for their mission and their vocation? And they range all the way from the Jewish view that when God did this work of restoration for Israel, then Israel would destroy the nations. Israel would basically fill the world by conquering the Gentile peoples. The head and not the tail, right? A lesser view, but a similar view, was that Israel would rule over all the nations. Israel would become a kingdom that would be dominant in the world when God restored David's house and throne and kingdom, and they would rule over the nations all the way to the idea that the nations would somehow become parties with Israel in this restored kingdom, a la Isaiah 19 and other passages. where Assyrian Egypt will be third parties together with the House of Israel. In the first century, it seems many Jews envision Israel's restoration and Gentile mission in terms of this idea of proselytism, making proselytes, converting Gentiles to the faith and practice of Mosaic Judaism. And we'll see that more in the coming weeks, because even as this new Jewish community of believers, and I've said it many times, The first Christians were all Jews and then some proselytes, some Gentiles who were proselytes to Judaism, but it was a Jewish church. It was a sect of Judaism. And how were they approaching this idea of the Gentile mission? They were approaching it at least largely through this lens of proselytism, making proselytes. This is what we'll see Acts 15 is all about. The Judaizing thing of Jewish believers saying Gentiles have to be circumcised and bind themselves to the covenant. Keep the law. And I don't want to develop that any further today, but we've totally misunderstood what that Judaizing thing was all about. So what is this issue of the Gentiles? How do they fit into this? What does it mean when God restores the house of Israel and they begin to carry out their global mission of bringing God's blessing to the nations? What will that look like? The scriptures had said that that would take place and that was Israel's vocation, but there was a lack of clarity as to what exactly that would look like. So when Jesus comes on the scene, He makes it very clear that he has come as Israel's Messiah. I give you these couple of citations here. Matthew 15. He says, I didn't come to the nations. I came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And we say, well, wait a minute. But that was primarily first and foremost his messianic calling. The Messiah would come out of Israel for the sake of Israel. He sent out the 12 to the towns and villages of Israel and he said don't go into the towns of the Gentiles. Right. He sent the 12 out to the people of Israel with the good news. Jesus came as Israel's Messiah. He came to fulfill God's promise to the nation to end their exile secure forgiveness and cleansing and restore the covenant relationship. to the Jew first, as Paul says, but also to the Greek. Those same scriptures, as I've said, insisted that Israel's restoration was for the sake of its own election, for the sake of the fact that it was the mediator of God's blessing. These citations I give you here from Genesis, the first is directly to Abraham In you all the families of the earth will be blessed. And then after the sacrifice of Isaac because you have been faithful in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. And then the promise to Isaac in you and your descendants all the families of the earth will be blessed. And then to Jacob in you and in your descendants all the families of the earth will be blessed. And as we've seen going through the Old Testament, the prophets themselves kept building up the case for this coming messianic deliverer who would be what Israel could not. Israel had failed its sonship, it had failed its vocation. Yahweh increasingly made it clear that he was going to raise up from within Israel one who would embody Israel, one who would be the faithful son, servant, disciple, and witness through whom Israel would be saved, restored, and recovered, through whom Israel could carry out its mission, its vocation on behalf of the nations. That was the messianic work and Jesus understood it was his work. And what you see through the Gospels is that as Jesus came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, he came to understand that ultimately this messianic mission that would involve the nations was going to be fulfilled through Israel's unbelief. Remember back, this goes back many, many weeks, you may not remember, but we started in the Gospels with Jesus going into the synagogue at Nazareth. And that laid a foundation of understanding for what his whole ministration was going to be about. He goes into Nazareth in the power of the Spirit, and he makes known to them that they are going to reject him. This is the time of Israel's decision, just as it had been in the time of Elijah and Elisha. There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, but yet Elijah was sent to none of them but a widow in Zarephath and Sidon. There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha, but Elisha healed none of them, only Naaman the Syrian. And he's making it clear to them that though they're saying, heal us, he'll say, you'll say to me, physician, heal yourself. Well, you won't be healed. this is the time of decision and you will miss the day of your visitation. And so Jesus came to understand that the way in which his mission would be fulfilled was going to be through Israel's unbelief. His own people would reject him and John records this, he came to his own but his own did not receive him. And as this goes on and the unbelief and rejection of the nation increases, you see this in the gospel accounts, Jesus begins to become more clear, more overt about how the Gentiles are going to play in this work of his. I won't take the time to read these passages, but you look even in the parables. He talks about in the parable of the vineyard how the owner of the vineyard leases out the vineyard to these workers to work it. and they're supposed to bear its fruit and give back its fruit to the owner of the vineyard, but they don't. And when the owner tries to come to collect that dew, they won't give it to him. They kill and they persecute and they send away those that the owner sends to them. And he says, I'll send my son, surely they'll receive him. And when the son comes, they say, this is the heir. If we kill him, this is all ours. Jesus tells this parable to his Israelite audience and he says, what should happen to them? And they said, he should throw these out, these unworthy servants. And he says, the kingdom will be taken from you and given to those who will bear the fruit of it. In Luke 13, Lord, are only a few in Israel going to enter into your kingdom? You're the Messiah. You've come to establish the kingdom. Are only a few being delivered? Are only a few to be saved in that sense? and he said, Be very, very careful. In that day you will see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob together with the prophets. all seated at table in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves cast out. Men will come from north, south, east, and west, and take their place at table in the kingdom of God. And so the last will be first, and the first last." Jesus began to make it very clear that this was going to be taken from the sons of the kingdom, the people of Israel, and given to the nations because of their unbelief. So he was appointed to restore and reconstitute Israel in himself, but that would mean forming a new people. The nation as a whole would reject him. And at Pentecost, we see in a beginning way how it is that Jesus is going to reconstitute Israel in himself. Remember in Isaiah it said, it's not enough that you should be my servant on behalf of the remnant of Israel, but you will take my salvation to the ends of the earth. I make you a covenant of the peoples. And Pentecost is where you begin to see how it is that the Messiah will build a new people for himself. A people now who will not be sons of Abraham by genealogical descent, but they will be a part of the Abrahamic covenant household by virtue of their faith in the Messiah and their union with him. A new family for Abraham. A new Israel of God, if you will. So Israel's scriptures and the Messiah pointed towards God's intent to gather in the Gentiles when he restored his covenant people, Israel. But Pentecost showed the nature of that and the implications for the structure of the covenant household. Maybe an easy way to kind of get at this is people have said to me through the years, why would Paul say that this thing of the church was a mystery hidden for ages and generations? When throughout the Old Testament God made it clear that his intent was to have a global people and Israel's own election was for the sake of the nations. They were chosen out to be God's instrument to take his blessing to all the families of the earth. Where's this mystery? It was all very clear from the beginning. Why does Paul call it a mystery? Well, what was a mystery is what exactly that bringing in of the Gentiles in relation to the people of Israel would look like, and what are the implications for forming a new covenant community. And you may not think that that's an important consideration, but it's fundamental to the views of the church in both dispensationalism and in covenant theology or reform theology as kind of the two predominant systems in American Christianity for sure. Two different views of the Jew, Gentile, Israel church dynamic. And Pentecost is crucial to thinking through those issues and really understanding how to resolve them. So as I said, before Pentecost and for the previous 2,000 years, dating all the way back to Abraham, how did Gentiles become a part of the people of God? They did so by becoming adopted children through circumcision and owning the covenant, Torah. Torah and circumcision, Torah and circumcision. So when these Jewish Christians are saying, yes, Gentiles can come in, but they have to be circumcised, they have to bind themselves to Israel's Torah, they were only saying that this is the way it's been from the time of Abraham. They were not saying, oh, these Gentiles have to earn their salvation. We've completely misread that, largely through Luther, but other things as well. But the point is that this is how Gentiles became a part of the house of Israel. They were proselytes. But at the same time, while they were proselytes, they were never regarded by the Jews as bona fide children of Abraham. There were two categories within the people of God. There were the Jews who were the children of Abraham, and there were Gentile proselytes. and the proselytes were viewed as faithful adherents to Israel's God. They were within the community, the household of Israel, as adherents to Israel's God. They were regarded as faithful to his covenant. They were followers of the true and living God, but the Jews did not regard them or treat them as children of Abraham. They were distinct. They were separate. They were even regarded as less than the actual children. To use Paul's nomenclature, you had natural branches and wild branches. That's the way it had been for 2,000 years. Now Jesus has come as Israel's Messiah to restore Israel and to recover Israel back to God. Now, what do we do with these Gentiles who are coming to faith? How do we view them? How do we think about them? How do we treat them as followers of Yahweh, now as followers of Yahweh's Messiah? How do we think about them? This is what the early church was wrestling with. This is what the epistles are dealing with. This is what Ephesians is dealing with as we read it. So now, though, the point is with Pentecost, everything had changed. The death, the resurrection of the Messiah, as it's reached its climax in the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, now they have to rethink this whole thing of the people of God. Now you have a new definition. Messiah followers, but in and through the Spirit. A people who are defined by being joined to the Messiah, being members of him, taken up in the life of God, becoming the dwelling of God in the Spirit. A whole different way of thinking about who are the people of God and how do we view them in their multiplicity, in their diversity. So it would take many years and the growing Gentile complexion of the Messianic community for the issues and implications of that transformation to be grasped and worked through. This is what you see the early church dealing with through the first several decades, many decades, recorded even in the epistles of the New Testament. But Pentecost laid a whole new foundation. It drew a line in the sand and said, the people of God are now defined in a new way. It fulfilled God's pledge to pour out His Spirit on the house of Israel. Remember Peter cited from Joel, this is what Joel said. But that promise to pour out the Spirit on Israel was also the promise to pour out the Spirit on all mankind. Because by pouring out the Spirit on Israel, Israel would become Israel indeed and therefore able to fulfill its mission on behalf of the nations. Therefore, the outpouring of the Spirit was ultimately for the sake of all mankind. Israel's renewal in the Spirit would yield a new Abrahamic family distinguished by the Spirit. Later on in Ephesians, Paul will say, give all diligence to preserve the unity amongst you. A unity defined by what? One Spirit. One faith. one Lord, one baptism, meaning union into the Messiah, one Christ, one God and Father of us all. That unity, that unity. So the spirit of creation had now, through Messiah's triumph and exaltation, become the spirit of recreation, new creation. That recreational work having begun with Jesus and his resurrection as the first fruit of God's new creation. So that as first fruit, he's first of all the fountainhead of a new human race. He's a new Adam who has his own offspring who share in his relation to the Spirit. Remember 1 Corinthians 15. The first Adam was Succokas man. soulish man, natural man. We've shared in his likeness. The last Adam is pneumatikos man, man of the spirit. And we share now in that likeness, ultimately in our bodies in the resurrection to come. So he's the fountainhead of a new human race that shares in his life and likeness as man of the spirit, but ultimately unto the end that the whole creation should be renewed and summed up in him. This is Romans 8. This is 2 Corinthians 4, 1 Corinthians 15. When this work of the Spirit's renewal is complete, God will be all in all. So Pentecost and the outpouring of the Spirit testified to a renewal that infinitely transcended Israel's expectation of liberation, forgiveness, cleansing, and restoration. Messiah's work was not going to resuscitate the former order as they expected. It was going to inaugurate an entirely new order so that the last Adam was not just the recovery of the first Adam. And a lot of times Christians think that, that Adam, before he fell, was man as God intended him to be. Oh, now he's fallen. Oh, God's got to get us back to Eden. He's got to get us back to the garden. He's got to get us back to Adam again. But if that's the case, then Jesus as last Adam is just unfallen first Adam. And Paul says he's not just unfallen first Adam. He's man consummately. He's telic man. He's man consummately. He's man at the telos, at the completion, at the ultimacy. The first Adam was the starting point. Christ is the consummating ultimate point, man of the spirit. Adam was not man of the spirit. in the way in which I'm speaking. And as I say, these truths had profound significance for the covenant household of Israel. This Jewish community of Jesus followers, they are following the Messiah. When they embraced Jesus, these Jewish people were doing nothing except saying, this is indeed the Messiah. This is the one we've been waiting for. This is the one who has fulfilled all of God's promises to the household of Israel. That's what they were believing, that's what they were doing. But they had to rethink all of that in the light of the Messiah himself. But as I say, they're even as equally important to the church's self-understanding and practice, and how we as Christians have to approach and understand all of the questions and concerns regarding the church, ecclesiological questions and concerns. which often are framed by and even emerge from the theological systems and traditions that we grew up in. We may not think so, but we tend to read the scriptures through the glasses that we've been given. Theological glasses, traditional glasses, denominational glasses, confessional glasses. As far as the early church, Their concerns primarily focused on what it meant that Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, had liberated and restored Israel. He fulfilled their scriptures. What did that restoration then imply and demand of them with regard to the relationship between them, the Jewish followers of Jesus, and his Gentile followers? This is what we're going to examine in the coming weeks. What do we do with these Gentile followers of the Messiah? Those were primarily the questions that they had to think about through the lens of Pentecost, through the lens of the Christ event. But since that time, the Church has continued to wrestle with a lot of the same issues. Not maybe the Jew-Gentile question, although the Jew-Gentile question certainly at different times and different points in history, Even up to the modern era, there are those Gentile Christians who still want to maintain that, in the ultimate sense, the Jews are the people of God. I've known some Christians who argue that Jews ipso facto will all be saved because they are the people of God. So the Jew-Gentile question still looms large in certain traditions and has throughout history. Even at the time in the centuries leading into the Middle Ages and beyond when Jews were largely vilified and seen as having no legitimate place in the community of God. To now where Jews tend to be lionized and seen as the people of God and the nation of Israel is in many ways equated with the people of God in that way. We still wrestle with many of the same issues. different garb, perhaps different emphases. But these are the things that I hope that we'll be able to flesh out in the coming weeks. But just to close, I wanted to, since it's been a month, I wanted to close us with the bookend of where we left off last time before we closed in our final song. But this is this statement from Thomas Torrance again as he talks about the restored people of God in relation to the spirit and what is the unity that we have. How do we become one and what does that really mean? Are there still multiple tiers or levels or distinctions within the church? How do we have unity and diversity? How should we regard differences? what defines and constitutes the people of God. So this is this Torrance quote, and keep this in mind as we sing this last song then. And this is in your notes from last time if you still have those. Torrance says, the oneness of the church derives also from the Father and the Son, but also from the one Spirit of God through whom it is united to Christ. One Father, one Christ, but also one Spirit. The Spirit is the principle of multiplicity as well as unity. But He is the principle of unity in the heart and wealth of all multiplicity. We're going to talk about that in the coming weeks. What really is unity? Is unity uniformity? Or is unity set within multiplicity? He says, the spirit is the principle of unity in the heart and wealth of all multiplicity. Therefore, when the spirit came upon the church at Pentecost, binding the people of God together in one, it was the antithesis of Babel. The dividing and confounding of people gathered to glorify their own name. For at Pentecost, the ancient promises and prophecies of the healing and restoration and reunion of God's people are fulfilled as they call upon the name of God and are saved. as they are given one heart and one mind, one voice in their praise and thanksgiving to God for Jesus the Messiah, his son. Because he, the spirit, sheds abroad the love of God in the hearts of the people of God, he heals their dissensions, he restores to fellowship and unity them with one another in God. Therefore, the continuance of division in the church cannot but grieve and quench the spirit in its midst. cripple and weaken the church and destroy the roots of its communion with the life and love of God. This is what Paul was so zealous for. We'll see again in the coming weeks. The two things Paul cared about, holiness and unity, and they're two sides of the same coin. Well, let me close in prayer and then we'll end with this last song, which hopefully speaks to that idea. Let me close in prayer. Father, this is the great struggle that we have to truly become one as Father, Son, and Spirit are one. It is a great mystery. Paul says this is what was hidden for ages and generations, that this renewal would not merely see Gentiles becoming proselytes to Judaism and in some sense second-class citizens of the kingdom on the fringes but that in the Messiah you would make one new kind of man, one new human community, one new human race. sharing in the last Adam, the man of the spirit, a new community bound together as one by the shared spirit. Not Gentile converts, not Jew and Gentile together in the same kingdom, but as distinct people, but a whole new family of people. And yet one in which that unity in the spirit will still be manifest by manifold distinctions, manifold differences, even as a body has many members which are one and yet are different. Father, I pray that you will help us to think through these things, to be committed to owning them, to growing in our understanding of them, The church is the way in which the gospel is proclaimed in the world. And to the extent that the church has always struggled to understand what it is, it struggles to understand its mission. It struggles to be what it is, to bear the fragrance of Christ truthfully with all integrity. And Father, this is our calling. Our calling is not to get souls into heaven. Our calling is to manifest throughout the world the truths of the kingdom, the truths of King Jesus, the truths of a new creation, a renewal that will take everything into its grasp, centered in a new human family, a new human organism. that is the fullness of Him who fills all in all. Cause these things to be glorious in our minds. Cause us to see how there's no such thing as the independent, individual Christian life. But that as living stones in the living stone, we are built into a spiritual house, and it's in that way that we offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable and pleasing to our God. We are, as Paul said, together being built up into the dwelling of the living God in the spirit, that our God may be all in all. Cause these things to become true and important to us and give us grace and discipline and true and genuine concern to pursue them. We ask these things in Christ's name and for his sake in the world and in his church. Amen.