Ephesians 4:3-6; One Father, part 6 – Fatherhood of God to Israel and summary of our passage.

Tuesday June 15, 2021

Our Father in heaven is Sovereign. He couldn’t be Sovereign if He wasn’t all powerful, or omnipotent, which He also states of Himself. “Omnipotence is not a name given to the sum of all power, but an attribute of a personal God whom we Christians believe to be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and of all who believe in Him to life eternal. The worshiping man finds this knowledge a source of wonderful strength for his inner life. His faith rises to take the great leap upward into the fellowship of Him who can do whatever He wills to do, for whom nothing is hard or difficult because He possesses power absolute.” [Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy]

By faith, we have to tap into God’s infinite power. Daily faith rest and prayer, walking through the day under the knowledge of our Father who can do whatever He wills and has our highest and best in mind.

A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, was approaching middle age and became broken in health. He was deeply despondent, and ready to quit the ministry, when he chanced to hear a negro spiritual: Nothing is too hard for Jesus, No man can work like Him. It’s message pierced him and after some time alone with God he arose to his feet completely cured and eventually founded one of the largest foreign missionary societies in the world.

Fatherhood to Israel – God as the redeemer, deliverer, provider of an adopted nation, the family of Abraham.

God’s Fatherhood of Israel was not through the regeneration of the individual by the Holy Spirit as it is in the church. In the church, God adopts individuals who believe in Christ and the Holy Spirit enters them into Christ, into His body. The body of Christ calls God Father and they are composed of believers all over the world, whether they attend a church of not. Israel’s sonship is based upon their physical birth into the nation. So God calls Israel His son, but the nation contained unbelievers. As Christ made very clear, their physical birth did not guarantee eternal life. Eternal life is only in Him. As Abraham believed God so everyone in Israel had that choice, but all could call Yavah Elohim their nation’s Founder or Creator.

Arnold Fruchtenbaum in his book Israelology writes this in reference to the election of Israel. “In dealing with the concept of election, a distinction must be made between individual election and national election. The former is soteriological and results in salvation of the individual. This type of election extends to both Jewish and Gentile individuals and any person who has ever believed, either Jew or Gentile, was the object of God’s individual election. However, the concern of Israelology is national election because only Israel was called an elect nation. National election does not guarantee the salvation of every individual within the nation since only individual election can do that. Nor does national election guarantee the physical salvation of every member of the nation. What national election does guarantee is that God’s purposes for choosing the nation will be accomplished and that the elect nation will always survive das a distinct entity. It guarantees the physical salvation of the nation and, in the case of Israel, even a national salvation. It is the national election of Israel that is the basis of Israel’s status as the Chosen People.”

When Fruchtenbaum states that Israel is guaranteed a national salvation, he means that the nation will be established on earth in fulfillment of God’s covenants to her. That does not mean that every child of Abraham will be saved.

The purpose of their election was that they should be unto God as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exo 19:6). As we know, they failed at this, but at the Second Coming of Christ, fulfilling the covenants made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they will be what God desired them to be.

Exo 4:22-23

Then you shall say to Pharaoh, 'Thus says the Lord," Israel is My son, My first-born. 23 So I said to you, 'Let My son go, that he may serve Me'; but you have refused to let him go. Behold, I will kill your son, your first-born."'"

Deu 32:5-9

“They have acted corruptly toward Him,

They are not His children, because of their defect;

But are a perverse and crooked generation.

6 Do you thus repay the Lord,

O foolish and unwise people?

Is not He your Father who has bought you?

He has made you and established you.

7 Remember the days of old,

Consider the years of all generations.

Ask your father, and he will inform you,

Your elders, and they will tell you.

8 When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,

When He separated the sons of man,

He set the boundaries of the peoples

According to the number of the sons of Israel.

9 For the Lord's portion is His people;

Jacob is the allotment of His inheritance.”

To Israel, as the church, Father and Redeemer are synonymous terms.

Isa 63:17

For Thou art our Father, though Abraham does not know us, And Israel does not recognize us. Thou, O Lord, art our Father, Our Redeemer from of old is Thy name.

Isa 64:8

But now, O Lord, Thou art our Father,

We are the clay, and Thou our potter;

And all of us are the work of Thy hand.

God the Father called them and created them like a potter and they are the clay.

Mal 2:10

“Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously each against his brother so as to profane the covenant of our fathers?”

Hos 11:1-4

When Israel was a youth I loved him,

And out of Egypt I called My son.

2 The more they called them,

The more they went from them;

They kept sacrificing to the Baals

And burning incense to idols.

3 Yet it is I who taught Ephraim to walk,

I took them in My arms;

But they did not know that I healed them.

4 I led them with cords of a man, with bonds of love,

And I became to them as one who lifts the yoke from their jaws;

And I bent down and fed them.