Have you ever wondered why, according to the Old Testament, God chose the Jewish people with whom to make His covenant? Why would a God, who loves all of us, focus on the Jewish people and ignore the rest of us? Do you find this as puzzling as I have for most of my life?
Might the Jewish prophets, who wrote the Old Testament, have simply made up the covenant? Might their belief, that God would protect them from their enemies, lead them to conclude that God had made a covenant with them, and not their enemies? Did their
understanding, that God’s love was conditional on their worship of Him, lead them to conclude that He must be rejecting all of those who didn’t worship Him (which, after all, was everybody else!)
What did Jesus teach? One of His teachings seems to support the Jewish people’s conviction that the covenant God made was with the Jewish people alone. In Matt 10: 5-6, when Jesus sends His disciples out, He commands them to not approach the Gentiles but go only to the house of Israel. Is Jesus not reinforcing what the Old Testament claims? Why would our God Incarnate, who claimed to love all of God’s children, reject most of them? Was it something we said? Or was it something we didn’t say? After all, a covenant requires
the participation of both parties. It takes two to tango. Recognizing that, could the thinking I’m about to share with you provide an explanation?
What have we come to know? Do the Meaning of Life Video Series and The Greatest Commandment establish or reinforce your knowledge that God loves all of us unconditionally and wants us to love Him to the best of our ability and more than anyone or anything else? Does Why Our Creator Keeps Itself Hidden From Us establish or reinforce your knowledge that, for God to enable us to choose to love Him, He must communicate with us without disclosing His overwhelming, and therefore intimidating presence? Does Is Your Creator Awaiting a Response to Its Constant Outreach establish or reinforce your knowledge that your creator’s first approach to communicating with us, without disclosing itself, is to put what it wants to say directly into our minds?
Based on this shared knowledge, how do you assess this following thinking? Might the
offer of a covenant have been put into all our minds? Might the Jewish prophets have been the first, and for a long time the only ones of us who discovered our creator’s message in their minds, responded to it and acted on it? Is it not clear that, for our creator to establish a covenant of selfless and unconditional love with each one of us, each of us must choose to respond to its invitation to that intimate relationship? Does it not follow that, until we discover, and respond
to our creator’s invitation in our minds, it is we who reject the covenant?
But how are we to be able to discover what our creator puts into our minds? Might the
techniques you discover in Is Your Creator Awaiting a Response to Its Constant Outreach work for you?
Until then, can we avoid the conclusion that it is not our creator who restricts the
covenant? Must we not conclude it is us?
Del H. Smith conducts research into life’s meaning and is the award-winning author of the Amazon Best Seller, Discovering Life’s Purpose.