May I Gently Suggest - iTunes Feed Jon Behrens

In Christ the separation and hostility between Jews and believing gentiles has been abolished. Now gentiles can be citizens of the Commonwealth of Israel and children of God. What does it mean to be a citizen of the Commonwealth?

In Matthew 11, John's disciples ask if Y'shua is actually the Messiah. This is a hinge point in the book. He explains that John could have been Elijah, but both he and Y'shua are being rejected by the ruling elites. This sets up the rest of the story telling how they are willing to corrupt every organ of society to get rid of a populist trouble maker. The parallels with our own day are striking.

With Israel once again in apostasy, the Midianites spread across the Jezreel valley during the harvest. They plundered Israel's crops and oppressed her people. God called Gideon to drive the Midianites from the land.

In this introduction, Paul writes of the glory and power that God exhibited in raising Christ from the dead. He also writes of the spiritual blessings and the inheritance that await believers. The Spirit being the guarantee of the inheritance promised in the fullness of time.

Fashionable intellectual belief is that reality is plastic, that is it can be formed into whatever people desire it to be. That is the basis for all of the 'isms' from the 19th and 20th centuries. In contrast, God tells us that reality is elastic. That means that it can be pushed out of shape for a while, but it eventually snaps back. The farther it is stretched, the more violent the snap. In Leviticus 19-20 Moses tells Israel to keep separate from the nations and not to adopt their ways. There he gives a set of principles to insure that Israel's society stays within safe elastic limits.

The Canaanites held the fortress city of Hazor and controlled the Jezreel valley which was ideal chariot country. Israel was mostly dismounted infantry. So the problem was how to overcome the tactical advantage of the Canaanite army. In this, God lent a hand by bringing rain.