What does Tribe teach about faith and politics?
Drawn from the message where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on faith and politics runs through a framing the series has used across multiple weeks: every person carries a set of beliefs like a hat, and wherever they place that hat is their hook. Brian has pressed the congregation to ask which narratives are winning their belief, and to notice that a compelling story is not the same as a true one. That tension sits underneath how the church approaches any politically charged subject, including one as charged as Israel.
In the message on Israel, Brian laid out three popular positions people are invited to adopt: that Israel is a colonizing, apartheid state; that the conflict is simply ancient and irrelevant to daily life; or that God has removed his covenant hand from Israel and transferred it to the Gentile church. He did not treat any of these as obviously right. Instead he traced the long history of hostility toward Israel, from the mockery Nehemiah faced while rebuilding the wall to modern media narratives, and argued that this pattern is neither new nor random. The Bible, he said, tells a cosmic story behind the political one, involving a fallen spiritual being whose only capacity is to tear down what God has made, and who has particular reason to target the lineage through which a messiah would come.
The conclusion Brian drew was not a political platform but a posture. Jerusalem is described in Zechariah 12 as an immovable rock that injures anyone who tries to move it, and Brian pointed the congregation toward the only response he called right: to fall on the rock of Jesus and let him shape a biblical understanding of the land, the people, and the city, rather than hanging that hat on whichever narrative happens to be most compelling at the moment.
Taught from Zechariah 12:1-3 · Nehemiah 4 · Matthew 21:44 · Deuteronomy 7:6-9 · Revelation 12:11
The passage taught · Deuteronomy 7:6-9
6 For you are a holy people to Yahweh your God. Yahweh your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, above all peoples who are on the face of the earth.
7 Yahweh didn’t set his love on you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all peoples:
8 but because Yahweh loves you, and because he desires to keep the oath which he swore to your fathers, Yahweh has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
9 Know therefore that Yahweh your God himself is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and loving kindness with them who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations,
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- July 7, 2024 Israel, A Stone In the Path Brian Hunter walks through Zechariah 12 to ask why Israel remains the most contested piece of ground on earth and where you have chosen to hang your beliefs about it.