What does Tribe teach about jewish identity?
Drawn from the messages 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 Jewish identity starts with a question Brian has returned to across the Unbreakable series: who is Israel, and who is a Jew? His answer is that no single category captures it. He has built a Venn diagram across the series with three overlapping circles: sovereign election, genealogical descent, and covenantal faithfulness. The argument is that a working definition needs all three. Pull on any one circle alone and you either get tied in knots in conversation or you become vulnerable to narratives whose actual goal is to dehumanize and do violence to the Jewish people.
Brian grounds sovereign election in passages like Deuteronomy 14:2 and Ezekiel 16, showing that God's choice of Israel was not based on anything Israel had done. He illustrates the word holy as meaning set apart, not morally superior, the way pulling one small tree out of a group makes it distinct without changing what it is. On genealogical descent, he pushes back immediately against treating bloodline as the whole story: King David's grandmother Ruth was a Moabite, and if blood alone defined who belongs, David himself would not qualify. He also works through what Paul says in Romans and Galatians, that believers are grafted in and that Christians appear inside the diagram too, not because they replace Israel but because God's sovereign election drew them into the same family.
The practical payoff Brian keeps returning to is this: a clear definition matters because real hostility toward Jewish people is real and has a long history. He used a clip of Tucker Carlson pressing Mike Huckabee on whether Benjamin Netanyahu had any genuine connection to the land, and walked the congregation through what happens when a person has only one of those three circles to stand on. Getting the definition right is not a theological puzzle for its own sake. It shapes how the church thinks about Israel's story, where that story is going, and how Christians belong inside it.
Taught from Deuteronomy 14:2 · Galatians 3:29 · Galatians 3:7 · Ezekiel 16:4-6 · Genesis 17:7-8
“A vandal is a weak person. They expend energy but not to create of their own, not to make something beautiful of their own, not to innovate of their own, not to improve, but just to tear down.”
From Unbreakable Week 5： Surrounded by Vandals, Part 2
The passage taught · Galatians 3
1 Foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you not to obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly portrayed among you as crucified?
2 I just want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by hearing of faith?
3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now completed in the flesh?
4 Did you suffer so many things in vain, if it is indeed in vain?
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 23, 2026 Unbreakable Week 5： Surrounded by Vandals, Part 2 Brian Hunter walks through Israel's history of persecution, asks why antisemitism persists, and connects God's faithfulness to a chosen people with his faithfulness to every broken life.
- February 22, 2026 Surrounded By Vandals Part II A Wyoming pastor walks through the Bible's portrayal of Israel, asking why antisemitism persists across history and what God's unbreakable commitment to his people means for us today.
- February 1, 2026 Who Is Israel? Brian Hunter explores what the Bible means by "Israel," examining sovereign election, genealogical descent, and covenantal faithfulness to show why Israel's story matters to all believers.