What does Tribe teach about israel in the bible?

At Tribe, the teaching on Israel starts with a simple observation about weight. Brian has walked the congregation through a comparison of how often major themes appear in Scripture: evangelism around 250 times, forgiveness around 350, prayer around 650, God's glory around 800, marriage around 1,100, Jesus by name or reference around 1,400, parenting around 1,600, and Israel around 3,500 times. His point is that a church committed to majoring on the majors cannot treat Israel as a niche subject. He names it this generation's defining fork in the road, the way earlier generations had to reckon with the divinity of Christ or the authority of Scripture, and he is direct that, as he puts it, "failure to have right thinking about Israel will result in either blatant or inadvertent antisemitism."

The foundation Brian keeps returning to is that God's commitment to Israel was never earned and, according to Scripture, cannot be undone. He takes the congregation to Isaiah 49:16, where God says he has written Israel's name on the palms of his hands and that Jerusalem's walls are always before him, and to Jeremiah 31:35-37, where God ties any possibility of casting Israel off to conditions that can never be met, measuring the heavens and exploring the foundations of the earth. The word never, Brian says, is built into that promise. He also spends time in Ezekiel 16, where the image is of Israel as a newborn no one wanted, and God passing by and speaking life over her anyway. The point he keeps pressing is that there was nothing in Israel herself that explained God's choice, which is what makes the covenant so striking.

Brian also works through the harder definitional questions, particularly who Israel is across the whole Bible. He has developed a Venn diagram across the series using three overlapping components: covenantal faithfulness, genealogical descent, and sovereign election. He argues that a working definition needs all three, and that standing in only one circle leaves a person unable to hold the conversation when it gets pressed. He acknowledges that Paul in Romans and Galatians says believers are grafted in and that God's definition of Israel includes Christians, which he admits will, in his own words, twist you into pretzels. But he is clear the diagram is not about salvation and not a chart of old versus new covenant requirements. It is an attempt to take seriously what the whole Bible says about a people God has never let go of.

Taught from Jeremiah 31:35-37 · Isaiah 49:16 · Romans 11:1-36 · Galatians 3 · Genesis 37:1-20