Ron

Welcome back Cheryl.  As I continue to read the comments here it seems a bigger picture is emerging. Not to lose the needed focus, but backing off the lens for a moment, it appears that a major paradigm shift is happening which affects almost all the ways we are beginning to understand the Kingdom. Many of my roots were rotting because of having been planted too deeply in a culturally corrupt institutional soil. I have come to an entirely different place, actually one much closer in essence to my early years with the Lord. A problem is that paradigm shifts cannot be forced and seem to occur only with, as Cheryl indicated, asking the right questions with the humility to accept fresh answers. God help us all.

Don pointed out that as we move ahead we need to return to some of our Hebrew roots in some of our thinking. I have been considering lately just exactly why Israel was cut off. I know the theological explanations, but I mean more like—well, what might it “have looked like” that would have carried Israel on into God’s purposes. Was it not really a spiritual-heart-relational matter, not doctrinal but perhaps not unlike what we see happening in major arenas of the Church today? Surely it was a matter of how God felt about their relationship to Him, and the warning to us “wild olive branches” in Romans.