Archive for the ‘Biblical Theology’ Category
Judge me, O Yahweh
In my previous post, I suggested that the Psalms disprove the dictum that we should never pray for justice. There are many such Psalms; one example is David’s Psalm 7:
Yahweh judges the peoples;
judge me, O Yahweh, according to my righteousness
and according to the integrity that is in me.
Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end,
and may you establish the righteous—
you who test the minds and hearts,
O righteous God!
My shield is with God,
who saves the upright in heart.
God is a righteous judge,
and a God who feels indignation every day. — Psalm 7:8-11
Jamie Soles has a great rendition of this Psalm on his album Pure Words, which you can listen to here: Psalm 7. But how can we sing this without the words sticking in our throats? For that matter, how could David sing this?
Before attempting to answer that, we should remember that it is of greater importance that we obediently sing the Psalms (Eph. 5:19, Col. 3:16), and it is only within the context of obedient faith that we seek to grow in understanding them. We approach God with childlike faith and trust in the beauty, goodness and truth of what he has given us. As we become familiar with the Psalms, the Spirit will help us grow in our understanding of them. Even the thousandth time we sing them, God will be revealing new things to us.
Perhaps our first instinct is to read David’s words like this:
Judge me, O Yahweh, according to my perfect obedience
This cannot be what David meant. No one was ever saved — or even promised salvation — on the basis of obedience alone. This was even true of Adam and Eve; if they had persevered, they would have had to do so in faith. This is clear from the way in which Satan tempted them — he tempted them to mistrust and disbelieve God and his goodness toward them. Perhaps surprisingly, this was even true of Jesus; again, we see in his temptations in the wilderness and at Gethsemane that the substance of his struggle was one of faith and not merely obedience. Would he trust his Father’s plan, or would he take things into his own hands? He persevered and saved us through faith (1 Pet. 2:23).
Could this instead be imputed righteousness, the active obedience of Christ?
Judge me, O Yahweh, according to my Savior’s obedience
The difficulty with this suggestion is that we understand imputed righteousness as an “alien” righteousness, a robe that we receive (e.g., Isa. 61:10). David, however, is talking about what is “in me,” in “minds and hearts.”
Calvin suggests that it is a relative or comparative righteousness, when measured against David’s adversaries. He writes of Psalm 7:
The subject here treated of is not how he could answer if God should demand from him an account of his whole life; but, comparing himself with his enemies, he maintains and not without cause, that, in respect of them, he was righteous. But when each saint passes under the review of God’s judgment, and his own character is tried upon its own merits, the matter is very different, for then the only sanctuary to which he can betake himself for safety, is the mercy of God.
This seems somewhat plausible, but unsatisfying. We are still on a treadmill of obedience, only now it is a relativistic one, which makes David’s appeal rather cheap. Why would David not rather appeal to God’s mercy if this was the case?
The answer lies in returning to our observation above that faith is more fundamental than obedience. Skipping a couple chapters back to Psalm 5, Calvin has an insightful comment concerning God’s righteousness:
The righteousness of God, therefore, in this passage, as in many others, is to be understood of his faithfulness and mercy which he shows in defending and preserving his people.
If we understand human righteousness in the same way, that yields the following interpretation:
Judge me, O Yahweh, according to my faithfulness to you and your covenant
Such faithfulness has a number of components. First, it begins with faith: it trusts in God, his goodness and his promises. Second, this faith obeys, because God can be trusted to give us good and wholesome commands, and he can be trusted to be working out what is best for us even if our obedience proves very costly or painful. But third, this faith also grabs hold of God’s provision of a sacrifice for sin when we fail to trust and obey. To be faithful is to regularly confess our sins, repent, and move on in the joy of forgiveness. In this sense, we can be righteous without being sinless, a people who meet with God at mountains and altars. This is the sense in which Zechariah, Elizabeth and Simeon were righteous (Luke 1-2), and in which Noah (Gen. 6), Abraham (Gen. 15) and David were righteous. The righteous shall live by his faith (Hab. 2:4).
Another way of putting this is to say that we have entrusted ourselves wholly to God and not to ourselves or others; that this thorough-going trust is the basis of all righteousness; and thus we are pleading with God that he would not put us to shame for trusting in him:
In you they trusted and were not put to shame. — Ps. 22:5
O my God, in you I trust;
let me not be put to shame;
let not my enemies exult over me.
Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame;
they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous. — Ps. 25:2-3Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you. — Ps. 25:20
And many more. All this is to say that it is a short hop from appealing to our righteousness (God, I have entrusted myself to you!) to God’s righteousness (I know you will be faithful to deliver me!). This is a persistent pattern; for example:
In you, O Lord, do I take refuge;
let me never be put to shame;
in your righteousness deliver me! — Ps. 31:1
Fittingly, this is how Psalm 7 ends up:
The Lord judges the peoples;
judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness
. . .
I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness,
and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.
It is because God is righteous and faithful that we can put our complete trust in him. Because of his faithfulness we can be sure that he will vindicate our trust in him.
But we should take care; we cannot always substitute faithfulness for righteousness any more than we could substitute perfect obedience earlier. It is right for us to formulate systematic definitions of words like this, but we also must recognize that the Spirit uses words in Scripture in varied ways.
For example, when Isaiah says that “our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isa. 64:6), he indicates that Israel’s righteousness has become a mere shell of selective external obedience — they have ceased to walk by faith, to obey the weightier matters of the law, and to truly repent of their sins. They have become faithless. In Luke 18:9ff, Luke draws attention to the irony of righteousness having anything to do with trust in oneself, so here again it has become an empty shell of genuine righteousness.
Paul also uses the word in varied ways. He sometimes uses it to point out that the Jews’ so-called righteousness has become faithless. For example, Romans 5:7 reads the reverse of what one would expect; this seems to me a scathing condemnation, as though it should have been translated with scare quotes. Earlier, when Paul says that “none is righteous” (Rom. 3:10), he is obviously using it in a different sense. He is quoting Psalm 14, where David applies this statement to “the fool,” to “evildoers” and to the “children of man,” but takes comfort because “God is with the generation of the righteous” (i.e., the children of God). It is possible that Paul is applying Psalm 14 in a new direction, to all people everywhere. But there are better passages he could have used if he had wanted to make that point (e.g., Ps. 51:5). It seems more likely to me that he is saying something more subtle. Paul is not saying that no one anywhere is righteous; rather, he is making the provocative application of Psalm 14 to the Jews. They have ceased to be God’s righteous people and have become boastful evildoers, enemies of Jesus and his church. Thus, the deepest sense in which sin caused grace to abound (Rom. 5:20-6:1), in which good was brought about by evil (Rom. 3:8), is that the evil act of crucifying Jesus brought about the salvation of the world.
Finally, as is always the case with the Psalms, we need to circle back and evaluate how they apply to Jesus, and how they apply to the church as the body of Jesus (who is our head). We approach Psalm 7 individually having repented of our sin and renewed our trust in Jesus. But Jesus is able to sing this Psalm with a more perfect sort of righteousness. Thus, when we sing this Psalm together as the gathered church, we sing it in Jesus who is our head, and we share in the confidence of his righteousness. Thus, when we sing the Psalm corporately, there is an additional sense in which the righteousness referred to is Jesus’ righteousness. This is subtly different from the imputed righteousness suggested above: in this sense, we are praying that the church would be vindicated against her enemies. To persecute the church is to persecute Jesus (Acts 9:4).
Pig out
In his 1992 essay Pig Out? 25 Reasons Why Christians May Eat Pork, James Jordan definitively refutes the notions that the Sinaitic food laws have any continuing applicability to the church, or that they ever had any intended health value. While he focuses on the food laws and their symbolism, his comments are also applicable to other can-do-no-wrong fads that search for some basis elsewhere in the ceremonial law, such as essential oils.
Jordan concludes:
The Sinaitic dietary laws were not given for reasons of health or hygiene, but were symbolic. They applied only to Israelites during the period between Moses and Christ. Noah and Abraham were not under these laws, Gentile God-fearers were not under these laws, and New Covenant Christians are not under them either. Deciding how much meat to eat, how often, and what kinds is a matter for Christians to determine for themselves in terms of sanctified common sense and the evidence of dietetic science.
Making these dietary rules a matter of faith in the New Covenant is demonic. Unquestionably this is not the intention of earnest Christians who believe that they have uncovered health secrets in the book of Leviticus. We have to remember, however, that Satan is a great deceiver, and he will mislead the very elect of God. By focusing attention on the Sinaitic dietary laws, Satan diverts attention from the one God-given food law of the New Covenant, which is to fellowship with Him at His table. God invites us to come to His house on His day and bring along some bread and wine. How many Churches serve His meal on His day (not monthly, not quarterly)? How many use bread (not wafers, not crackers, not doughnuts)? How many use wine (not grape juice, not soft drinks)? How many include the children, whom God invited in the Old Covenant, and who are surely invited today (1 Cor. 10: 1-4)? How many Churches see this meal as a covenant renewal, a time of restoring our relationship with our God? How many Churches proclaim that there is health in this covenant renewal, and sickness in abusing it (1 Cor. 11:30)?
Too many pork-haters have a low view of the Church. They replace the sacramental interpretation of the Sinaitic dietary laws with an interpretation that is little more than “medicine man religion. ” They overlook the real health giving meal, the New Covenant sacrament. As a result, they mislead the people of God.
You can order a copy of this paper from Biblical Horizons; refer to their catalog.
A prayer for the church
Who can count the dust of Jesus
or number the fourth part of the church?
Let me die the death of the upright,
and let my end be like his!He has not beheld misfortune in Jesus,
nor has he seen trouble in the church.
Jesus their God is with with them,
and the shout of a king is among them.
Jesus brings them out of the old creation
and is for them like the horns of the wild ox.
For there is no enchantment against Jesus,
no divination against the church;
Now it shall be said of Jesus and the church,
‘What has God wrought!’
Behold, a people! As a lioness it rises up
and as a lion it lifts itself;
It does not lie down until it has devoured the prey
and drunk the blood of the slain.How lovely are your tents, O Jesus,
your encampments, O church!
Like palm groves that stretch afar,
like gardens beside a river,
Like aloes that Jesus has planted,
like cedar trees beside the waters.
Water shall flow from his buckets,
and his seed shall be in many waters;
His king shall be higher than Caesar,
and his kingdom shall be exalted.
Jesus brings them out of the old creation
and is for them like the horns of the wild ox;
He shall eat up the nations, his adversaries,
and shall break their bones in pieces
and pierce them through with his arrows.
He crouched, he lay down like a lion
and like a lioness; who will rouse him up?
Blessed are those who bless you,
and cursed are those who curse you.
Adapted from Numbers 23-24
Spirituality, worship and the world
Mark Horne writes about:
- How to be spiritual according to the Bible
- Ten things a church can do to save the world
- Five things you are not allowed to do on a holy day of worship
The Spirit is opposed to the flesh, but not the body. The Spirit gives life to our bodies and to the church-body.
Up, up and away
Jesus is lifted up, both on the cross (John 12:32-33) and in his ascension (Luke 24:50-53).
He lifts us up in and to himself (Ps. 68:18, John 12:32-33, Eph. 2:6). We are the joyful entourage of the conquering king (Ps. 24).
Thus approaching his throne, we further exalt and lift him up (Ps. 22:3, 99).
Supplanter
Jacob, Supplanter was his name
Uprooting other kingdoms until he alone remained
Just like Jesus the greater king to come
All His foes will fall until He is the only one— Jamie Soles, Supplanter (listen)
What are some ways in which Jesus fulfills and expands Jacob’s type?
Like Jacob, Jesus was promised a great inheritance (Psalm 2:8). Unlike Esau, the interlopers of this world were too savvy to sell the stolen inheritance for a pittance (Matthew 4:8), and required actual blood for their appeasement rather than “red stuff” (Matthew 2:16-18). To secure his inheritance, Jesus pulls off the greatest righteous deception in all of history. Herod (the Edomite), Caesar, Caiaphas and Satan all believe that they have secured their coup by killing the son (Luke 2:9-18). But Jesus’s death is the very means by which he receives his inheritance and begins to execute judgment on his enemies.
Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.— Psalm 2:10-12
Covering
What does water do? It covers, sometimes unto death and sometimes unto life:
- Genesis 7:19-20 — And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.
- Exodus 14:28 — The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen; of all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea, not one of them remained.
- Exodus 15:5, 10 — The floods covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone. . . . You blew with your wind; the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
- Job 22:11 — A flood of water covers you.
- Job 36:30 — Behold, he scatters his lightning about him and covers the roots of the sea.
- Job 38:34 — Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, that a flood of waters may cover you?
- Psalm 84:6 — As they go through the Valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools.
- Psalm 104:5-9 — He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. . . . You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.
- Psalm 106:11 — And the waters covered their adversaries; not one of them was left.
- Isaiah 11:9 — The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
- Jeremiah 46:8 — Egypt rises like the Nile, like rivers whose waters surge. He said, ‘I will rise, I will cover the earth, I will destroy cities and their inhabitants.’
- Jeremiah 51:42 — The sea has come up on Babylon; she is covered with its tumultuous waves.
- Ezekiel 26:19 — For thus says the Lord God: When I make you a city laid waste, like the cities that are not inhabited, when I bring up the deep over you, and the great waters cover you,
- Habakkuk 2:14 — For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
This has several implications. First, this supports Leithart’s thesis that baptism is inherently an investiture, a covering. In baptism we are inducted into the priesthood of all believers. Second, this lends strong support to pouring and sprinkling as proper modes of baptism: the water and Spirit move towards us, rather than the reverse, and baptism is much more a pronouncement God makes over us than a statement we make ourselves. Finally, this links baptism with atonement: just as we are covered, our sins are covered (Isaiah 61:10, Psalm 32:1, Romans 4:7).
And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name. — Acts 22:16
Worship is warfare
Peter Leithart writes:
Worship is not a retreat to a safe haven where we can offer praise to God in blissful forgetfulness of the challenges before us. Worship is part of the Church’s engagement with the world, one of the chief strategies in our combat. . . . When [the Lord of Hosts] is exalted in our praises, He becomes a terror to our enemies, leaves the field strewn with corpses, and makes the valley of battle into a Valley of Berecah.
Douglas Wilson writes:
So the world is not conquered with a sword. The instruments of conquest, the weapons of our warfare, are Word and Sacrament. The worship of the Church is not a religious meeting in a room, with the assembled seeking to escape from the world outside. . . . We have a battering ram about which the lords and princes of this world know nothing, and every Lord’s Day we take another swing at their gates with it. We do this as we sit down at the Table which He has prepared for us in the presence of our enemies. The Church hearing the Word preached is the Church hearing the terms of conquest. The Church at the Lord’s Table is the church ruling.
See also: Noah, Far as the curse is found, Let us go up.
Mystery
For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles—assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. — Ephesians 3:1-6
Paul speaks here of a mystery, and states clearly what it is: the Gentiles are fellow heirs with the Jews in Jesus. He has been sent to proclaim this good news to the Gentiles.
Mystery
In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, the same word for mystery appears in only one place: Daniel 2, 4. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is spoken of as a mystery. This mystery is revealed to Daniel, and its interpretation is this: including Nebuchadnezzar, four earthly kingdoms would arise in succession. Following these, a stone uncut by hands “became a great mountain and filled the whole earth,” meaning that it would “break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.”
God had previously promised a seed to destroy the serpent and undo the curse (Gen. 3). His heel would be bruised, and he would even die and be resurrected, as Abraham expected of Isaac (Gen. 22) and as every offering testified. God had further promised David that this seed would be a son of his, and that his throne would be established forever (2 Sam. 7). The mystery of the old covenant revealed to Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel is that the promised seed would not just be king of Israel, leading the many nations in righteousness, but that he would be emperor of one kingdom that would fill the earth. So we see that in this phase of Israel’s history, even the world emperors became types of the Messiah (Isa. 44-45).
This gives us added insight into Paul’s mystery. Paul further reveals that the Messiah would not establish this world-wide kingdom either by leading Israel in victory over the nations, or by bringing the nations to be incorporated into Israel. Instead, the Messiah establishes a new kingdom that is forged equally out of Israel and the nations. Israel as much as any other nation must submit to this king and kingdom. Thus, Jesus is not only a new Isaac, David, and Cyrus, but he is even pre-Abrahamic: a new Adam, a new Noah, a new Melchizedek. He is the firstborn of an entirely new creation.
This is not entirely unexpected; with each new covenant, Israel had to die to the past and submit themselves to God’s plan for the future. So, for example, when God created a new Israel in David, it took Israel seven and a half years to repudiate Saul and accept David (2 Sam. 2-5). Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years because of their refusal to repudiate Egypt and Egypt’s gods. This is repeated in the forty years between Jesus’s ascension and the destruction of Jerusalem.
Pentecost
We can also understand Paul’s mystery in terms of Babel (Gen. 11). Jesus will ultimately overcome all of the effects of sin and the curse, so that Babel will progressively be undone. But the way in which this happens is a mystery, a great surprise. The kingdom of Jesus does not return to a single language, either by dominating or destroying all other languages (sorry, Esperanto). Instead, Jesus subverts Babel by welcoming every language into his kingdom, causing every nation and language to confess his lordship. The confusion and cacophony of tongues becomes a harmony and symphony of tongues.
Pentecost, then, is a gospel event, the beginning of the accomplishment of Paul’s mystery, the good news that all nations are brought in to Jesus. We all stand on equal footing before the king of kings.
Something better for us
And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. — Hebrews 11:39-40
In my previous post I wrote that Paul’s argument in Ephesians 2 is both more subtle and more profound than it seems at first glance. We’ve established that Paul was not saying that either Gentile or Jew had no possibility of salvation before Jesus. So what was Paul saying? I suggest that there are two main categories for understanding what Paul is saying Jesus accomplished in the new covenant: the quality and quantity of salvation.
Quality
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. — 1 Corinthians 15:23-26
Jesus is presently reigning as king over the whole earth (Rev. 1:5). Everything is presently in subjection to him though we do not yet see it fully realized (Heb. 2:8). Thus, theologians speak of the “already” and the “not yet” of Jesus’s kingdom. In this framework, we may speak of the old covenants as being a time of essential “not-yet-ness,” a time of promise and not fulfillment. Equally, we may speak of the new covenant as a time of essential “already-ness.” We are not now waiting for the promises to be fulfilled, only for them to be experienced in their fullness. We have presently “come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb. 12:22). We are presently seated with Jesus in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). There are certainly ways in which this characterization does not capture everything perfectly — Israel truly tasted God’s goodness (Ps. 34:8), and even today we see in a mirror dimly compared to what we anticipate in the resurrection (1 Cor. 13:12). Yet this does capture the essential difference between the old covenants and the new.
This is the culmination of a pattern that God repeated in each new covenant. Adam seized the promised judicial authority before his time, but God freely gave this authority to Noah (Gen. 9:1-7). Abraham is promised that kings will come from him (Gen. 17:6), and this is fulfilled in God’s covenant with David. Ezekiel and Jeremiah promise the exiles that the Spirit will be poured out on them in more powerful ways when they return from exile (Ezek. 37, Jer. 31). In one sense these promises were fulfilled in each new covenant, but in another sense they are not truly fulfilled until Jesus establishes his church. Perhaps the best way to understand this is that the old covenants were powerless in themselves to accomplish anything. What power they had was borrowed against the hope of the new covenant, so that all blessings enjoyed before Jesus were enjoyed in Jesus, foretastes of future life breaking through the chinks of time into the distant past. It is only through Jesus the promised seed that Adam and Eve were preserved.
In terms of Jew and Gentile, Paul is emphasizing two things: first, that both Jew and Gentile now have the same access to God, and second, that Jew and Gentile have a degree of access to God that far exceeds anything available in the old covenant.
Again this is a matter of degrees. We have seen that Gentiles did have access to God before Jesus. God heard the prayers of all old-covenant believers. And yet, by comparison, Gentiles were largely kept farther away from God’s house. In order to approach God’s house to offer a sacrifice, a Gentile had to follow the laws of cleanness and thus in a small symbolic way repudiate his Gentile-ness. Jews themselves were kept apart from God by degrees — most Jews could not enter the tabernacle or temple, only priests could enter the holy of holies, and only the high priest could enter God’s earthly throne room once a year on the day of atonement. We, too, have direct access to God at any time in prayer. But by contrast, in our weekly worship, we do not stand outside God’s house to offer our sacrifices, but rather enter all the way in to stand before his throne.
Peter Leithart points out that “the movement [between covenants] . . . is from rituals and signs of distance and exclusion . . . to signs and rituals of inclusion and incorporation.” You might even say that, while the old covenant was a time in which uncleanness and death were contagious, in the new covenant it is holiness and life that is contagious (consider Matt. 9:20-22). What this means is that we are all made priests, we are all made clean once and for all by our baptisms. Salvation and priesthood are collapsed into one in the new covenant, and there are no longer any degrees of holiness and separation in God’s house.
It should have been no surprise to Israel that Gentiles would be saved. This is pointed to in so many ways — by the inclusion of unclean animals on the ark, by the seventy representative elders who ate with God on the mountain (Ex. 24), by the seventy weeks of Daniel’s vision (Dan. 9). What was less clear, the “mystery” that Paul refers to in Eph. 3, is that the Gentiles would receive salvation by being made priests, but not by being made Jews. Jesus’s circumcision counts for all, so that we only need to be baptized into Jesus but not circumcised into Israel (Col. 2:11-12). While the seventy elders could not go all the way up the mountain, the seventy nations may now stand face to face with Jesus. While Gentiles could not partake of Passover without first becoming Jews, all Gentiles may now freely partake of the church’s weekly Passover feast.
Both Gentiles and Jews are now fully priests, kings and prophets. The new Adam has brought us into everything the first Adam should have attained, and more. He is a priest after the order of Melchizedek.
Quantity
But there is an additional dimension here. Paul is not saying that some small number of Jews and Gentiles will now truly experience God’s nearness. He is saying that the Jews and the Gentiles — the nations — as such, will experience this. So while David spoke of the nations opposing God (Ps. 2), we may now speak of the nations themselves being discipled (Matt. 28:19-20), and of the nations themselves becoming “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph 3:6). At present, we do not yet see it, but Jesus intends to save Jew and Gentile wholesale, and that by bringing them into one united body, his church. Now we are all priests, ministering to the remaining strongholds of unbelief.
The one who was born king of the Jews (Matt. 2:2) died and ascended to become king of the nations (Rev. 1:4, 15:3-4). He passed the test of Adam, being unwilling to seize his inheritance (Matt. 4:8-10) but waiting for it in patient faith.
God is not content to save a few.
He says:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” — Isaiah 49:6
I gotta have my orange juice. 