What we learned from the Jews - Joseph Loconte

                                        What We Learned from the Jews


Every culture, in one way or anther, reaches out for God.
  
This has been true throughout human history.

The Jews in Jesus' day were very much like, but also very different from, the other cultures around them.

Virtually every other society viewed nature as divine.  The list of gods and goddesses, representing every aspect of the physical world, was endless.

No matter where we look -- among the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks or Romans -- we find people worshiping nature as the living and breathing embodiment of divinity.

Not the Jews.  The opening pages of Genesis assert the non-divinity of the cosmos: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..."  (Genesis 1:1).

The heavens and the earth are not eternal. They came into existence, we are told, from the hand of a Being outside of them, a Creator utterly distinct from His creation.

While other religions assumed the presence of deities all about them, the religion of the Jews began in a radically different place.

Jewish philosopher Leon Kass says the opening lines of Scripture set Judaism at odds with the rest of the known world: "This perfectly natural human tendency [nature worship] the Bible seeks to oppose, and right from the first verse, by denying that the heavens -- or any other beings -- are worthy of human reverence."

In another sense, though, the Jews are like people in other societies. They, too, are God-seekers.

More importantly, they believed firmly that they had discovered the one true God and that they were known and favored by Him among all the peoples of the earth.

They championed the idea that God is not only personal, but purposeful, a Supreme Being with a supremely moral agenda for mankind.

Scholar Paul Johnson calls the introduction of this idea "one of the great turning points in history, perhaps the greatest of all."

   -- From The Searchers, by Joseph Loconte


Most ancient religions viewed history in a circular pattern - cycles of planting and harvest, birth and death, in never-ending circles like a spinning stationery bicycle wheel.

History was not "going" anywhere.

The Jews, however, viewed history as a straight line, a journey along a road, with a definite destination -- starting someplace and ending someplace.

History was going somewhere......

This road was revealed to them in the Old Testament Scriptures.