(Audio)
I will make them one nation upon the land,
in the mountains of Israel,
and there shall be one prince for them all.
Never again shall they be two nations,
and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms.
Jesus wants to form one people over whom he will be shepherd and king forever. This is an amazing gift of grace whereby he abolishes the divisions among the people, "that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility" (see Ephesians 2:15-16). The barriers he breaks down to make this possible are both between us and our neighbors and between us and God. This is atonement or at-one-ment, in the deepest sense of the word.
"What are we going to do?
This man is performing many signs.
If we leave him alone, all will believe in him,
and the Romans will come
and take away both our land and our nation."
We sometimes act like the chief priests and the Pharisees. If Jesus is the center it means we are not the center. We had plans and now these plans are threatened by Jesus acting in ways that go beyond what we can understand of our circumstances. We search for ways to take back control and so rebel. Yet even though we fail the Kingdom of Jesus is designed to absorb our failures and convert them into redemption and new life.
He did not say this on his own,
but since he was high priest for that year,
he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
and not only for the nation,
but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
Let us place Jesus at the center of our lives unconditionally. Only then can we know the oneness of deepest fellowship that has always been the most fundamental of our hidden desires.
He who scattered Israel, now gathers them together,
he guards them as a shepherd his flock.
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