The Scandal of Particularity
Why Jesus Had to Be Born Jewish
Hello brothers and sisters.
Christmas has come and gone and it’s time to start thinking about the New Year and what that has in store. But it’s times like these that I like to reflect on the Christmas season. And one of the thoughts that has been striking me is how God’s greatest gift to humanity didn’t drop out of the sky fully formed. He came through a very specific process, in a very specific place, to a very specific people.
And that specificity bothers some people.
If God loves the whole world, why did He choose one nation? If the Gospel is for everyone, why did the Messiah have to be Jewish? Why Bethlehem and not Athens? Why Mary and not someone from Rome? Why Hebrew prophecies instead of universal philosophical truths accessible to all cultures?
These aren’t new questions. They’re as old as Christianity itself. And they point to what theologians call “the scandal of particularity”; the offense, the stumbling block, the awkward fact that God’s universal love required particular means.
God didn’t send a philosophy. He didn’t reveal timeless spiritual principles that anyone, anywhere could discover through meditation or reason. He sent a Person. A Jewish Person. Born in a specific place. At a specific time. To a specific woman. From a specific bloodline.
The Incarnation is the ultimate scandal of particularity. God became not just human, but a specific human. Jewish. Male. Born in an obscure Judean town to a teenage girl from an even more obscure Galilean village. In a stable. Announced to shepherds. Threatened by a paranoid puppet king.
Every one of those particulars was essential.
With the close of the Christmas season, let’s explore why the narrowness of the Incarnation is actually the doorway to its universality. Let’s understand why Jesus had to be born Jewish. And let’s see how the very specificity that scandalizes some people is actually proof of God’s meticulous faithfulness.
Because the scandal isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s the pattern of how God works. And once you see it, you’ll never read Scripture— or understand Christmas —the same way again.
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Before we dive into the specificity of salvation and the messiah, I have a late Christmas present for you! Between these two pages, you’ll find at least 20 books (as of this writing) that you can read for free, all it will cost you is your email address.
And now, let’s dig in to Scripture.
The Genealogies as Evidence of Particularity
Let’s be honest, most of us skip the genealogies. When we read Matthew (much like Luke 3:24–38), our eyes tend to glaze over until we get to about verse 16, when the genealogy appears to become relevant to the Gospel with the arrival of Joseph and Mary.
But those genealogies aren’t boring filler. They’re essential. They’re Matthew and Luke’s way of screaming at us: THIS MATTERS. Jesus isn’t a mythical figure. He’s not a timeless symbol. He’s not an abstract spiritual principle. He’s a real person with real ancestors, rooted in real history.
Matthew’s Genealogy: The Royal Line
Matthew begins his Gospel with a declaration: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1).
Right from the start, Matthew is anchoring Jesus in Jewish history. He’s the son of David, the rightful heir to Israel’s throne. He’s the son of Abraham, the fulfillment of God’s promise that through Abraham’s offspring all nations would be blessed.
Matthew’s genealogy is deliberately structured in three sets of fourteen generations: from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian exile, from the exile to Christ. It’s a royal genealogy, tracing Jesus’ legal right to David’s throne through Joseph, His adoptive father.
The fascinating part is Matthew includes four women in his genealogy, which was highly unusual in ancient Jewish genealogies. And every one of them is scandalous in some way.
Tamar (Matthew 1:3) - Judah’s daughter-in-law who disguised herself as a prostitute to conceive twins by him (Genesis 38). Not exactly respectable.
Rahab (Matthew 1:5) - A Canaanite prostitute who hid the Israelite spies in Jericho (Joshua 2). A Gentile and a sex worker.
Ruth (Matthew 1:5) - A Moabite woman who married into Israel (Ruth 1-4). Another Gentile, from a nation that was excluded from the assembly of Israel for ten generations (Deuteronomy 23:3).
The wife of Uriah (Matthew 1:6) - Bathsheba, with whom David committed adultery before arranging her husband’s death (2 Samuel 11). Matthew doesn’t even use her name, but rather identifies her by her wronged husband.
Why does Matthew include these women? Because he’s showing us that Jesus’ genealogy isn’t sanitized. It’s messy. It includes Gentiles, sinners, sexual scandal, and grace. It shows that God works through broken people, through unlikely people, through people the world would dismiss.
And it shows that Jesus came to save people exactly like His ancestors; the imperfect, the flawed, and those in desperate need of redemption.
The genealogy proves: Jesus isn’t a mythical hero born from the gods. He’s rooted in human history, with real ancestors, real names, real dates. He’s the culmination of a very specific story that God has been telling for two thousand years.
Luke’s Genealogy: The Human Line
Luke’s genealogy is different from Matthew’s. While Matthew traces Jesus’ lineage through Joseph back to Abraham (through the Jewish Legal Line), Luke traces it through Mary all the way back to Adam.
Luke is showing us something crucial: yes, Jesus is Jewish (descended from Abraham and David), but He’s also the second Adam, the representative of all humanity. His genealogy connects Him to every human being who has ever lived.
“The son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38).
Do you see what Luke is doing? He’s showing both particularity and universality. Jesus is specifically Jewish; He had to be to fulfill the promises made to Abraham and David. But He’s also universally human, descended from Adam, representing all of humanity before God.
You can’t get to “second Adam” without going through the first Adam’s very specific descendants. You can’t have the universal Savior without the particular Jewish Messiah.
Why Genealogies Matter
In the ancient world, genealogies weren’t just interesting family trivia. They were legal documents. They proved identity. They established inheritance rights. They demonstrated legitimacy.
Jesus’ genealogies prove He’s the rightful heir to David’s throne. They prove He fulfills the covenant promises made to Abraham. They prove He’s qualified to be the גֹּאֵל (goel) or Kinsman Redeemer; fully human, fully Jewish, fully connected to the story God has been telling since Genesis (see Leviticus 25, Numbers 35, Deuteronomy 19, Joshua 20, and the Book of Ruth for full details on the requirements and responsibilities of the goel).
But more than that, they prove God works through history. Through real people. Through specific bloodlines. Through messy, complicated, sometimes scandalous family trees.
Salvation isn’t a timeless spiritual principle floating above history. It’s a historical fact accomplished by a particular Person with a particular ancestry at a particular time.
Both the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint preserve these genealogies. The Hebrew emphasizes the royal Davidic line and the covenant with Abraham. The Greek helped spread these genealogical records to the wider Gentile world. When Greek-speaking converts read Matthew or Luke, they understood: this Jesus is the climax of a very specific story that began with Abraham and will encompass all nations.
The particularity isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
Why It Had to Be Israel
So why Israel? If God wanted to save the world, why didn’t He just reveal Himself to everyone equally? Why choose one nation?
The short answer is because that’s how reality works. Universal blessings require particular means. It has to start with the micro before it can reach the macro. Like storytelling, it can only reach the general through specificity.
Allow me to explain.
God’s Choice of Abraham
The story begins in Genesis 12, when God calls an elderly, childless man named Abram and makes him a promise:
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3).
Notice the movement: God chooses one man (Abraham), from whom will come one nation (Israel), through whom all nations will be blessed.
From the very beginning, the particular was meant to serve the universal. God chose one family to bless all families. He chose one nation to be a light to all nations. He chose one people to bring salvation to all peoples.
This wasn’t favoritism. It was strategy.
And God makes this explicit throughout the Old Testament:
Deuteronomy 7:7-8
“It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers.”
God didn’t choose Israel because they were impressive. He chose them because He loved them and because He’s faithful to His promises. And through them, He would bless all nations.
Isaiah 49:6 (Septuagint)
“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.”
God’s plan for Israel was always bigger than Israel. They were chosen to be servants, a light to the nations, the vehicle through which God’s salvation would reach the ends of the earth.
The particular (Israel) was always meant to lead to the universal (all nations).
The Covenant Logic
Here’s why it had to be this way: God made specific promises to specific people.
He promised Abraham that through his offspring all nations would be blessed (Genesis 12:3; 22:18).
He promised Isaac that the covenant would continue through him (Genesis 26:3-4).
He promised Jacob that kings would come from his line and that in him and his offspring all the families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 28:13-14; 35:11).
He promised David that his throne would be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16).
Each covenant built on the previous one, narrowing the focus, tracing a specific line through history until it landed on one Person: Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam.
The promises couldn’t be fulfilled by vague universal principles. They required a specific heir. A specific descendant. A specific Person who could legitimately claim to be the fulfillment of everything God had promised.
Jesus had to be Jewish because the promises were made to Israel. The Messiah had to come from David’s line because God promised David an eternal kingdom. The Savior had to be Abraham’s offspring because God promised Abraham that through his seed all nations would be blessed.
The Preparation of Scripture
Here’s another crucial reason it had to be Israel: only Israel had the Scriptures.
Only Israel preserved the prophecies pointing to the Messiah. Only Israel had the written record of God’s character, God’s promises, God’s pattern of working through history. Only Israel had the temple, the priesthood, and the sacrificial system; all of which were types and shadows pointing forward to Christ.
Think about it: you can’t have the reality (Jesus the Messiah) without the shadows (Israel’s worship system). You can’t recognize the fulfillment without the prophecies. You can’t understand the Lamb of God without the Passover lamb. You can’t grasp the significance of the high priest entering the Holy of Holies once a year without understanding how Jesus, our great high priest, entered the heavenly sanctuary once and for all with His own blood.
The entire Old Testament is a massive, intricate, centuries-long preparation for Jesus. And that preparation happened in and through Israel.
When Jesus came, the world was ready to understand Him. But only because Israel had preserved the Scriptures that explained Him.
Paul’s Argument in Romans 9-11
The apostle Paul wrestles with this question in Romans 9-11. If the Gospel is for everyone, what’s Israel’s role? Did God abandon His chosen people?
Paul’s answer is emphatic: “By no means!” (Romans 11:1).
He lists Israel’s privileges: “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever” (Romans 9:4-5).
Everything necessary for salvation came through Israel. The covenants, the law, the prophets, the promises, the Scriptures, and the Messiah Himself were all Jewish.
And Paul goes on to explain that Gentiles aren’t replacing Israel. We’re being grafted into Israel. “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches” (Romans 11:17-18).
The olive tree is Israel. Gentile believers are wild branches grafted in. We don’t replace the tree; we join it. We don’t supersede the particular; we’re included in it.
This is Paul’s whole point: the Gospel came “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). Not because Jews are superior, but because they were entrusted with God’s oracles. They were the custodians of the promises. Through them, salvation came to the world.
An Illustration
Let me give you a modern analogy. Imagine you want to send a package to every person on earth. You can’t just throw it into the air and hope for the best. You need a specific address, a specific postal system, a specific route.
God chose Israel as the specific route through which blessing would reach all nations. Not because other nations didn’t matter, they mattered immensely. But because particularity is how universality works in history.
If you want to reach everyone, you have to start somewhere. God started with Abraham, narrowed to Israel, focused on Judah, zeroed in on David’s line, and culminated in Jesus. One specific Jewish man born in one specific Jewish town at one specific moment in history.
And through that radical particularity, the door opened to the whole world.
The Scandal of Bethlehem, Mary, and the Manger
But the scandal doesn’t stop with God choosing Israel. It gets even more specific, even more scandalous.
Bethlehem: The Unlikely Town
When the Magi came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?” (Matthew 2:2), Herod’s scribes knew exactly where to look. They quoted Micah 5:2:
“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.”
Both the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint agree on the essential point: the Messiah will come from Bethlehem, the insignificant, overlooked, “too little” town in Judah.
God could have chosen Jerusalem, the capital city, the center of worship, the place where the temple stood. He could have chosen Rome, the seat of the empire. He could have chosen Athens, the intellectual capital of the Greco-Roman world.
Instead, He chose a nothing town famous only for being David’s birthplace a thousand years earlier.
Why? Because God’s glory appears in the least expected places. Because God delights in choosing the lowly, the small, the overlooked. Because the kingdom of God doesn’t operate by the world’s logic of power and prestige.
Micah makes it explicit: Bethlehem is “too little” among Judah’s clans. And yet from this insignificant place comes the one whose “coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.” The eternal God entered time and space in the most humble way imaginable.
Mary: The Unlikely Mother
And then there’s Mary.
She’s a teenage girl, probably between 12 and 16 years old (the typical age for betrothal in first-century Judaism). Most estimates place her in the middle of that range, about age 14. She’s from Nazareth, a village so unimportant that Nathanael’s reaction was, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). She’s betrothed but not yet married, which meant her pregnancy would have been scandalous to any Jewish observers, even though we know it was miraculous.
By the world’s standards, Mary had nothing to commend her. No wealth. No social status. No political connections. No impressive credentials.
And yet God chose her to bear His Son.
When the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, she responds with a question: “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34). And Gabriel explains that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, that the power of the Most High will overshadow her, that the child will be the Son of God.
Mary’s response is one of the most beautiful statements of faith in all of Scripture: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
She doesn’t understand how it will happen. She doesn’t know what it will cost her (and it will cost her dearly. Think of Simeon’s prophecy in Luke 2:35 that a sword will pierce her own soul). But she trusts God. She surrenders. She says yes.
And then, as we explored on Christmas Day with the Magnificat, Mary bursts into song. And her song reveals that she understands what’s happening: God is overturning the world’s expectations. “He has looked on the humble estate of his servant... He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate” (Luke 1:48, 52).
Mary uses the word ταπείνωσις (tapeinōsis): ”humble estate,” “lowliness,” to describe herself. She knows she’s nobody special by worldly standards. But God has chosen her. God has looked on her lowliness. God has done great things for her.
This is the scandal: God doesn’t wait for impressive people to accomplish His purposes. He chooses the weak, the lowly, the overlooked. He entrusts the Incarnation to a teenage girl from a nothing village in an insignificant corner of the Roman Empire.
The Manger: The Unlikely Birthplace
And then there’s the manger.
After traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem— a journey of about 90 miles, probably taking 3-4 days on foot while Mary was eight to nine months pregnant —Joseph and Mary arrive to find no room in the inn. So Jesus, the King of kings, the Lord of glory, the Creator of the universe, is born in a stable and laid in a feeding trough.
Not a palace. Not even a decent house. A stable. Among the animals. In the stench and the noise and the cold.
Luke tells us simply: “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7).
The first bed the Son of God ever lay in was a feeding trough for livestock.
There’s a beautiful irony here. In Isaiah 1:3, God laments through the prophet: “The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.”
The animals know where to find their food. But God’s people don’t recognize Him.
And now, in Bethlehem, Jesus is laid in a manger, a feeding trough. The Bread of Life, who will later say “I am the bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:41), begins His earthly life in a place where animals feed.
The scandal is deliberate. The humility is intentional. God could have arranged better accommodations. He could have made sure there was room in the inn. He could have orchestrated a royal birth announcement, a reception fit for a king.
Instead, He chose poverty, obscurity, and humility.
Why? To show us that salvation isn’t only for the powerful, the impressive, or the well-connected. It’s for everyone. Especially the lowly.
If Jesus had been born in Caesar’s palace in Rome, we’d think salvation is for the powerful. But He was born in a stable in Bethlehem to show that salvation is for the poor, the weak, the overlooked, and the ordinary.
The particularity— one nation, one town, one girl, and one manger —becomes the invitation to all.
From Particular to Universal
Here’s where the scandal resolves into glory: the story that began with “Leave your country and go to the land I will show you” (Abraham in Genesis 12:1) ends with “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Jesus in Matthew 28:19).
Particularity was never the end goal. It was the means to the universal goal.
The Great Commission
After His resurrection, Jesus gathers His disciples on a mountain in Galilee and gives them their marching orders:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:18-20).
All nations. Not just Israel. Not just the Jews. All nations. Every tribe, every tongue, every people group. The particular mission to Israel explodes into a universal mission to the world.
But notice: it doesn’t replace Israel. It includes the Gentiles in what God has been doing through Israel all along.
The Gentiles Included
Paul explains this beautifully in Ephesians 2:11-22. He’s writing to Gentile believers, reminding them of where they were before Christ:
“Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:12-13).
Gentiles were “far off.” That is, outside the covenants, outside the promises, outside the commonwealth of Israel. But now, in Christ, they’ve been “brought near.”
How? Paul continues:
“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility... 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” (Ephesians 2:14-16).
The dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been broken down. The hostility has been abolished. Jews and Gentiles are now “one new man” in Christ.
But notice what Paul says in verse 19:
“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”
Fellow citizens. Not replacing citizens. Not superseding the saints. Fellow citizens. Gentiles are joining what God has been building through Israel for two thousand years.
Paul uses another metaphor in Romans 11:
“If some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches” (Romans 11:17-18).
Gentiles are wild olive branches grafted into the cultivated olive tree. We don’t become the tree. We don’t replace the tree. We’re grafted into it. We share in the nourishing root— the patriarchs, the covenants, the promises, the Scriptures, the Messiah —all of which are Jewish.
The scandal of particularity doesn’t end with Gentile inclusion. It expands to encompass us. We’re included in the particular story God has been telling through Israel.
The Septuagint as Bridge
And this is where the Septuagint becomes crucial. As we’ve explored elsewhere on The LXX Scrolls, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures was the bridge between Jewish particularity and Gentile inclusion.
Greek-speaking Gentiles could read Israel’s Scriptures in their own language. They could see the prophecies. They could understand the promises. They could see that God always intended to include them.
Isaiah 49:6 in the Septuagint declares:
“I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
The Gentiles reading this in Greek understood: we’re not an afterthought. We were part of the plan from the beginning. The particular (Israel, the Jewish Messiah) was always meant to reach us.
The Septuagint didn’t replace the Hebrew text. It extended its reach. It made the promises accessible. It prepared the way for the Gospel to spread to the ends of the earth.
The Pattern Holds Today
And here’s the beautiful thing: the scandal of particularity is still God’s method today.
The Gospel still spreads through particular people, in particular places, at particular times. God doesn’t work through abstract principles or universal spiritual laws. He works through embodied, specific, historical actions.
Your witness in your town, to your neighbors, in your workplace; that’s the scandal of particularity continuing. God is using you, specifically, to reach people, specifically, with the Gospel.
You don’t have to reach the whole world. You just have to be faithful where God has placed you. In your particular context. With your particular gifts. To your particular neighbors.
And God will use your particularity to accomplish His universal purposes.
Just like He did with Abraham. Just like He did with Israel. Just like He did with Mary. Just like He did with Jesus.
The particular is the pathway to the universal. It always has been. It always will be.
Embracing the Scandal
So here we are, just after Christmas. Celebrations are winding down, out of town family are going back home. We’re getting ready to go back to work or school. And what did we just spend all that time and money celebrating?
The most particular event in all of history.
God became human. Not humanity in general, but a specific human. Jewish. Male. Born at a specific time, in a specific place, to a specific woman.
Don’t be embarrassed by the particularity of Jesus. Don’t wish He’d been born in a more respectable place, to a more prominent family, in a way that made more “sense” to the world’s expectations.
The scandal is the point.
God didn’t send a philosophy, a set of principles, or a universal religious system. He sent a Person. A Jewish Person. Born in Bethlehem. To Mary. In a stable. Announced to shepherds.
And through that radical, offensive, scandalous particularity, He opened the door to the whole world.
You’re Not Saved by Being Spiritual
Here’s what this means for you: You’re not saved by “being spiritual” or “finding truth” in some abstract, universal sense. You’re not even saved by following the Hebrew Law (though we should do our best to do so). You’re saved by a specific Person: Jesus Christ, born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised on the third day.
The Gospel doesn’t say “all roads lead to God.” It says there’s one road, and His name is Jesus (John 14:6). There are no other paths that lead to the Father.
That’s scandalous. It offends many folks’ modern sensibilities. We want to say, “Surely there are many paths to God. Surely God accepts sincere seekers from every religion.”
But Jesus Himself said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
The scandal of particularity means there’s only one Savior. Only one Mediator between God and man (1 Timothy 2:5). Only one name under heaven by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).
But— and this is crucial —though it’s a narrow road that leads to a narrow gate, that one road is wide enough for everyone.
Jesus didn’t come just for Jews. He came for all nations. He didn’t die just for the righteous. He died for sinners. He didn’t rise just for the powerful. He rose for the weak, the broken, the lowly, and the lost.
The particular Person is the universal Savior.
A Christmas Reflection
This Christmas season, as you reflect on having celebrated the birth of Jesus, thank God for choosing the narrow way.
Thank Him for choosing Abraham and Israel. Thank Him for preserving the Scriptures through the Jewish people. Thank Him for sending His Son through Mary. Thank Him for Bethlehem, for the manger, for the shepherds, for every particular detail of the Christmas story.
Because every particular was necessary. Every detail mattered. Every choice was intentional.
God wasn’t being arbitrary or capricious. He was being faithful. He was keeping the promises He made to Abraham. He was establishing the kingdom He promised to David. He was fulfilling the prophecies spoken by Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and all the prophets.
And He was doing it in the only way that would work: through particular means to accomplish universal purposes.
The scandal of particularity is how God saves the world.
Final Encouragement
So as we reflect on the winding down of the Christmas season, let’s embrace the scandal.
Let’s celebrate that God didn’t stay distant and abstract. He came near. He became specific. He entered our mess, our history, our particularity.
And if you’re ever tempted to think God should have done it differently, just remember the manger. Remember Mary. Remember Bethlehem.
God knows what He’s doing. The scandal of particularity isn’t a flaw in the plan. It’s the plan itself. And it’s the most glorious, most beautiful, most hope-filled plan the world has ever known.
One God. One Mediator. One Savior. One way. And that one way is open to all.
Thanks be to God.
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Coming Up Next
That’s it for this year. I hope you’ve had a blessed year and that the blessings keep rolling in. With our first post next year, we’re going to shift gears dramatically.
From the dragon that God uses to humble Job and our Christmas devotions, we’re going to turn to perhaps the most quoted verse in the Psalter—a verse that appears on coffee mugs, wall art, and inspirational posters, usually accompanied by peaceful nature scenes:
“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)
If you think this verse is just about peaceful meditation or finding inner calm, you’re only seeing half the picture.
Because when you examine the Hebrew רָפָה (raphah) alongside the Greek σχολάσατε (scholasate), you discover something fascinating: the Hebrew tells you to let go and release your grip, while the Greek— surprisingly —tells you to go to school on God.
That’s right. The Greek word is the root of our English word “school.” The Septuagint doesn’t just call you to stop striving; it calls you to devoted study, contemplative focus, and the kind of leisure that ancient philosophers considered the highest form of human life.
But here’s what makes this even more powerful: the context isn’t peaceful contemplation in a quiet garden. It’s cosmic catastrophe. Mountains collapsing. Waters roaring. Nations raging. Wars and destruction.
And right in the middle of chaos, God says: Stop. Make space. Study Me. Know Me.
In our next post, we’ll explore:
What the Hebrew harpu (let go, release, cease striving) really means
Why the Greek scholazō (take leisure, devote yourself) adds a crucial dimension
How ancient Greek philosophy and Jewish meditation practices both inform this verse
What the Church Fathers understood about contemplative trust
Why this verse is both fiercer and deeper than we’ve realized
How “being still” is simultaneously an act of surrender and devoted attention
The Hebrew and Greek don’t contradict, they complement. And when you read them together, “be still and know” becomes not just a comfort verse, but a complete theology of trust.
Sometimes the most familiar verses are the ones hiding the richest treasures. Next time, we’ll discover what it really means to cease striving and devote ourselves to knowing the God who rules over chaos.
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