--- schema_version: "1.0.0" id: "the-faith-that-holds:en:chapter-8" work_id: "urn:systemstheology:book:the-faith-that-holds:chapter:chapter-8" book_id: "the-faith-that-holds" chapter_id: "unit-7-why-did-god-call-israel" chapter_slug: "chapter-8" title: "Unit 7: Why Did God Call Israel?" book_title: "The Faith That Holds" language: "en" source_language: "en" translation_status: "source" authors: ["Systems Theology"] editorial_owner: "Systems Theology" editors: [] review_status: "not_specified" reviewers: [] content_version: "content-f7bef3592f1a" content_hash_sha256: "f7bef3592f1ac1dfe20e7ccf9404c78d274a24d7bddb1339ac1bfcfc9af5dbf1" published_at: "2026-07-15T21:14:45.000Z" modified_at: "2026-07-15T23:50:19.254Z" canonical_url: "https://systemstheology.com/library/the-faith-that-holds/chapter-8/" markdown_url: "https://systemstheology.com/research/books/the-faith-that-holds/en/chapter-8.md" license: "All rights reserved; research use subject to the Use Policy" license_url: "https://systemstheology.com/use-policy/" correction_url: "https://systemstheology.com/library/the-faith-that-holds/chapter-8/#chapter-comments" --- # Unit 7: Why Did God Call Israel? Question: Why did God call Israel? Answer: God called Israel to receive his promise, live as his covenant people, and carry blessing for the nations. ## Read - Genesis 12:1--3 (NIV): God promises blessing to Abraham and blessing for all families of the earth. - Exodus 19:4--6 (NIV): Israel is called as God's treasured possession, priestly kingdom, and holy nation. - Deuteronomy 6:4--9 (NIV): Israel is taught to love the Lord and teach his words in ordinary life. - Psalm 67 (NIV): Israel's blessing is ordered toward the nations knowing God. - Isaiah 49:6 (NIV): God's servant is a light for the nations. ## What the Answer Means After sin bends human life away from God, God does not abandon the world. He calls a people. God calls Abraham and promises blessing. He rescues Israel from slavery. He gives covenant, law, worship, priesthood, sacrifice, wisdom, kingship, prophets, exile, return, and hope. Israel's story is not a random preface to Jesus. It is the covenant road on which God teaches his people who he is, what holiness is, what sin does, what mercy means, and how blessing is meant to reach the nations. The law is not a ladder by which Israel climbs up to God. It is covenant instruction from the God who rescues. It teaches worship, justice, mercy, bodily holiness, neighbor-love, rest, truth, memory, and dependence. It also exposes sin. Israel receives God's words and still breaks covenant. The prophets tell the truth. The exile shows the cost of rebellion. The promises keep hope alive. Christians do not meet Jesus as a detached spiritual teacher. Jesus comes as Israel's Messiah. He fulfills the promises to Abraham, the hope of David, the meaning of temple and sacrifice, the wisdom of Torah, the cries of the Psalms, and the words of the prophets. He brings blessing to the nations without erasing Israel's story. To skip Israel is to make the gospel thin. The whole story matters: creation, fall, promise, covenant, law, worship, kingdom, exile, prophecy, Messiah, cross, resurrection, Spirit, Church, and new creation. ## When Waiting Feels Like Being Forgotten Waiting can feel like being forgotten. That is true for a child waiting for a parent to come home. It is true for a single adult waiting for companionship, a couple waiting for a child, or a sick person waiting for test results. It is also true for a church waiting for repair, a grieving person waiting for the day to feel less heavy, or an older believer waiting while the body becomes weaker. Waiting is not always peaceful. Sometimes it feels like absence. Israel's story gives ordinary believers language for that place. The people of God wait with promises in their ears and trouble in their hands. They wait in barrenness, slavery, wilderness, exile, foreign rule, and silence. They wait while singing Psalms that ask, "How long, LORD?" (Psalm 13:1 (NIV)) They wait while prophets tell the truth about sin and still speak hope. They wait with Sabbath, feasts, memory, sacrifice, households, and Scripture. This kind of waiting is not passive emptiness. It is life organized around God's promise while the promise has not yet become sight. That matters when you think faith should remove all delay. Sometimes God does deliver quickly. Sometimes the Red Sea opens. Sometimes the child is born, the prayer is answered, the danger passes, the wound heals, the door opens. But Scripture also teaches a longer road. Abraham waits. Israel waits. The prophets wait. Mary waits. The Church waits for Christ's appearing. Waiting under God asks for two things at once: honesty and remembrance. Honesty says: > This is hard. I do not like this delay. I am tempted to believe I have been forgotten. Remembrance answers with the larger story God has already given: > God has spoken. God has acted. God has not abandoned his promise. Christ has come, and Christ will come again. Both sentences belong in Christian faith. If you only remember without honesty, you may become false. If you only speak honesty without remembrance, despair may begin to sound like wisdom. Israel teaches us to hold both. So when waiting feels like being forgotten, bring the waiting into prayer, Scripture, worship, and the body of Christ. Refuse the faster god you can control. Tell the truth about disappointment without calling delay meaningless. Ask for daily bread. Keep one command. Sing one Psalm. Tell one trusted person the truth. Receive one sign of God's faithfulness. Refuse one idol that promises quick relief. Waiting is not the whole story. But it is often where the promise becomes deeply planted. ## The Chair Beside the Hospital Bed The appointment was supposed to bring an answer. Instead, it brought another test, another appointment, and another month of waiting. The doctor was kind. The words were careful. Nothing sounded hopeless. Nothing sounded clear either. Afterward, the woman sat beside her father's hospital bed and watched him sleep. The room hummed. A half-finished cup of water sat on the tray. Her Bible was open on her lap, but she had read the same line three times without taking it in. Her brother texted, "Any news?" She typed, "Not really," then erased it and wrote, "We are still waiting." The sentence looked smaller on the screen and carried more weight. She wanted a stronger faith. She wanted to say something brave. She wanted peace to arrive like proof that she trusted God. Instead, her shoulders ached, and the line in the Bible kept blurring. The catechism answer from the night before sounded almost too simple: > God keeps his promises in Jesus Christ. She did not doubt the sentence exactly. She doubted whether she could hold it in that room. An older woman from church came by with soup in a paper bag. She did not ask for a full medical update. She did not say, "Everything happens for a reason." She set the bag on the chair by the door and asked a different question. "What has to be carried before the next appointment?" The daughter almost cried from relief because the question was so practical. There was laundry at her father's apartment. There was a prescription to pick up. Her brother needed a clearer update than the one-word texts she kept sending. Someone had to sit with her mother on Thursday. The older woman took a pen from her purse and wrote four lines on the back of the clinic papers. Then she sent two texts: one to a deacon, one to the daughter-in-law who had asked how to help but had not known what to offer. Only after that did she open Psalm 13. The daughter said, "I know God has not forgotten us. I just feel forgotten." The older woman answered, "Then we will not make you carry that sentence alone." > Lord, you have not forgotten us. Help us while we feel forgotten. The test results still waited. The month was still long. But waiting had become less shapeless. It had a Psalm, a prescription, Thursday covered, and a brother who now knew what sentence to carry. Two weeks later, the update was still not simple. One number looked better. Another raised a new question. The daughter cried in the parking garage because she had wanted either relief or catastrophe, anything clearer than another partial answer. This time she did not wait to invent a stronger sentence before driving home. She texted the same three people: > Still waiting. Can you keep Thursday covered and pray Psalm 13 with me again? In that text, Israel's lesson became practice. Promises are not given so one person can carry an entire wilderness alone. Israel's story helps ordinary believers in rooms like that. It does not turn delay into a lesson we are supposed to enjoy. It gives us a people who waited with promises in their ears and trouble in their hands. It gives us songs for the days when faith is real but thin. It teaches us that remembrance is not pretending. Sometimes the faith that holds is a Psalm beside a hospital bed, a church member who asks what must be carried next, and a promise remembered through very ordinary help. Watch for this. Israel is not disposable background. Christians receive Israel's Scriptures as Scripture and confess Jesus as Israel's Messiah. ## Questions for Conversation - Why is Israel's story not just background information? - How does covenant instruction differ from a ladder for earning God's love? - What part of Israel's story helps you understand Jesus more clearly? ## Practice Choose one promise, command, Psalm, or prophetic hope from Israel's Scriptures and ask: - What does this show about God? - What does this show about human beings? - How does this prepare us to see Christ?