It’s been a while since I’ve done a weekly review post; but since I’ve listened to some rather impressive things this week, I wanted to fill you in with the goods:

1. Upon recommendation I bought Flame’s latest album entitled Our World Redeemed. Amazing Christian rap. I especially like the last track, Joyful Noise, and number seven, Hold On. Deeply and richly biblical. Powerful.
2. Dr. Russell Moore presented a very moving treatise against abortion from the first chapters of the Gospel of Matthew in Southern Seminary chapel on October 16 entitled “Joseph Is a Single-Issue Evangelical: The Father of Jesus, the Cries of the Helpless, and Change You Can Believe In.” Definitely worth your time. Download the MP3.
3. Al Mohler just today preached a very timely message here in Southeastern chapel on How Not to Raise a Pagan fromDeuteronomy 6. Listen to the MP3 or watch the video (MP4). Your children need to know that “God kills people.”
4. On the latest edition of The White Horse Inn Dr. Michael Horton and company give unique Election Coverage. No mention of Obama or McCain here; only the biblical concept of election presented from a decidedly reformed standpoint with plenty of helpful discussion.
5. If you listen to nothing else from this list, download the interview with Burl Cain, Warden of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, on The Drew Marshall Show. The testimony of the power of the gospel to transform lives that is taking place right now at this prison in Louisiana will astound you. It could only be God.

There’s election and there’s election.

Hill and Walton in their A Survey of the Old Testament describe God’s election of Israel as making “the Israelites the people of God only in a revelatory way.” They further clarify by saying, “By this we mean that God chose them as his instrument of revelation.”

The difference between this use of election and the (modern) Christian usage is that “when we speak of the church as God’s people, we refer to those who have accepted salvation through faith, specifically faith in Jesus Christ.” The Christian concept of election is strictly soteriological while that of Israel as a people is understood as revelatory. This is not to deny that “many Israelites of the Old Testament could be identified as God’s people by virtue of their faith in Yahweh”; but that “God revealed himself to the world through Israel” through the law, their history, writings of the Bible and Jesus the Christ.

How does this square withRomans 11 where Paul seems to be speaking of the election of Israel in soteriological terms? In line with the understanding and differentiation of election given above, “a remnant chosen by grace” (Rom. 11:5) appears to differentiate those Israelites who are “identified as God’s people by their virtue of their faith in Yahweh” from ”the rest [who] were hardened” (Rom. 11:7) who were only God’s people in the sense of belonging to the people group God elected revelatorily. For if Israelite election were the same as Christian soteriological election, how could the Scripture speak of “Israel not find[ing] what it was looking for, but the elect did find it” (Rom. 11:7)? It could not. Therefore the distinction made by Hill and Walton appears to fit with the Pauline distinction made inRomans 11.

Ultimately, this distinction leaves soteriological room for Gentiles which is the vein in which Paul continues through to the end of the chapter leading to an eruption of praise to God:

Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments and untraceable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor? Or who has ever first given to Him, and has to be repaid? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen. (Rom. 11:33-36)

[All quotations from Hill and Walton, A Survey of the Old Testament, Zondervan: 2000, 74. Scripture quotations from the HCSB.]