By the Rivers of an Everlasting Babylon, June 24, 26.

Dear Ehud, before we get to the arguments from Scripture, and they are coming, promise,

I wanted to touch on one more subjective element that I suspect you were dealing with.

In my previous

letter, we looked at the element of struggle, wrestling with both God and man. In this one, I would

like to consider the sense of isolation and exclusion. This is kind of a push-me-pull-you situation

because the isolation is chosen by you and the exclusion is chosen or so you feel by the other. You are not a Christian because

you have not become one. You have not been baptized. And yet at the same time, you feel rejected by

the Christians as though you were not invited to the party, and you should have been. All of this is

rooted in several events of the first century, the principal one being the death and resurrection

of Jesus of Nazareth. While Christians and Jews share the Old Testament, we principal one being the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

While Christians and Jews share the Old Testament, we come down here to a foundational principle

of division, Jesus either rose from the dead or he did not. The Old Testament either prophesied

that he would or didn't. If he did not rise, then as the Apostle Paul noted, we Christians

are the most pitiable creatures ever, 1st Corinthians 1519.

If he did rise from the dead, then he is the promised Messiah that the entire Old Testament

was pointing toward. That would make the Jews the most to be pitied. This would mean that the

ingenuity of a thousand rabbis can't put the Old Testament jigsaw puzzle together because someone

put the wrong box lid on it. The lid is

of a lighthouse and the puzzle itself is of a sailboat. And whether Jesus rose from the dead is one of

those binary things. He either did or he didn't. There is no halfway. If he didn't, then what honest

man would want to be one of those deluded Christians? If he did rise, then every sensible person would want

...