Welcome to Culture and Christianity.

This is kind of a special session for me.

I'm a bit excited about it.

I'm prepared for it.

I'm going to read more scripture than you're accustomed to me reading.

And in some respects, it got focused for me last week. I had, I suppose I had 10 different

people reach out to me with questions around anti-Semitism, hating the Jewish people.

And most of them were being influenced by a lot of voices in the current ecosystem, whether it's whether you live in social

media or you're following things through the church, or maybe you're watching some current

events, people who have opinions and influencers and a lot of conversations, a lot of opinions,

and the people reaching out to me were looking for resources, trying to sort it out.

And while I was passing out resources, I thought maybe a shorter way to do that would be to take a bit of time and for us to talk about it.

So the topic really has to do with hating the Jewish people. Is it appropriate?

Is the modern nation of Israel a pretender? Should they be disregarded?

Do the Jewish people have a place in God's unfolding purposes as a people?

Or do they just have to get folded into the narrative of contemporary Christianity?

And I want to kind of begin to walk through that.

And I'm not going to start by trying to do a verse-by-verse comparison of kind of the proof text that are the typical talking points. I probably would start with the, you know,

we meet Abraham in the Book of Genesis. The Book of Genesis introduces the big rock ideas

of the Bible. If you will accept the book of Genesis as true, the rest of the Bible makes

sense. If you reject the book of true, the rest of the Bible makes sense.

If you reject the book of Genesis, the rest of the Bible feels like a farce.

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