God’s Chosen Ones? (Colossians 3:12-4:1)
- by Pei Zuan Tam
This essay is adapted from the lesson on the Letter to the Colossians, chapter 3 verse 12 to chapter 4 verse 1, given on February 19, 2024.
The selected passage of Colossians for this lesson opens with one of the most fraught phrases in the history of faith: “as God’s chosen ones” (Colossians 3:12). Who are the chosen ones? By what qualifications? How should they behave? What about the rest of humanity? Are they any lesser in the eyes of the chosen ones, or even of the One-who-summons-the-chosen?
You see, this one phrase already gives us enough problems to work with. So central and challenging is this phrase in this conversation that the rest of what Paul said in Colossians is not meaningful to us until we confront the concept of the chosen. In this study I will focus on exploring this concept. How one understands it will affect everything he or she does — the relationship with oneself, with other Christians, with humanity, and with God.
Where is the concept of “God’s chosen ones” first mentioned in the Bible? As it turns out, at the very beginning. On day six of creation, God created land-dwelling creatures of all kinds including human beings, but it was humankind that was chosen to bear God’s image in this world that God created in love (Genesis 1:24-31). In principle each and every one of us the image bearers, simply by existing, is chosen and imbued with certain holiness and responsibilities from Heaven. From there the idea of the chosen is repeated in the Noah’s story, the calling of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and finally the calling of Moses. By the time we come to the climatic scene at Mount Sinai where the entire nation is called — an event unprecedented and unrepeatable — “God’s chosen ones” is already a familiar tune to the readers’ ears:
Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, “This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.” (Exodus 19:3-6)
The downside of a familiar tune is just that — familiarity. It is all too human for us to treat something familiar as background noise. We stop paying attention. We lost the inspiration despite how glorious it once was. Thus was the great challenge for Moses in his final days. He foresaw that future generations would face the double-threat of, on the one hand, taking for granted God’s covenantal love in good times, and on the other, giving up their own covenantal faithfulness all too easily in bad times. Cross-generational education therefore became the central concern in Deuteronomy — the same reason why early Christians began collecting and compiling the writings and why we get to read Colossians today. Right before Moses died he said to the second generation who were going to enter the promised land:
Look: the heavens, even the highest heavens, belong to the LORD your God, with the earth and all it contains. Yet it was on your ancestors alone (i.e. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) that the love of the LORD is pleased to dwell, and it was you, their descendants, that He chose among all the peoples, as He does today. (Deuteronomy 10: 14-15)
Echoing Moses, Paul in his letter to Colossi quoted a hymn that says in essence: the heaven and the earth was created through Jesus and belong to Jesus, who is God. And it was on Jesus alone that the fullness of God is pleased to dwell, and it is you, Jesus’s body, that God has reconciled to himself, as He does today. (Colossians 1:15-23) We are chosen, not on the merits of our own, but — in the Christian context — on the merits of Jesus. Moses continued:
Therefore, circumcise your heart, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. (Deuteronomy 10: 16. Being stiff-neck is a code word for idolatry)
Likewise, in chapter 2 of Colossians Paul argued: in baptism you have been spiritually circumcised, so do not let yourselves be taken captive by human philosophies and worldly principals any longer. (Colossians 2:8-12) The key phrase here is “circumcise your heart”, or “be spiritually circumcised”. What does it mean to be spiritually circumcised? To this Moses already gave the reasoning a few verses back:
What does the LORD Your God ask of you? Only this: to revere the LORD your God, to walk in His ways and love Him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and all you soul. (Deuteronomy 10:12)
Meaning, you serve the King of the universe not because you have to, but because you want to. That is what free people do. The first lesson about being the chosen ones is to know that you have been set free by God, therefore you freely choose to serve God.
Returning to our passage in Colossians:
As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. (Colossians 3:12)
Just like how God clothed Adam and Eve with the garment that God made Himself (Genesis 3:21), and how Moses clothed Aaron the high priest with the garment of glory and splendor (Exodus 28:2), Paul urged the Colossians Christians to clothe themselves with the spiritual garment of splendor, because every adopted child of God is royalty. But how do you put on a garment of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience? Do you go to a Christian clothing store — there are such stores — to buy a hoody with the word “humility”, put it on, and walk around showing off? You could, but I doubt you would.
You put on this garment by the way you carry yourself. This is why from Exodus to Deuteronomy there are pages after pages of instructions — “do this, do not do that”. Why? Because the royal garment you wear is the way you behave. This is not to be confused with legalism. When Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt the Israel society after the Babylonian exile, they read the book of Deuteronomy and found it imperative to recommit themselves to the commandments. One of the commandments was the sabbath year — the release of all debt every seven years (Nehemiah 10:33). What is the logic behind such a strange law? Moses gave this reason in Deuteronomy: because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you (Deuteronomy 15:1-15).
You would think that the obvious reasons for acting generously is to help those in need, or at least for the good of your own soul — there is truth to that — but those are not the reasons given in the scripture. Time and again, Moses told the Israelites: you liberate others because God liberated you. Your generosity is not based on whatever benefits you may derive for yourself or others. It is based on memories: memories that you were once treated as less than human, but God heard your cry and saw your oppression and rescued you, so you too will not turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the hardship of others around you. This is overwhelmingly the basis for almost all the commandments concerning civil affairs in the Law. Likewise Paul said to the Colossian Christians:
Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. (Colossians 3:13)
Above all, clothe yourselves with love — love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength (Deuteronomy 6:5); love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18); love the foreigners among you, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:19) — love binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3:14)
And:
let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. (Colossians 3:15-16)
We are to saturate our lives with the Word of God — when we read the scriptures we allow God to speak to us, in prayer we speak to God, in community we speak and listen to one another — until our individual souls and the surrounding culture is thoroughly transformed by God’s living words. In other words, we need to constantly educate ourselves and the next generation, just as Moses told his second generation:
Set these words of Mine upon your heart and upon your soul, bind them as a sign upon your hand, and have them as an emblem between your eyes. Teach them to your children, speaking of them when you are at home and when you travel, when you lie down and when you get up… (Deuteronomy 11:18-19; a variation is also found in Deuteronomy 6:6-8)
The book of Psalms opens with these words:
Happy is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked…
Instead, the Lord‘s teaching is all his desire,
and contemplates that teaching day and night.
He is like a tree planted on streams of water,
yielding fruit in its season, its leaves never withering. (Psalms 1:1-4)
Studying and meditating the text is central to the lives of God’s adopted children. Paul closes out this section by saying:
And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:17)
Thus far we have covered a short but dense and passionate sermonette in Colossians chapter 3. I also demonstrated how Paul, in mere 6 verses, essentially reprised the equally passionate final words of Moses. He must have felt the same worry and hope for the Christians in Colossi as Moses had for the second generation of the wilderness years. The question is, was Paul’s worry justified? This is answered by Moses’s haunting prophetic future (Deuteronomy chapter 28) and Paul’s own painful past as a Jew, i.e. the history of Israel in the biblical era.
Prophets of the biblical era — all of who loved Israel and gave their lives for her — were most critical of Israel when it came to its current affairs. To be sure, the ancient Israel had no shortage of prophets who preached only good news (Jeremiah 14:13-14), but it were the most critical voices — like Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. — that made it into the Bible that we have today. No other ancient cultures came anywhere close to Israel in the genre of self-criticism. Reading the prophets make us realized that Moses was right to worry. Ditto for Paul. He had all the reasons to worry about the gentile Christians. Why worry? Because nothing is easy about the vision of becoming a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:6, 1 Peter 2:9). The history of the biblical Israel is an extended testimony to the difficult birth and growth of a nation aspired to this vision. What shall we say then? That Israel has failed, so God ditched His Plan A with Israel and switched to His Plan B — the church?
First of all, all “replacement theologies” are dangerous ideologies that took humankind down to many dark places — for example: the Holocaust. There was a time when I too was convinced by it — I had fallen captive of this human philosophy — and I had to repent.
Secondly, the long and often messy history of the biblical Israel cannot be reduced to a simple binary of passing versus failing. Case in point: the book of the Judges was self-critical enough to see its own history as an anarchy, “all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 21:25) . Even then, there was one brief but sparkling moment in that period when a tiny community in Israel came ever so close to the ideals of heaven-on-earth. It is right there in the Text, but it is so often missed or misunderstood. Once you see it, though, you cannot unsee it. I am talking about the book of Ruth.
In my own church tradition, half the people quite literally miss the story of Ruth, because the men’s groups almost never study this book. The other half that do study Ruth often misunderstand it because — while we manage to draw great lessons about friendship, hospitality, spiritual conversion, even dating ethics from the story — we are not asking the key question: what is a book like Ruth doing in the Bible? And what an odd book is Ruth! Its story took place in a time and place where we expect to see laws, commandments, prophecies, miracles, prayers, politics, warfare, etc. None of these are found in the book of Ruth. What then is a book like Ruth doing in the Bible? Once you answer this question, not only will you uncover new insights about the Bible, but as I will use the rest of the essay to argue, you will see a very vivid picture of what Moses, the prophets, and Paul have labored so hard and so long for — an actualization of the people who call God their King, whom God calls His people. (Deuteronomy 26:17-19)
The Book of Ruth begins with a tragedy: in the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. A family from Bethlehem fled to the fields of Moab in search for survival and a future. But there the man of the house died, so did the sons. All that were left were the widows: Naomi the wife, and Ruth and Orpah the two daughters-in-law. Naomi learned that “the LORD has remembered His people and gave them bread” so she decided to go back to Bethlehem. Ruth insisted on following, vowing to never leave Naomi. Once they returned, however, they found themselves in the double-jeopardy of fate: A) with no surviving males to inherit their ancestral land they had no means to grow their own food, and B) with no surviving patriarchs as spokespersons they had no chance to properly remarry; they would remain as childless widows, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable in the agricultural patriarchal ancient Middle East. (Ruth chapter 1)
It gets even more depressing when we compare the situation against the promises in Deuteronomy that says “blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, and the fruit of your land…(Deuteronomy 28:4)” Naomi and Ruth did returned to the promised land, but what awaits them were anything but the promise. What are we to make of it? Beneath the surface narrative of this short story is an existential question no less challenging than the notoriously depressing book of Job.
Most of the story in the book of Ruth took place in the harvesting field owned by a Israelite man called Boaz of the tribe of Judah. Ruth, one the other hand, was not an Israelite; she was a Moabite, hence a foreigner — a foreigner and a widow in the land of Israel. Boaz welcomed Ruth to pick the leftovers in his field until the end of the harvest season. His generosity came as a timely relief for Naomi and Ruth who faced the question of basic survival (Ruth chapter 2).
The story led us to believe that Boaz did what he did out of his own generosity. Most readers pick up this theme and see Boaz as a role model of hospitality. What we do not read — what I believe is left out on purpose by the author — was the law of gleaning that says:
When you reap the harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the migrant, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord you God may grant you blessing in all the work of your hands. When you beat the fruit from your olive trees, do not go over them again. Leave what remains for the migrant, the orphan, and the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the migrant, the orphan, and the widow. Remember that you were slave in the land of Egypt. And so I command you in this. (Deuteronomy 24:19-22)
What this law prescribes is an ancient form of welfare system that guards against the vicious cycle of poverty. No doubt Boaz fulfilled this commandment exceedingly well. So why did the author not give Boaz the legal credits? Is it because the author did not know the law, or that he forgot to cross-check the Torah? The answer is a resounding “no”. Using parables to debate the law is a hallmark of a Torah master. One of the most well known examples is the exchange between Jesus and a legal expert, where Jesus answered the question “who is my neighbor” with the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Likewise, the author of Ruth was a Torah expert of the highest order. He used the story to probe the question: what if Israel do what the law says not because they have to, but because they want to.
Now we are beginning to crack the code on the question we asked earlier: what is a book like Ruth doing in the Bible? It is not just there to retell something that happened in the past. It is asking a very serious question: what exactly is the responsibility of Israel in its covenantal relationship with God? “Blessed shall be the fruit of your land”, yet there are people like Naomi and Ruth who go hungry. What do you do about it? As long as we hoard everything to ourselves, no divine providence is enough to tackle hunger and poverty. What we need is a soft heart and an open hand like Boaz. That is what the people of God is all about. Boaz exemplifies the ideal covenantal partner that the prophet Jeremiah speaks of:
“Circumcise yourself to the LORD, remove the foreskin (i.e. hardness) of your hearts.” (Jeremiah 4:4)
“I (God) will grant them the heart to know Me, for I am the LORD. They will be My people, and I will be their God (i.e. the chosen people), for they will return to Me with all their heart.” (Jeremiah 24:7)
“I will put my law in their minds and in their hearts, and I will be their God, and they will be My people (i.e. the chosen people). No longer will each person teach a neighbor and each person a brother, saying , ‘Know the LORD!’ For they will all know me… (Jeremiah 31:33-34)
Later on in the story, we found out that Boaz was actually a relative of Naomi’s husband, Ruth’s father-in-law. Why does it matter? Marriage. In a daring move, Ruth was going to propose to Boaz [1]. In keeping with the style of the story of concealing the law, we are not told — but we are expected to know and wrestle with — the regulations of remarrying widows like Ruth:
When brothers live together, and one of them dies without a son, his widow shall not be married to a stranger outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall come to her and take her in marriage, fulfilling the duty of a brother-in-law. The firstborn son whom she bears will perpetuate the name of the dead brother, so that his name is not erased from Israel. (Deuteronomy 25:5-6)
In the tribal society, a widow without a child lost all protections and was one of the most vulnerable people. What made the Israel project different — at least according to the vision of the Torah — was to construct a society unlike Egypt and would not allow a personal misfortune such as this to lead to systemic injustice. The solution for the ancient Israelites was also straight forward: do not let a childless widow stay a childless widow in perpetuity. Her brother-in-law is required to take her as his wife. The firstborn child from this new marriage will inherit the name of the dead husband, along with the allotted land in his name. This is called a levirate marriage, an ancient practice of achieving the twin-justice of A) protecting the widow, and B) perpetuating the legacy of the dead husband.
Unlike the law of gleaning, which Boaz performed so outstandingly, the law of levirate marriage did not concern him. After all, he was not Ruth’s brother-in-law. Ruth, on the other hand, continued to remain a childless widow, because her only other brother-in-law, Mahlon, died in Moab (Ruth 1:5). Legally speaking it was not possible for Ruth to get a levirate marriage. Boaz knew it, so did the author of Ruth — I have argued earlier that the author was an expert of Torah, and he crafted the narrative as a meta-discussion about the nature of performing the law. All these made Ruth’s marriage proposal to Boaz the biggest plot twist in the story. This is how she proposed:
“I am your maidservant Ruth — spread your mantle (outer garment) over your maidservant, for you are a redeemer.” (Ruth 3:9)
In simple vernacular: “take me as your wife now, like how a brother-in-law would.” At hearing this, Boaz replied: “May the LORD bless you, for the kindness you just did was greater the first”. (Ruth 3:10) What was the first kindness he referred to? That Ruth did not give up on her mother-in-law Naomi, even though it was within Ruth’s full right to leave. Her second and greater kindness? Despite being at the legal dead end to prolong her deceased husband’s legacy she never gave up on trying — an unmovable conviction that Boaz only just found out upon hearing her marriage proposal, and he could not help but be humbled and moved.
Did Ruth use the law correctly? Certainly not, at least not in the normative sense. A redeemer or next-of-kin like Boaz had the duty and honor to repurchase a kinsman’s land on his behalf should he be forced to sell it in hard times (Leviticus 25:25). He had no obligation to marry the widow, raise up a child for the dead, then return the redeemed land to the child; only a brother-in-law was obliged to this. What was Boaz’s final answer to Ruth’s rather awkward proposal? He said: “I shall do all that you ask.” (Ruth 3:11) Surely Boaz knew that the marriage would be unconventional and not what law prescribed, yet he submitted to Ruth as if her legal interpretation was superior and he became a student of Ruth. It was not because Ruth was a more accomplished Torah scholar — how could she be? She just arrived from Moab, she still looked and sounded like a Moabite — a fact that the author emphasized multiple times. It was not her knowledge but her love that humbled Boaz on the one hand and challenged him to go higher on the other.
At this juncture it is time to revisit the idea of “God’s chosen ones”. In Ruth’s story, Boaz is the “chosen one”; he is portrait as the golden child of Israel who did no wrong. Ruth, on the other hand, was a Moabite who “shall not be admitted to the congregation of the LORD even to the tenth generation” (Deuteronomy 23:3). She is anything but “the chosen one”. But it took somebody like Ruth to say, “who says only a brother-in-law can act on behalf of my late husband, why can’t one of his clansmen do so”, to which Boaz said, “you are right.”
Boaz has what we call moral courage — the strength to do the right thing. He proved that by welcoming Ruth to glean in his field.
Ruth has what we call moral imagination — the ability to think outside the box for the sake of what is right and just. It should not surprise us that moral imagination is usually found among the outsiders — people at the fringes who do not have the resources and status to accomplish what is right even if they try. Moral imagination is when the society and everyone in it says: a decent society is where the whites stay here, the blacks stay there, the chosen ones stay here, the non-chosen ones stay there, but Martin Luther King Jr. said “I have a dream”. People with moral imaginations are trailblazers. For a time they are misunderstood. But overtime enough people will be inspired and humanity takes one step forward.
There is no doubt that when Paul wrote “as God’s chosen ones” he meant the gentile Christians in Colossi — and by extension, Christians today. But it gets more nuanced than that. In the beginning of this essay I asked the counter-question: “if some are chosen, what about the rest?” During their own times Ruth and Martin Luther King Jr. belonged to “the rest”, yet we who self-identify as the chosen ones are enjoying the spiritual wealth they created. Like Boaz, the chosen ones have things to learn from the not-yet-chosen ones like Ruth. This is a profoundly humbling realization. It is how I understand the stark contrast in Paul’s message to the slaves versus the masters in Colossians. To the masters he simply said: “treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven.” To the slaves he said:
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.” (Colossians 3:22 - 4:1)
Some say Paul was promoting blind obedience and slavery, but such interpretations are simply reading modern emancipation into the ancient text. What Paul described was the biblical freedom modeled after the liberation of Israel from Pharaoh. What is the biblical form of freedom? It is this:
they (the impoverished Israelites) and their children with them shall go free in the jubilee year, for to Me the people of Israel are My servant, they are My servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 25:54-55)
Paul, whose understanding of freedom was based on scriptures, reminded the slaves in Colossi that they were free precisely because they had one master — not the earthly ones but the Heavenly One. “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? … that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.” (Romans 6:16-18) That’s what redemption is about — a purchase, an exchange of lordship from the old master to the one who purchased us. From Moses to Paul the understanding of true freedom has not changed one bit: a man cannot serve two masters, but a man cannot not serve any master. He must serve one master and one master alone — God. True freedom is to freely choose to serve God and care for our fellow human beings. But the real punch line is the next verse, where Paul said to the slave masters:
“Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven.” (Colossians 4:1)
It is strikingly sparse compared to what Paul said to the slaves, as if to say to the masters: “all that I have to teach the you I have taught them to your slaves. Go learn from them, for you are no different — you too are under the same lordship of God like them.” That is the second lesson of this study: in the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, your “chosenness” put you in right standing before God, but it forbids you from using it as a ranking among men.
The Gospel is radical and subversive to the status quo of the Greco-Roman empires of its time; it should still be the radical voice of our time. Sadly, this is what the many forms of racial supremacists get it so backwardly wrong. Their understanding of being “chosen” is all about the rest of us being “rejected”. They often replace the radical equality Paul preached with their supremacist ideologies and call it the gospel.
I write this essay in February — the Black History Month — a season of high awareness in anti-racism. Given the recent prolonged antisemitic rants by Kanye West on various media [2], I find the timing of this essay all too surreal. What is even more tragic and tragically ironic is that West’s ideology is not new. In 1979, six years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, his mother Alberta Williams King was gunned down by a young African American man named Marcus Wayne Chenault in the middle of a church service. It later came to light that Chenault was also deeply influenced by the same ideology like West’s which claims that the blacks, not Jews, are the real biblical Israelites. [3]
Fast forward to the 21st century, we again find ourselves facing the allure of what Paul called “human philosophy and empty deceit” (Colossians 2:8); only back then Paul did not have to deal with the onslaught of the 24-7 preachings by media pundits and influencers. From Israel to Iran, Europe to North America, various groups are making their own versions of claims that “God is on our side” but the only problem is “they” keep infringing upon our God given rights and rightful place in this world. An alarming trend of ultranationalism is sweeping across many different cultures. In the western world including North America we see the syncretism of ultranationalism and Christianity. In truth this is not the Gospel but the worship of power. [4]
We owe it to ourselves and future generations to pass down what Paul taught the Colossians — the true meaning of “God’s chosen one” whose mandate is this:
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of Lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10:17-19)
“The King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:34-40)
The third and final lesson of this study is this: lay down your chosenness for the cause of the not-yet-chosens. Jesus is a descendant of Ruth and Boaz accordingly to the genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel, which makes us — the co-heirs of Christ (Romans 8:17) — the spiritual descendants of not just Boaz the chosen one, but also Ruth the not-yet-chosen one. As long as we keep our hearts soft like Boaz, then like Boaz who did not fail to notice Ruth, we will not fail to notice the not-yet-chosen around us. As you lay yourself down in service of one another, may God lift you up in this world and the world to come.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus
“who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:6-11)
[1] The daring proposal was not without precedent. In Genesis chapter 38 Tamar the Canaanite did the same to Judah. But the author of Ruth withheld this connection until the very final verses, where we learn that the eventual son of Ruth and Boaz traces his lineage back to Perez, son of Tamar and Judah.
[2] West’s ideology traces its roots to the Hebrew Israelite movement https://www.timesofisrael.com/black-people-are-actually-jews-the-origins-of-kanye-wests-inflammatory-remarks/
[3] Chenault was swayed by the ideology of Hebrew Israelite https://www.nytimes.com/1974/07/04/archives/a-spiritual-teacher-asserts-chenault-was-an-avid-student-little.html Hebrews Israelite is identified as a hate group: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/history-hebrew-israelism
[4] See "Taking America Back for God" by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Also read Dr. Tim Keller’s thoughts on the book https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/book-review-on-the-topic-of-christian-nationalism/