A New Vision For Israel

As Americans in the 21st Century it is difficult to approach and relate to Jesus outside of our own presuppositions and cultural traditions. As a result we end up shaping Jesus into a mold that looks more like our own ideologies and less like the God that stepped into human history during a specific time, place, people, and context.

Scot McKnight's book: A New Vision For Israel: The Teachings of Jesus in a National Context is a helpful resource to anyone that desires to understand what Jesus and his mission meant to those who would have heard (and seen) his message first hand. Taking into a account cultural and historical elements McKnight shows how Jesus' view of things like: God, exile, kingdom, conversion, salvation, and ethics radically spoke into the 1 century landscape and as a result what they mean for us today.

Here's an excerpt from the book as McKnight discusses the vision and hope Jesus came to bring: "That both John and Jesus had a vision for the nation of Israel needs to be emphasized: neither John nor Jesus was thinking down the road thousands of years, to our own time, when Christianity would have gone through a multitude of mutations and denominations and when the Church would be interacting with cultures and ideologies so remote from that encountered in the land of Israel at the time of Herod Antipas. Both John and Jesus had a single vision: the restoration of Israel."