Salvation is the Christian preoccupation. But it ought not be ours. Salvation is personal and private and very very selfish as a reason for being.

Salvation also forms a convenient excuse for ignoring important doctrines and practices we are all commanded to perform but few can agree upon. People feel free to avoid them because they are not “salvation issues”.

Salvation is a decoy objective.

Both saving ourselves and saving others are selfish goals, because our salvation is preoccupied with avoiding eternal perdition; and the salvation of others is preoccupied with believing we ourselves have the power to affect the eternal condition in others by whether or not we have given them the “good news”.

(“Good News” being the redefining and abridgment of the entirety of the Scriptures to just the part where the Father sends the ‘Son’ to die for our sin and rise again.”

Accept that last little bit and live forever….

…Not so fast!

Where did we get the salvation distraction from?

Where did we acquire the idea that we have a sin nature we need to be saved from, that we are headed for eternal perdition unless we obtain salvation, that we are doomed to die unless we can be saved by saying a few words and accepting a few facts for which we lack all context?

Originally and all the way back to the breaking of Israel in two, the aim has been national restoration not personal salvation.

One could argue for semantics here between salvation and restoration, and they would not be completely wrong on the basis of the literal meaning of the words. But who or what is being saved/restored?

Saved from what to what? Restored from where to where? Saved/restored from what, condition, threat, fate, etc?

The Sundering happened around 930 BC.
The Restoration never as yet.

Following the death of King Solomon,
Israel was anciently divided into two nations: the northern Kingdom of Israel (Ephraim) and the southern Kingdom of Judah.

This split occurred due to internal conflicts, particularly over the harsh treatment of the people under Solomon and the expressed intended continuance of such policies, by his son, Rehoboam - Jeroboam thereafter leading the northern 10 tribes and Rehoboam, ruling Judah in the south (3 tribes).

(The division is described particularly in 1 Kings 12.)

How do salvation and restoration differ?

They can be the same thing sometimes and that similarity caused the confusion. The difference lies in who or what is being saved/restored and from whom or what?

From the start of the Divide between the two Kingdoms, YHWH foretold of the restoration/salvation that would one day take place.

The prophets Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos all made fatidic proclamations first of reunification and later of restoration. There was division and then in subsequent generations dissolution followed by further division and dissolution.

The northern kingdom was exiled in 722 BC never yet to return. The southern kingdom exiled in 586 BC yet returned 70 years later.

(Though returned, Judah has as yet never been fully restored as before and without her other ‘half’, has yet to be fully reunified and “saved” as a nation.

After the northern kingdom’s exile the people began to intermarry and intermingle with the nations of the world becoming to this day mixed into and indistinguishable from the other peoples of the earth.

Yet inspite of this the prophecies still stand with further prophecies added in aswell doubling down on the declaration.

In the time of the last exile of the Jews by the Romans and the over throw of the remnant of Israel, the Revelation declares that the 144,000 will be called out from all of these people including the Lost Tribes and the Jews.

The emissaries of our Messiah insist that in the end “all Israel will be saved”.

Many theological scenarios have been concocted to explain this mystery, every one of which is constructed in the absence of the consideration of the nature of this salvation.

Since the Sundering, the goal was always restoration of the nation and restoration of status, restoration of rights and citizenship and title and land and structure and all around identity. The goal was restoration of the nation of Israel and of ourselves within it…

But that has no global appeal. That’s not universal “Good News.”

That’s not a winning message, especially not for pagan born peoples who are hearing about this same restoration brought about by this ‘Son’ of the Creator.

This view does not work when we are outside looking in and looking at all the biblical stuff as if it were “Jewish” as opposed to it being the obligations of Israel, and when we are seeing ourselves as gentiles rather than ourselves belonging to Israel, ourselves as Israelites lost and wandering in a wicked world.

If Israel is just the Jews and the restoration has come to the gentiles then it much be saving us from something else. It can’t be restoring Israel and restoring us to our place in that people, because that people is just Jews and we aren’t trying to become Jews, right? It can’t be salvation of the people of Israel scattered to the four corners of the earth cause Israel is just the Jews and the Most High is done with them, right? It can’t be gathering the exiles from the farthest reaches under heaven! It can’t be calling us all home! It can’t be reaching out to the foreigners, the pagan-born gentiles to extend the offer and invitation of immigration, naturalization and assimilation into the people and nation of Israel, under Yeshua the Messiah, the rightful King!…it couldn’t be!…

…could it?

It becomes a mess in a hurry when we decide we know what the Bible is talking about before reading it first without bias.

Chayah in Hebrew is to live whether literally or figuratively; causatively to revive, keep alive, or make alive. It is to promise life, allow to live, nourish, preserve, quicken, recover, repair, restore, revive, save, and make whole.

Sozo in Greek means to save, deliver or protect, literally or figuratively, to heal preserve, save, make well, or make whole, and to restore.

Chayah translated as Sozo and rendered as salvation by nonJewish persons coming to the faith from a gentile perspective and with a view of Israel as only the Jews, easily evolved the invented alternative.

What must happen now is for those of us attempting to unlearn the ancient errors and relearn the truth of old, to begin to discard this disastrous view of salvation being about our personal selves.

YHWH did not sunder His nation in twain and dissolve it into atomically small pieces prophesying generation after generation of its restoration, only to reinterpret the meaning when it came time to make it real.

Finally foretelling the restoration definitively and specifically tribe by tribe once it was completely and totally lost from land and legitamacy, our Heavenly Father did not alter the restoration intended and foretold for so many centuries.

He didn’t wait till the situation was so impossible it requires a miracle to make it actual, only to change His mind and make the salvation personal and eternal.

From of old YHWH foretold that His nation would be saved, restored, made whole….and individual people acquire this same state of existence aswell. We are not being saved, restored and made whole in our pagan gentile state.

We are not being saved from being eternally damned to Dante’s inferno. We are not being restored to some inception condition of Edenic innocence, nor made whole as heathen peoples and left as is.

When we read in the writings of the disciples about our salvation, we are reading of our restoration to citizen status in Israel.

When we read of the arguments regarding the salvation many believed to be found in circumcision, we aren’t hearing a discussion about whether or not that particular surgery would save one’s soul, but rather an argument over whether or not the act of circumcision enacted the restoration of citizenship or concluded the restoration process.

When we read that “all Israel will be saved” we are not encountering the understanding that every Jew will be given eternal life in the end nor that all those who have eternal life in the end will belong to Israel. We are reading about the restoration of all Israel as a people, as a nation and as a land…

Exactly as all the prophets have said and exactly as was always expected until the reinterpretation of salvation to mean saving from sin, death, and hellfire.

All Israel Will Be Saved

All Israel Will Be Restored

…

Are you part of Israel?

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