A family should exhibit some degree of cohesion. Family members should look out for one another, encourage each other, and love one another through the endless trials of this life. But if we have trouble doing that in our own flesh-and-blood families, how can we hope to do better as the family of God?
Numbers 1:1-4:20; Hosea 1:10-2:21; Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 68:5-6; Matthew 23:13; Romans 9:24-26
Click here to listen to the podcast: A House for the Lonely
Click here to download the transcript: A House for the Lonely.pdf
Music: “Home,” Teshuva, Return, Teshuva 2014. Visit https://www.teshuvamusic.com/ to hear more by Teshuva.
THE BARKING FOX 
Hi Al,
Shalom from remote, rural, western Kansas! Anything speaking of isolation is always of interest to me. Just returned from a wonderful Shavuot weekend in Elk City, Oklahoma. That’s the closest fellowship I’ve been able to make contact with from where I live now – and that’s about 200 miles from here. Sometimes strange the places the Lord has us located at times and for seasons.
Can you expound on this statement that I stumbled over in your last message:
The large family Jacob brought to Egypt already included Canaanites, Arameans, Egyptians, and people of other nations.
Just not aware of that phenomenon.
Many thanks, Kay Brooks
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Hi Kay. That’s a good question. Israel has always been a multiethnic, multicultural nation. We need look no further than Deuteronomy 26:5, where the declaration each Israelite is to make upon presenting a firstfruits offering is, “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down to Egypt and he lived there as an outsider.” That describes Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The record of Genesis tells us that Isaac and Jacob took wives from Aram (Haran, which is now in Turkey). The one who negotiated the bride price for Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, was Abraham’s steward, Eleazar of Damascus. That’s the servant born in Abraham’s house who would have been his heir had Isaac and Ishmael not been born. If Abraham’s steward was an Aramean (Syrian), then we can reasonably conclude there were other Arameans in the household, as well as Chaldeans who had originally left with Abraham’s family.
In the next generation, those who came with Jacob to Egypt, according to Genesis 46, included Judah’s son, Shelah, and Simeon’s son, Shaul, both children of Canaanite women. Tamar, mother of Judah’s sons Perez and Zerah, was also a Canaanite. The family joined Joseph, who had married Asenath, an Egyptian, and Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh were raised as Egyptians. By that time, how many other nationalities were represented in the household? How many of Joseph’s servants were not native Egyptians? Were there Nubians and Minoans among them? What about Hittites and Amorites who might have attached themselves to Jacob? After all, Abraham’s allies in the rescue of Lot were Amorites, and it was Ephron the Hittite who sold him the cave and field of Machpelah.
This is why I have no problem asserting the multiethnic nature of Israel. It has always been a nation of people grafted in and adopted, as well as the native born. The question of identity, as Paul explains in Romans 9-11, involves heart transformation. The King Himself is the only one who has authority to say who is part of His nation. Any of us humans who want to exclude others should first take that up with the King.
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