One family, not two plans

The church isn’t God’s backup plan, running alongside Israel or replacing it outright — it’s grafted into the same family, the same covenant, the same story that runs all the way back to Abraham. That changes how the Old Testament is meant to be read: not as someone else’s history with a few pre-Christian lessons in it, but as your own family’s story.

It also changes how easily “us and them” thinking can slip into how you think about Israel, the church, or any other group of God’s people that looks different from your own corner of it.

There’s a second thread worth pulling on here: belonging to this family was never really about bloodline, even inside the Old Testament itself. From the beginning, God kept a remnant — a faithful few inside Israel, marked out by loyalty rather than ancestry, while plenty of ethnic Israelites drifted away. The second Exodus picks up the same pattern: God rescuing a people not because they’d earned it, but because he keeps binding himself to whoever stays loyal, generation after generation. That’s a much steadier place to stand than heritage, denomination, or a family name ever was.

Questions to reflect on

• Do you actually read the Old Testament as your own family’s history, or as background material for someone else’s story?
• Where has “us and them” thinking crept into how you view believers who don’t look, worship, or belong the way you do?
• If belonging to God’s people has always been marked by loyalty rather than heritage, what are you currently leaning on instead — a family name, a denomination, a tradition — that faithfulness alone was always meant to hold up?

Prayer

Father, thank you for grafting me into your family and your story, reaching back to Abraham. Teach me to read the Old Testament as my own family’s history. Take the “us and them” out of my heart towards your people who look different from me, and keep me leaning on faithfulness to you rather than on heritage or a name. Amen.