Is modern Israel the heir of the promises and covenant God made with ancient Israel?
This is the second installment in the 1517 articles series, “What Makes a Saint?”
This story is not meant for six-year-olds, but it is meant for us, though we should hardly handle it.

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Here is the truth: we have gained more in Jesus than we lost in Adam. We lost human perfection in the first man's fall. We gained perfect flesh-and-blood unity with God in his Son's incarnation.
I don’t need to watch a blood-soaked story on CNN or visit someone of death row to familiarize myself with the beast of depravity crouched within the human heart. I just need to look in the mirror, to stare deeply into the eyes that are a window to a soul that has journeyed down dark paths whose only illumination comes from the fires of hell.
She against whom I preached, in her unexpected response actually “preached” to me three truths I have never forgotten.
The Spirit, who endowed the tabernacle architects with wisdom from on high, overshadows Mary's womb, the new holy of holies, where Wisdom is incarnate below.
Though the theophanic elements at the Jerusalem Pentecost were not as diverse as those at Sinai, there is one prominent commonality between the two: divine speech out of divine fire.
Let him feel the heft of stone cradled in his palm, and consider the gravity of guilt cast upon the hypocrite.
This is the night when the earth is formless and void; and the darkness of blood is over the face of Thy Son. And the Spirit of God moves out of His body as He gives up the Ghost.
The prophets had foretold, His coming Incarnation; The Word would make our flesh, His only habitation.
Never are we more Hollywood than when we admit wrongdoing. Our confession is scripted, edited, practiced. Move over Brad Pitt; I’ve got this role down pat, for it’s my version of me.
People take off their public masks when around relatives. They let their darkness shine. That’s why Manuel spends his December 25 in the graveyard, talking to the dead.
Strange though it be, however, it is marvelous in meaning: for this was his way of writing his covenant into the very flesh of his people. What was not there, was a sign of what was there.
A few weeks ago, the pastor of my congregation did something in his sermon I’ve never heard a pastor do: he confessed a failure. He had once been ashamed of his brother, he admitted, and had acted in a way toward him that was not in keeping with love.