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The Gifts of the Jews
There’s an interesting book written by the scholar Thomas Cahill. He’s a historian rather than a pastor or theologian—I believe he comes from the Catholic religious tradition—but his books are fascinating. They talk about ancient individuals and cultures that have had an enormous impact on today’s world. He takes broad, complex histories and shows how those long-ago decisions and outcomes continue to shape the way we think today.
One of his books that captured my attention is called The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.
That title says a lot already, but this best-selling book, which came out in 2010, goes into detail about the Old Testament story of God’s people and how Jewish concepts about individualism, time, and justice spilled from their ancient culture into what it means to be human today.
I think often about how this book confirms what God promised to Abraham in Genesis:
“I will make you a great nation;
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
—Genesis 12:2-3
God not only promised to bless Abraham and his descendants, but that His people would bless others.
Cahill writes about many of those blessings in his book. He writes this in his introduction:
Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings…we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.
He says there has been no other people group in history like the Jews. I believe it, because I read it in the Bible.
That lead me to consider three additional blessings of the Jewish people.
The Most Important Man
The Jewish people gave us the most important man in all human history: Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. He is a Jew and He is our Messiah.
Notice that I didn’t say Jesus was a Jew. I said He is a Jew. Our Savior is Jewish and will be Jewish for all eternity.
This is why I will never understand how a Christian—a follower of Jesus—could also be an anti-Semite. How can any of His followers hate the Jewish people?
The Most Important Book
I’ve said it before and I will say it again and again: The Bible is the most important book in the history of the world. It’s the best-selling book of all time and is thought to have sold around 5 billion copies to date.
It was the most popular book in the world before the printing press was invented—back when it was reproduced by hand—and it is absolutely the most popular book in the world today. Around 80 million Bibles are printed every year.
And every single word in the Bible was written by Jewish people. It is a 100-percent Jewish book. God has used His people to give us the light by which we can live our lives and know God’s intention for us even after we leave the world.
The Most Important Organization
The Jewish people also gave us the Church, the world’s most effective and important organization. On the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended and the Church was born, 100 percent of those who first received the Spirit were Jewish.
That means 100 percent of the people in the audience at the first Christian sermon were Jewish. And if you read the rest of Acts, you’ll see that, by grace (God’s and also the Jews’), we who are non-Jews were also invited into the Church.
Those early Jewish believers listened to the Holy Spirit. If you are a Christian today, you can connect your faith directly to the Jews of the 1st century.
The most important man.
The most important book.
The most important organization.
Those are just three of the “gifts of the Jews,” life-changing gifts which have transformed humanity. The Jewish people have blessed the world with those gifts, and many others.
God never forgets a promise. He made an everlasting covenant with Abraham concerning all generations of the Jews—that He would bless them and that He would use them to bless the world.