Opus 2025-484: Leftovers

As I was contemplating the relationship between God and Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, I found myself wanting the right word to express the status of the first humans.  At first, I wanted to say God fellowshiped with His creatures, but then I realized God also made the horses, cows, earthworms and oak trees.  He does not fellowship with them.  In trying to find the right term I stumbled across one that I probably first saw in a book by Michael Heiser, “image bearers”.

We are created in the image of God.  None of the other creatures does God fellowship with.  He didn’t walk with them in the garden.  He didn’t create for them a tree of life and a tree of knowledge of good and evil.  They were there for Adam and Eve to subdue and care for.  They were creatures.  They still are.  We were created in His image which makes “image bearers” a logical title for us.

From there, my mind did a sharp left turn, and I began to wonder if even many of the people that we consider human beings like ourselves were actually creatures instead of image bearers.  Somehow, I feel like I’m wondering into some kind of heresy.  We have people all the time talking about how we are all God’s children and how God loves His children and yet that does not play well in Peoria.  All through history, God has chosen individuals and groups of people to be special in His eyes.

He chose Noah and his sons to preserve out of all humanity.  He chose Abraham to be the father of a line of people leading toward the Messiah.  He chose the Jews to carry the banner of the law.  Even today he chooses those who believe in Jesus to have eternal life.  All through history, there have been the in-crowd and the outsiders.

The word that I’m coming up with from the Bible is “remnant”.

Remnant can have different meanings.  In our culture, remnants generally are referred to as leftovers.  When you go to a store that sells cloth and sewing supplies, the remnants are those little pieces of a bolt that were not sold.  They aren’t big enough to make a lot of clothes from, but they might be enough if carefully marshaled to produce one article.  It would seem in Bible times that the remnant would have that appearance to the masses.  They would be the ones who are out of step.  They would be the ones who are old-fashioned.  They would be the ones clinging to the past.

In God’s eyes this remnant are the chosen ones.  I often wonder how Paul and Romans 11:26 can claim that all Israel will be saved.

Romans 11:26 (KJV) And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob:

You either take the concept of salvation and separated it from any sense of responsibility or personal response and actually go back through history and reclaim every single Jew who lived, or you seek to understand the possibility that in this case “Israel” means something more, or less, than every DNA Jew through history.

It is more likely that it refers to the remnant, the faithful, the leftovers.  When you consider that what Paul said,

(Gal 3:28 KJV)  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Then there is a welcome mat out for faithful, believing Jews in the Body of Christ.

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