Thomas Nelson, College/Singles Minister at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, illustrates the impact that Judaism is the foundation of our Christian Faith.
Video Transcript:
I'll never forget that week. The week that had finally arrived. We had been promised by our teacher for months that it was going to happen. She said put down your pencils, push your paper aside. She began placing these objects on our desk, and they might as well have been hundred dollar bills the way our eyes lit up. They were Texas Instruments TI-83s, the calculator that could do it all. It was going to revolutionize the way we had done math. Our pencil and paper methods were now obsolete because all we had to do was plug our numbers in, punch a button, and out came the answer. No more hours of sitting down with pencil and paper trying to figure out, "Is it right? Is it wrong? Did I do my formula correctly?" It was right here. It was just handed to us.
I wonder if there's not a parallel between pencil and paper math and the way we view our Christian heritage in the New Testament verses our Jewish roots in the Old Testament. What about Jesus? He was Jewish. He had Jewish parents. He lived in a Jewish culture. He grew up and went to a Jewish school. He celebrated the Jewish feasts. Jesus was Jewish through and through, and somehow we have separated it all, and his Jewishness has been left behind. And even the book of Revelation has over twice the number of references and ties to the Old Testament than any other book in the New Testament.
Maybe all this points to the fact that our Jewish roots and Jewish heritage and the Jewish people have a special place in God's heart. In fact, this calculator, without pencil and paper math, wouldn't even be.
