Everything in this season traces back to one promise in Genesis. Episode three goes back to the beginning to read the Abrahamic covenant line by line, including what it says about the Promised Land, the descendants, and the blessing to all nations.

Jesse and Josiah work through Genesis 12, 15, and 17 together, from the ancient ritual where only God walks between the animals to a wrinkle in the Hebrew that still shapes this whole debate: why “offspring” shifts between one person and a whole nation. Then they follow the thread into Paul’s writing in Galatians and Ephesians, circumcision, and how Gentiles get grafted into a promise that was never originally theirs.

In this episode:

📜 The three things God actually promises Abraham: land, nationhood, and blessing

🌱 Why “offspring” means one person in some verses and a whole nation in others

🔥 The ancient covenant ritual in Genesis 15, and why God alone walks through it

🧱 How Ephesians 2 reframes circumcision as the “dividing wall” Christ breaks down

Resources and verses mentioned:

Genesis 12:1-3, 7

Genesis 15:7-21

Genesis 17:1-14

Genesis 28:14

Galatians 3:16

Ephesians 2:11-15

Acts 15, Acts 21

Learn more about Passages: https://passagesisrael.org/

This episode is sponsored by The Public Interest Fellowship (TPIF), a two-year fellowship for recent grads and young professionals in Washington, DC and New York, NY. https://publicinterestfellowship.org/programs/the-public-interest-fellowship-tpif/

Why do the end times divide Christians and Jews more than almost anything else, and does it have to? Episode two takes on eschatology, the history of dispensationalism, and what Christian Zionism actually has to do with either.

Jesse walks through his own journey away from end-times fixation and back again, the real story behind the Scofield Bible, and the three postures Christians tend to take toward the Jewish people: apocalyptic fixation, theological indifference, or what he calls covenantal solidarity. Along the way, they land on a Charles Spurgeon sermon on the Valley of Dry Bones, preached eight decades before Israel existed as a nation.

In this episode:

⏳What eschatology actually means, and why almost everyone has a theory even if they've never named it

📖 Where dispensationalism came from, and why it's not as tied to Christian Zionism as people assume

🦴Charles Spurgeon's sermon on Ezekiel 37, preached decades before 1948

🤝 The three ways Christians tend to approach the Jewish people, and which one Jesse thinks gets it right

Resources and verses mentioned:

- Ezekiel 37 (Valley of Dry Bones)

- Charles Spurgeon's sermon on Ezekiel 37, referenced in The Puritan Hope by Iain Murray

- Donald Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism

- Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant

- Gerald McDermott, "The Reformed Tradition on Israel Is Diverse," The Gospel Coalition: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/reformed-tradition-israel-diverse/

Learn more about Passages: https://passagesisrael.org/

This episode is sponsored by The Public Interest Fellowship (TPIF), a two-year fellowship for recent grads and young professionals in Washington, DC and New York, NY. https://publicinterestfellowship.org/programs/the-public-interest-fellowship-tpif/

Some people online are telling Christians that supporting Israel makes them a heretic. This season, we're sorting out whether that holds up, and episode one starts where it has to: agreeing on what the word 'Israel' even means.

Meet Jesse, SVP of Passages Latino, he has a backstory that shapes everything he brings to this conversation. He and Josiah open the Bible to work through what "Israel" actually means, the two categories the church has debated for two thousand years, and where that viral Tucker Carlson interview missed the point.

In this episode:

⛪️ The two kinds of "Israel" the church has argued about since the early church fathers

🎙️ Where the Tucker Carlson interview went wrong

🇮🇱 Why mixing up "the Jewish people" and "the Israeli government" derails most conversations about this

Resources and verses mentioned:

• Romans 9:6 - Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho - Origen, De Principiis
• "The Genome-Wide Structure of the Jewish People," Nature
• "Abraham's Children in the Genome Era," American Journal of Human Genetics

This episode is sponsored by The Public Interest Fellowship (TPIF), a two-year fellowship for recent grads and young professionals in Washington, DC and New York, NY. https://publicinterestfellowship.org/programs/the-public-interest-fellowship-tpif/