Calvin-In-Common  had a discussion on David Remnick’s piece in the New Yorker on the seeming death to the two state solution.

I’m preaching on Genesis 3 this week and pondering relational conflict. Conflict is something important to learn, but seldom fun to learn it well. The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” just keeps giving.

Conflict math is simple:
Option A: Resolve the conflict
Option B: Maintain the conflict
Option C: Eliminate your adversary

CS Lewis’ picture of Hell in “The Great Divorce” offers option D: find more land (or money or stuff or toy or job or another girl or guy or whatever the fight is about).

The “more” option is usually tried first. Unfortunately “more” often gets others involved. In the colonial era the others were often aboriginals or those with less power.

The relational conflict in the garden boiled down to exile, a variant of the “more” option. The man and the woman are now distant. Cain too will learn distance and fear it.

What an immense irony to have the Jews at the center of this mess. It almost seems like a script only the Almighty could arrange. I’m not dispensationalist but it certainly appears that Israel is once again the crucible within which the world’s drama is portrayed.

The fathers of Israel, the victims of numerous attempts at Option C would be perpetually tempted by the same option.

We all flirt with Option C in small ways and large: condescension, apartheid, racism, classism, torture, confinement, exile. Maybe Option D is a weaker variant of Option C, or perhaps a necessity when people, stories and rights are everlasting, immune to annihilationism.

I can’t imagine how Israel thinks it has time on it’s side. The asymmetric reproductive numbers skews the future towards fundamentalists on both sides.

Barrenness in the OT stories whispers despair. There can not be a future for this race. This is why we pray. pvk