child of God. They may have a relationship to God as Creator but not as Father. The

tragedy was that the earthly channel that God was preparing to reach the whole world, the

people of Israel, rejected Him, and He came to them, primarily, at His first coming, He

said: "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Note He calls them

"lost sheep". That shows they needed a Redeemer, before God could use them and the

divine plan for the earth cannot be realized until this is accomplished.

When He called the twelve apostles, we are told in Matthew's Gospel that He limited

their ministry to the same people.  In 10: 5, 6 we read: "Go not into the way of the

Gentiles and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep

of the house of Israel": in other words, their ministry was exclusively Jewish, and unless

we understand the plan we shall be puzzled here. Someone may say, "I thought God

wanted to bring in a world-wide kingdom; I thought He wanted to reach all families of

the earth, and now when Christ comes, He ministers only to one nation and forbids the

Apostles to go any wider than this. How is the gospel every going to spread over the

earth if the message is limited in this way?

But you see, the human channel must be got ready first! God has not abandoned this

way to bring in the kingdom; this earthly people must be laid hold of, redeemed and

prepared by His grace. Thus the attention is focused on them to begin with, and when

they respond, and are saved, then they shall be the means used to take the knowledge of

the Lord to the ends of the earth. The Bible asserts that "The knowledge of the Lord shall

cover the earth as the waters cover the sea". When God concentrates upon Israel, He has

not forgotten this, but is preparing them so that one day this prophecy may be gloriously

true. So Christ must die for them; He must become their Priest, their Offering, their

Saviour, before He can be their King and before they can be the channel through which

this great kingdom can be brought into being.

There is something else that we must add. While the death of Christ was a necessity,

foreknown by God in this great plan, we must not for one moment think that God forced

the people of Israel to crucify Christ. That would be a terrible thing. If God forced them

to do this, they have no responsibility for it. Peter could never have proclaimed publicly

as he did, after the day of Pentecost and accused his own people, saying to them: "You

with wicked hands, have taken and crucified Him." Their hands would not have been

wicked at all, for they would only have been doing what God intended they should do.

Here appears to be a dilemma: Christ must die to be the Offering for sin, because "the

wages of sin is death". He must die for us or all of us whether Jew or Gentile, must die

eternally, one or the other. We may resolve the difficulty if we read a verse in John's

Gospel. He said: "I lay down my life that I might take it again: no man taketh it from

me." Will you note that? So Israel did not really take it from Him unless He had been

willing; they did not force Him to go to the Cross--"No man taketh it from Me, I lay it

down of myself". I decide when I am going to die, He said, "I have power to lay it down,

I have power to take it again". No ordinary man could talk like that! You know quite

well that you have no power to decide the moment you are going to die, unless you

commit suicide, of course, and if you did that you certainly have no power to take it up

again; you could not raise yourself from the dead. But Christ asserted that He had the