John 3:8 “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Jewish traditions controlled every aspect of their lives from what they ate down to what they wore. Then came the time of the judges.

Judges 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

1 Samuel 8:4-9 English Standard Version

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah  and said to him, “Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.”  But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the Lord.  And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.  According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you.  Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

Samuel warned them and still they wanted an earthly king. And so it was until all was lost.

2 Kings 17 English Standard Version

The Fall of Israel

6 In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

Exile Because of Idolatry

7 And this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods 8 and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had practiced. 

That was the end of the line of kings over Israel circa 727 BC. 

Then Daniel prophesied that the Son of Man would come to rule and reign forever. In this kingdom He sits on the right hand throne of God and has sent His Spirit to issue His commands and execute the Father’s will.

John 14:16-17 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

I struggle with what I see as the differences between the four gospels. The Lord just reminded me that this is not about my struggles, it is about the struggles of the first century Jews and the messages they were receiving.

I begin here with “I am the way”. The Jews of that time had struggled in the world for thousands of years from the time of the drought that caused them to become captives in Egypt to the Roman occupation. That is a long history of believing in God without seeing a permanent solution to their personal struggles. Life was always a struggle.

If this one statement had been in the synoptic gospels they would have rebelled immediately and not been open to the good news. They struggled with seeing Jesus perform signs and wonders that were only hinted of in the Old Testament. That alone would have been difficult but then His words were so different from what the scribes were teaching. Adding to that a statement that they had been getting it wrong all those years would have been too much.

The closest Matthew came was Matthew 22:16 “And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.” Mark echoed some of that with Mark 12:14.

Luke 17:20 Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed,

Luke hinted that religious observations weren’t going to get them into the Kingdom. John 14:6 was telling the Jews that they could not come to the Father without Jesus. That would have been a stumbling block too difficult for them to remove.

Most of us came from a place without generational teachings that said their birthright was the only thing that mattered. 

Exodus 3:15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”

Most of us are not from that generation and might not understand how that colored their understanding. Paul entered the synagogues and reasoned with them through the law and the prophets without challenging their heritage.

Being born again has nothing to do with heritage.