God Alone, Not Abraham: Dependence, Salvation, and the Witness of Mount Ebal

God, Not Abraham, Is the Source of Salvation

There is a small but striking parallel between the worshipper's confession in Deuteronomy 26 and a passage in Isaiah:

With all of Abraham's greatness, neither this passage in Isaiah nor the confession in Deuteronomy makes Abraham the actual father or deliverer of the nation. God alone gets that credit.

There is a remarkable rabbinic commentary on this very point, preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 89b:

Neither pedigree nor ancestry rescues anyone. Only direct dependence on God does.

This has practical implications. Your church, whatever denomination it is, cannot save you and has no authority on its own to forgive your sins — only God can do that. Reliance on the founders of any denomination is ultimately powerless. Race and pedigree will not help your relationship with the Creator — only an actual, two-way relationship with Him will. And that relationship, according to Yeshua's own teaching about the sheep and the goats, expresses itself concretely in how we treat the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned:

The Salami Between the Empires

There's a sobering historical pattern worth naming honestly: from the moment Abraham arrived in this land, Israel has been, in effect, the salami between the empires — always connected to and dependent on whichever great power surrounded it. First the Hittites (Abraham had to buy the cave of Machpelah from Ephron the Hittite), then Egypt, then Assyria, then Babylon. Today, despite all the bravado broadcast about Israeli independence, the reality is dependence on other nations like the United States and on the prayers of Christian Evangelicals worldwide who stand with the Jewish people.

I know this dependency personally and painfully. In the late 1970s, when my family was horribly persecuted and went through attempted murders, the persecution only ended after we appealed through Mike Adams, congressional aide to Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, who reached the President of the United States, who in turn called the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Real help, in real crisis, often comes from outside — not from our own strength.

An Altar Reached Only Under Armed Escort

The altar God commanded built on Mount Ebal had specific architectural requirements: the stones had to be whole, uncut by any iron tool, and inscribed with God's law. Mount Ebal itself is barren and dry, facing east toward the Jordan Valley, while Mount Gerizim across the valley, facing west toward the Mediterranean, stays green and fertile nearly year-round — to this day, the Samaritan community still sacrifices Passover lambs on Gerizim.

I went up to Mount Ebal only once in my life, and getting there required a heavily armed military escort — two armored jeeps in front, one behind. I wanted to see for myself whether the altar described in a document at least 2,600 years old actually still existed at the place the text describes. It did. I climbed on top of it and walked around it and touched it with my own hands. As Yeshua said,

— but I count myself blessed also for having seen it. It was a real faith-building experience.

Not far from that ancient altar stands a more recent monument: for a young Israeli fighter pilot whose jet was shot down nearby during a war. Two altars of sacrifice, separated by millennia, on the same barren mountain where the curses were once read aloud. What remains up there today is far less than what I saw — Palestinian mobs have torn apart much of the ancient monument Joshua and the children of Israel built. I was genuinely sad when that vandalism succeeded. But we can live without the stone witnesses. We cannot live without the human witnesses — the people, generation after generation, who stand up and testify with their actual lives to the power, love, grace, and truth of God's word. That kind of witness, unlike stone, cannot be torn down by a mob.