The Apostle writes that his people, natural Israel, stumbled, that through their trespass salvation could come to Gentiles, with salvation forming a new nation of Israel (1 Pet 2:9-10), one reckoned not through physical descent but through spiritual descent, so as to make natural Israel jealous (Rom 11:11, 14).
Pause for a moment: how will worshiping on Sunday and eating swine’s flesh make natural Israel jealous? All either will do is repulse the natural Jew, causing him to look with distain upon the poor goyim who are so foolish as to think they have favor with God through their disobedience. Only by living as a Jew without being physically circumcised and without having descended from the patriarchs will the natural Jew feel jealousy.
Today, even the goyim that live by the commandments of God, keeping the weekly Sabbath as well as the high Sabbaths, do not make the natural Jew jealous for these goyim have no love, no “works,” no spiritual fruit; plus, they eat cheeseburgers. They are spiritually dead (not because they eat cheeseburgers), collectively a corpse that utters words without understanding. Nor do these Sabbath-observing goyim make Anabaptist Christendom jealous, for the women of these Sabbatarians do not cover their hair. Their women look like the world and act like the world. They might as well be the world.
Question: would a Sabbatarian wearing an Amish cap make the Amish jealous? How about wearing an Old German Baptist cap, or a Mennonite mesh cap?
Grace is the “covering” of Christ Jesus’ righteousness, put on daily by prayer as if His righteousness were a garment. A woman’s attire and her head covering are symbolic of this garment of Grace through which the sins of the disciple are not visible to the Father or to the angels. A garment of grace made from mesh would not hide the lawlessness of the disciple.
If Christians are to be lights to this world, what sort of lights are bare-headed Christian women to Muslim women? A light of liberation? Or a light of rebellion against the authority of God?
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