Why did God use religion?
The book begins with a hard possibility: God used religion to hold Satan’s attention on Israel and the law, while concealing His larger purpose, salvation for the whole world.
The argument
Some questions are worth the discomfort.
Israel makes room for a possibility many readers have never been encouraged to consider: that religion and grace may not be on the same side.
Three places to begin
What does performance promise?
Israel examines the pressure to measure up through law, ritual, and effort, then asks what that pressure does to the meaning of grace.
What changes if grace was always the plan?
The invitation is not to add one more religious requirement. It is to reconsider the foundation underneath every requirement.
A question worth refusing
Grace is not cheap because love is not cheap.
Some call the belief that Jesus Christ died for every person’s sin “cheap grace.” But the phrase misses the cost entirely. If the Creator of the world would enter suffering for even one person, that love cannot be treated as cheap.
The question is not whether grace asks something of us. It is whether Christ’s suffering can ever be reduced to a transaction reserved for the few. Israel asks readers to consider a grace vast enough to meet the whole world, without making that grace small.
For the reader who has wondered
You do not have to agree before you begin. You only have to be willing to look again.Read the book