The most widely published book in human history tells us we are created in the image of God

That’s true, then how we think about Israel, the Jewish people, and our own moment in history is not a side issue. It touches the very heart of what God is doing with the human family.

On a recent episode of Created in the Image of God, I spoke with Dr. Jennifer Rosner—a Jewish follower of Jesus, theologian, and professor of systematic theology at Fuller Seminary. She grew up in a Jewish home, came to faith in Jesus at a secular state university, and has devoted her life to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

One of the richest parts of our conversation revolved around Purim, Persia, antisemitism, and God’s ongoing covenant with Israel—and what all of that means right now.

Here’s a reflection that weaves those strands together.

Purim: God’s Hidden Work in Persia

If you’re not familiar with it, Purim is a Jewish holiday rooted in the biblical book of Esther. It remembers:

A Jewish people living in exile in ancient Persia (modern‑day Iran).
A powerful official, Haman, who plots to wipe them out.
A young Jewish woman, Esther, who becomes queen “for such a time as this.”
And a series of reversals in which the plot is exposed, Haman is executed, and the Jewish people are spared.

It’s a celebratory day. In Jewish communities around the world, the story is read aloud; kids dress up; noisemakers drown out Haman’s name; there is feasting and joy.

But there’s a strange feature: God is never mentioned in the book of Esther.

No direct “Thus says the Lord.” No explicit miracles. Just a series of “coincidences” and courageous human actions.

Jewish tradition has long read this as a story about God’s hidden providence—God at work behind the scenes even when He is not named.

This year, Purim took on an uncanny edge.

Just days before the holiday, the world watched as a key Iranian figure—part of a regime that has openly called for Israel’s destruction—was killed.

Jen noted how many Jewish communities could not help but connect:

Ancient Persia (Iran) …
A plot against the Jews …
A powerful anti‑Jewish figure taken down …
Modern Iran’s leaders voicing the same murderous intent …
And, right before Purim, a very public reversal of fortunes.

You don’t have to endorse every geopolitical move to see the resonance. It felt, at minimum, like an Esther‑shaped echo in our own time.

And the question, as always, is: where is God in this?

“We Don’t Put the Menorah in the Window”

Jen’s sensitivity to this isn’t theoretical. It’s biographical.

She shared two early memories that shaped her awareness of antisemitism.

The Hanukkah menorah.
In many Jewish homes, it’s traditional to place the lit Hanukkah menorah in the window—a public witness, letting the light shine out.
Jen’s mother refused.
As a child, Jen didn’t argue; she simply absorbed the lesson:

“We have to be careful who we share our Jewishness with.” The message underneath: there are people in the world who do not like Jews, and visibility can be dangerous.
The classroom project.
In high school, her brother had a classmate who did a “project” glorifying Hitler and fantasizing about eliminating Jews.
Jen’s parents didn’t shrug. They went straight to the principal and confronted it head‑on.

Those experiences didn’t make her paranoid. They did make her aware that Jew‑hatred never fully goes away; it just changes forms.

Today, one of those forms is anti‑Zionism—a fierce, often one‑sided hostility to the Jewish longing for a homeland and to the existence of the modern State of Israel.

Antisemitism’s New Mask: Anti‑Zionism

Jen pointed out that antisemitism has taken different shapes over time:

Religious antisemitism: hatred of Jews because of their faith.
Racial antisemitism: Nazi ideology; Jews as a biological threat to be eliminated, regardless of belief.
Modern anti‑Zionism: demonizing Jewish aspirations for national self‑determination in ways we never do for other peoples.

That last one is important.

At its core, Zionism is simply the conviction that the Jewish people:

Are a people with a history and identity,
Have a deep connection to the Land of Israel,
And have as much right to self‑determination and security as anyone else.

For nearly every other people group, we celebrate that impulse. For Jews, large parts of the world treat it as uniquely illegitimate.

That’s the double standard.

After October 7, we saw massive campus protests and slogans calling for Israel’s elimination. Jen noted an especially telling detail: when some of those students were interviewed and asked what happened on October 7, they didn’t know.

Protests were being fueled less by informed moral outrage and more by a pre‑packaged narrative that:

Centers Jews/Israel as the primary villain,
Erases or excuses those committed to killing Jews,
And treats Jewish life as negotiable in a way we never would for others.

In that climate, it becomes easy to forget something basic:

The Bible—from Genesis to Revelation—is the story of God’s covenant with Israel
and the promise that the nations will be blessed through that covenant, not instead of it.

Which is where Jen’s theological work is so important.

God’s Covenant with Israel: Not Revoked, Still in Force

When Jen came to faith in Jesus as a college student, she didn’t initially know what to do with her Jewishness. Jesus and Judaism felt like two separate worlds. So she “put Judaism on the shelf” for a while.

Her later work—especially her dissertation and the book Healing the Schism—was, in part, a way of taking it back off the shelf and asking:

What does the New Testament actually say about Jews and Gentiles?
Did God abandon His covenant with Israel when Jesus came?
How should Christians think about Israel and the Jewish people now?

Her answer, drawn from Scripture and from a wave of new Jewish New Testament scholarship, is clear:

God’s covenant with Israel is ongoing and irrevocable.
Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and the Lord of the nations—but His coming does not cancel God’s promises to the Jewish people.
Gentiles are “grafted in” to Israel’s olive tree; they don’t replace the tree.

She noted how, for centuries, Christian theology often defaulted to:

Judaism = law, flesh, works, legalism.
Christianity = grace, spirit, faith, freedom.
Paul = ex‑Jew who turned against Judaism.

But in the last 50 years, scholars—including Jewish New Testament scholars—have been dismantling that caricature:

Paul never stopped being a Pharisee (“I am a Pharisee,” he says in Acts, present tense).
He never envisioned God ending His covenant with Israel.
His mission was to bring Gentiles into covenant relationship with the God of Israel, not to extract Jews from Israel.

For Jen, this is nothing less than a miracle of timing. She often recites the Jewish Shehecheyanu blessing—“who has kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to this moment”—when she teaches on it.

Because we’re living in a time when:

Christians are re‑examining centuries of anti‑Jewish theology.
Jews are re‑examining whether Christianity is inherently anti‑Jewish.
And Jews who follow Jesus are reclaiming a fully Jewish way of doing so.

In other words, even after our long, tragic “parting of the ways,” God is still at work.

The Hard Way to Unity

I shared with Jen my own sense that in Eden, humanity chose the hard way to maturity. We ate from the tree we were told not to eat from. We opted into a long, painful education in discerning good and evil.

History since then has been full of:

Schisms,
Wars,
Mutual condemnations,
And communities defining themselves over against each other.

The split between Judaism and Christianity is one of the deepest of those wounds.

Yet Jen brought in an intriguing perspective from Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig and Catholic theologian Paul Griffiths:

The separation between Judaism and Christianity is a tragedy, and
God can work even this into His redemptive plan.

Rosenzweig pictures Israel and the nations like a star:

Judaism is the burning core, living out obedience and worship before God.
Christianity is the rays, carrying that light and heat to the ends of the earth.

Griffiths goes so far as to suggest that each community—Jews and Christians—has learned things in separation that it couldn’t have learned otherwise. Each has something to give and something to receive from the other.

None of that excuses antisemitism. None of it sanctifies every action of any modern state. It does, however, offer a profoundly hopeful way to see:

Purim and Persia,
Esther and the Holocaust,
Israel and the nations,
Jews and Gentiles,

not as rival claims to God’s favor, but as intertwined threads in a story God refuses to abandon.

Even when His name, like in Esther, seems absent.

We are, right now, in a moment of intensified conflict, loud slogans, and resurgent antisemitism. It is tempting:

For some Christians to retreat into silence,
For others to collapse everything into a single political question,
And for many to forget that real Jewish lives, bearing the image of God, are at the center of this.

Jen’s work is a reminder that:

God’s covenant with Israel is still in force.
Jesus is still the Jewish Messiah and the hope of the nations.
And God is still able to bring redemption even out of our worst divisions.

Our task, as people created in the image of God, is not to resolve every geopolitical dispute in one article or one show. It is to refuse the easy prejudices, to honor the story God has written with Israel, and to let that story shape the way we see our Jewish neighbors—both in Israel and in our own communities.

Sneak Peek: Next Week on Created in the Image of God

Next week, we’ll shift from theology and history to the front lines of medicine and human dignity.

I’ll be joined by Dr. Constantine “Kosti” Psimopoulos, a leading voice in bioethics and a deeply committed Orthodox Christian. We’ll be talking about:

Why he sees Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan as the crux of all medicine and health care
How modern systems have lost the soul of care, reducing people to numbers, costs, or “cases”
And what it would take to re‑imagine medicine around the human person, created in the image and likeness of God

If you’ve ever felt like the health‑care system sees you as a chart instead of a soul, this conversation is for you.

Join me next week at 8:00 p.m. Central for Created in the Image of God with Dr. Constantine Psimopoulos.