God's election is of the Jewish people as a whole and that while out of this people he has called prophets, kings, redeemers, priests—heroes of all sorts whose service and stories are detailed with great precision in the Hebrew Bible, they each had their significance only as they came out of Israel and returned into it as sons of the nation God had elected and which he had sworn not to abandon. If we take the Hebrew Bible seriously, there cannot be any individual, however significant and prominent, whose relationship with God is unilateral, with the people of Israel not being the decisive presence serving as the purpose of the relation. The kings, priests and prophets of Israel were sent to rule, minister to and address the people of Israel; without this people not one of them would have had any significance nor would his mission have been conceivable… Should we be misled into believing that this is true only of the Hebrew Bible where as in the New Testament it is Jesus addressing humanity rather than just the people into which he was born, we need only remind ourselves of those passages in which Jesus specifically proclaims the focus of his ministry as being the Jewish people…We need to realize that Jesus must not be separated from the Jewish people because he did not wish to separate himself from them. - Michael Wyschogrod, via Bill Scofield