Pip: There is a road, apparently, and it is narrow — and according to cj’s recent writing at The Way of the Rabbi, most of us are on the other one.
Mara: The posts this episode cover a lot of ground: what a remnant actually is, what the New Covenant asks of the people in it, and what faithful obedience looks like across both Testaments. Let’s start with the remnant itself, and what it costs to be counted in it.
The Remnant, the Narrow Way, and the New Covenant
Pip: The post opens with a deceptively simple question: what does a remnant look like? And the answer the text gives is uncomfortable — eight people. Out of the whole of humanity, eight. That is the frame the rest of the argument builds on.
Mara: The post draws the line between Noah’s favor and his family’s salvation directly. Setting up the theological stakes, it quotes Paul’s letter to the Romans: “So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.”
Pip: So grace is doing the choosing — but the post is quick to say that does not let us off the hook. Yahweh says “I have kept for Myself,” but the post insists our decisions are still in the equation. The remnant is small because obedience is chosen, not automatic.
Mara: And the post works through what disobedience costs, concretely. Lot’s wife was told to flee and turned back. Ham made it onto the ark and was later cursed. The post reads those as object lessons — surviving the judgment does not guarantee faithfulness inside it.
Pip: The wide road is well-traveled for a reason. It requires nothing.
Mara: The post then turns to Romans 11 on the olive tree — the broken branches and the grafted-in wild shoots — and quotes it at length. “Do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will He spare you.” The kindness of God, the post argues, is covenantal. You continue in it, or you are cut off.
Mara: What that means practically is that the New Covenant is not new in content — it is the same covenant, now written on hearts, with the Holy Spirit as the guide on the narrow road. Gentile believers are not joining a new thing; they are being grafted into Israel.
Pip: The post closes by pointing to a companion piece on faith — Understanding Faith: Beyond Belief and Action — for readers who want to follow the thread on what active faith actually looks like. The invitation at the end is direct: choose the remnant, choose the narrow way, choose the covenant.
Mara: And the weight of that choice, the post says, extends beyond the individual — “perhaps by implication, the eternity of your family depends on it.”
Pip: Which brings us back to Noah, and why the post opened there at all.
Pip: Eight people. One ark. The math of a remnant has never been comfortable reading.
Mara: But the post is less interested in the numbers than in the question underneath them — what does it mean to walk in the kindness of God, and to keep walking? That question does not close here.
Read the post in its entirety here: The Remnant, the Narrow Way, and the New Covenant in Messiah
