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WHO ARE THE REAL HEIRS TO

THE LAND PROMISES OF THE OLD TEATAMENT?

by Dr Robert Reymond

FROM SWORD & TROWEL 2006 No 2

Dr Robert Reymond, former Dean and Professor at Knox Theological Seminary, Florida, explains the spiritual purpose of the land promises first made to Abraham. This article is a slightly shortened version of a fuller treatment of the topic.

I will begin by stating that a gigantic effort is underway today to convince the evangelical citizenry of the United States of America that the political state of Israel rightfully owns in perpetuity the so-called ‘Holy Land’ at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea by virtue of God’s bequeathing it to Abraham and his descendants in the Old Testament. This effort is being made not so much today by the secular leadership of the state of Israel as by self-acclaimed Christian scholars who claim to speak for over seventy million evangelical Christians, but who ought to know better.

Apparently convinced by this huge propaganda effort, President Clinton, after citing the words of his desperately ill Baptist pastor to him: ‘If you abandon Israel, God will never forgive you,’ declared before the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem on October 27, 1994[1]: ‘ . . . it is God’s will that Israel, the biblical home of the people of Israel, continue for ever and ever.’ President Clinton concluded his speech by saying: ‘Your journey is our journey, and America will stand with you now and always,’ a statement that illustrates the deep involvement of the USA in both Middle East politics in general and its specific political commitment to Israel in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in particular.

In my opinion, President Clinton’s statement is bad politics based on equally bad theology, because, as I shall argue in this article, all God’s land promises to Israel in the Old Testament are to be viewed in terms of shadow, type, and prophecy in contrast to the reality, substance, and fulfilment of which the New Testament speaks. I will argue that it is we Christians as members of Christ’s messianic kingdom who are the real heirs to the land promises of Holy Scripture but in their fulfilled character in the heavenly hereafter.[2] This view is often called ‘replacement theology’ because it ‘replaces’ in the economy of God the Jewish people with the church of Jesus Christ. Ethnic Israel per se was never the centrepiece of God’s covenant programme since, according to Paul, God’s promises always encompassed only the true spiritual Israel within ethnic Israel (Rom 9.6-13) and the land promises of the Old Testament, as we will show, were always to be viewed typologically.

I will begin with a discussion of the Abrahamic covenant as the antidote to the error of dispensationalism.

THE COVENANT OF ABRAHAM

With the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 the covenant of grace established in Genesis 3.15 underwent a remarkable advance. The instrument of that advance is the covenant that God made with Abraham that guaranteed blessing for all the families of the earth (Gen 12.3). So significant are the promises of grace in the Abrahamic covenant[3] that it is not an overstatement to declare these verses, from the covenantal perspective, the most important verses in the Bible. The fact that the Bible sweeps across the thousands of years between the creation of man and the call of Abraham in only eleven chapters, with the call of Abraham coming in Genesis 12, suggests that God intended the information given in Genesis 1-11 to be preparatory background to the revelation of the Abrahamic covenant. Revelation subsequent to it discloses that all that God has done savingly in grace since the revelation of the Abrahamic covenant is the result and product of it. In other words, once the covenant of grace came to expression in the promises of the Abrahamic covenant - that God would be the God of Abraham and his spiritual descendants (Gen 17.7) and that in Abraham all the families of the earth would be blessed - everything that God has done since, to this present moment, He has done in fulfilment of His covenant promises to Abraham.

If this view of the Abrahamic covenant seems to be an overstatement the following declarations from later revelation should justify it:

1 It is the Abrahamic covenant and none other that God later confirmed with Isaac (Gen 17.19; 26.3-4) and with Jacob (Gen 28.13-15; 35.12).

2 The Scriptures state that God redeemed Jacob’s descendants from Egypt in order to keep His covenant promise to the patriarchs: ‘And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob’ (Ex 2.24; see 4.5).

3 Again and again throughout Israel’s history the inspired authors of Scripture trace God’s continuing extension of grace and mercy to Israel directly to His fidelity to His covenant promises to Abraham (Ex 32.12-14; 33.1; Lev 26.42; Deut 1.8; 4.31; 7.8; 9.27; 29.12-13; Josh 21.44; 24.3-4; Ps 105.8-10, 42-43; 2 Kgs 13.23; 1 Chr 16.15-17; Mic 7.20; Neh 9.7-8).

4 When we come to the New Testament it is no different. Both Mary and Zecharias declared the first coming of Jesus Christ, including the very act of incarnation, to be a vital constituent part of the fulfilment of God’s gracious covenant promise to Abraham. Mary in Luke 1.54-55 said: ‘He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; as he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.’ Zecharias in Luke 1.68-73 said: ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people . . . to perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant; the oath which he sware to our father Abraham.’

5 Jesus, Himself the Seed of Abraham (Matt 1.1; Gal 3.16), declared that Abraham ‘rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad’ (John 8.56).

6 Peter declared that God sent Jesus to bless the Jewish nation in keeping with the promise He gave to Abraham in Genesis 12.3, in turning them away from their iniquities (Acts 3.25-26).

7 Paul declared that God, when He promised Abraham that ‘in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed’ (Gen 12.3), was declaring that He was going to justify the Gentiles by faith and was announcing the Gospel in advance to Abraham (Gal 3.8). Accordingly, he stated that all believers in Christ ‘are blessed [with justification through faith] with faithful Abraham’ (Gal 3.9).

8 Paul also declared: ‘Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision . . . to confirm the promises made unto the fathers: and that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy’ (Rom 15.8-9).

9 Paul further declared that Christ died on the cross, bearing the law’s curse, ‘that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we [both Jews and Gentiles] might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith’ (Gal 3.13-14).

10 Paul expressly declared that the Mosaic law, introduced several centuries after God gave His covenant promises to Abraham and to his Seed (Christ), ‘cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect’ (Gal 3.16-17).

11 Paul also declared (1) that Abraham is the ‘father of all them that believe’ among both Jews and Gentiles (Rom 4.11-12), and (2) that all who belong to Christ are ‘Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise’ that God gave to Abraham (Gal 3.29).

12 Finally, Christ described the future state of glory in terms of the redeemed who ‘shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt 8.11).

THE GARDEN OF EDEN: THE PROTOTYPICAL PARADISE OF GOD

O Palmer Robertson begins his treatise on the significance of the land as a theological idea by stating: ‘The concept of a land that belongs to God’s people originated in paradise. This simple fact, so often overlooked, plays a critical role in evaluating the significance of the land throughout redemptive history and its consummate fulfilment. Land did not begin to be theologically significant with the promise given to Abraham. Instead, the patriarch’s hope of possessing a land arose out of the concept of restoration to the original state from which man had fallen.’

In the Edenic paradise of Genesis 2 we see God placing Adam and Eve within it to tend and to keep it and to enjoy communion with Him (Gen 2.8). But the paradise of Eden was lost by Adam’s fall and our first parents were expelled from this land of blessing. However the idea of paradise was renewed, first, by God’s inaugurating a second covenant with the guilty pair - the covenant of grace of Genesis 3.15 - and, second, by His covenant with Abraham of Genesis 12.1-3 to redeem a people from their fallen condition and to transform the cosmos. Just as Adam and Eve had known God’s blessing in Eden, so also God would bless His redeemed people in another Eden, a land flowing with milk and honey, that lay somewhere ahead of them in the future.

THE TYPOLOGICAL NATURE OF THE LAND PROMISES

Undoubtedly, temporal, earthly promises of a land were given to Abraham and his descendants in the Abrahamic covenant, but the land promises were never primary and central to the covenant’s intention and for their complete fulfilment they await the final and complete salvation of God’s elect and the recreation of the universe (Rom 8.19-23). I say this because the Bible declares that Abraham dwelt in Palestine ‘as in a strange country’ (Heb 11.9) and that he never inherited any land during his lifetime (Acts 7.5), which shows that Abraham believed that the fulfilment of God’s land promises lay in the end-times future.

Was this really Abraham’s understanding of God’s land promise? Or did he think that God’s promise entailed the small portion of land bounded on the west and the east by the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley and generally on the north and the south between the Sea of Galilee and the southern tip of the Dead Sea? Hardly. Was his faith even such that he would have been satisfied in knowing that some day his offspring would inherit the land ‘from the river of Egypt [not the Nile River but the Wadi el Arish] unto the great river, the river Euphrates’ (Gen 15.18)?[4] Again we must respond, hardly. His entire life experience of walking by faith and not by sight taught him to look beyond the temporal circumstances in which he lived.

To understand Abraham’s concept of God’s land promise to him we must give special heed to the New Testament. Just as Paul declared that the events of Israel’s redemptive history were ‘types’ for believers during this age (1 Cor 10.6), just as Paul said the religious festivals of the old covenant were ‘a shadow of things to come’ (Col 2.17), just as the author of Hebrews stated that the administration of redemption under the old covenant was but ‘a shadow of good things to come’ (Heb 10.1), so also he taught that Abraham knew that God’s land promises in their fulfilment entailed something far more glorious, namely, a better and heavenly homeland whose designer and builder is God, than the land of Palestine. This served only as the type of their fulfilment. Note the details of Hebrews 11.8- 16:-

‘By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God . . . These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country . . . a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.’

Quite plainly, Abraham understood that the land promised to him had both its origin and its fulfilment in the heavenly, eternal reality that lay still in the future. Possession of a particular tract of land in ancient times might have significance from a number of perspectives, but clearly the land promise under the Abrahamic covenant served simply as a type. It anticipated the future reality of the coming of the messianic kingdom, with the Messiah Himself assuming the throne of David in Heaven and ruling the universe after His resurrection/ascension, and reigning until all His enemies have been put under His feet.

How was it possible for Abraham to have the view of the land promise that the author of Hebrews ascribed to him? What led him to ‘spiritualise’ the promise to make it entail future heavenly, kingdom realities? The answer lies in the fact that he took seriously God’s promise to him that ‘in [him] shall all families of the earth be blessed’ (Gen 12.3).[5] Therefore, he perceived that the promise to him and his offspring, Who is Christ (Gal 3.16), meant that in Christ ‘he should be the heir [not of Palestine but] of the [glorified] world [kosmou]’ (Rom 4.13). Plainly, Abraham understood that God’s land promise meant that God would some day restore the entire cosmos to its former paradisiacal glory and in that he placed his hope and patiently waited for it. His faith and understanding would have been satisfied with nothing less.

Moses too, and his contemporaries, wandered in the wilderness of Sinai for forty years, and died in faith, not having received the promise (Heb 11.39).

Under Joshua’s leadership the Israelites conquered the land, receiving in a very limited fashion the paradise God had promised. But it quickly became obvious that this territory could not be the ultimate paradise. For one thing, undefeated Canaanites remained in the land as ‘hornets’, and later (because of Israel’s sin throughout the united and divided kingdom periods) the land was devastated by the Neo- Babylonians. The Indwelling Glory departed from the Solomonic temple (Ezek 9.3; 10.1-22), which temple was then destroyed; and the people were banished and came to be known as Lo-ammi, meaning ‘not my people’ (Hos 1.9). The once fruitful land took on the appearance of a desert, a dwelling place of jackals, owls, and scorpions. Paradise, even in its old covenant shadow form, was taken from them.

Even the restoration after the Babylonian Captivity under Ezra and Nehemiah could not be paradise, but the return to the land and the rebuilding of the temple pointed the way to it. The glory of that tiny temple, Haggai prophesied, would some day be greater than the glory of the Solomonic temple. What did this seemingly hyperbolic language mean? It meant that God still had something better for them than a temporal land and a material temple.

The promise of the land would be fulfilled by nothing less than a restored paradise on a cosmic scale. As Isaiah predicted, some day the wolf would lie down with the lamb, the leopard would lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion would live in peace, and a little child would lead them. The nursing child would play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child would place his hand on the adder’s den, and the earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the places of the sea (Isa 11.6-9). No more would sin and sorrow reign nor thorns infest the ground. Then, writes Paul in Romans 9.25-26:-

‘As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.’

JESUS’ TEACHING ABOUT THE LAND AND THE FUTURE OF ETHNIC ISRAEL

Now what about the Saviour? Did He teach anything about the land and about the future of ethnic Israel? Indeed He did, and what He taught should dispel any lingering doubts that anyone may still have concerning the heavenly fulfilment of the land promises. When Christ came 2000 years ago the biblical perspective of the land experienced a radical advance. By inaugurating His public ministry in Galilee of the Gentiles along the public trade route (‘the way of the sea’) in accordance with the prophecy in Isaiah 9.1 (Matt 4.12-16), Jesus was making a statement. That land would serve as the springboard to all nations. It is interesting too that after His bodily resurrection from the dead Jesus instructed His disciples to leave Jerusalem and to meet Him in Galilee where He issued His Great Commission (Matt 28.7, 10, 16). Clearly, the implication is that the kingdom of God - the central theme of Jesus’ teaching - would encompass a realm that extended well beyond the borders of ancient Israel. As Paul so pointedly indicated, God’s promise to Abraham meant that he would become heir of the whole world (Rom 4.13).

The Lord’s pointing His ministry toward the whole world rather than confining it to the land of Canaan cleared the way for the old covenant ‘type’ to be replaced by the new covenant ‘antitype’. Teaching that the kingdom of God had appeared in its grace mode with His first coming and that it would appear in its power mode at His second coming, He focused the imagery of a return to a land flowing with milk and honey upon a rejuvenation that would embrace the whole of God’s created order. It was not Canaan as such that would benefit in the establishment of Messiah’s kingdom. The whole cosmos would rejoice in the renewal brought about by this newness of life resident in the messianic kingdom.[6]

Second, what about the future of ethnic Israel in Jesus’ teaching? In His parable of the wicked farmers, Jesus tells the story of a landowner who leased his vineyard to some farmers and then went into another country. When the time arrived for him to receive his rental fee in the form of the fruit of the vineyard the landowner sent servant after servant to his tenants, only to have each one of them beaten or stoned or killed. Last of all he sent his son - Luke says his ‘beloved son’ - saying: ‘They will reverence him.’ But when the tenants saw the landowner’s son, they said: ‘This is the heir: come, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours.’ This they did, throwing his body out of the vineyard. When the landowner came, he destroyed the tenants and leased his vineyard to others. The interpretive intentions of the parable are obvious on the face of it: the landowner is God the Father; the vineyard the nation of Israel (Isa 5.7); the farmers Israel’s leaders; the servants the prophets of the theocracy (Matt 23.37a); and the son Jesus Himself.

The central teaching of the parable is obvious - as indeed it was to its original audience (Matt 21.45): after having sent His servants the prophets repeatedly in Old Testament times to the nation of Israel and its leaders to call the nation from its sin and unbelief, only to have them rebuffed, persecuted, and often killed, God, the Owner of Israel, sent the Second Person of the Godhead. Listen once again to the pertinent verses in this connection:

- Matthew 21.37: ‘But last of all he sent unto them his son.’

- Mark 12.6: ‘Having yet therefore one son, his wellbeloved, he sent him also last unto them.’

From Matthew’s ‘last of all’ and Mark’s ‘last’ it is clear that Jesus represented Himself as God’s last, His final ambassador, after Whose sending none higher can come and nothing more can be done.[7] As God’s Son, the Son of God is the highest messenger of God conceivable. In sum, God had in Jesus Christ finally (Matt 21.37: hysteron; Mark 12.6: eschaton) sent His own beloved Son Whom, He taught, the nation would reject. This rejection (Jesus taught) would cause ‘the complete overthrow of the theocracy, and the rearing from the foundation up of a new structure [Christ’s church] in which the Son would receive full vindication and supreme honour.’[8]

His very words are as follows:-

‘Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof’ (Matt 21.43).

‘What shall therefore the lord of the vineyard do? he will come and destroy the husbandmen, and will give the vineyard unto others’ (Mark 12.9; also Luke 20.16).

Here is a biblical ‘replacement theology’ and it is the Saviour Himself Who enunciated it. National Israel, except for its elect remnant, would be judged, and the special standing that it had enjoyed during the old dispensation would be transferred to the already emerging international church of Jesus Christ, made up of both the elect Jewish remnant and elect Gentiles. So as the Lord predicted, in time Israel’s rulers rejected Him and incited Rome to execute Him as an insurrectionist and a false messiah. As He also predicted, the temple was again soon destroyed (see Matt 24.1-35), the people dispersed, and Israel ceased to exist as a political entity as Moses had predicted in Deuteronomy 28.15-68 (see Deut 31.24-29), leading Paul to declare in 1 Thessalonians 2.15-16 that the Jews:-

‘Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost [eistelos].’

Since Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians in AD 50 or 51 it is unlikely that he intended by his phrase, God’s ‘wrath is come upon them’, the destruction of Jerusalem that occurred some twenty years later in AD 70. More likely he was referring to the divine rejection of ethnic Israel that Jesus referred to in His parable of the wicked farmers and elsewhere (Matt 23.38; 24.15-28), a rejection that Paul declared in Romans 11 had come to expression in God’s hardening the mass of Israel save for an elect Jewish remnant. If this is what Paul meant it means that ethnic Israel en masse today is in the same position that the nations outside of Christ are in, namely, ‘without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel [of God], and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world’ (Eph 2.12). So once again Israel as an ethnic entity has become Lo-ammi, ‘not my people’, only now with a finality about it save for the elect remnant (Rom 9.27-29). Accordingly, Paul writes in Romans 11.7-10:-

‘Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for [that is, a righteousness before God (Rom 9.31)]; but the election [remnant] hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded (according as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day. And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them: let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway [dia pantos].’

But because God, as I have already noted, has by no means rejected every Jew, choosing in grace a Jewish remnant (Rom 11.5), elect Jews today continue to be saved by being provoked to jealousy (Rom 11.11, 14) by the multitudes of saved Gentiles who are enjoying the spiritual blessings originally intended for Jewish people. All who respond through faith in Jesus Christ, their Messiah, are grafted back into their own ‘olive tree’ (Rom 11.23-24). The justification of Gentiles is then the primary avenue to the justification of the Jewish elect.

SIX PROPOSITIONS

In light of this data we are now in a position to declare as biblical the following six propositions[9]:

1 The modern Jewish state is not a part of the messianic kingdom of Jesus Christ. Even though this particular political state in God’s general providence came into being on May 14, 1948 it would be a denial of Jesus’ affirmation that His kingdom is ‘not of this world’ (John 18.36) to assert that modern Israel is a part of His messianic kingdom. To put it bluntly, the modern state of Israel is not true ‘Israel’ at all (Rom 9.6-8) but is rather the spiritual son of Hagar (Gal 4.24-25) and thus is ‘Ishmaelitish’ to the core due to its lack of Abrahamic faith in Jesus Christ.[10] It has accordingly forfeited any legitimate biblical claim to Palestine, any partitioning of which should be negotiated today by the claimants to the land, not under biblical claims or threats of war and terrorism, but through the political peace process of the law of nations.[11]

2 The land promise of the Old Testament served in a typological role as a model of the ultimate realisation of the purposes of God for His redeemed people from all ‘of the earth’ (Gen 12.3), and for the entire cosmos (Rom 4.13), which means that Christians as members of the messianic kingdom of God are the real heirs (along with Abraham) of the land promise.

3 Because of the inherently limited scope of the land promised in the Old Testament it cannot be regarded as having continuing significance in the realm of redemption other than in its function as a model to teach that obedience and divine blessing go hand in hand, while disobedience and divine retribution also go hand in hand.

4 The Old Testament predictions about the return of Israel to the land in terms of a geo-political re-establishment of the state of Israel are more properly interpreted as types having fulfilment at the ‘restitution of all things’ that will accompany the resurrection of believers at the return of Christ (Acts 3.21; Rom 8.22-23). To interpret these Old Testament predictions literally would be a backward step, elevating the type over the antitype. Robertson concurs: ‘In this age of fulfilment, a retrogression to the limited forms of the old covenant must be neither expected nor promoted. Reality must not give way to shadow.’

5 The future messianic kingdom will embrace the whole of the newly recreated cosmos and will not involve a special ‘Jewish’ manifestation in the region of the so-called ‘Holy Land’ area, or anywhere else.

Peter, the apostle to the circumcision (who surely would have had his ear tuned to any and every future privilege Jews might enjoy), when he wrote of future things in 2 Peter 3, said nothing about a Jewish millennium or about a restoration of a Jewish kingdom in Palestine but rather divided the whole of earth history into three periods:

(i) The first period - ‘the world that then was’ - extending from the beginning of creation to the Genesis Flood (2 Pet 3.5-6), that was destroyed by the Flood.

(ii) The second period - ‘the heavens and the earth, which are now’ (2 Pet 3.7) - extending from the Flood to the final day of the Lord at which time the earth will be destroyed by fire (2 Pet 3.7) and the present heavens ‘shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up’ (2 Pet 3.10).

(iii) The third period - ‘new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness’ (2 Pet 3.13) - extending throughout eternity future.

If he had known about a Jewish millennium following this present age 2 Peter 3 would have been the appropriate place to mention it but he makes no mention of a millennium, much less a Jewish millennium, but places the entirety of earth history within the three time frames that I just mentioned.

6 Biblical prophecy says nothing about the modern state of Israel. In fact, this state, far from being a fulfilment of biblical prophecy, is a major (if not the major) means today in the hand of God to sustain ethnic Israel in its divinely imposed hardening.

Christian Zionists, to the contrary, claim that the establishment of Israel as a nation on May 14, 1948 fulfilled biblical prophecies. The following Old Testament prophecies are samples from a larger group of passages that these biblical interpreters say were fulfilled by the establishment of modern Israel in 1948:

- Jeremiah 29.14, it is said, predicted the founding of the modern state of Israel. But the context of Jeremiah 29 makes it clear that the predicted ‘restoration’ after the completion of the seventy years of Babylonian Exile (29.10), refers to the return from exile under Zerubbabel in 536 BC.

- Isaiah 11.11, it is said, speaks of a ‘second time’ that God would restore the remnant to the land, the first being the return from Babylon in 536 BC, the second being the establishment of modern Israel in 1948. But the context of Isaiah 11 makes it clear that Israel’s first deliverance was from Egypt under Moses (11.16) and the second was from the nations into which she had been sent in the Assyrian/Babylonian Captivity.

- Zechariah 8.7-8, it is said, predicted that God ‘will save [His] people from the east country, and from the west country; and . . . bring them, and they shall dwell in the midst of Jerusalem.’ It is, however, stretching the text to see this prediction as referring to the modern state of Israel. In fact, the passage speaks of the faithfulness and righteousness of the inhabitants of Jerusalem in that day (8.8), something that is definitely not true of present Jerusalem. Much more likely is it that Zechariah was predicting the return of exiles during the days of Ezra, Nehemiah, and after (see Ezra 7.1-10; Neh 11.1-2) that, again, pointed forward to the antitypical new paradise of God.

- Ezekiel 36.24-26, it is said, predicted that Israel would be restored to the land ‘in unbelief’ which agrees with the situation in modern Israel today. But the passage does not speak of a restoration ‘in unbelief’. God does not reward disobedience! Verse 33 states: ‘In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the wastes shall be builded,’ clearly implying that those who are ‘restored’ have first been spiritually cleansed, thereby meeting the requirement of Leviticus 26.40-42: ‘If they shall confess their iniquity . . . ; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled . . . , then will I remember my covenant . . . and I will remember the land.’

- Amos 9.14-15, it is said, declares that a condition of permanent national establishment would some day prevail which simply was not true of any Old Testament restoration. However, the restoration of Amos 9.14-15 envisions the return from exile during the Second Temple period. Given the fact that Amos 9.11-12 (according to James in Acts 15.15-17) describes the present church age, it is clear that he describes in the only terms that would communicate to his contemporaries, the future rejuvenation of the cosmos and the ‘restoration of all things’.

I strongly urge anyone interested in reading further on this subject to consult O Palmer Robertson’s The Israel of God: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2000) and his The Christ of the Prophets (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2004), chapters 10, 11, 12.

CONCLUSION

What should we conclude from all this? The twin facts of ethnic Israel’s unbelief and God’s wrath exhibited toward ethnic Israel (1 Thes 2.15-16) pose something of a problem for Christians today. On the one hand, should not our attitude toward the Jews (through whom came not only our Old Testament Scriptures but also our Messiah and Saviour according to the flesh) be one of gratitude, and should not Christians do everything in their power to make the lot of the Jewish people more acceptable to the world? On the other hand, were not the Jewish people complicit in the crucifixion of their Messiah? And has not world Jewry for the most part rejected the Saviour of the world, declaring Him to be only one in a long line of false messiahs, and do not these same Jews, when pressed, acknowledge that they regard Christians as idolaters, worshipping as they do One Whom they regard as a ‘mere man’?

In response to this problem, I would first say that no Christian should advocate anything even remotely resembling discrimination against Jews because of their ethnicity or religion. At the same time, in the light of the fact that the only hope of salvation for the Jewish people resides in the provisions of the Christian Gospel, it would be wrong, indeed, unloving and unchristian, for Christians to encourage or to support Israel in the establishment and maintenance of its ethnic or religious ‘Jewishness’ which is the ground of its hope of approval by God. We must take seriously the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ as the only Saviour and the only hope not only of ethnic Israel but also of every race and every nation. The Bible denounces every hope for acceptance by God that is not grounded in the person and work of Christ. Therefore, the Jew, if he is ever to know genuine forgiveness by God, must forsake the notion that his racial connection to the patriarchs and/or his allegiance to Torah make him acceptable to God (Rom 2.17-29; Gal 5.3-4).

It is a strange twist of thinking, if not downright disloyalty to the Gospel, for Christians to aid and abet Israel in the retention of its ethnic/religious distinctives as the ground of its hope for divine acceptance, the holding on to which only solidifies Israel in its unbelief. And yet, in order that the blessing of Genesis 12.3 might be theirs, and in order to escape the threatened curse enunciated in the same verse, many Christians fervently believe that they must support Zionist causes whatever the cost and must rejoice with every ‘Israeli advance’ in the world. They fail to realise as they do so, that as long as they encourage the Jew to continue to hold his unbiblical perception of what constitutes ‘Jewishness’,[12] they blind him to the Gospel.

Never mind that the Jewish people for the most part deny the deity of Christ and thus the doctrine of the Trinity. Never mind that they for the most part rejected their Messiah the first time He came as a misguided prophet at best and a blasphemer at worst, and had Him crucified. Never mind that they believe today that Christians are idolaters because we worship Him Whom they contend was simply a man. Never mind that they see no need for Christ’s substitutionary atonement. According to Rome’s teaching they are still related in salvation to the people of God and may go to Heaven!

Again, the Christian is often told today that in his witness to Jewish friends he may assume that the Jew to whom he speaks already believes the Old Testament and that it only remains to show him that Jesus Christ is the One about Whom the Old Testament prophets spoke. This is surely an inaccurate appraisal of the actual situation.

The great mass of world Jewry today neither believes that the Old Testament is the inspired, inerrant Word of the living God nor does it have a clue about what the Old Testament teaches. We must think more carefully here, for can one truly believe the Old Testament and not acknowledge Jesus Christ to be the Messiah, Saviour, and Lord revealed therein?

The real truth of the matter is that no one who has heard of the Messiah and His atoning work, who then rejects Him believes the Old Testament. Jesus Himself expressly declared: ‘For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me’ (John 5.46).

When the modern Jew claims that he believes and follows Torah, even though he may say that he sees grace taught therein, and at the same time also believes that he must live a certain way if he is to merit and remain a ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ of Torah, he does not believe the Old Testament. He denies the saving provision of which Torah actually speaks through the elaborate protocols of its Levitical sacrificial system, all pointing to Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.

Christians must realise that to bring ethnic/religious Israel to the Christian faith they must show the futility of any and every hope for God’s acceptance that rests on the fact that Jews have Abrahamic blood flowing in their veins (Matt 3.9; John 1.13) or that they are physically circumcised (Rom 2.25-29; Gal 5.2-4; 6.15) or that they are practising ‘sons and daughters of Torah’ (Rom 2.17-24; 3.9; Gal 3.10; 4.21-5.1). Only then will evangelical witness to ethnic/religious Israel become effective.

We must realise with Romans 11.28 that as far as the Gospel is concerned, God regards Jews as enemies of the saving of non-Jews. However, as far as election is concerned, they are ‘beloved for the fathers’ sakes’. As Christians, therefore, we should love ethnic/religious Jews in whom and by whose elect remnant God will fulfil His elective promises to the patriarchs.

But Christians must also do everything they can, without being arrogant toward them, to bring ethnic/religious Israel to the place where they will forsake any and every Jewish ethnic/religious distinctive in which they place their hope for salvation. Christians must do this for the sake of ethnic Israel and out of loyalty to the cause of the Gospel. ‘How sad it would be if evangelical Christians who profess to love the Jewish people should become a primary tool in misdirecting their faith and expectation’[13] toward a false hope and away from this world’s only true Saviour Who is Jesus Christ.

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