The Relationship Between the Church and Israel
An Unnecessary Controversy with Some Yet To Be Answered Questions
By Mark Odell, PhD
If you asked a sample of Americans why the US Secret Service exists, you’d get a vast majority who would say, “To protect the President, and other high-ranking government officials.” They would almost certainly assume confidently that the Secret Service’s purpose has always been thus, not knowing that they would be wrong. The Service was founded in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, for the purpose of combating counterfeiting, which was a big problem at that time. It only became an intelligence and protective service in the 1900s. But few Americans know that.
If you asked a sample of contemporary American Evangelical Protestants what the relationship between the Church and Israel is, you’d probably get a plurality suggesting that they are both God’s chosen but separate people, and both of them have a significant role in how the end times play out, of which there appear to be many current indicators. As with the Secret Service’s origins, their naivete’ of the history pertaining to the question’s original answers would be something of which they have little awareness.
Part of the problem is the universal human habit of forgetting the important things of the past, or if not forgetting, at least drifting, eventually far enough to lose what was once firmly known. That’s the reason behind the Bible’s consistent theme of remembrance—reminders of what God has said and done in history, reminders of theological truths, the establishments of rituals (e.g., Communion, baptism, liturgy, recitation and renewal of covenants, circumcision, ceremonial washing), physical markers (the myriad altars in the OT set up at places where God showed up), and commemoration days (all those feasts and festivals, in the OT, but also in the NT—just because we don’t celebrate them as American Protestant Evangelicals does not eliminate their legitimacy among Christians who do celebrate them). In our day, this unacknowledged habit of forgetting has accelerated in part because of the speed at which life seems to be changing and our perennial fascination with and prioritizing of innovation and the newest thing. We prefer the microwave to the smoker, and even as Christians, we are subject to the context within which we live. But our faith is one that has been anchored to real historical people and events, and then passed down, largely unchanged for centuries, and if we fail to appreciate that, we will miss significant and lasting truths that are supposed to help us anchor our lives in Christ and among his people. We will also ask questions that have been answered already, but not realize we are doing it.
The Issue: Who Belongs to God?
Asking about the relationship between the Church and Israel is more precisely a question about who belongs to God, who is/are his people. The “is/are” expression is necessary because God saves individuals, who then make up a group of people with whom he has a corporate relationship called the people of God. In the OT, the group was collectively called Israel, and in the NT, the Church. Regarding both, however, the Bible teaches that having the label doesn’t necessarily guarantee inclusion (e.g., “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel” [Rom. 9:6], and “not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven…I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers’” [Mt. 7:21-23]). So there must be something else that is the key ingredient.
There is. What the people of God have in common has nothing to do with ancestry, region, clan, family, or nation; it has nothing to do with the Mosaic Law, circumcision, good works, philanthropy, being a “good person,” or even sound academic theological knowledge. It is the fact that they have been given by God, and have also chosen through their own will in a mystery we cannot fully plumb, a saving faith in him (see Rom. 9-11). They have been chosen by God, and he has declared them righteous. This has always been true, before Jesus came, before Moses received the Law, before there was an Israel, going all the way back to Eden.
Over time, God revealed more of himself to various people (this is called progressive revelation), culminating in Jesus, the Son, God in the flesh, the final and fullest revelation of himself to the world (Heb. 1). Upon that clarity of revelation, the people of God are those who are saved by grace through believing faith in Jesus’s atoning work on the cross. Further, it is an axiom that nobody comes to the Father except through Jesus, full stop (John 14:6). Currently, that is the Church, a theocratic but non-genetic/non-ethnic/non-national entity that consists of Jews and Gentiles. These are the ones receiving the fulfillment of the covenant promises to Abraham that he would be made into a great nation with innumerable descendants and through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. God’s interest in redeeming all of humanity has always been there, first hinted at in the proto-evangelion from Gen. 3.
This should not be controversial, as it is a clear and historically established doctrine going back to the Apostolic period, the first several decades of the Church. But somehow it is controversial again today. And currently, the controversy has a name: supersessionism. Its critics call it “replacement theology.” The problem is that, despite the clear NT teaching (and more, both within the scriptures, in history, and from extra-biblical sources), there are those who object to there being only one people of God, and that it is the Church. This objection manifested itself at the very beginning of the faith.
It is ironic that this debate, which has been addressed in the narrative history of the Bible in the Gospels and Acts, and in the NT epistles, and then again by various church authorities, in what appear to be clear terms of settlement, keeps returning. It is an unnecessary conflict, and it has been and can be a powder keg of divisive passion because too many believers are uninformed about their own immediate theological ancestry and its lenses yet hold them very tightly, and they do not appreciate how much of who God is and what he has done, does, and will do is beyond our fathoming.
The term “supersessionism” originated in 1972, coined by an American Methodist theologian, Roy Ekhardt, who attempted to explain Christian opposition to Israeli post-1967 War policies as stemming from the correct theological position held in the Church for centuries that the Church was the “new, true Israel.” In other words, he was applying an established NT theological principle to explain in broad brush strokes narrow political disagreements over Israel’s conduct with its Arab neighbors. The argument was that Christians were among the casualties of war even though they were not leading Arab governments, and therefore Israel and Christians were de facto enemies (echoing the Apostle Paul in Rom. 11:28), recapitulating earlier eras in history going back to the 1st century. The political disagreement added fuel to an already burgeoning excitement over the newly re-established nation that (historically recent) Dispensational eschatology insisted was the fulfillment of OT prophecy; to oppose the Jewish state at all was to go against what the Bible had promised would be a sign of Christ’s imminent return, because again, the certainty was that Israel was and is still God’s people—because there are two peoples of God.
There is a contemporary parallel to how a newly invented term can take on a meaning that legitimizes its opposing idea. Today, one can be guilty of “mis-gendering” someone, i.e., concluding that someone is female or male based upon their genotype and not their self-concept or their phenotype. The term is premised on a radically new idea that it is actually possible to completely separate biological sex from gender, and once accepted, it provides a legitimizing target to pound in the service of activism intended to gain validation for that separation. Supersessionism as a term buttressed the historically largely discarded argument that there is more than one people of God, and so here we are now, with that term being the fulcrum of the rekindled debate, and reopening past arguments that were considered closed.
In fact, one of the clearest and most unambiguous NT teachings is that there is only one people of God. That people of God now is called the Church, not Israel. In Romans, Paul outlines the reality that Israel was supposed to become the Church, but as a whole, they did not, in spite of all the genuine advantages they had in relationship for centuries with God. Paul’s own life is a microcosm of what was supposed to happen, the Israel-to-Church transition. In his public defense against the Jews who were likely going to kill him if the Romans had not intervened in Acts 22, he outlines his Jewish OT Israel bonafides. He states he was so zealous for what he was certain was God’s way that he was persecuting the Way, which his hearers knew referred to the Jesus followers that they all understood as blasphemers worthy of destruction. Paul was the best example of OT Israel one could ask for and he claims it boldly. Then he encountered Jesus, not because he asked, but because Jesus chose him. That encounter did not require a lengthy argument between Paul and Jesus to convince Paul to change his thinking. It was an instantaneous conversion from an OT Israel Jew to a NT Christian through the direct revelation of the Son of God, a specific and individual manifestation of the fulfillment of the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic covenants.
The NT proclaims boldly that the Church is the earthly establishment of the Kingdom of God, with the Gentiles as fellow heirs (Eph. 3:6-11), that will not be overcome by the Kingdom of Hell (Mt. 16:18). The Church is the new, true Israel (Rom. 2:28-29; Gal. 6:16; Phil. 3:3), the new expression of God’s covenant people in the world (Heb. 8:6-13). Paul in the letter called Ephesians (the earliest manuscripts of it do not mention Ephesus), writing to the churches of Asia Minor, obviously significant in Revelation, speaks to primarily Gentile believers that although they were once “excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God…you who were formerly far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall by abolishing in his flesh the enmity, which is the Law…so that in himself he might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross” (Eph. 2:8ff).
Peter describes the Church as “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that…declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Pet. 2:9-10), a nearly direct quote from the Mosaic covenant in Ex. 19:5-6, where God says of Israel that they will be his own special possession, a holy nation and a kingdom of priests to him. Especially noteworthy words from the apostle who had once accepted the pressure of Judaizing believers (Gal. 2:11ff) in the early church and had to learn hard lessons about letting go of much of his Jewishness, and here is saying this to believing recipients who were both Jew and Gentile. The same phrase is used by John in Rev. 1:6 to describe the Church as “a kingdom and priests to serve” God. As well, the OT motifs of God as father and husband are applied to the Church. We are his children (Rom. 8:15; Heb. 12:5-11). Jesus alludes to himself as the bridegroom (e.g., Mt. 9:15; John 3:29) to the Church, and more explicitly, the Church is the Bride of Christ in Rev. 19:7 and Rev. 21 and 22.
So, Why the Controversy?
Jesus’s arrival on Earth 2,000 years ago catalyzed a simmering and deeply entrenched contention among both his opponents and his followers that visibly began during his ministry and continued after his ascension and into the early church’s first 400+ years about who the people of God is. It has continued to erupt within the Church from time to time, with its most recent and lasting manifestation coming in the last two centuries, primarily in Western and in particular American Protestant Evangelicalism, largely as a byproduct of an interpretation of eschatological Scripture that has come to be known as Dispensationalism, and then given a turbo-charged boost with the establishment of the nation-state of Israel in 1948.
From the outset of Jesus’s public ministry, and from the beginning of the Church’s existence (c. 30 AD), and for the next several decades—i.e., the Apostolic and NT period, it became increasingly emphasized that the long-established (and for the Jews, cherished) distinction between Jews and Gentiles was obliterated in the Gospel. Salvation and intimate relationship with God was available equally to both Jews and Gentiles, and the longstanding enmity between them was required to be put away, once for all, in Jesus. This was a direct fulfillment of one of the covenantal promises made to Abraham, reiterated to Jacob, then to the nation of Israel through Moses, and then to David that through their seed (i.e., descendants genetically and spiritually) all nations would be blessed, and that there would be many nations arising from them under their sway, and they would be a great nation with innumerable descendants. But that didn’t go over well immediately, even among the apostles. Peter states in Acts 10:34ff that he finally sees that God does not show partiality, echoing Paul in Rom. 2:11 that “there is no partiality with God,” explicitly addressing a recurrent theme of Jewish belief in Jewish preeminence over Gentiles and a reluctance to embrace the universality of God’s redemptive plan for all of humanity, even Gentiles who were the Jews’ enemies!
This was a central feature of the Gospel’s revolutionary impact: Being a chosen member of God’s family, his people, was actually explicitly available to anyone and everyone who believes in the Son of God. Paul’s declaration that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” in Gal. 3:28-29, an epistle written to take on this issue directly with “Judaizing” Jewish believers that insisted that non-Jewish converts—Gentiles—were required to adopt Mosaic law practices as part of believing in Jesus, is a blunt repudiation of this sectarian cancer. If someone believes in Jesus, nothing else matters.
Except it really should not have been all that revolutionary, and if people (the Jews prior to and contemporary with Jesus, and now some Christians) had not become so attached to a slowly developed distortion of God’s revealed although mysterious and inscrutable character that was the result of centuries of theological interpretive tradition passed down, it would not have been. But humanity, and even God’s chosen people, has consistently missed God’s point.
How to Be in God’s Family, a Member of His People
What is necessary to belong to God, to be a member of his family? None of humanity since Eden, although created in his image and in right relationship with him initially there, is part of his family, part of his people, without a God-given solution. And thankfully, there is one! But there is only one. As mentioned, the underlying theme throughout the entire Bible of what brings us into right relationship with God, that makes us his people, is faith, a proper and complete acceptance of God’s holiness, goodness, and trustworthiness in revealing himself and his intentions and promises to us image-bearers.
The first time this is explicitly stated is in regard to Abram, who we are told “believed in the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6), which is quoted in Rom. 4:3, Gal. 3:6, and James 2:23, as proof of its validity before there was an Israel, and before Jesus. Likewise, in Hab. 2:4, we read that “the righteous one will live by his faith,” which is quoted both in Romans and Galatians (3 times in some variant), again before Jesus came. Hebrews 11 is the famous “Hall of Faith” chapter, wherein the writer catalogues several OT characters who lived righteously because of their faith, and none of whom had the chance to receive the promise of the Messiah, yet were awarded righteousness (v. 39). The next verse highlights that, in a sense, these OT saints, not all of whom were actually Hebrews/Jews/genetic descendants of Abraham, were not “made perfect” ahead of us who have received the good news of Jesus, the Messiah; in other words, we have been the recipients of what they were promised but did not receive in their lifetimes, yet God justified them all the same. Taken together, all of us, who are declared righteous by God because of our faith, are the people of God, regardless of when.
Covenants: The Successive Road Maps to Relationship with God
The principal way in which humanity, individually and collectively, has been offered “road maps” of how to be in right relationship with God, and to grasp the necessity of believing faith and subsequent obedient living to be his people, is through covenants. Biblical covenants are personal yet formal agreements initiated by God with individuals he chose and declared righteous, whereby they and their descendants are called into dependent relationship with him, albeit with some variations. Generally, God obligates himself to love, provide, protect, and bless his people, and in return they are obligated to worship and obey him, and there are promises made that God will fulfill. Covenants don’t necessarily have a time frame; they can be (but don’t have to be) voided by violation by one or both parties, they can be released when their purposes and promises have been accomplished, or they can be amended by subsequent covenantal provisions, or they can end by death. The Bible’s covenants also revealed more of God progressively, such that the way of living righteously by faith became more clearly explicated. Jesus initiated the new, most explicit, and final covenant that signified the fulfillment and completion of all the prior ones. There is debate about some of that, however, regarding promises God made.
The 3 most important covenants pertaining to Israel and Christianity are those God made with Abram/Abraham, Moses, and David. God made the promise to Abram that he will be made into a great nation, and through him all the families of the earth will be blessed (Gen. 12). We understand from the vantage point of Christianity that latter piece of the promise about all the families, aka nations, being blessed through him would be eventually fulfilled through Jesus. There was still no Israel, but Abraham was in the family of God. Moreover, the covenant God made with Abram does not include a specifically stated or even implied requirement of obedience for the covenant to be maintained or fulfilled; it is a “grant” covenant that God binds himself to unilaterally. God promises to give his descendants the land (Gen. 15:18-21). God amends the covenant in Gen. 17, implying an obedience expectation that Abram, renamed now as Abraham, and his descendants will “walk before” God and be blameless (indeed, God will extend the covenant to Isaac), while God will give them the land of Canaan. The covenant is signified via obedience to the rite of circumcision. It is also to be everlasting (the root word here is Heb. olam), both regarding the continuation of circumcision and the possession of the land.
Olam is an extremely important word in the OT, appearing 208 times, and it has several meanings that are context-dependent. The root word means hidden, concealed, beyond the horizon, pertaining to God’s essential nature, but in OT usage its meanings are regularly applied to time and include everlasting, permanent, eternal, forever, of ancient origin, perpetual, going into the future, of the world, and even age- or time-limited. The underlying commonality is that it is hard to see, or hard to understand, like what is beyond the horizon. It is not necessarily always what we think of as linear time; rather, it may be cyclical, conditional, and of indeterminate length, a way of thinking about time foreign to us in our culture, even though translated as “forever” or “everlasting.”
Parenthetically, this is one of the reasons some interpreters in the last several hundred years have arrived at suspect conclusions about covenantal permanence and promises: they do not understand properly the ancients’ perspective on time. The argument is made that olam should be understood as truly permanent and neverending, and it is the word used to describe God, his unending mercies, his never-failing love, and his power, and it is used for permanence in many other places as well. However, it is also used in places where it cannot mean permanent and unending, such as the statutes of the Mosaic Law, the feasts celebrated every year (e.g., Passover), the necessity of continuing the rite of circumcision, and even the voluntary lifetime commitment of a slave to a master. These latter instances are conditional and have ended, because Jesus instituted the new covenant, or in the last case, there came the end of a life.
Israel as the people of God began with Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, whose name was changed to Israel, meaning “he who contends with God,” by the Lord after his all-night wrestling encounter with the angel (Gen. 32:24ff, and then again in Gen. 35:9). The nation of Israel was the family descended from one man, the last of the three successive father-son patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and then Jacob—who had sons that became the 12 tribes of Israel, as promised to him specifically by God in Gen. 35:11-12. Included in the promise was a repeat of what Abraham was promised, namely that a good and plentiful land would be given. What is also still present but easily overlooked was the promise that all the nations of the earth would receive God’s blessing, now through Israel downstream of Abraham.
Israel was a people of genetic relation who were selected by God and brought into relationship with him through Moses via the Exodus, the miraculous deliverance and destruction of Pharaoh and the Egyptians and the subsequent giving of the Law, that established a much more explicit and detailed covenant with him, the benefits immediately promised about a land to be given them flowing with milk and honey, but conditional on obedience and faithfulness. Israel as God’s people was a theocratic but also genetic/ethnic/national entity.
It is critical to note that there was nothing explicitly stated about eternity or a spiritual reality underlying the material, but the implication of an olam version of permanence was clear. The theological ideas of eternal life, resurrection, or a reality more significant beyond this material one on Earth had not been developed very far; God had not yet revealed them. For Israel, he would be their God, and they would be his people, and as long as they obeyed him, the blessings of the land and its plenty would be secure, and that was as good as it could get. Specifically, as already mentioned, God says that Israel will be his own special possession, a holy nation and a kingdom of priests to him, language Peter uses later as mentioned nearly identically to describe the Church in the NT; that parallel is not an accident.
Israel’s (“he who contends with God”) history from the beginning, immediately after the Exodus with all of God’s miraculous intervention, was an extension of humanity’s trajectory in general: one of rebellion, grumbling, forgetfulness, disobedience, and faithlessness, and judgment predictably as promised from God. God’s wrath against Israel—against his people!—led to their being ultimately conquered, the land dispossessed, the temple (once it was constructed) destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed and rebuilt, the ark of the covenant lost, regained, and finally lost, and the people of God dispersed all over the region over the course of centuries; their continual infidelity to God forfeited the promises they were supposed to enjoy because God was faithful to the covenant’s negative provisions. This people of God as a whole failed to uphold the covenant, yet there were those who remained faithful who were implied to be righteous (e.g., 1 Kings 19:18), and were often called a remnant. What we can conclude is that the people of God called Israel in the OT were not all really his people.
It is also the case that God’s interest in redeeming non-Israelites is apparent (e.g., the Ninevites, Israel’s enemies, that Jonah preached unwillingly to), most starkly perhaps immediately prior to taking the Promised Land with the Canaanite prostitute, Rahab (Josh. 2). The irony is breathtaking that this immoral woman of an enemy people is selected by Israel’s God to be among his people (see both Heb. 11:31 and James 2:25) and to even be in the line of the promised Messiah (Mt. 1:5). To the Israelite of the time, but a hundred times more for the Jew of the 1st century, this was a jarringly incendiary idea; a Gentile prostitute in the land given to Israel would never be brought by God into his family! Yet Rahab’s saving faith put her in direct and insulting contrast both to the bulk of the Israelites of the Exodus who died by God’s judgment and did not possess the Promised Land and with the unbelieving Jews rejecting Jesus.
Eventually, Israel explicitly rejected God as their king (1 Sam. 8) and insisted on a human king to be like the other nations, and God accommodated them, but that is also exactly what his as yet unrevealed plan for redemption for a people for himself required. Israel’s first king was Saul, but he was not faithful, and God rejected him (1 Sam. 15:23). God replaced him with a “man after his own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14), David, a shepherd boy who was otherwise unremarkable in appearance and the youngest of a bunch of brothers. David was a good and faithful and obedient king, although he certainly failed in huge ways and had more than a little drama during his reign, but Israel under him and then for a time under his son Solomon enjoyed the best of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants’ promises about a promised and possessed land, regional peace, and international glory. This roughly 75 or so year period from c. 1000-922 BC marked the highlight of Israel’s national history, a time the Jews would hearken back to in subsequent centuries as the greatest fulfillment of God’s promises to them and what they would aspire to recover, believing God would do so for them. This period of time was also where the promises of God to both Abraham and Jacob/Israel about the land had been fully realized; in other words, God had fulfilled what he promised covenantally!
God established yet another covenant with David on top of the Mosaic; in 2 Sam. 7:8ff, God told David that God will build a permanent (v. 13; olam again) kingdom for him and through him, specifically through David’s descendant. This covenant had a double application, first through Solomon, to whom the covenant was extended and who built the first physical temple for God in Jerusalem, and then through Jesus, who would build a different kind of temple for a different kind of kingdom that would last for a different kind of forever. God’s progressive revelation of himself was again in evidence herein, such that with David there was a growing glimpse of a coming true Messiah, first hinted at in the proto-evangelion from Gen. 3, and expanded in many scriptural (and non-canonical) places.
Regarding Solomon, God said he would establish his throne forever (again, olam) (1 Chron. 22:10), but that establishment was conditional (1 Chron. 22:12-13). Because Solomon toward the latter part of his reign failed to obey the covenant, despite his unrivaled wisdom, Israel was fractured immediately after his death (c. 922 BC) into a northern kingdom, Israel, and a southern kingdom, Judah (from where the term “Jew” originated). The two kingdoms were at times allies and at times enemies, still being God’s people, and yet they paralleled each other for 200 years of a lot of infidelity to God and the Law, setting a trajectory that ultimately forfeited the land God had given them. God sent numerous prophets to them both, calling them back to himself, warning of judgment if they did not (and stating it was at some point no longer avoidable), and often offering future descriptions of both the Messiah and a restoration of their blessings of peace and prosperity in the Promised Land. Israel fell in 722 BC to the Assyrians, while Judah remained for another roughly 135 years, falling in 586 BC to the Babylonians. The land was lost, the temple destroyed, the ark of the covenant vanished, the Mosaic system suspended, and the Israelites/Jews dispersed, and yet there were faith-filled people who were in God’s family despite all of that.
A small group of Jews was allowed to return to the land about 70 years later (see Nehemiah and Ezra) in 515 BC, with the permission of the Persians under Cyrus to rebuild the temple and resume the Mosaic system (many commentators have observed that this is likely the first week of Daniel’s seventy weeks from Dan. 9:24). They did, and the Jewish nation was rebuilt along with it, although it did not regain full independence; Israel was a Persian subject for about 180 years. During the time under the Persians, God’s final OT prophet, Malachi, finished his oracles to Israel by about 400 BC, wherein he spoke against the Jews’ continuing failure to live out their faith well despite the temple’s recovery, leaving the Jews looking for what was to come next: the Messiah. In 334 BC, the Persians were conquered by the Greeks, led by Alexander the Great, and Israel became a subject of the Greek empire.
The Development of Jewish Eschatology
While both the northern and southern kingdoms were in conflict with each other and their neighbors during the pre-exilic period (between 922 and 722 BC), terminology about “the Day of the Lord,” aka “the Day of the Lord’s Wrath” came into parlance, although the specifics of the term’s origins are unclear. What was clear was that God was expected to turn his wrath against Israel’s enemies and destroy them, and restore Israel’s fortunes with a peaceful kingdom. He would do this as he had in the past for Israel, with leaders that came at just the right time, “saviors” like Othniel, Gideon, Deborah, and Samson, and men of God like Elijah, Elisha, and Samuel.
But God did not meet their expectations. The prophets who called out Israel and Judah applied the language of “Day of God’s Wrath” not only against the enemy nations, but also against God’s own people because they had been chosen by him and were given much more (e.g., Amos 3:2). Other prophets, such as Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah, who prophesied before and after Israel’s destruction, introduced more fully the idea of an ideal future king, taking the Davidic promise further all the way into a restoration of Eden (e.g., Is. 11), and the idea of a “remnant” of Israel that God would keep in spite of judgment, as a reminder of his mercy and his faithfulness despite the failures of his people (e.g., the theme of Hosea).
Later theological developments from Isaiah, Zechariah, Malachi, and even more so from Daniel, Joel, and Ezekiel added fuel to the idea that God’s final actions in history would be dramatic beyond belief, literally bringing God’s dispersed people back from doom to glorious and victorious pre-eminence over their foes. The restoration of Israel’s glory, ideas pertaining to the resurrection of the dead and their judgment, and the political and military success of the Messiah were all more fully built. And then God was silent.
God had stopped speaking to his people, who had regained the land, but they had not recovered the glory days of old. It was during this time that Jewish Messianic eschatology began developing in earnest. Prior to this time, eschatological thinking among the Jews was comparatively limited. They saw themselves correctly as God’s chosen people, and that God was not only their God but the God of the universe, so they looked forward to God establishing on earth his reign over all with Israel in particular prominence, both politically and geographically. They had that with David and Solomon, but it was lost, and as the Jews’ infidelity to God became increasingly hardened, the Lord sent them prophets to warn them away from what became their imminent destruction, but also to tell them that there would be a future restoration of some kind.
But history continued, and they waited. The Jews were in their land, but they were vassals groaning under Persian and then Greek rule. When the Maccabean War of 167-160 BC took place, the Jews were finally able to overthrow the Greeks, with divine intervention that was memorialized by Hannukah. The leader of the revolt, Judas Maccabeus, was hailed as a hero, but he was not of the Davidic line, so the wait for the Messiah continued. However, Jewish independence was short-lived, as the Roman conquest of the region occurred about 100 years later, in 63 BC. The Jews were still oppressed, awaiting God’s deliverance.
With Jewish eschatology becoming more fully established during the intertestamental period, by the time Jesus came, almost a thousand years after David, the Jews’ Messiah was expected to be a military leader like him, called “the Son of David” (as hailed in Jesus’s Triumphal Entry in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the gospel accounts), who would be empowered by God to overcome and expel Israel’s enemies, re-establish their kingdom in the Promised Land, and restore Israel’s material prosperity and international status. A secondary role that the Messiah would play would be in moral judgment and the establishment of righteousness, but the application of that was against Israel’s enemies much more than within Israel itself, let alone among individuals, even though those themes were clearly evident in the OT prophets. The Mosaic sacrificial system was assumed to be unending, and Israel would return to, and presumably never lose, the glory days of David and Solomon in the Promised Land. In sum, this established “orthodoxy” was what Jesus came into.
The Arrival of Jesus
The Jews were partly right in their expectation—Jesus was the “Son of David”—but massively wrong overall. Jesus came and confounded all of their expectations on an unacceptably huge scale. In fact, the people of God missed God when he showed up in their midst precisely because they were certain of who he should be and what he should do, and it led them to kill him because he did not meet their certainty. Instead of a military leader who would oust Rome and restore the Davidic dynasty, Jesus preached about a kingdom not of this world, identifying and defeating an enemy called sin and death and the Devil, living out the Law in spirit and not by letter, and emphasizing loving God and one’s enemies and the importance of eternal life. He appeared indifferent to Rome’s occupation, even accepting the legitimacy of taxation, he dealt favorably with Gentile (!) Romans, Greeks, and Samaritans, he broke and/or contradicted the Law according to the Jewish leaders’ understanding of it, and he reserved his harshest words for those very leaders, both priestly and kingly, that were supposed to be God’s people shepherding God’s people Israel properly. He mentioned nothing about recapturing the Promised Land, or any actual piece of land on earth, and was frustratingly noncommittal when asked specifically about it. And all the while, he performed signs and wonders unlike and beyond any ever seen before, culminating in his resurrection which demonstrated the legitimacy of his message, and were the things that so powerfully drew people, especially desperate ones, to pay attention to him, even to believe in him. It is hard to imagine a more clear demonstration of how some of God’s people were his human worst enemies who would receive his condemnation and wrath (John 3:36); they were not his people, even though they were Israel!
The parable of the vine growers (Mk. 12:1-12) is a blunt-force promise about what unbelieving Israel was on the cusp of earning for themselves, and ultimately did. The vineyard in the parable would be taken from the reprobate vine growers, who killed the owner’s son and whom he destroyed, and given to others. John 1:11-13 states that Jesus, the Son of God and Messiah, came to his own, Israel, and his own did not receive him, but to those that did, he gave the right to become the children of God, not according to any genetic descent or human choice, but by God alone, true for everyone.
Luke 4:14ff records a striking scene in Nazareth, Jesus’ home town, at the beginning of his ministry. He reads in the synagogue Is. 61:1-2a, which was understood as a Messianic prophecy, and then he applies it to himself, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk. 4:21). His hearers are amazed, favorably, but that is short-lived. He does not read v. 2b, which is about the Lord’s vengeance, or go on later in the prophecy to the promises about rebuilding the ruins and restoring the land, which would have been expected. In fact, he immediately makes comments about being rejected by Jews and that they are like the Jews of Elijah and Elisha’s time who did not receive God’s deliverance, but rather their enemies did. Clearly, Jesus is not interested in meeting their eschatological Messianic expectations.
Further, in Luke 24:13ff, we read of how after the resurrection Jesus, unrecognized, encounters 2 disciples on their way to Emmaus who express their disappointment about how Jesus of Nazareth was their hope of redeeming Israel, but who had been crucified. He chides them, and then “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, he explained to them the things written about himself in all the Scriptures” (v. 27). While we do not know how far he explained things, that there is no mention of him validating their eschatological expectations about the military defeat of Israel’s enemies and the recovery of the Promised Land strongly suggests that much, perhaps nearly all, of those eschatological beliefs were built on incorrect interpretations of OT prophecy. Jesus’s time on earth marks the beginning of the end of Israel as God’s people, and the beginning of a new God’s people, who will be taught directly of God (John 6:45, referring to both Is. 54:13 and Jer. 31:34) through the intermediary of God himself in the person of his Son (e.g., 1 Tim. 2:5, Heb. 3:1, 6:17, 8:6, 9:15, 12:24).
Those Jews, individuals who were part of the OT people of God, who accepted Jesus as Messiah never considered themselves no longer Jewish, and the early church was seen both by those outside and those inside as a sect within Judaism; in fact, it was an ongoing source of the controversy in the 1st century about how Jewish the believers in Jesus would need to be—circumcision, dietary laws, etc. Further, for the first several decades of the faith, the Gospel’s proclamation and spread occurred much more through existing Jewish synagogues than through other venues. Believers met regularly in the Jewish synagogues until they were put out by the end of the 1st century, and also met in private homes. The early church was mostly Jewish, and lived as the continuation of the people of God now with the Messiah in plain view! Again, that was what was supposed to happen—Israel was supposed to become the Church. As a whole, they did not.
History demonstrates clearly that the OT chosen people of God, Israel, obviously not all of whom believed with saving faith yet did participate in the Mosaic sacrificial system, were given a window of about 40 years, from roughly 30 AD to 70 AD, to remain God’s people of the new covenant by accepting Jesus the Messiah’s once for all sacrifice. During that time, both the sacrifice of Christ and the OT temple sacrifices were available as evangelism about Jesus the Messiah took place primarily among the Jews, sort of a salvific theological upgrade from covenant 1.0 (one of Law) to covenant 2.0 (one of Grace). Then the window closed, with the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. OT God’s people Israel who believed in Jesus became NT God’s people the Church/Israel contiguously. One could rightly point out that the Mosaic sacrificial system had been interrupted before, but this time it ended because a new covenant was established that fulfilled the old one and rendered it obsolete.
The New Covenant: The Establishment of the Church
The early church understood itself unmistakably as having received the new covenant and being the new people of God, with the Jews being the first group to be evangelized, followed by the Gentiles. Of significance is the fact the it was also the Jews who persecuted the early church far more than did the Gentiles for the first few decades, and for religious reasons. This Jesus fellow could not be the Christ, and a violent reaction against what was held as blasphemy was commonplace. The OT people of God, Israel, persecuted the NT people of God, the Church, because the OT people of God were no longer his people; that does not mean he was finished with them, but rather that God wished to make Israel jealous of their lost position (Rom. 11:14). But, again, God only has one people: those who belong to him through faith, and once Jesus came, through faith in Jesus. Extending the bride metaphor, for God to have both Israel and the Church would make him a bigamist, a rather bracing charge to which God’s character and “one-fleshness” is antithetical.
In spite of all the advantages they had that Paul describes in Romans 3, the Jews were in the end not all God’s. In fact, Paul points to Israel as the example of what not to follow as God’s people in 1 Cor. 10, using explicit Christological language that draws a direct connection to who God’s people are supposed to be and how they are supposed to live out their God-given identity. Israel had multiple chances, and yet they failed, and eventually, because God was faithful to the covenant even when Israel was not, lost everything. Paul warns the Church not to do the same. The fact that so much of the NT focuses on standing firm in one’s faith, no matter what, and warns against falling away inevitably opens up the parallel that being part of the Church is dependent upon the genuineness of the individual’s faith. Not all who claim to be Christians belong to God.
So, What About Israel?
The question arises with what to do with Israel; they were the chosen people of God before Jesus, but now what? What is their status? What is their future? And, the question the controversy hinges most on, did Jesus fulfill all the promises of the previous covenants?
Unbelieving Jews are not God’s people (as are all who do not accept Christ), which by now hopefully is beyond question. But God’s faithfulness to them remains, even if the particulars of what that involves are unclear. This is ultimately a mystery (Rom. 11:25) that we cannot understand, but one we must accept and act upon in creating unity within the body, between Gentiles and Jews, and for us today, about the Jews. The mystery is that, for now, Israel is hardened for a time, until all the Gentiles are saved who will be saved. This is clearly a look into eschatology, and it is not crystal clear!
As Paul is the prototypical example of the Israel-to-Church transition, so is he also proof that God indeed has not permanently rejected the Jews, even though they have again rejected him. Paul is an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin—clearly of the OT covenant people—and he is proclaiming boldly that Jesus is the Messiah, the old covenant has been fulfilled, and the law’s requirements have been set aside. Paul has embraced the new covenant out of the old covenant, and even after so totally rejecting the new covenant that he persecuted the Church; quite a reversal! He is the living embodiment of an obstinate and contrary Jew who had a zeal for God but without knowledge (Rom. 10:2), who God chose sovereignly to save; if God did that with him, he can and will do that with all among the Jews (and Gentiles) that he wills. Moreover, this is also true of all the original Apostles, Jews all, and the 3,000 who came to faith as a result of Peter’s first sermon early in Acts. The early Christians were overwhelmingly Jews, who were and are among those not rejected by God, in spite of their initial unbelief.
God’s bringing the Gentiles to salvation was in part to make the Jews jealous, so that they, actually the remnant, would be spurred to come back to him. The Jews’ falling away opened the door for the Gentiles to be invited in, which in God’s sovereignty was always part of his plan, articulated in the Abrahamic covenant. Parenthetically, throughout Israel’s national history, they were the ones running off after other gods, provoking God’s holy jealousy, as a suitor who competes against a rival. Now, God has turned the tables on them. How ironic that the ones through whom the world was supposed to be blessed are now blessed because they rejected their blessing and it was given to somebody else, and through those others it came back to the original recipients. To be precise, most Jews that come to faith today do so now through the efforts of Christians who aren’t Jews. Hmmm…
It also is the case that at the present moment (i.e., in 57 AD, when Paul wrote Romans, and now), the unbelieving Jews are enemies of Christians over the Gospel, but that isn’t a permanent or total situation. Unfortunately, this comment about Jews being the enemy has been the justification for gross inexcusable anti-Semitism and persecution against Jews by “Christians” and others in history. Nevertheless, God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29), so as a group, elected and saved Jews will receive what was promised. What specifically that is remains open to discussion.
To sum up: Salvation is and always has been by faith, initiated and created by God in receptive people, whether Jew or Gentile, and the saved are together the people of God. Israel in the OT was God’s chosen people, but they failed to remain faithful to him, and the Gentiles were brought into the family of God (and had been, even before Jesus). Jesus, the revealed Messiah, fulfilled and set aside the requirements of the Law, and all who believe in him, Jew and Gentile, comprise the Church, the new true Israel, the body of Christ. But unbelieving Israel is not lost completely, because God is ever faithful; there will be a saved remnant of Israel that will come to faith at God’s calling at some point in time. But all the called, known, and elected will comprise the Church, the Bride of Christ, the mysterious new Jerusalem, the Holy City with the names of the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles on its gates (Rev. 21:9-14).
Eschatology Addressing the Church-Israel Issue in The Early Church
With the writing of Revelation and the early church’s efforts to interpret and understand it, the Church-Israel issue came up again in a different way. The earliest interpretation within the Church of Revelation’s prophecy was something called Chiliasm, from the Greek word chilioi, meaning thousand (related to the Millennium of Rev. 20), and it was prominent from the early 2nd century through the late 4th century. Chiliasm was an importation of the previously discussed Jewish eschatological framework developed before Jesus’s time that viewed the Messiah as the military and political leader who would restore the land and kingdom promised to Israel, going back to the Mosaic and Abrahamic covenants, and drawing on the Messianic prophecies in parts of Isaiah, Daniel, and Zechariah. Further ideas were imported originally as well from the OT Apocrypha, Talmudic sources, and other Jewish and then Christian non-canonical apocalyptic writings (and there were many) and adapted in view of Jesus as Messiah. Parenthetically, again, this was what the 1st century Jews believed, and it was a large part of why Jesus was rejected.
With Jesus as the recognized Messiah, Chiliasm was updated, such that his second advent would accomplish what had not been in his first. The fundamental expectation was that Christ’s return was imminent and his primary opponent was Satan via the Gentile Roman Empire, and all of the promises given in the OT to Israel would be fulfilled in literal, physical, material ways yet to come for the Church. Specifically, Chiliasm held that Jesus’s return would come at the end of the Tribulation period of indeterminate length, ending the persecution of Rome (or for today, Babylon, which was code for Rome back then), but it would not usher in the final judgment and the close of history immediately; there would be an intermediate 1,000 literal years during which the resurrected saints would come with Jesus and then reign with him from Jerusalem over the rest of the living people on the planet in a manner reminiscent of the Garden, full of peace and justice. After that, the resurrection of the wicked and their judgment would occur, followed by the close of history into eternity.
It is important to note, especially for the purposes of the present Church-Israel discussion, that for Chiliasts, it was accepted that OT Israel had been superseded by the NT Church, thus they did not insist on a distinction in the 1,000 years between OT saints and NT saints; they were all the saints. The promises of God to Israel were not unique to Israel, but rather applied to the Church, Jew and Gentile alike. Not surprisingly, Chiliasm was held to strongly by many early Jewish Christians in particular; it was less persuasive to Gentile believers. But a number of notable Church fathers embraced it, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian; even Augustine was sympathetic to it, for a time, before rejecting it.
The main reason for Chiliasm’s rejection was that it was ultimately evaluated as theologically defective in several places. The earliest commentaries within the Church on Revelation, beginning as early as perhaps 120 AD (before canonization had occurred), all had in common a general acceptance of pre-Christian, Jewish eschatology. With Roman persecution abating, then ending, and then Christianity becoming legal in 313 AD, and then the official religion of the Empire in 380 AD, the (presumed) antichrist of Rome and Caesar was defeated without Jesus’s return. Perhaps the millennium had arrived, but without Jesus? Had the Church badly misunderstood Jesus’s words and Revelation’s message, such that Christ’s kingdom could be established by the Spirit-empowered Church without Jesus’s literal return (that specific perspective has become what is called today Postmillenniallism)? Apparently, Chiliasm’s imported Jewish eschatology had ended up showing itself to be in serious error. The two visions of a Messianic kingdom—one the result of a political military victory and one of an eternal kingdom not like those of the world—were incompatible with each other, and damaged badly Chiliasm’s credibility. Finally, the refusal of the Church to accept Chiliasm’s Jewish emphasis on Christ’s kingdom, even if for only 1,000 years, as being based on the restoration of a regional piece of real estate called the Promised Land rather than as an unlimited, eternal, and renewed kingdom in its final establishment required its dismissal. But it has not completely disappeared, and a minority of Christians today still hold to it, calling this view Historical, or Old, Premillennialism.
Why is This an Issue Today?
The reappearance of the Church-Israel question today, thus the contemporary controversy, is a product of Dispensational Theology, a theological system that rose to prominence in Western, and in particular American, Protestantism, beginning in the 1830s. Like the Secret Service’s origins, most evangelical Christians do not know that Dispensationalism is about 200 years old, but they adhere to its eschatology assuming it is and has been the “correct” one since the earliest days of the Church because it’s all they have been taught. Dispensationalism’s eschatological framework, which is called Dispensational Premillennialism, or Futurism, is the predominant and most well-known system in our society (not just in our churches). It interpreted the book of Revelation and OT eschatological passages in a novel way, insisting that Revelation’s prophetic timeline is mostly in the future, and despite the clarity of the scriptural passages already mentioned and the Church’s historical understanding, God has two distinct people, Israel and the Church. As a matter of fundamental hermeneutics, whenever a doctrine contradicts clear NT scripture by using less clear OT scripture, and overturns the Church’s own established view of that scripture, trouble is already here. That is the basic problem with Dispensationalism’s eschatology, and other elements of its theology.
Dispensationalism teaches that the nation of Israel, i.e., the Jewish people of the OT who were given the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic covenants, and the Church, including both Jews and Gentiles, who received the new covenant through Jesus, are both God’s current day people. The assertion that God has two chosen people, Israel and the Church, with different covenants, comes from Dispensationalism’s insistence that the OT prophecies to the Jews that have not been fulfilled literally are part of the future end times and will be fulfilled literally at some point before the end of history, specifically to Israel as a nation, who will eventually all come to saving faith in Christ before the end. Essentially, requiring the OT prophecies to be fulfilled literally requires a kind of revised and updated version of Chiliasm, but dismissing Chiliasm’s insistence that the OT promises of God to Israel are actually to the Church. This is where debates between Historical/Old Premillennialists and Dispensational/New Premillennialists focus.
So…?
Hopefully, the need for a controversy about who the people of God is/are can be put to final rest. What remains unanswered, though, has to do with the future outworkings of the Eschaton. With Israel as a nation reconstituted in 1948, eschatological beliefs sympathetic to Dispensationalism, and a bit to Chiliasm/Old Premillennialism, have been significantly boosted, but that is not the same as clarity. It is hard to know who or what constitutes Israel. Is it ethnicity? Is it religion? Is it a percentage of blood (Rabbinic tradition states that Jewishness is passed down through matrilineal descent to 4 generations; as such, I write as a Jew, with my maternal great-grandmother being a full blooded Jewess)? Who is all Israel that will be saved, from Rom. 11:26?
Because Paul in Romans 9-11 is discussing the Jews, it is hard to assume he’s taking what has been called the “Ecclesiological” perspective, that collapses all believing Jews and Gentiles into one and thus that is how all Israel is to be understood as being saved, though in the sense of being the people of God it is true. The “Roman Mission” perspective, whereby Paul’s comments are specifically targeting the Roman church and Jews in Rome, is also untenable. Likewise, the “Two Covenant” perspective, consonant with Dispensationalism, does not fit, for reasons this discussion has beaten to death. The “Eschatological Miracle” view, that all the Jews, possibly even without regard for when they lived, will be miraculously ushered into saving faith at Christ’s return and the establishment of his kingdom is a hard sell given all the history of the people and the NT teaching about them. The most probable position, in my view is, that “all” means merely the total number of Jews elected will be saved, regardless of the particulars of when and how; this is called “the Total National Elect” view.
Depending on who is asked, the promises of the OT that have not been literally fulfilled pertaining to the Promised Land and the recovered status of David and Solomon’s kingdom, as opposed to being fulfilled allegorically or symbolically, are still required. But are they? Ultimately, these are questions that cannot be answered definitively. And because of that, we should be charitable toward each other as we consider possibilities. But we should never lose sight of the fact that those who have received prophetic revelation in the past have often not gotten it right, sometimes massively, and therefore our unity in love as the disciples of Jesus, saved by faith in him, should never be compromised. Eschatological historicism, i.e., the practice of identifying scripturally prophetic signs, people, and events in real-time occurrence now, has had a 0% success rate thus far, even with the Holy Spirit’s presence.
For what it’s worth…In my opinion, insisting on a literal, earthly, future kingdom for Israel in the Promised Land is like a promise made to a 4 year-old for a trip to the neighborhood park with a slide and swings that he can enjoy as long as he minds the parent properly. If he does not, they have to go home. The trip happens, the child disobeys, and the park is no longer available. God is the parent, Israel the rebellious child, and the park—the land—is lost. The parent tells the child that despite the loss of this venture, there will be another opportunity yet to come when the child is much older for a much grander trip to a much grander park, having in mind all the amusement and adventure parks on Earth. But the child still insists, even now as a young adult with presumably greater maturity and imagination, on going to the park around the corner with the slide and swings before he’ll go anywhere else because the first promise still takes precedence for him, and it was lost before, so it must be regained. Maybe that is what will happen, but it seems to me to be pretty limiting in comparison to what God may have in store.
But we should rest assured: No matter what, God is sovereign, his promises sure, and his people will be one and will glorify him, whether on Earth now or in eternity. Let us not get bogged down in speculation and become divided unnecessarily, especially on things that we simply must accept as mystery.
Sources
Azar, Michael. (2021). “Supersessionism”: The Political Origin of a Theological Neologism. Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 16(1), pp. 1-25.
Elwell, Walter A. (Ed.) (1988). The Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible. Ada, MI: Baker Publishing Group.
Hill, Charles. (Jan/Feb 1999). Why the early church finally rejected Premillennialism. Modern Reformation Online.
Hummel, Daniel. (2023). The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Jewish Virtual Library.org
Odell, Mark. (2017). The Heart of The Gospel: A Study in the Book of Romans. Unpublished manuscript.
Zoccali, Christopher. (2008). “‘And so all Israel will be saved’: Competing Interpretations of Romans 11.26 in Pauline Scholarship,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 30(3), pp. 289-318.