With recent events in the Middle East, we are seeing diverse reactions among Christians related to the modern nation called Israel. While many of these reactions are made confidently and enthusiastically, they also include diverse forms of confusion regarding what the Bible really has to say about the modern Israeli state.
In reality, Scripture says nothing at all about the modern
Israeli state. Instead, the perspective
of Scripture, and of the first 19 centuries of Christian theologians, was that
Israel was always the Church, and the Church has always been Israel. This isn’t some sort of “replacement
theology,” as some would accuse, because this does not assert that one has
replaced the other, but that since the moment God called Abraham in Genesis,
they have been one in the same.
The message of the entire book of Hebrews is that the
temple, priesthood, law, and nation of Israel were all pointing us forward to
Jesus, and are ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, and the book of Romans repeatedly
shows that ancestry creates no special status with God, and it is trust in
Jesus which saves even those descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God’s people are those who trust in Jesus,
whether they do so beforehand, in anticipation of His coming, or by trusting in
the accomplished fact of His death and resurrection, regardless of ancestry or
geography.
For a finite time, a particular geographic location and
ancestry largely characterized God’s people, but even during that time their
land and genealogy were not exclusive.
Consider the example of Old Testament saints like Rahab and Ruth or the
Israelites who were scattered across nations while still hoping in the coming
Savior. Consider that at the time of
Elijah, God says that there were only 7000 among them (those who had not given
in to idolatry) who were His people, or the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans,
British, and others who ruled that land between the time of Jeremiah the
prophet and the present day.
It was only in the 1840s that a man named John Nelson Darby
first invented the idea that the end times involved a restored earthly nation
in that land. When a nation sharing the
name and location of Israel was founded in the wake of World War II, followers
of his new teaching began to spread the idea that it was coming into
fulfillment.
Whatever good reasons, from geopolitical strategy to mercy
for those harmed by war, we might have for supporting this earthly nation, let
us not be deceived by this only 150 year old notion that there is any spiritual
or eschatological significance divinely associated with our secular ally who is
currently under attack.
