|
Justice, the Gospel, and the Land of Israel
By David Devenish
Bedford, UK
One of the most contentious issues today both in terms of theological understanding and geo-political events, concerns the land of Israel. Much debate arises as to whether evangelical Christians should be helping Jews return to the land of Israel from all around the world, particularly from the former Soviet Union. Foreign policy currently in the United States and historically in Britain has been strongly influenced by evangelical Christians’ campaigns in favour of the Jews returning to the land of Israel, which is of course essentially a question of Biblical interpretation.
As leaders we must give thought to this issue and teach on it. Why? First because many of the widely read Christian books today about the ‘end times’ express a particular opinion on this subject and second because Christians are to be involved in working out the kingdom by prayer, gospel preaching and social action in order to see justice, peace and reconciliation in our world. We cannot, therefore, ignore the Middle East.
So, are the Jews entitled by the promises of Scripture to possess the land of Israel even, as many would suggest, well beyond the borders of the current political Israel? What is the Biblical teaching on the land?
Because this is such an emotive subject, it is important to make a number of points clear at the outset:
• First, we love the Jewish people and therefore our desire is for them to have what is their greatest blessing possible, receiving the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, and finding forgiveness and freedom through His cross.
• Second, as John Hosier points out elsewhere, we believe there will be a massive turning to Christ amongst Jewish people as many are grafted back into the ‘olive tree’ of the people of God (Rom. 11:24).
• Third, we recognise that in church history there has sometimes been terrible anti-Semitism and maltreatment of Jewish people. This we renounce.
• Fourth, because of the awful history of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany we support and sympathise with the need for Jewish people to be in a place where they can be secure and free from unprovoked attacks. This is an expression of the justice and mercy of God.
We also need to make clear by way of introduction a hermeneutic for applying relevant Scriptures:
• Old Testament Scriptures are to be understood in the light of clear New Testament revelation as to their current application.
• There is progressive revelation throughout Scripture which makes clear the unfolding plans and purposes of God.
The land in the New Testament
With these hermeneutic ‘givens’ in mind, what does the New Testament teach about the land of Israel? Answer: absolutely nothing. There are no references to the importance of the land or of Jerusalem as a ‘holy city’. Some would say that this is simply an argument from silence and that there are sufficient promises in the Old Testament to establish the land as belonging to the Jewish people without the need for New Testament confirmation. However, not only is there silence about the land but the whole tenor of the New Testament message and revelation of God’s saving purpose amongst His people points in a different direction.
To a Samaritan, despised by the Jews, Jesus makes special places of worship (including Jerusalem) a redundant concept (John 4:21). When marvelling at the faith of a Gentile centurion, Jesus applied to the gathering in of Gentile peoples from all over the world the Old Testament promises of the bringing of God’s people from the east and west into the promised blessings alongside Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Matt. 8:11).
The promise of the restoration of David’s tabernacle is applied by James, the leader of the Jerusalem church, to the reception of the gospel by the Gentiles. This confirmed they are full participants in the people of God without needing to fulfil the outward requirements of the law (Acts 15:15-19). The promised future blessing of fruitfulness for an Israel coming out of exile is applied by Paul to the new people of God, both Jew and Gentile, who receive the Messiah and the promises of faith (Gal. 4:27).
The Old Testament form of worship, including the whole sacrificial system in the temple, is merely a shadow and thus declared obsolete. In the same book, written to scattered Jewish Christians, the writer declared triumphantly, ‘You have come to mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God’ (Heb. 12:22) without any hint that they should also await an earthly Zion. So far as the specific promises of the land itself are concerned, the New Testament enlarges them to the whole world! Abraham is described as heir, not of a small strip of land but the world (Rom. 4:13)! The meek shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5).
This is the glory of the mystery of God’s ways revealed in the New Testament. God had chosen Abraham and his descendants, the people of Israel, to be God’s special people as the bearers of His blessing to all the nations of the earth. Israel had failed to carry this blessing. (One prophet even ran away revolted at the prospect of Nineveh repenting and being blessed!) But Old Testament prophecy looked forward to the coming of a Messiah who would fulfil all the promises to Israel.
The Messiah himself and His dreadful death on a cross became the means by which ‘all men’ (spoken in the context of Greeks seeking Jesus) would be drawn to Him. This Messiah was vindicated primarily by His resurrection from the dead but also by the early fulfilment of His prophecy that the temple would be destroyed.
The mystery of God’s ways revealed to the apostles and prophets, and emphasised by Paul in his letter to the Romans, the Galatians and in particular the Ephesians, was that now the only basis for salvation and being part of the people of God was through faith in this Messiah. The result was that there is now ‘one new man in Christ’, composed of both Jews and Gentiles, eventually from all the nations of the world, incorporated into the people of God and heirs together of all the promises to Israel. Like Isaac, we are all children of promise (Gal. 4:28). The Gentiles who believe are heirs together with believing Israel (eg Rom. 2:28-29, 3:30) and thus receive the promise through Christ.
As N T Wright puts it, ‘The land no longer functioned as the key symbol of the geographical identity of the people of God, and that for obvious reasons: if the new community consisted of Jew, Greek, Barbarian alike, there was no sense in which one piece of territory could possess more significance than another. At no point in this early period do we find Christians eager to define or defend a “holy land”. Jesus and the church together are the new temple; the world I suggest is the new land.’ (NT Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, SPCK, 1992).
The blessing of the whole world
This does not devalue the Jews, rather it means that we believing Gentiles are incorporated into the same promises as believing Jews, enlarged so that, for example, the temple becomes the dwelling place of God by His Spirit wherever Christians are gathered. Similarly, the promise of the land is not abrogated but enlarged to encompass the blessing of the whole world which will eventually, after Jesus returns, result in the inheritance not of one small land but of a renewed earth for which all creation is longing.
But what about the promise of the ‘everlasting possession of the land of Canaan’ (Gen. 17:8)? Again we must read this Scripture in its context. In the same chapter, not only is the promise of the land described as ‘everlasting’ but so is the covenant of circumcision (v13) and are the promises to Isaac (v19). In the New Testament, circumcision is no longer necessary to define the people of God because that is determined by how we respond to Christ in faith. Circumcision of the flesh is now nothing; it is circumcision of the heart by the Spirit that counts (Rom. 2:29). The lesser is enfolded in the greater, the ‘type’ into the ‘anti-type’, the ‘shadow’ into the ‘fullness’. Similarly, the promise to Isaac is described by Paul as being applied to Gentiles as well as Jews who believe in Christ, and thus both are children of promise. Unbelieving Jerusalem in this same section is described as children of Hagar (Gal. 4:25). The promises remain but their fulfilment is for those who receive the promise of the Messiah. It is therefore not at all surprising that in the New Testament the land is now included in the greater promise to bless the whole earth.
Furthermore the promise of the land, even in Old Testament terms, was not unconditional. Deuteronomy chapters 4 and 28 make it clear that if the Jewish people were to rebel against the Lord and embrace idolatry then they would be exiled from the land. There was in Deuteronomy a promise of return to the land but this was to follow a return to the Lord. It is clear from the New Testament that a return to the Lord involves an acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah and King.
In considering this, John Stott makes the following points:
• The Old Testament promises about the Jews’ return to the land are [accompanied] by promises of the Jews’ return to the Lord. It is hard to see how the secular, unbelieving state of Israel can possibly be a fulfilment of those prophecies.
• The Old Testament promises about the land are nowhere repeated in the New Testament. The prophecy of Romans 11 is a prophecy that many, many Jews will turn to Christ, but the land is not mentioned nor is Israel mentioned as a political entity.
• The Old Testament promises according to the apostles are fulfilled in Christ and in the international community of Christ. The New Testament authors apply the promise of Abraham’s seed to Jesus Christ. And they apply to Jesus Christ the promise of the land and all the land which is inherited, the land flowing with milk and honey, because it is in him that our hunger is satisfied and our thirst quenched.
A return to Jewish nationalism would seem incompatible with this New Testament perspective of the international community of Jesus.
If this is so clear from the New Testament, then why do so many, probably a majority of, evangelicals take a different view? To understand this we need to review church history over the last four centuries.
Some Puritan preachers in their longing for wider blessing for the world believed that the conversion of Jews to Christ would lead to this wider blessing. A few of these preachers linked this conversion to Christ with a restoration to the land for the ‘rebirth of the Christian Israelite nation’. This view became much more prominent at the beginning of the 19th century with, for example, the great preacher Charles Simeon being convinced that the Jews would soon return to Palestine but only as Christians.
The importance of believing for Jews to turn to Christ
Whilst I am not convinced about the continued promise of the land, I am in very sympathetic unity with such preachers on the importance of believing for Jews to turn to Christ. However, at the same time in the early 19th century another very different, though superficially similar, doctrine arose. This was promoted initially by Edward Irving and J N Darby (the founder of exclusive Brethrenism). They taught at a number of ‘prophetic conferences’ held at stately homes in Britain that the church was ‘in ruins’, had or would soon turn to apostasy and that another ‘dispensation’ would be inaugurated. That would lead to the Jews as a distinct people in the land preaching the gospel of the kingdom to the nations after the church had been raptured (not the ‘gospel of the grace of God’ which is for the church age).
This led to the view that the Jews were a separate ‘earthly people of God’ from the church, the ‘heavenly people of God’, and that they would be converted at the return of Christ. Darby became very influential in the USA and, in particular, on one C I Scofield who prepared a ‘study Bible’ with footnotes, that widely promoted dispensationalism and the separation of Israel from the church. This edition of the Bible became very widely read and ‘Scofield footnotes… have been memorised by many as religiously as have verses from the Bible’ (Cox).
This particular view of Scripture undermined the need promoted by others for the Jews to be converted to Christ in order to return to the land. Furthermore this view influenced evangelical politicians like Lord Shaftsbury. Similarly, Arthur Balfour, who pioneered the Balfour declaration in 1917 about a homeland for Jewish people, was brought up in an evangelical home and was influenced by dispensational teaching.
One of the problems with dispensationalism is that it maintains a separation between Israel and the church which later justified a view, quite common today, that it is right to help Jews return to the land without the need to share the gospel with them. One popular US preacher suggests that the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore represents two Israels, one ‘physical’ (sand) and one ‘spiritual’ (stars) or as another advocate put it ‘Israel is an eternal nation, heir to an eternal land, on which David ruled from an eternal throne… never the twain, Israel and the church, shall meet’. Another advocate of this view maintains ‘we don’t believe in conversion, we don’t want to make the Jews into Christians’.
Popularised dispensational thinking
One of the most influential exponents of this view is Hal Lindsay who wrote The Late Great Planet Earth. This popularised both dispensationalist thinking and the view of Israel as a separate evangelistic force with ‘144,000 Jewish Billy Grahams’ after the church is raptured. Not only have some of the predictions in Lindsay’s earlier books not come to pass but from the perspective of the issue of the land there are a number of serious questions to raise about this sort of teaching:
• Though there is a desire to help Jews return, there is also a prediction that this will bring them to wholesale slaughter at Armageddon. Lindsay predicts a 200-mile valley filled with blood and the debris of war. Another writer specifically refers to another Holocaust. Such writers cannot support any peace initiatives between Israel and Palestinians because that would undermine their predictions of Armageddon. As Christians we should be praying for peace and reconciliation for the sake of the gospel so that Jews and Palestinians alike can come to Christ.
• Another hindrance to the peace process is the premise that the full inheritance of the land is much wider than the current politically recognised boundaries.
• There is also Christian support for a restored temple where sacrifices will be offered again – in clear contradiction, from a Christian perspective, of the teaching of Hebrews.
If this were a small minority of prophetic speculators, not too much need be said. However, it is clear that the powerful lobby reflecting these opinions has an impact upon US foreign policy in the Middle East just as early dispensationalism did on UK foreign policy a hundred years ago.
What should be our reaction?
• Pray for peace and security for both Israel and Palestine, and that a way for peace should be found without the demand for an expansionist Israel to alleged Biblical boundaries.
• Evangelise and pray for the salvation of Jewish people through Christ and His cross and reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in ‘one new man in Christ’, refusing the idea that the gospel does not need to be preached to the Jews because they are a separate people from the church.
• Affirm that it is right for Israel to have security and defend themselves against terrorists. Remember also the Palestinian refugees, a not insignificant minority being Christians, for whom very few in the Christian scene are calling for justice or compensation for the dispossession of their homes. |
|
|
Previous issues
Articles and features from previous issues of Newfrontiers Magazine are available from the magazine archive. To search the archive click here »
Printed copies
Printed copies of the latest magazine issue are available from your local Newfrontiers church or by subscribing.
Email: magazine@newfrontierstogether.org for more info. |
|
|