Did the Church Replace Israel? Replacement Theology Explained

Preston (00:01):
I want to start with a simple question. What does it mean when we say the word church? Now imagine with me for a moment, you’re a new believer in Jesus and you just moved to a new town. Somebody tells you you really got to start attending church. So what do you do? You take out your phone, open the map sap, type in the word church, and what pops up? You see, Saint Mary’s Church. Isn’t it supposed to be Jesus’ church? You see Church of Christ. Oh, that must be the right church. Wait, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Is that like the new and improved version? Church of Scientology, that must be the most recent modern version of church, right? And somebody tells you, “No, no, it’s not the building. It’s not church isn’t a building you go to. Church is the people.

(00:53):
” So then you think, okay, which people is it? Is it some of them? Is it all of them? Is it just the ones who agree with me? It’s not as simple as we first think when we begin to explore this topic of what is the church. There’s so many different types of churches, so many different ways of doing church. If it’s Orthodox, Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, what do we mean when we say church? Similarly, when you hear the word Israel, what do you think? Do you think of the ancient Israelites mentioned in the Bible? Do you think of the land of Israel? Do you think of the modern nation state of Israel? Or maybe you think of the Jewish people themselves as those who belong to Israel, but then what does that mean to be Jewish and to belong to Israel? It’s not a simple topic.

(01:51):
Even when we look at what the Bible says, it can be difficult to understand what this means to talk about people called Israel from Genesis to Revelation. Our topic today is going to be a topic that addresses both of these things. What is the church? What is Israel? And what is their relationship to each other?

(02:24):
So at the core of this teaching is this idea that the church has replaced Israel, but there’s really just, like we said, these two nouns, the church and the Israel and their relationship to each other. What is the verb that’s connecting these two ideas together? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. But before we can really answer this question that we started with, what is the church? We have to look at the history of this people called Israel. What does the Bible tell us about this people? So what we’re going to do is we’re going to speed through the biblical history of Israel from Abraham to Acts. And so if you’re watching this video, most likely you know this story of how it all began when God called a man named Abram and promised him that he would bless his descendants and make his family great, that he would give his descendants their own land to live in and this man Abraham changed his name.

(03:32):
God changed his name from Abram to Abraham and his son Isaac and his son Isaac’s son Jacob. These are the patriarchs of the faith, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So this story as I’m sure you’re familiar with, it’s Jacob who Genesis tells us he wrestles with God and his name is changed from Jacob and Hebrew Yakov to Israel, which Genesis tells us means he who wrestles with God. That’s the name Israel. And Israel has 12 sons who then become the 12 tribes of Israel. This is where it all begins. And as I’m sure you know the story, as there is a famine in the land, the story of Joseph happens where the descendants of Israel, Israel’s family are required to move to Egypt where God miraculously provides through Joseph who had become the number two in the land of Egypt. God miraculously provides for the family as they move, but then over time the family just as God promised began to multiply and grow and grow.

(04:45):
And as Exodus tells us, there rose up a king who did not know Joseph. And the Israelites now are put into slavery. And this is the next part of the story when God sends a deliverer named Moses. I told you we were going to go fast through this biblical history. God sends a deliverer named Moses and it’s the Exodus when the Israelites are brought out of Egypt and Moses’ successor, Joshua then is the one who brings the Israelites into the promised land and there they remain in the land and so begins the period of the judges until it reaches a point when Israel asks God for a king. So then is the story of King Saul, King David and King Solomon. So this is the period known in Israel’s history as the United Kingdom under David. So this is a point that’s really important to remember in biblical history, one of those watershed moments.

(05:50):
So for the first time, Israel is united as a kingdom in the very land that God had promised them. But as Solomon comes into power and his son, Jeroboam, he actually Solomon was going to pass the kingdom on, but one of Solomon’s chiefs. So he was the chief of infrastructure. He came in and he led a rebellion against Solomon and ended up taking 10 of the 12 tribes. So these were the 12 that were descended from Israel’s sons, 10 of the 12 tribes and creating a separate northern kingdom of Israel. So then you suddenly at this period in time, you had now the 10 tribes of Israel in the north and then you had the two Southern tribes of Judah in the South and you have a split and in history this is called now the divided monarchy. You had a split between these two kingdoms and this changes everything because from this point on, it’s no longer possible to just talk about Israel.

(06:59):
Oh, here’s Israel because when you say the word, especially if you read through the prophets, if you read a prophet who is speaking to Israel, oftentimes it’s just this northern kingdom of Israel they’re referring to and the southern group of Judah is distinct. So at this point then, all right, this is biblical history. We’re zooming through. You have these two kingdoms and the new superpower in the region is the Assyrians. They come in and Judah makes peace with them, but the northern kingdom of Israel does not and they are brought into exile and scattered. And this is where we get the term, the 10 lost tribes of Israel. So years pass now and the new superpower again is the Babylonians who push out the Assyrians and this time they come in and end up exiling the Southern, those who had remained in the land, the kingdom of Judah.

(08:00):
And this is the Babylonian exile that I’m sure you have heard about before, but it’s so interesting now to see that the northern kingdom have been dispersed, but the southern kingdom of Judah is preserved, taken to Babylon. And this is the story of Nehemiah Ezra when the Persians come in. There’s so many superpowers to remember who are constantly competing over this land. The Persians then come in and under Cyrus, the story of Nehemiah, the Jews are allowed to return back to Israel to rebuild Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple that was destroyed during the first Babylonian exile. So in this bit of history then, the land itself under the Persian rule is now named Yehud after the Hebrew word, Yehudah, which is Judah and this becomes the name of the region then that the Jewish people now see we’re using this word Jewish people instead of the Israelites because they become associated with this name of Judah, Yehudah, that’s the name of the land.

(09:24):
And even after the Persians are pushed out and under Alexander the Great, the Greeks come in, they still keep the same name Eudea in Greek. And then when the Hasmonians, all right, there’s so many different names to remember here. The Hasmonian dynasty is when the Maccabian family, if you know the story of Hanukkah, they end up, there’s a terrible ruler named Antichus IV who ends up defiling the temple outlawing circumcision and the Jewish people under the Maccabian family began to revolt and they push out the Greek power in the region and they set up their own autonomous rule in the land. That’s called the Hasmonian dynasty in this period. And even then they stick with this name Judah as the name of the land.

(10:26):
And after the Hasmonians, as you know, the Romans who end up having to dequell the civil war that ends up happening within the Hasmonian dynasty, the Romans come in, they set up the herods in charge of the land now and the Herods are the ones who are ruling. And even despite all of these changes, you still have in the Hebrew prophets this note that has played the entire time of recognizing the division between the North and the South, but prophesying and seeing the day when all Israel will be restored. This idea of the tin scattered of the two Southern and there being a restored whole Israel, that’s never given up despite the fact that this name Judah, from where we get etymologically, where we get the name for the Jewish people to be a Jew is to belong to this land to this people. So despite that, you have this emphasis of all Israel one day being restored in the prophets through the prophets.

(11:44):
So this leads us then we talked about that was a full … We covered all of the Old Testament just then in a very short amount of time. So congrats to you for sticking with me. This leads us then to the hinge of history, right when the Messiah, Jesus was born and if you want to say zero, 1AD, whatever the exact year is, it’s this hinge that we mark all of time upon. And this God of Israel that was revealed in the Hebrew Bible is now revealed and fully disclosed in this person who is born in Nazareth. And as Colossians says, he is the exact imprint of God’s nature, the on whom all the fullness of God dwells in bodily form. But here’s the remarkable thing. So remarkable to us who are standing much further along in history and maybe for some of us who don’t have as much context about the Jewish foundation of the faith, but at that period, not as remarkable, but remarkable to us is that this God of Israel, he didn’t make steps to become more universalized.

(13:12):
He didn’t take on a Androgynous, a non-human type form that didn’t seem like that it was tied to any type of race or nationality or language. He didn’t become more universalized. The opposite happened where he became even more particular to us by binding himself to Jewish flesh. And this Messiah, this Jewish man, as Matthew 15:24 tells us, also didn’t declare a universal mission without any reference to what had happened before or to the Jewish people or to what the prophets declared about the restoration of Israel. Matthew 15:24 has the words of Jesus saying, “I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Now this phrase house of Israel wouldn’t have just been like, “Oh, he’s just talking about Israel.” No, he’s referring to this prophetic idea of the restoration of all of Israel and this was his declared mission. The people group that he was reaching first takes on Jewish flesh, takes on a particular identity and eternally binds himself the fullness of God as the New Testament scriptures teach us the fullness of God eternally bound in Jewish flesh.

(14:59):
And as you know, the story, the book of Acts tells us the early history of the church and do you know what the final question the disciples ask Jesus is? What is the final question they are ever able to ask him in person? This is even after his 40 days of post-resurrection teachings where he’s with them for 40 days teaching them as Acts one: six tells us the final question the disciples ever asked was, “Is now when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” And this is the story of the early church where it then tells us that Jesus didn’t rebuke them for their question, but he says, “No, you’ll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And that’s this geographic pattern of growing out from Jerusalem, from the wider region of Judea that Jerusalem is found in, and then to the north in Samaria.

(16:09):
And so some history there, Samaria is actually where the Northern 10 tribes were based out of. And then to the ends of the earth, it’s this outward expansion that actually tells us what happens in the book of Acts. This is exactly what happens after the death, the stoning of Stephen. Then the believers in Jesus, the earliest Jewish followers are then scattered out and they begin to go into Samaria and all of this then. We talked about some significant watershed moments. This is another significant watershed moment. In Acts 10, it then tells us, so they had gone, they went out from Jerusalem. They’re now in Samaria and Acts 10 talks about the story of Cornelius.

(17:01):
And Acts 10 is really like the hinge of the New Testament that opens up this mission of God reaching the house of Israel. Now it suddenly opens up and if you read in Acts 10, it’s the story of when God gives the Apostle Peter a vision and leads him to enter Cornelius a Gentile’s home. And this is something that Acts 10 even tells us. Peter admits this was against Jewish custom to do to enter a Gentiles home like this, especially a centurion, someone associated with the Roman imperial system. And it’s not just then that Peter is able to bring the gospel to Cornelius, but something remarkable happens. As Peter is speaking to Cornelius, it says that the Holy Spirit fell on Cornelius and his entire household. And this is, I don’t want us just to brush past the scandal of this moment. The fact that someone who is not associated with everything that had gone before with the covenants God had made to Israel from the sign of circumcision and Abraham to the Torah of Moses, all the history that had gone before suddenly now the most precious thing, the spirit of God was given to this Gentile and his family Don’t brush past that fact.

(18:46):
And so Peter sees this, Peter sees, well, they have been baptized. They’ve received the Spirit without anything, without any need to be circumcised, to join themselves, to the synagogue, to join themselves into any type of commitment to the Torah. Suddenly, God is endorsing that these Gentiles can be brought in and not just brought in as outsiders, brought in as those who bear and carry the very spirit of God. So of course, that’s why I say this is like a hinge that suddenly opens up the door is now open. Everything begins to change at this point. The disciples begin to see and ask this question that we started with. Okay. Then what does it mean to be the people of God? What does it mean to be in our term to be the church? What does this mean if now these people are able to be brought in?

(19:45):
And Acts 15 tells us that the decision that was made, this is the first church council. I know that word is anachronistic, but this is the first church council that happens and the disciples through the leading of the Holy Spirit decide that these Gentiles can be brought in and included and they are not required to be circumcised or to keep the Torah. There’s only the four specific commands that are given to them and you can go in and read that in Acts 15. So up till this point, it had all been God’s purposes for Israel and it was even intensified so much more through the incarnation of the Jewish Messiah who took on Jewish flesh. It wasn’t abstracted. It was intensified even more and yet here it opens up and things begin to change.

(20:43):
I wasn’t just then that the disciples made this decision, the leaders in Jerusalem and that was it. Simultaneously, there was also intense persecution that began to break out in this period and it led up to 70 AD, the first Jewish revolt took place and the Romans came in, destroyed the temple, the second temple and the mood began to shift in Jerusalem. Historically, we know about the flight to Pella when some of the disciples, Jewish believers in Jesus fled Jerusalem for safety and this tension continues to escalate for another 65 or so years you have then in the second Jewish revolt that takes place and it’s called the Barkokba Revolt. You might’ve heard about it. And this revolt then is a decisive moment when the emperor Hadrian decides to rename the region, no longer Judea. He renames it Syria, Palestine, Syria, Palestina, and he casts out all the Jewish people from Jerusalem and says they’re not allowed to come in.

(22:07):
These moments, as we’re stringing them all together, you can see historically that the progression of this people called Israel and what the New Testament teaches us about the particular Jewish mission of Jesus and then the opening up in the early church of the Gentiles, but then these intense persecutions and the expulsion from Jerusalem and it’s getting harder and harder to maintain this grip on the Jewish root as natural historical circumstances begin to evolve. These aren’t just, if you think about the devolvement of good theology about Israel, it wasn’t just like right after the temple got destroyed some Gentile theologians met together and decided, “I think this is what we’re going to believe about Israel.” It didn’t happen that way. It was gradual over a period of decades and a period of centuries where these things began to root in because of historical events that were outside of the control of many of the early church fathers and theologians and teachers.

(23:22):
So this gradual parting of the ways, I want you to see that. I want you to see that it wasn’t just a single moment. It wasn’t 70. It wasn’t 1:35 during the second Jewish revolt. It wasn’t even when Constantine came into power in the 300s, none of these moments taken by themselves decide the blow to this parting of the ways between two people, but you could see the complicated nature of how it all begins to unravel. So I want to return then to where we started. So in view of biblical history, of what the Bible tells us about this people called Israel, about this covenant that Gentiles are allowed and invited into the same spirit that we’re given in light of all of this, what do we mean when we talk about the church, when we talk about Israel? So let’s look at the word itself then, the church, church.

(24:33):
Where does that word even come from? So the Greek word is which means of the Lord, and it’s from that root, Lord, Kyria, which is Greek for Lord. This is actually the Bible doesn’t use, the New Testament doesn’t use the word Kyriakan for the church. It really developed and became more pronounced starting in the fourth century and it became, it’s a of the Lord, it ended up being short for of the Lord’s house and it really began to refer to the specific building, the holy building that was set apart, the Lord’s house to meet. And of course, over time from Latin, it then moved into German, Kiesha, and that’s where we get the word in English, church.

(25:27):
It’s a great word. I don’t want to devalue the word church, but I do want you to see that it’s not actually the word that the New Testament uses. The word the New Testament uses is eclesia most often, which is a compound word that means ec to be out called to out and then so eclesia to be called out. And so it’s a compound word of ech out and kaleo, which means to call. And it has a long history of not just being this sudden word that was invented and thrown into the New Testament, but even in classical Greek, it really referred to an assembly of the people like in a town hall meeting or something. It was just this, here’s the gathered assembly together to either hear something or to make a decision. And in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, we see this word Eclesiah most often translating the Hebrew Kahal, which was similar, this covenant assembly of the people of Israel gathered before the Lord.

(26:43):
And so it’s key to see that this word has a connection back to this Kahal, this Hebrew idea of assembling together before the Lord. The Eclesiah then first referred not to a gathered group of Jew and Gentile together, but to the assembly of the people of Israel, more to do with the people and less to do with the institution or the building, which is where that word comes in. And so this history we talked about, the Acts 10 moment and the Acts 15 decision, this gathered assembly then, that’s why it was so challenging for them to figure this out, this gathered assembly of Israel, of those connected to the family of God were suddenly and quickly changing in composition. And you’ve heard the phrase, the church was born at Pentecost, but I think it might be better to say the church was born with Cornelius because it’s this idea of no longer being an assembly of Israel alone, but an assembly of those who are from the nations and from Israel together.

(28:06):
So I just want you to catch that key point though, that if we want to talk about the church in any true and meaningful way, then we must resituate that word in its Jewish context by finding continuity with that story of Israel that we just covered from Genesis to the book of Acts. So we got to find continuity. But here there’s a trap, right? There’s a subtle continuity trap. If we’re looking to really find continuity with Israel, there can be a trap of falling into one name or the other. How do we identify ourselves?

(28:54):
Are we now Israel or are we now the church? So choosing one name by necessity displaces the other name. We can try to keep in our minds both names and maybe in our belief, our theology could be we believe in the existence of both, but choosing one name or the other will maybe unintentionally displace one and we could fall into this trap of coming to the theology of replacement. Okay That’s what I’m getting at here. So we guard against this continuity trap. With continuity in the identity, we must also keep the particularity of identity. Okay. So we’re going to use these These big words, particularity, I’ve said it a few times now, but it’s just this thought of when something is particular, something is by itself, you could say, “Well, that’s a particular thing.” We’re defining that we’re abstracting it a bit to say particularity.

(30:21):
Something has the quality of being particular. So when we say there’s a particular identity, we’re saying that we want to maintain continuity with the same story of Israel, the same covenant. It’s not a different covenant, but we’re maintaining that continuity and not losing the particularity.

(30:44):
And many Messianic Jewish scholars will also distinguish between Israel and the church, not because they have a poor ecclesiology and they don’t believe in there being such a thing as a universal church, but because this word church has been abused for so long, it has been like I just said with this displacement of Jewish identity, this displacement of Israel, it has carried the full weight of what it means to be the body of Christ and oftentimes defining itself against Jewish identity. And that’s not for this teaching to get into the history of anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, and there’s plenty of other resources that we have at the Center for Israel that can help teach you about that. But many Messiane Jewish scholars will distinguish between the two and have preferred using terms like the body of Messiah or even the Eclesiah because they’re trying not to devalue the word church, but they’re just trying to keep in mind that there’s something more we mean when we say the church oftentimes.

(32:03):
So by now it should be clear that when we’re talking about the church, we’re talking about the gathered assembly of the people of God that consists of both Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus. It’s not one or the other, but it’s consisting of both Israel and the nations. But immediately you can feel the limits of our language. We want to gravitate towards one. We just want to be able to say, “I just want to talk about the church and just mean everything.” And traditionally, in Christian theology, there’s a beautiful heritage there of talking about the church in a universal way. And I don’t want to discredit that, but I want you to keep in mind that from the very beginning, the story we went through of the history of God’s people from Genesis to Acts, there has been, it started with Israel and even after Jesus Yeshua, it was still the core, the root was Israel and the Gentiles, the nations were brought into that.

(33:23):
So in order for us to walk with that understanding, sometimes we have to keep in mind other words, other ways to explain the church and not just be content with sticking with what we’ve always been comfortable with.

(33:42):
So now that we have hopefully a better grasp of some of the history, some of the terms, some of the nuances between talking about Israel, the church, Jewish, Gentile identity, if some of those things are still muddy to you, we have got plenty of resources or you can reach out to us as well if you have any questions, but we can now start to explore. Remember how we started talking about two nouns and their relationship to each other. Israel, the church. Now, how do they relate to each other? A moment ago, I said that Jewish and Gentile believers are united together. So that is a direct proposition. I’m saying I’m explaining their relationship to each other. They don’t just exist. There is some type of relationship.

(34:43):
And the metaphors really that scripture uses help us to approach this relationship. I don’t want to just talk theology to you, okay? I want to see what scripture tells us about their relationship. So first, in Romans chapter 11:17- 18, it’s this metaphor of branches together on the same olive tree. It says, “If some of the branches have been broken off and you, speaking to Gentiles, though a wild olive shoot have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do consider this, you do not support the root, but the root supports you. ” So that’s the first metaphor. The second is in one Peter two verses four through five. This is the idea of living stones together in the same house. It says, “As you come to him, the living stone rejected by humans, but chosen by God and precious to him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” So this is speaking of both Jew and Gentile in the same house as living stones together.

(36:06):
The third metaphor is parts of the same body one Corinthians 12:12- 14. “Just as a body, the one has many parts, but many parts form one body, so it is with Christ for we were all baptized by on spirit so as to form one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, slaver free, and we were all given the one spirit to drink even so the body’s not made up of one part but of many. So the parts of the same body, that’s the third metaphor. The fourth members of the same household. So this is Ephesians 2:19 and there’s actually two images scripture gives us here. “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household. So two images, members of the same household, Jew and Gentile and also fellow citizens, joint citizens together, Jew and Gentile, in the same city.

(37:15):
There’s two more images here that are found in Ephesians three: six. This mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel. Members together of one body and shares together in the promise in Christ Jesus. So co-heirs of the same inheritance. In the Greek, it’s the prefixed sin, which means together, S-Y-N, co-heirs of the same inheritance, co-partakers of the same promise. So when the New Testament begins to explain this relationship, the relationship between Israel and the church, between the Jewish people and the nations, it uses these pictures, these metaphors, branches together on the same olive tree, living stones together in the same house, parts of the same body, members of the same household, fellow citizens of the same city, co-heirs of the same inheritance, co-partakers of the same promise. Every one of these pictures shows particularity without replacement. They all describe shared life, shared space, shared inheritance without erasing distinction.

(38:35):
The Ecclesia, the gathered people of God are Jew and Gentile together, not one replacing the other but join together.

(38:47):
So that’s what scripture tells us is the right relationship, holding continuity and particularity together. But now another way, so if we approach that from the perspective of how scripture describes the relationship, we can also now approach it on the other side from theologies, ways of thinking about this relationship that are negative. So it’s a negative angle. What are ways that are not quite right? Okay. Let’s talk about some of the alternatives. What ends up being replacement without us necessarily realizing it or intentionally wading into those waters. So Dr. David Rudolph helpfully lists out two extremes as the one new Jew on the one hand and the one new Gentile on the other and in the middle is the biblical perspective of the one new man. So these two extremes have various ways of approaching the relationship between Israel and the church that all end up in this place of replacement but in two different types of replacement.

(40:24):
It’s not like we’re saying the church is the new Israel. There’s another type of replacement that still does the exact same thing because at the root of any type of replacement thinking is on, like we said, that gets rid of the continuity, yes, but also that gets rid of the particularity. If you say that there is no longer such a thing as a Gentile, then you are now into this replacement mode of thinking. If you say there’s no longer such a thing as a Jew, the same, you’re in this place of replacement thinking. So let’s walk through some of these beliefs on the one side of the one new Jew. There are some common approaches outlined, one of them being something called on law theology. And this is just a term that comes from this idea, both Jew and Gentile are required to keep the same Torah, the same law.

(41:30):
And you’ll often see then people maybe who are trying to attend a church and they’re not Jewish, they’re wearing a kippah, they’re wearing a talit, they’re keeping kosher and they are teaching others that this they should do likewise and they should keep the Torah. They should keep some mode of Jewish law. So that’s this one law idea. And there’s also similarly something called Hebrew roots. And this is just a way to describe a tendency of a teaching that we have to be keeping a Hebrew way of life. We need to restore something of that original Hebrew way of doing things that we read about, whether it’s in the Hebrew Bible, whether it’s in the New Testament. If the disciples kept kosher, then we also need to keep kosher. There’s something about getting back to that original Hebrew root that is what we’re supposed to do.

(42:40):
So both of these end up collapsing the distinction because it’s saying, okay, if we’re all supposed to act Jewish, then there’s no such thing as a Gentile identity anymore. And lastly, under this one new Jew is this teaching which is actually gaining more popularity recently through a scholar named Jason Staples. It’s this thought of the Ephreomit or two house theology and it’s basically is that the Gentiles, the nations are actually part of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. And when scripture teaches in Romans 11 about the restoration of all Israel being saved, it’s actually talking about these Gentiles being brought in with the existing Jewish people and then that’s the all Israel that’s being saved. And the same problem happens there then though, that if now Gentiles, if the nations are part of this 10 lost tribes, then there’s no longer two identities being united together.

(43:46):
So that’s on the one new Jew side. All right, now let’s swing over to the other side of the one new Gentile. Now this is more commonly what you might think of when you hear about replacement theology is this belief in the elimination of Jewish identity and that we are just now the church and there’s no such thing as Jew and Gentile. There’s different forms of this as well. So in its most radical expression, something termed punitive replacement theology, which that word like the penal system, punitive, it just means to be punished. And this creeps in with the thought of deocide early on in church history, you have this teaching that the Jews killed God, the Jews killed Jesus and so they are now punished, put under a curse for that. So that’s punitive replacement theology. Then you have economic replacement theology and that in the economy of divine salvation, it’s this belief that Israel is no longer necessary.

(45:03):
They have fulfilled their requirements. So a good illustration is like in a presidential term. A president can be impeached and that would be like punitive replacement theology. They’re being punished. They’re being removed from office. And this other type economic replacement theology is like when a president just reaches the end of their term. They’ve reached the end of the four years and now it’s time for somebody else. It’s this thought that Israel played their part and now it’s time for the church to continue that. So that’s economic. There’s two more I want to talk about. So the next one is this thought of structural replacement theology and this is the narrative construal of the gospels that has an Israel forgetfulness at its center. So what does that mean? It’s talking about, like you may have heard the gospel presented before as mankind, humans sinned and fell, but God provided a remedy in Jesus and there was redemption and it’s this arc of fall and redemption and it’s universalized and it’s true and it’s right, but there’s this sneaky forgetfulness of rooting the gospel in a historical people in a historical covenant and we wouldn’t be having this conversation if there was no such thing as the incarnation, but when Yeshua became flesh and took on Jewish flesh and eternally became identified with this people according to the flesh called Israel, it meant God was then endorsing history, endorsing the development over centuries of this historic covenant he made to Israel.

(47:15):
So when we remove Israel completely from our understanding of the gospel, from our understanding of salvation, we’re guilty of this structural type of replacement thinking. Lastly is the idea of Christological fulfillment. And this is espoused even by some well-known scholars such as Inti Wright who talk about Christ being the perfect Jew. He was the perfect Jew similar to the economic idea of because Christ was the perfect Jew, he fulfilled everything that Israel was meant to fulfill and now we only look to Jesus to be that Jewish identity, the Jew par excellence, the fulfillment of everything that Israel was meant to be. And there is truth in the fact that Jesus was indeed the perfect, perfect human. He was the fulfillment of all things, the fullness of God in bodily form, but to say that then that completely eliminates God’s purposes for a real Israel according to the flesh or a real people called Israel is to miss what scripture is trying to teach us.

(48:39):
So that is the two spectrum, right? On the one side of the one new Jew, there’s different ways that we might theologically fall into traps and end up believing that we’re all supposed to take on Jewish or we’re all supposed to be on have an Israel-like identity. And then on the other hand, we can fall into traps where we think we’re all supposed to take on this Gentile identity and there’s no such thing as Jewish expression of identity anymore. We’re all the church. So we have to battle against that, but there’s also one more thing that one more way of accidentally falling into traps when it comes to replacement thinking. And it’s possible to emphasize this distinction, to uphold this distinction between Jew and Gentile, but to go too far in their separation, to miss the idea of the oneness, the on new man to join together as one.

(49:41):
And so there’s two approaches that can fall into this and I just want to give you the full overview of all of the major types of replacement theology so that you feel informed. The first type is what’s called dual covenant theology. And that’s just the thought that there are actually two covenants, that there is a covenant God made through Moses through the Torah and then there’s a covenant God made through Jesus. It’s Sinai and Calvary that Jews are able to come to salvation but through their own mediated covenant whereas Gentiles, we come to salvation through a different covenant and I don’t need to explain the reasons why that’s not something we should hold to as biblical believers in Jesus, but then the second form is what could be called dispensational theology. And this is really just a strict separation between the church and Israel. They’re viewed on separate timelines.

(50:54):
So when the Bible talks about the church, it’s only referring to Gentiles. It’s like literally the church as Gentiles and this would be similarly undermining the idea of one new man, both Jew and Gentile coming together. So those are two other forms that kind of sit outside of that spectrum we talked about, the one new Jew and the one new Gentile. So you could see it’s possible to emphasize distinction without unity, but the Bible teaches us that we need all three. We need continuity. We need particularity and we need oneness. Those are the metaphors of the New Testament. They each hint at those three pieces coming together. You can’t have one without the other or you’re missing the full picture.

(51:53):
It is like a mystery similar to the Trinity of trying to understand how can we uphold all of these things at the same time. But as we come to a close, I hope it’s clear for you that when the New Testament speaks of the Eclisia, speaks of the church, that it’s not describing a new people that replace an old people. It’s describing the gathered assembly of the Lord and Israel renewed around the Messiah and also the nations brought in alongside of that gathered assembly, all one assembly together before the Lord. And it’s not the nations over Israel, it’s not the nations instead of Israel. The New Testament doesn’t resolve this distinction by collapsing Israel into the nations or by separating them on parallel tracks, right? Instead, it teaches us to live inside a mystery. This is why the New Testament doesn’t reach for definitions but reaches for metaphors, right?

(53:15):
An olive tree with natural grafted branches, a house built of many stones, a body made of many parts of household, a city shared by those who once stood far apart from each other. These are images, metaphors, not just clear cut propositional definitions. And every one of these images hold together these three things at once, continuity without collapse, particularity, without hierarchy, and oneness without erasure. Replacement theology rarely begins with bad intentions. It begins when we grow uncomfortable with complexity. When we rush towards something that feels cleaner, simpler or more universal, fall into replacement thinking when we assume that later means better, that universal means superior, that spiritual means non-particular or that fulfillment means finished, but the Bible refuses all of these ways of thinking. It teaches us that God’s covenant with Israel is not a temporary scaffolding to be discarded once something more universal appears. It is the enduring trellis upon which the vines of the nations grow.

(54:37):
The church does not replace Israel and Israel does not dissolve into the church. Instead, both are united and held together in the same Messiah. All of this means learning to speak about the church carefully and it’s not a side issue. It’s a test of whether we actually believe God is faithful to his promises. And if the last question that disciples ever asked Jesus was whether God would restore the kingdom to Israel, then perhaps the church’s task today is not to try to answer that question too quickly, but to live faithfully within the tension it creates.