We know God chose Israel in the Old Testament. So all the things you allude to, we see that in the covenant, but where does that take place in the New Testament and modern day? And here’s the second part of that. Didn’t Jesus usher in a new covenant that was no longer Israel focused but more world focused? Yes. Oh, I love this question.
Okay, so I think the King’s University is obviously one of the most special places in the world, and I think probably one of the only universities that I know of that don’t openly teach replacement theology – or to make it softer, sometimes I’ll say supercession theology – which basically is agreeing that God chose Israel, but it was always really just because he wanted the whole world. Like Nick said in Genesis 12, God says, I’m choosing you, Abraham and your descendants Israel to bless the nations. So they were just the mail-carriers to the nations. And then once that happened, they brought Jesus on the scene. Jesus, for God so loved the world, Jesus came and now it’s all about us.
The issue with that is one, if we believe that he made a covenant and then broke it for us, that’s not a faithful God. So it actually dishonors the character of God to say he broke that covenant because we were more special. What we’re actually saying is that he made Israel his ex-wife and we’re his new wife. It was really all about us. That kind of defames his character. The second thing is sometimes we don’t understand that Jesus came with a very specific goal. He said himself, I came for the lost sheep of Israel. Remember when he’s talking to a gentile who’s like, save my daughter? And he’s like, it’s not good for me to give the kids bread to the little dogs. And we’re like, oh my gosh. He says, I came for the lost sheep of Israel. But here’s what’s interesting. All throughout the book of John, you hear Jesus say something, my time has not yet come. My time is not yet come. My time is not yet come. Do you remember that? They tried to kill him, but his time is not yet come. Don’t tell anybody because my time has not yet come. What is the time where Jesus says my time has come? Wouldn’t that be pretty important if all throughout John, he’s like, my time is not yet, my time is not yet, my time is not yet. And then all of a sudden, when does he say my time has come? It’s when the Gentiles want to meet him. Philip and Andrew come to Jesus and say, hey, the Greeks want to come follow you. And he says, my time has come. Because he knows I have to die for Israel. I have to save (Yeshua) save Israel to open it up to the whole nation. But when he makes a new covenant, he doesn’t break the old.
Gentiles are allowed to come into what is old, which is why Paul in Romans 11 talks about an olive tree with the roots of the Abrahamic covenant, Isaac and Jacob, the natural branches being the Jewish people. And we are grafted in. Replacement theology says there’s a new tree. No, no, it’s the same tree, it’s the same covenant. We’re grafted into that covenant. And something that I think is really important for us to see when you kind of take a 50,000 foot view of scripture is you have Genesis 12 and Romans 11, and I always say Genesis 12 and Romans 11, they talk to each other. Because in Genesis 12, God tells Abraham, I’m choosing you, but I’m choosing you to bless the nations. So we can sometimes foolishly think it is all about us then. But in Romans 11, when we’re finally allowed to come into that covenant, be grafted onto that olive tree, or as Romans 11 also says, adopted into the family, what does he tell the gentiles? Romans 11:11, the reason I brought you into the family was to provoke Israel to jealousy so they would come back.
So what are we supposed to say? Oh, it’s not about us. It’s all about Israel. And it’s interesting – that’s how God always works. What does he tell husbands? You need to die and lay down your life for your wife. What did he tell wives? You need to lay down your life for your husband. He’s talking to both of them about the other. He tells Israel, I’m using you because I love the nations. And then the nations come in and he says, I love you and let you in because I love Israel. So we’re supposed to serve each other. But yet we took the blessing and then we just kept it for ourselves and we cut Israel out of the picture.
So I often relate it to marriage because we talk about Jesus has a new covenant. He brought a new covenant, he ushered in this new covenant. Well, when male and female enter into a new covenant of marriage, they stay male, female, but there’s a new unity there. In fact, the Bible says male and female are married and they become what? One flesh – of male and female. They don’t become this an amorphous new gender. They stay male female because that was distinction that God always proclaimed. Another distinction he always proclaims is Jew Gentile Jew. Gentile is a distinction that God has put on people. And when Jew and Gentile enter into a new covenant, (wink, wink) like marriage, the Bible says they become one new man, not this amorphous new identity. It’s a one new unity of Jews and Gentiles. And when male and female come into a new covenant, what are they supposed to do with each other? Serve one another, humble one, another love one another. When male and female come together in marriage, they’re actually stronger together. Well, when Jew and Gentile come under a new covenant, they stay Jew/Gentile, and they’re supposed to humble one another, love one another, serve one another because they’re actually better together.
And so that’s why it’s important to understand this Jew/Gentile distinction, what’s going on in Israel because as Nick said in a weekend video that played at Gateway, he said, when someone’s coming against Israel and the Jewish people, it’s like they’re coming against our family. That’s how God desires us to see it. It’s like someone’s coming against my wife because I’m in covenant with her. Gentiles that have been rooted into the olive tree that Paul talks about, the family of God, we are now in covenant with the Jewish people, and an attack on them should feel like an attack on us. So that’s how we bring it to the New Testament.
Yeah. You want to add anything to that?
Well, yeah. So to get specific, I think even too, to answer your question, one of the things that I hear a lot, and some of you might be wondering this too, is that okay, I get it. There’s a lot of references to the land of Israel in the Old Testament in the Hebrew scriptures, but that’s pretty silent in the New Testament. And the problem with that is that we’ve all been brainwashed by replacement theology where, as David said, there’s been a disconnection between the continuity of God from the old into the new. When you read Jesus as a faithful Jew who takes for granted or takes just as an assumption that, yeah, I’m Jewish. I’m standing on the promises that God gave to my people. I’m the representative king of my people. Then you hear him say in Matthew 5 in the beatitudes, blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.
You know what Jesus is doing in Matthew five? He’s directly quoting David in Psalm 37. And in Psalm 37, David says five times that the meek will inherit the land. Jesus is reminding his Jewish audience that if they want to live again in the boundaries that God gave to them and be an influence to the nations and live in security and have possession, they need to be meek. They need to be humble. They need to seek justice. And so people overlook that and they say, oh, he’s talking about the Earth, but he’s not. He’s talking to a Jewish audience and there are people from the nations around that are listening in.
But then even you look at Paul, Paul makes these references in the New Testament as well when he references land. Peter in Acts three talks about this restoration. And the Greek word that he uses is the exact same Greek word that the prophets use when they talk about the restoration of the captives and the exiles of Israel to the land of Israel. Peter was a faithful Jew. They didn’t just choose a word out of the blue. He didn’t go to thesaurus like many of us preachers do and pull out a word just because it rhymed or sounded good. He knew what he was saying because he knew Jesus is our messiah. Jesus is the king of Israel and he’s now the head of the church and he’s going to be the one that establishes a kingdom that’s way bigger than any kingdom that we thought was going to be here. But he needs to do it in a place. And that’s why understanding what’s going on in Israel right now is so important. Because when Jesus does come back, he is coming back to Jerusalem. So like David said, we are living in between the pages of Acts and Revelation. And our choices as followers of Jesus, we can actually expedite that, or we can delay it by how we align ourselves with God and his purposes.
