Israel Matters by Gerald R. McDermott

Author:Gerald R. McDermott [McDermott, Gerald R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493406760
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-29T17:00:00+00:00

What’s the Point?

So how does all this fit together? That’s what I wondered over the years when I started finding all these strange things in the New Testament that did not fit with the supersessionism I had inherited. According to that view, there was no more room for Jews as Jews in the kingdom of God once the Messiah had come. And there was no real reason why the land of Israel should not be like any other country in the world. It was no longer a holy land, even if it was holy in the time of Jesus and in Old Testament times. Now the whole world was the land of promise.

But then I started bumping my nose, as it were, against the wall of evidence in the New Testament that did not fit those two preconceptions. Jesus and his disciples still appeared to believe that the Jew-gentile distinction played some role in the new kingdom, even if Jesus’ coming had brought fulfillment to the kingdom. So even if Jews and gentiles were one in Christ as brothers and sisters in Abraham’s family, even if both groups were redeemed by Christ, they had different relationships to Jewish law—just as men and women in Christ, though one, were assigned different roles in marriage.22

It also became clear that in the end times and on the renewed earth there would be distinctly Jewish features, and that Israel would be a separate nation on the new earth, which would be multinational. The whole earth would be under the control of the Messiah, but there would be a center called Israel, with Jerusalem at the center of that. Israel would still be the Holy Land.

One clear difference this made to me was in the way I looked at the Jewish State of Israel. The present state is the result of a massive ingathering of Jews from all over the world in the last two centuries. There have always been Jews living on the land, for more than three thousand years. But this recent return of Jews to the land was unprecedented. And in an uncanny way it matches the predictions of the prophets, which we examined in the last chapter. It also corresponds to what the New Testament anticipates—a return to the land and restoration of the Jewish people as a coherent group that governs itself.

I cannot say that the present State of Israel is the last one or that the full spiritual restoration of the Jewish people in Israel has come. My Israeli friends tell me that spiritual restoration is taking place off the radar, in ways that are invisible to the outside world. But even they would agree that the state is far from perfect, has many problems (what country doesn’t?), and is a long way from the fully restored Israel that the prophets depicted and the New Testament anticipates.

And yet, we Christians believe that while we “groan inwardly as we await . . . the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23 AT), the Spirit is working within us to prepare for that redemption.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.