One of the most confused areas in evangelical theology today concerns the place and standing of the nation of Israel in Scripture.  Covenant Theologians teach that Israel is continuous with the church in the New Testament and that the major change we see in Scripture is the inclusion of the gentiles into the people of God in the New Covenant era.   On the other hand, Dispensationalists teach that God has two faithful peoples of God, Israel and the church.  We believe both theological systems are in error in the way they view the nation of Israel.  New Covenant Theology teaches that Israel is an unbelieving picture of the people of God and (except for the remnant of Israelites who actually believed) the individuals of that nation received God’s judgment.  In the following pages we intend to show that the uniform teaching of Scripture is that the nation of Israel was never a believing people as a whole.

The History of Israel

The nation of Israel is first established through the sons of Jacob and really comes into its own in Egypt under the tyrannical shadow of Pharaoh.  Its beginning was tenuous but God caused them to be fruitful and became their deliverer through Moses. 

The Exodus Generation

After delivering the Israelites out of the hands of Pharaoh, God made certain that they did not enter the promised land because of their rebellion.  Are we to understand this punishment as merely a temporal discipline which God gives to His children for their good (Hebrews 12:3-11)?  Or should we see this as God’s eternal wrath poured out on an unbelieving generation?  The book of Hebrews addresses this issue by using that generation of Israelites as an example to spur on believers who seem to be turning away from Christ due to hard times (Heb. 3:7-14)

 So, as the Holy Spirit says: “ Today, if you hear his voice do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did.  That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.’  So I declared on oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest.”

William Lane in his commentary on the book of Hebrews writes concerning this passage: His (the author of Hebrews) concern is that the community should maintain its integrity and continue to live in terms of the divine promises.  The memory of Israel’s failure in this regard, as set forth in Ps 95, provides the basis for the sober warning that a refusal to listen to God’s voice and to respond in obedience would entail the tragic loss of their promised inheritance.[1]  The loss of inheritance that we see for the Israelites is the loss of the promised land.  But clearly this is shown to be a picture of or analogous to spiritual salvation resulting in eternal life.  Lane goes on to write:  In 3:7-19 the quotation from Ps 95 furnishes the basis for the exhortation to remain sensitive to the promise of eschatological salvation…His interpretation of the text was heavily influenced by Num 14.  According to Num 13-14, Israel was camped at Kadesh in the Desert of Paran, on the verge of entering Canaan.  Entrance into the land was the goal of the Exodus and was necessary for the fulfillment of the promise.  When those who had been sent into Canaan to explore the land brought back a bad report, however, the Israelites refused to enter.  They rejected the promise through unbelief.[2]  What is illustrated for us in the Old Testament is a people unwilling to believe God’s promise concerning a physical inheritance and therefore a refusal to obey resulting in a loss of the inheritance.  This is then interpreted by the Holy Spirit through the author of the book of Hebrews to point to the reality of people refusing to trust in the work of Jesus Christ alone to save them resulting in loss of a spiritual inheritance and receiving spiritual condemnation.  This becomes alarmingly clear in verses 15-19 of Hebrews chapter 3:

As has just been said:  “Today if you hear his voice do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.”  Who were they who heard and rebelled?  Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt?  And with whom was he angry for forty years?  Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert?  And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed?  So we see that they ere not able to enter, because of their unbelief.

The message of these verses can be paraphrased as follows:  “The Israelites of the wilderness generation turned from God and experienced his judgment.  They were a disobedient people who lost their inheritance because they were UNBELIEVERS.  Don’t be like them.” The wilderness generation, who had the blood of Abraham coursing through their veins, was a generation of unbelievers.  They heard the “good news” and they did not believe and therefore received God’s eternal judgment.  This judgment is illustrated to us by their physical death before entering the Promised Land.  But this is only the first step in our journey in understanding the biblical identity of the nation of Israel.  Perhaps Israel learned her lessons and turned to God in true repentance and faith leading to a bright and godly future.  It is to this possibility that we will now turn our attention. 

Crossing The Jordan

Moses addresses this next generation as he is about to die and just before they cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan and he prophesies in Deuteronomy 31:24-29

After Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord:  “Take this book of the Law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God.  There it will remain as a witness against you.  For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are.  If you have been rebellious against the Lord while I am still alive and with you, how much more will you rebel after I die!  Assemble before me all the elders of your tribes and all your officials, so that I can speak these words in their hearing and call heaven and earth to testify against them.  For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you.  In days to come, disaster will fall upon you because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord and provoke him to anger by what your hands have made.”

These are pretty strong words from Moses about the future of national Israel.  Was Moses correct?  Were the people of Israel to continue in rebellion after the death of Moses?  Or were these bitter words from a dying prophet?  The first step to answering these questions is to look at the very next stage in redemptive history, the entrance into and possession of the Promised Land found in the books of Joshua and Judges.

 Joshua:  Turning Over a New Leaf?

The book of Joshua presents Israel with a bright new start.  We have a brand new people to start over with after the horrible rebellion that brought God’s judgment just a generation before.  We also find that Israel has a brand new leader and the future looks bright.  In order to make things clear that the Israelites are starting over, we read of them telling Joshua, “Whatever you have commanded we will do” (1:16) which is reminiscent of the promise their fathers made to Moses in Exodus 24:7 before their rebelliousness flared up.  In the first few chapter of the book of Joshua the Israelites are obedient and seem to have turned over a new leaf.    Although there are moments of disobedience that punctuate the account of Israel in Joshua, on the whole it as a positive account of God’s people being brought into the promised land and possessing it. At the end of the book the Israelites have a positive outlook on life as we get to witness Joshua renewing God’s Covenant He made with Moses now with this new generation.  But it is hard to read this dialogue between Joshua and the people without Moses’ stinging words from Deuteronomy 31 ringing in our ears.  Here is part of the dialogue:

 Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the Lord.  He is a holy God; he is a jealous God.  He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins.  If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you.”

            But the people said to Joshua, “No!  We will serve the Lord.”

            Then Joshua said, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen to serve the Lord.”

            “Yes, we are witnesses,” they replied (Joshua 24:19-22).

We are left wondering, “Will they obey the Lord or was Moses right that they will turn their back on God and chase after idols?”  The book of Judges leaves us no doubt as to the answer to this question. 

Judges:  Living Like Hell In The Land of Promise

The people obviously made a great start at living for God, but did they continue?  The book of Judges gives us a glimpse at the nation of Israel after they had begun to possess the land.  Do the Israelites live up to the promises they made to God and to Joshua in Shechem?   Not exactly.  The constant refrain of the book of Judges is, “then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord” (2:11, 3:7, 12; 4:1; 6:1, 10:6; 13:1).  It is a history that causes the reader to ask the question, “how can a holy God who demands loyalty and faithfulness put up with the evil and rebellion of the nation of Israel?”  But a thoughtful Christian might look at his own life and see the same pattern of rebellion, repentance, and restoration as seen in the book of Judges.  It is true that Christians struggle with sin, but notice the type of sin in which these Israelites were involved:

Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals.  They forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt.  They FOLLOWED and WORSHIPED various gods of the peoples around them.  They provoked the Lord to anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths (Judges 2:11-13 emphasis mine).

Imagine, on your most sinful day, are you tempted to stop at the local Mosque or Buddhist temple to worship another god?  The Israelites actually bowed down to pagan gods and perhaps participated in human sacrifice in the process of their “worship.”  Let’s look at another sin the Israelites were involved in:

The Israelites lived among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizites, Hivites and Jebusites.  They took their daughters in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served other gods (Judges 3:5-6).

Blatant idolatry and intermarrying with God’s enemies were the two big and consistent sins that plagued the Israelites.  These are not the normal sins that Christians struggle with.  To go and actually worship another God and give yourself over to the immoral practices that these Canaanite religions required, not to mention marrying into a people that God has marked as His enemy fit only for destruction is more than just a day to day struggle to live for Christ.  This is out and out hardened unbelief that we would be surprised to see in the most wicked pagan.  This sort of sin was being committed by the nation as a whole, punctuated only by brief periods of repentance, and it went on for a period of about 300 years! 

Israel and Her Kings

The books of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings portray the nation of Israel as even worse than the book of Judges!  In rejecting the prophet and last Judge, Samuel, the people of Israel are said to be rejecting God Himself:

And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.  As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you (1 Samuel 8:7-8).

Although that doesn’t sound like a good report about Israel, a golden age is about to begin for Israel when David is made king.  Perhaps this godly king can redeem the tarnished reputation of the nation of Israel.   Perhaps it is after this point in history that we can then understand Israel as a believing people rejoicing in God their savior.  As we examine the history of this period and God’s own evaluation of Israel, we will find Israel once again to be lacking the qualities of true children of God.  God promises David an everlasting dynastic kingdom (2 Samuel 7:6-16).  We see a seeming fulfillment of this promise as we enter the golden age for Israel.  The borders expand under David and under Solomon in his early years. In short, we see economic prosperity for Israel that is unprecedented.  But as history moves on we see the people of Israel engaging more and more in idolatry and immorality.  Of course leading the way in this sin is unfaithful king after unfaithful king.  After the division of Israel and Judah, God first pours out his wrath on Israel by exiling them using the Assyrians (722 B.C.) as His chosen instrument.  Then Judah is next to experience the wrath of God for their rebellion when He sends in the Babylonians to clean house in 586 B.C.   We are not left to our own imaginations to interpret exactly what God was saying to the Israelites when this happened.  God makes it clear that this was not simply His fatherly and loving hand of discipline but rather his wrath against unbelievers:

The Lord said through his servants the prophets:  “Manasseh king of Judah has committed these detestable sins.  He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him and has led Judah into sin with his idols.  Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says:  I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.  I will stretch out over Jerusalem the measuring line used against the house of Ahab.  I will wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.   I will forsake the remnant of my inheritance and hand them over to their enemies.   They will be looted and plundered by all their foes, because they have done evil in my eyes and have provoked me to anger FROM THE DAY THEIR FOREFATHERS CAME OUT OF EGYPT UNTIL THIS DAY (2 Kings 21:10-15 emphasis mine).

Here we have clear biblical evidence of God’s own evaluation of the nation of Israel from the time of their inception until the time of the exile of Judah.  They were a wicked and unbelieving people from the first day until the last.  There seems to be no room to call them a believing nation.  But for the die-hard supporter of the position that the nation of Israel is seen in Scripture to be a believing people, an attempt at “redeeming” national Israel might be made by looking to the post-exilic days of Ezra and Nehemiah as the days in which the people did truly turn to God and become a nation of believers.   Yet, even after all of the attempts at reform, we find Nehemiah beating people for their rebelliousness:

Moreover, in those days I saw men of Judah who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab.  Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah.  I rebuked them and called curses down on them.  I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair.  I made them take an oath in God’s name and said: “Your are not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons, nor are you to take their daughters in marriage for your sons or for yourselves.  Was it not because of marriages like these that Solomon king of Israel sinned? (Nehemiah 13:23-27).

We have seen that the entire history of Israel reveals the nation of Israel as an unfaithful, rebellious and unbelieving people.  In each significant historical epoch of the Old Covenant era, Israel turns away from God and is judged accordingly.  We now need to turn our attention to the New Testament and see if once again test our thesis that Israel as a whole is viewed in Scripture as an unbelieving people against the Word of God.

Israel in The New Testament

The Gospels

Beginning with the Gospels we find a New Testament pattern in which Jesus and the Apostles go first to the Jews who reject salvation and then they turn to the Gentiles.  In the introduction of the Gospel of John this pattern is clearly revealed: 

He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.  Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God- children born not of natural descent or a husband’s will, but born of God  (John 1:11-13).

The constant emphasis in Scripture is that although the Israelites were born into the people of God by “blood” or physical descent, that does not get them into the kingdom.  There is a reconstitution of the people of God moving from physical descent or those related to Abraham by blood to spiritual descent or those possessing the faith of Abraham irrespective of physical descent.

In Matthew chapter 8 when Jesus is talking to a Roman centurion, the soldier expresses his trust that Jesus has the authority to simply speak and it will be done.  That is, he expressed his conviction that Jesus was God Himself.  Jesus goes on to compare the faithfulness of this gentile to the unfaithfulness of Israel: 

When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.  I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.  But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:10-12).

The “sons of the kingdom” are the nation of Israel and to be “cast out into the outer darkness” is eternal punishment in hell (Matthew 22:13) given to all unbelievers who rebel against God.  D.A. Carson writes concerning this passage, So the ‘subjects of the kingdom’ are the Jews, who see themselves as sons of Abraham…, belonging to the kingdom by right…But Jesus reverses roles (cf. 21:43); and the sons of the kingdom are thrown aside, left out of the future messianic banquet, consigned to darkness where there are tears and gnashing of teeth- elements common to descriptions of gehenna, hell.[3]  Matthew is plain that the majority of Israelites are going to face God’s eternal judgment because they have rejected Him.  In this passage Matthew clearly states that the Israelites will be replaced in the kingdom of heaven by a people who actually love God.

The Children of Abraham in Galatians

In the book of Galatians “the children of Abraham” are redefined as all those who place their trust in Jesus Christ, that is Spiritual Israel, rather than those who are simply related to Abraham by blood. The book of Galatians is written to professed believers in Asia Minor who were in danger of going back under the Mosaic law by redefining the Gospel to include both trust in Jesus and obedience to the Mosaic Law in order to be saved.  So Paul begins to explain to them that they completely misunderstand the purpose of the Mosaic Covenant and the Mosaic Law.  In chapter three and four he explains in some detail the purpose of the Mosaic Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant, and their relationship to one another:

Consider Abraham: “He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”  Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham.  The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham:  “All nations will be blessed through you.”  So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham the man of faith (Galatians 3:6-9).

The contrast in this passage is between law and faith.  Abraham’s faith was “reckoned to him as righteousness.  This is biblical shorthand to say that Abraham gained acceptance from God not by anything that he did, that is not by obedience to the law, but by taking God at His word.  Now, we have the first mention of “sons of Abraham” in the book of Galatians in verse 7.  But this definition of who the sons of Abraham are should cause us to wonder.  The impression we get from Genesis 17 is that the children of Abraham are those who are physically descended from Abraham, the Jews:

Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you:  No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.  I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you and kings will come from you.  I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.  The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:3-8).

There is nothing in the context of Genesis to lead us to understand the descendants or seeds of Abraham to be anything other than those who are physically related to him.  But now in Galatians we find that the children of Abraham are all those who are “of faith.”  Make no mistake about it, this is God’s inspired interpretation of who the children of Abraham really are.

Later in the book of Galatians Paul refers to Genesis 12:7 and the Abrahamic promise:

 The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed.  The Scripture does not say, “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to  your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ (Galatians 3:16).

Now this should strike us as a very strange statement given that in Genesis 15:4-5 God tells Abraham that the promise of a seed is “plural”:

Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir.”  He took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars- if indeed you can count them.”  Then he said to him, “so shall your offspring be.”

Again we have a clear redefining of terms by God through Paul in the book of Galatians.  Paul is interpreting the physical picture given in the Old Testament and showing us the Spiritual reality to which it pointed.  The Abrahamic Covenant is the revealing of God’s plan to save a people.  Isaac as “the seed of Abraham” is the key to the promise given to Abraham.  But of course that promise extends to all of the physical descendants of Abraham through Isaac.  Therefore, through Isaac the children of Abraham are as many as the stars in the sky.  In the same way, God uses one seed, that is Jesus Christ, to save a Spiritual people and make them His own.  Jesus Christ is the one seed that God brings into the world to save a people, and those who are united to him by faith become seeds or children of Abraham.  We find this explicitly stated in Galatians chapter 3 verse 29:

 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to promise.

So the children of Abraham are redefined as being all those who trust in Christ, rather than all those who are physically descended from Abraham.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Scripture clearly identifies the Israelites as an unbelieving people.  There always has been a small remnant of believing Israelites, but they exist as the exception rather than the rule.  If our theological system does not allow us to identify the Israelites as primarily unbelievers, then it is our system that needs to be retooled to agree with God’s Word.   

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