Brian Hooper (NZ Baptist, February) asks whether God has a plan for Israel. I want to affirm that he does. Romans 11:1 makes it quite clear that God has not rejected his people and Romans 11:29 claims that God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable. This is beyond question. But two other questions also need answering.

The first concerns the relationship between Israel in the Bible and in Paul in particular, and the state of Israel that was founded in 1948. Paul had never heard of this entity. It probably never entered his head. For Paul, Israel consisted of faithful Jewish believers. Romans 2:29 establishes that the true Jew is a Jew inwardly, with inward rather than only external circumcision, and Romans 9:6 points out that not all Israelites truly belong to Israel.

Paul knew that Israel (then, as now) is a mixture of faithful and unfaithful people. Members of the true Israel are the faithful ones. These are truly Abraham’s descendants (Romans 9:8). The future that God has for Israel is connected with faithful Jewish believers in Jesus (like Paul, Romans 11:1-2). And if I read Romans 11 correctly, we should expect that, before Jesus returns, their number will increase. That, says Paul, will be “life from the dead” (Romans 11:15, cf. Ezekiel 37).

To equate the democratic state called Israel (made up of secular, orthodox, messianic and other Jews as well as Israeli Arabs who are mostly Muslims) with the people of God in the Bible is just wrong.

The other question is whether this future has anything to do with the promised land. Those who argue that it does have to deal with the almost complete silence about land in the New Testament. Land is the fourth most common word in the Old Testament (after God, the Lord and Israel), and indeed, the theme of the OT could be summarised as the relationship between Israel and God’s land – land promised to Abraham, conquered under Joshua, expanded under David and Solomon, forfeited in the time of Jeremiah, and restored under Ezra and Nehemiah. This theme is entirely absent from the New Testament, even from Romans 9-11 where Paul refers to the future of Israel.

The land promise only appears twice in the New Testament. In Hebrews 11:9-10 it is negated in favour of the heavenly Jerusalem and in Romans 4:13 is it re-interpreted as a promise of the world. The land promise is fulfilled, on the one hand, in the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth and, on the other, in the anticipation of the new heaven and earth.

There is simply no evidence in the New Testament that Jesus or the apostles envisaged a return of the Jews to their ancient homeland and the establishment of the State of Israel before Jesus returns. Those who argue for this have to read the Old Testament as though the New Testament had never been written. The Old Testament promises of return from exile cannot be read with reference to political realities in the Middle East in the 20th Century and beyond. That too is wrong.

God has a future for Israel to be sure, but as I read the Bible it seems clear to me that it has nothing to do with the state of Israel and nothing to do with the promised land.

– Philip Church
Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies, School of Theology Mission and Ministry at Laidlaw College