Every time the situation in Israel-Palestine hits the news, for Christians, one of the issues that emerges is whether or not the modern State of Israel is a fulfilment of biblical prophecy. Lots of preachers will waste a lot of preaching opportunities to talk about "the end times", the (very unbiblical) rapture, etc.
So what's a Christian to think about the issues that revolve around the State of Israel and the Bible?
For starters. let's put the very idea that the modern State of Israel is connected to biblical prophecy itself into a historical context.
Christian Zionism is a political theology with 19th-century roots. It took on its full form following the birth of modern Israel in 1948. It's a political theology because modern Israel, in this view, is not like other countries: It is the outworking of God's plan foretold in the Scriptures, and therefore modern Israel’s political fortunes have profound theological and spiritual consequences.
The spiritual root of Christian Zionism is dispensationalism, whose themes have fully permeated many American churches. Dispensationalism was born in the 1800s as an attempt to divide human history into a series of seven biblical categories (or dispensations) of time: The eras of Adam, of Noah, and others. We live in the era of the church, followed by the end of time. Dispensationalism embraced a pessimistic view of history, thinking the world was coming to its end and judgment day was near. As a result, it became sectarian, separating itself from mainstream society, calling sinners to repent and be saved from the impending catastrophe.
Christian Zionism takes the land promises of God in Genesis 12, 15, and 17 and applies them to the modern state of Israel. To Christian Zionists, this promise of land inheritance is permanent and unconditional. Therefore, despite Israel's own declared intention of being a secular state (and despite Israelis' low religious participation), modern Israel still benefits from a 4,000-year-old promise. For Zionists, the Abrahamic covenant is still active regardless of whether Israelis believe in God or not. In the Christian Zionist view -- and this is key -- the covenant of Jesus Christ does not replace or supplant the Jewish covenants.
Christians have, at least since the New Testament, believed that something decisive between God and humanity happened in Jesus Christ. The covenant of God made in the cross affected not simply the covenant of Moses, making a new and timeless form of salvation, but also every other Jewish covenant, including Abraham's covenant. Christ fulfills the expectations of Jewish covenant life and renews the people of God rooted in the Old Testament and Judaism. Thus, Jesus is the new temple, the new Israel. That's a theme repeated throughout the New Testament writers.
For example, in Galatians 3.16, the apostle Paul writes, "Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring; it does not say 'And to offsprings,' as of many; but it says, 'And to your offspring,' that is, to one person, who is Christ". Paul argues from the singular noun in Genesis to show that the promises to Abraham point to Christ. Christ is the locus of the promise of land! The promises to Abraham have been realized in Christ. He holds everything Judaism desired, and knowing him gains access to such promises.
Or, in Jesus' homily in John 15, Jesus himself says the same. The Old Testament image of Israel is that of a vineyard filled with vines rooted in the soil of the Holy Land. You can see this outlined beautifully in Isaiah 5. But Jesus upends this. We see a vineyard again, but now we learn that there is one vine -- Christ -- and the only concern is not on gaining access to the land but being attached to him.
To think Christianly about the covenant of land in the Old Testament is to think differently about Israel -- all because of Jesus. The New Testament changes the spiritual geography of God's people. The kingdom of God is tied to neither an ethnicity nor a place. Because the early Christians understood this, they carried their missionary efforts to the entire world. God loves Ephesus just as much as he loves Jerusalem. Indeed, God loves the entire world and all its people equally.
That's why it's a serious theological mistake to take the covenant with Abraham as a promise of land in modern political terms. The work of Jesus Christ in the cross is definitive. Easter confirms this. There is now one covenant made with the entire world -- and that covenant is made in the person of Jesus Christ. In the zeal to promote a modern State of Israel, Christians have quite wrongfully demoted Jesus.
Let that sink in for a second.
I know why we did it. We bear a huge collective guilt for the atrocities committed by Christians (both deliberately and through neglect) in the Shoah. But Holocaust guilt makes for poor theological rationale. After all, doesn't all this emphasis that I'm placing on Jesus lead us quite directly to the anti-Semitism that made the Holocaust possible?
I don't think it necessarily does this. Jesus is Jewish and the early Christians were -- at least a significant majority -- Jewish. The question of Gentiles was a serious one; just read Acts 15. Gentiles, as Peter knew only too well (see Acts 10) have been engrafted into the Jewish tree of Abraham (Romans 11.23-34). Jesus is Jewish, and its through Jesus that we come to understand abour heritage as one that fulfills the covenants with Abraham and his descendents.
Jesus doesn't replace those covenants. He fulfills them by casting the wide vision of Genesis 11 into the coming Kingdom of God. The choice isn't between Israel and the Church. There is a rich continuity between them. That's why Paul didn't "become" Christian; he realized the deepest meaning of his Jewishness in Jesus (read Philippians 3). He was, as the early Church Father Chrysostom put it, "a Jew's Jew". The category-changing event happened in the cross of Jesus Christ. In the cross, God's arms were extended wide enough to embrace the entire world, not simply Israel.
Jesus Christ is central to understanding God's covenants with Israel and God's intention to bring a blessing to all the peoples of the earth (Genesis 12.3b).
Some have misused and misunderstood that centrality and promoted an anti-Semitism in the church's history. But it's evil ... and a lie.
Placing the contempoary insistence on the importance of the State of Israel within that historical and theological context, how do Christians read things like Ezekiel 39 Christianly?
Ezekiel's first task was to explain to his people that the fall of Jerusalem and the exile were God's judgment for the ways in which they had broken the covenant. God had taken away four of the most fundamental and significant gifts included in the covenant -- the land, the city of Jerusalem, the temple and the monarchy. Having explained the reason for the exile, in the second part of the book Ezekiel gives his people hope for the future (chapters 33-48). Not only will they be able to return to their land, but they will see that God is going to do something radically new in and through the restoration of the land, the city, the temple and the monarchy.
But when we look at the history of the people in the land after the return and in the next four centuries, it is hard to see much evidence of the national and spiritual renewal and revival that Ezekiel had envisaged. It was not surprising, therefore, that in the intertestamental period people began to dream of a time when God would intervene in miraculousways to fulfill the visions of the prophets. Some of these hopes centred round the gure of a messiah, who would be either a supernatural figure coming on the clouds or a military figure overcoming oppressive foreign rulers and restoring Israel’s independence.
These were the kind of hopes of a better future that were held by many Jews in the first century, and summed up by Luke in expressions like "the consolation of Israel" (Luke 2.25), "the redemption of Jerusalem" (Luke 2.38), "the one who was to come" (Luke 7.18) and "the one who was going to redeem Israel" (Luke 24.20). People must have thought, "If the visions of Ezekiel and the other prophets have hardly been fulfilled in the history of the nation until now, surely God has to intervene in a dramatic way to demonstrate his faithfulness to his promises!"
The promise to bring exiles back to the land looks at first sight as if it has no echoes in the New Testament. But Jesus' use of Old Testament texts concerning the return from the Babylonian exile -- taken mostly from Isaiah -- suggests that Jesus saw his people as still in a state of exile, and announced that he was going to lead them out of exile. The clearest examples come in his address in the synagogue in Nazareth ("The Spirit of the Lord is on me...", Luke 4.18-19, quoting Isaiah 61.1-2), and his response to the disciples of John the Baptist, in which he describes his healing miracles in the poetic language used by Isaiah to describes the exiles returning to the land ("The blind receive sight, the lame walk ...", Luke 7.22, quoting Isa 35.5-6). It may seem strange to include the words of Jesus about the Son of Man sending his angels to "gather his elect" (Mark 13.27) in this context. But since the word angelos can be translated as either "angel" or "messenger," it is perfectly possible that Jesus could be speaking about the proclamation of the gospel as a way of gathering the elect into the kingdom of God.
New Testament writers use Old Testament terminology about the land (in particular the word "inheritance," kleronomia) to speak about what all believers possess in Christ. Thus Paul in his farewell address to the Ephesian elders, echoing Joshua's farewell address (Joshua 23.1-16), speaks about "the word of his [God's] grace, which ... can give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified"(Acts 20.32). Peter speaks of how all believers experience "new birth into a living hope ... and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade -- kept in heaven for you ..." (1 Peter 1.3-4). The Letter to the Hebrews was addressed primarily to Jewish followers of Jesus, who might have been expected to hold onto the hope that promises and prophecies about the land would one day be fulfilled in a very literal way. But the writer gives no hint of any expectation of a literal fulfilment, and instead develops the theme of the land in a completely new direction. He speaks of the land as "that rest," saying that "We who have believed enter that rest" (Hebrews 4.3). And traditional Jewish hopes about Jerusalem for the writer are no longer centred on the actual city of Jerusalem: "But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God ... to the church of the first born ... to God ... to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant ... " (Hebrews 12.22-24).
Christians generally have no difficulty in seeing most of these themes of Ezekiel's prophecy -- about the Davidic shepherd-king, the sanctification of the name of God, the nations knowing that he is God, cleansing from sin, the gift of a new heart and of God's Spirit, the covenant of peace and God's sanctuary being among his people for ever -- as being fulfilled in the coming of Christ. If the themes concerning the nation and the land can also be related to Jesus and to everything that is offered to every human being through him,it becomes much harder to believe that prophecies about the people and the land are in a special category, separate from all the other themes of Ezekiel's prophecy, and therefore demand a literal fulfilment.
Ezekiel's visions of the restoration of Israel led to a glorious climax in the temple in which God was going to "live among the Israelites for ever" (43.7) and in the city whose name would always be "The Lord is there" (48.35). If we believe, therefore, that it was uniquely in Jesus that God has come to live among us (John 1.14), we should not be looking to see the fulfilment of Ezekiel's visions either in the twentieth-century return of Jews to the land, or the establishment of the state of Israel, or the present city of Jerusalem or in a future millennial reign of Jesus in Jerusalem. Perhaps Ezekiel, the priest turned prophet, was using the only language and imagery that were available to him at the time (related to the land, the nation, the city and the temple) to hint at something much more glorious than a return to the land, the revival of the nation and the restoration of a building. Perhaps God was using him to prepare his people and to open their minds for what it would mean when, centuries later, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt (in Greek, tabernacled) among us" (John 1.14) and "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Corinthians 5.19). And the Book of Revelation tells us that the best is yet to come -- not in the land or in Jerusalem, but in "the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God" and in "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev 21.1-4).