The People of God

Many Christians refer to the Jews as “God’s chosen people.” If, by this expression, they merely mean “the people whom God chose to form a covenant relationship through whom He gave the world its Saviour in His Son Jesus Christ” then it reflects Scriptural truth. Unfortunately, the usage of the expression suggests that more often than not it means something like “God’s favourites, whom He loves above all other people, the treatment of whom is the standard by which God judges everybody else, so you have better be nice to them and say nothing bad about them or God will get you”. This is not Scriptural truth but a doctrine of racial supremacism. Ironically, those who are most likely to use the expression in this way are those who pride themselves the most on following the Bible rather than “man-made tradition” and on interpreting it literally rather than figuratively.

When the expression as used in this manner is taken seriously and applied to world politics it has some truly terrible implications. We recently considered religious Zionism which, contrary to the orthodox teachings of both Judaism and Christianity, identifies the current state of Israel with the Restoration Israel prophesied in the Old Testament and so gives that state its unqualified support, encouraging our governments to do the same lest they lose God’s blessing and invite His wrath. Israel is to be preferred over the terrorist organizations with which she is perpetually at war, because she is a legitimate state representing a civilized society whereas they are irresponsible madmen who aim rockets at her civilian neighborhoods from bases they put in their own civilian neighbourhoods so that when she strikes back their own women and children are killed. That she takes their bait, however, is to be attributed to the fact that she is under the control of a radical, nationalist/expansionist, faction with a growing fringe element that increasingly uses the language of racial supremacy to justify their own cause and the language of extermination about their enemies. Under these circumstances, it is insane to offer her support without qualification or condition.

The problem with this concept goes much deeper than its political implications. Scripturally, it is correct to say that God made a covenant with the children of Israel, after rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, in which He agreed to be their God, and they agreed to be His people. In making this covenant, He went out of His way to demonstrate that He was and is not just another petty tribal deity like Baal, Chemosh, Moloch, Dagon, and every other idol that the other peoples of the ancient Near East worshipped, but rather the One true and living God of the whole world. The way many Christians seem to think of the relationship between God and the Jews, however, tends to reduce God to the level of one of these tribal deities.

That God is the one true and living God and not just another idol is a doctrine established from the very first words of the Torah in which God is declared to have created the heavens and the earth – including all things which the heathen nations worshipped as gods, such as the sun, moon, and stars. The first promise of redemption in the Torah, is made not to the patriarchs of the nation Israel, but to the mother of all living (Gen. 3:15).

Therefore, when God called Abram to leave his country and go west to Canaan, promising to make a great nation out of his descendants, He said “in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed”. (Gen. 12:3) a promise He reiterates when Abram, now Abraham, passes the test of his faith when he is commanded to sacrifice Isaac. (Gen. 22:18). He further repeated this promise to Isaac (Genesis 26:4) and Jacob (Genesis 28:14). To each of the patriarchs of Israel, the promise that their descendants would be made into a great nation was linked with the promise that all of the peoples of the world would thereby be blessed. God’s purpose, therefore, in bringing this nation into being and entering into covenant with them, was much larger than the nation itself, but pertained to the whole world.

After God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, He brought them into the wilderness of Sinai and presented them with an offer. If they obeyed Him and kept His covenant, He would in turn make them a kingdom of priests and holy nation (Ex. 19:1-6). This offer was accepted and the terms of the covenant were handed down to Moses, beginning with the famous Ten Commandments which begin by prohibiting the worship of any other gods and the making of idols. These were announced to the Israelites by Moses, then written down in a book and read to the Israelites, who each time agreed to the terms, and the covenant was sealed with the blood of a sacrifice. (Ex. 24:1-8).

The overarching theme of the covenant, the details of which continue to be spelled out throughout Exodus and Leviticus and which are reiterated in Deuteronomy on the eve of entry into the Promised Land, is that God is not like the gods of the other nations, and therefore Israel is not to be like those other nations. The gods of the other nations lead their worshippers into practices the true and living God considers abhorrent, therefore Israel is not to worship those idols, or commit those practices, but is to keep herself separate and holy. To further the distance between her and the idolatrous nations, she is given detailed instructions on where and how to worship God, her own priesthood, and a set of ceremonial and dietary instructions.

Yet when we come to the prophetic literature of the Old Testament we find that it is filled with promises of a day when the nations of the world would flock to Jerusalem to learn the ways of God (Michah 4:2, Zechariah 8:22) and the Temple in Jerusalem would be a house of prayer to all people (Isaiah 56:7). Most significantly, it is prophesied that God would raise up priests and Levites out of every nation (Isaiah 66:20-21), indicating that in this day, all peoples would be God’s people.

The literature that contains these promises was addressed to the nation at the time when she was facing imminent judgement, in the form of the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, after a history of violating the covenant by worshipping idols and following after the practices of the heathen. The promises are connected to the message of hope contained within these prophecies of doom – that God would break the cycle of rebellion and judgement, by sending a final deliverer, the Messiah, Who would make good on all the promises God had ever made to Israel and her patriarchs, would establish a new covenant in which His laws would be written on their hearts, and would restore them to the land promised to their forefathers.

Judaism is still looking for that Messiah, but Christians know that He has already come, and furthermore, that He has established the new covenant by the blood of His sacrifice on the cross, a fact of which we are reminded each time we come to the Lord’s Supper and hear the words with which the Lord instituted the sacrament on the eve of His crucifixion. How does this affect our understanding of the old covenant, and the people with whom God made that covenant?

There is much confusion about this due to a number of errors that have sprung up. One new doctrine, very popular among North American evangelicals, teaches that the present age in which God is working through the Church, is a parenthesis in His dealing with Israel which will be resumed after the Church is removed in the rapture. Another doctrine, teaches that God has rejected His ancient people, just as they rejected His Messiah, and that the Church has replaced Israel as the people of God. The truth, as traditionally understood, is more nuanced than either of these views.

God does not have two different covenants with two different peoples. The first covenant, the old covenant, was fulfilled by Jesus Christ, Who also established the new covenant. God’s people, are those with whom He has a covenant relationship, and since the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, such a relationship is through the new covenant.

The new covenant offers salvation from sin through the grace of Jesus Christ to be received freely through faith. The offer is made to the whole world. Anybody can receive this grace by believing in Jesus, and when they do so they are made part of the people of God. This does not mean that God has replaced His old people, Israel, with a new people, the Church.

The Church is a continuation of Israel, not a replacement for it. This is clearly what St. Paul the Apostle teaches, when he writes that the ceremonial law, which separated Israel from the Gentiles, has been torn down so that believing Gentiles are no longer “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” but “fellow citizens with the saints” (Eph. 2:11-19). In the Book of Acts we see this unfold, as Christ commissions His disciples to take His Gospel, from Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, then to the rest of the world (Acts 1:8), as the Gospel is taken to the Gentiles, and the dietary laws (Acts 10) and circumcision (Acts 15) are revealed or ruled to be unnecessary in the Church, the body of Christ in which the Gentiles are united with Israel, through faith in the Messiah. St. Paul uses the metaphor of an olive tree to illustrate how the Church is a continuation of Israel. Israel is the root and trunk of the olive tree, from which certain branches (unbelieving Jews) have been pruned, and into which wild branches (believing Gentiles) have been grafted (Rom. 11). The tree of Israel in this condition – unbelieving Jews cut off, believing Gentiles grafted in, is the Church.

When he uses this metaphor, St. Paul writes that the day will come in which the unbelieving bulk of the nation will believe and be grafted back into the tree (vv. 23-31). This clearly coincides with the Old Testament prophecies of the Final Restoration, and equally clearly makes the conversion of the unbelievers to faith in Jesus Christ the necessary pre-condition for that Restoration. The unbelieving state of Israel in the Middle East today is therefore not that Restoration, although there are good grounds for supporting that state against her mortal enemies for other reasons.

Under the new covenant, a person who does not believe that Jesus is the Christ cannot claim a covenant relationship with God on the grounds of racial descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whereas a person who does believe that Jesus is the Christ, although ethnically a Gentile, has been made a full partaker of the commonwealth of Israel. That is the orthodox Christian doctrine on the subject, and there is no support in it for the kind of racial supremacism in which Arab life is treated as cheap and worthless compared to Jewish life, which supremacism is disturbingly becoming more prevalent among Israel’s governing class, and her supporters.

Religious Zionism – Bad Theology, Bad Politics

As I have argued previously, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the sane choice, if we are forced to pick sides, is Israel, because Israel is a legitimate state, the political expression of an established, civilized, society, genuinely interested in the wellbeing of that society, whereas her enemies, organizations like Hamas, are terrorists who exploit the suffering of their own people, hiding behind them as human shields and hurling them against their foes like human projectiles. Out of this fundamental distinction two other differences arise. First, Israel is highly efficient in protecting her own people from harm and wreaking destruction upon her enemies. As a result her casualty and injury lists are insignificant compared to theirs. Her detractors have tried to use this against her but, as again I have argued previously, their reasoning does not stand up to scrutiny because the possession of strength cannot reasonably invalidate its use. The second difference is that while both sides have committed great crimes against the other in their struggle over the land they both claim as their own, Israel will on occasion take responsibility for crimes committed in her name, and punish the offenders. The only responsibility her enemies have ever been willing to take for their actions has been in the form of praise, credit, and glory amongst themselves.

Many of Israel’s defenders and supporters deny that great crimes have been committed by both sides. According to them Israel is a squeaky clean paragon of justice and virtue who never does anything wrong whatsoever. Max Boot, for example, in a very recent article for the website of Commentary Magazine, wrote:

Needless to say, the Israel Defense Forces do not deliberately target children–any more than do the armed forces of the United States or other civilized powers.

Boot does, of course, later have a point – a very good one, as a matter of fact – when he observes that it is difficult for Israel to avoid civilian casualties when striking Hamas because the terrorist organization deliberately places its rocket launchers in the middle of civilian neighbourhoods to maximize the harm to their own civilian population from Israeli strikes. True as this is, however, it is not the whole story.

The rest of the story is that over the last three and a half decades Israel has increasingly come under control of a radicalized, nationalist faction, with a vision of a “Greater Israel” in which Israel’s territory would be greatly expanded, perhaps to the Scriptural limits of the Promised Land (the Nile and the Euphrates). This faction, known as the Likud, was founded by the men who had led the Zionist terrorist organizations the Irgun and the Stern Gang in the 1940s which during the 1948 war attacked Palestinian Arab towns and villages, driving out those they didn’t massacre, with the end result being Israel’s annexation and absorption of 80% of the territory apportioned to the Palestinian Arabs by the United Nations. In power, the Likud has interfered with American attempts to establish a Palestinian Arab state, sabotaged peace negotiations with its settlement program in occupied Palestinian territory, and basically made clear by its actions its intentions to pursue the end of “Greater Israel” by the same means of violence and expulsion with which Israel seized most of the Palestinian territory in 1948. That this plays a significant part in the events currently unfolding can be seen in the Netanyahu government’s deceptive decision to withhold the information that they knew the kidnapped teenagers had been murdered and that the men who did it were not acting on official Hamas orders.

More disturbingly, in recent years even more extreme voices have arisen within the Likud faction, equating the Palestinian Arabs with the original inhabitants of Canaan (many Palestinian Arabs have, very foolishly, claimed to be the descendants of such in order to establish a claim to the land that predates that of the Jews) and calling for Israel to treat them the way the Israelites were commanded to treat the original Canaanites.

This horrendous suggestion, which thankfully, Netanyahu and the governing Likud of Israel are almost certainly far too pragmatic to seriously attempt to put into practice, is bad theology as well as bad politics. God’s instructions to mercilessly exterminate the seven tribes of Canaan was a special, one-time divine authorization of what was otherwise contrary to God’s commandment to live at peace with whoever was willing to accept a treaty with them (Deuteronomy 20), for which God, Who ordinarily does not give account of His decisions to man, gives a specific justification in the exceeding wickedness of the tribes as described in Leviticus 18. When the Israelites failed to follow through on these instructions in the initial conquest of Canaan, they were forbidden to renege on the treaties which they, contrary to their instructions, had made with the inhabitants of the land.

We find just as bad theology, although not always with such horrible implications, among religious Zionists, some Jewish but mostly Christian, in Western countries like Canada and the United States. Religious Zionists base their support for Israel, not upon the reasons I outlined in my first paragraph, but upon the belief that the modern Zionist movement and the establishment of the modern state of Israel fulfil the Old Testament prophecies of the Restoration of Israel. Religious Zionists offer Israel far greater, and much less-qualified support than she otherwise finds among her defenders. Some of them have been known to rank the well-being of Israel over that of their own country, an attitude that is sometimes called “Israel First”. Most of them take an attitude towards criticism of the actions of the government of modern Israel that would ironically, condemn the very prophets whose writings they look to for support of their position as those prophets were blistering in their condemnation of injustices and idolatry of the Israeli leaders of the time. Many of them are in strong sympathy with the positions of the Likud.

Yet the basic premise of religious Zionism is heresy by the standards of the traditional orthodoxy of both Judaism and Christianity. The Jewish Tanakh which is the Christian Old Testament does indeed prophesy a restoration of Israel. In Genesis, God promises Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that He will make a great nation out of their descendants and give them the land of Canaan forever, in Exodus He delivers the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and makes a Covenant with them, the terms of which are spelled out in Exodus and Leviticus and reiterated in Deuteronomy when they finally arrive at the border of the Promised Land. They enter and conquer the Promised Land in Joshua then in Judges, the cycle of idolatry and rebellion, followed by judgement and dispersion, followed by repentance and restoration, begins which continues through the history of the united kingdom of Israel, and the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, until the latter two are swept away in the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities the first two of three events that brought about the Diaspora, the scattering of the Jews through the nations. It is the prophets who warned of and saw these Captivities that prophesied a final restoration of Israel in connection with the coming of the Messiah and the New Covenant in which God would write His laws upon their hearts rather than on tablets of stone. In the final Restoration, like the mini-restorations throughout the entire aforementioned cycle, spiritual restoration would precede physical restoration.

This is why Zionism is heresy. The orthodox doctrines of both Judaism and Christianity require a spiritual restoration to precede the physical restoration. This was not the case with the establishment of modern Israel, ergo modern Israel cannot be the fulfilment of the prophecies. Judaism rejects the truth that Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah and that He established the New Covenant in His blood two thousand years ago. Therefore, by orthodox Jewish doctrine, Israel cannot be the fulfilment of the Restoration.

Christianity is built upon faith that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Christ, the promised Saviour. Yet although Christianity recognizes that Messiah has come, Israel still cannot be the fulfilment of the prophecy because apart from those who founded the Church, the nation rejected Christ which led to the third of the events that brought about the Diaspora, when the armies of Rome put down the Jewish rebels and sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D. In orthodox Christian theology, the spiritual restoration of Israel which must precede her physical restoration, is her recognition of Him Whom they rejected, as their Lord and Messiah. Obviously, that has not happened.

Heresy always bears bad fruit. If we equate present day Israel with the renewed and righteous restored Israel of Scriptural prophecy we are unable to provide the present state with precisely what she needs the most – qualified support, tempered by strong criticism and indeed condemnation of her actions when such condemnation is called for.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

A little over a month ago three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped in the West Bank as they were hitchhiking home. The Israeli Defense Forces were sent in search of the teenagers and the Israeli government issued a statement saying that Hamas was behind the kidnappings. The terrorist organization which has governed the Gaza Strip for about seven years now denied the charges. On June 30th the bodies of the teenagers were found in a field near Hebron.

In the course of investigating the kidnapping, the IDF arrested about five hundred people and confiscated cash, electronics, and other goods from homes and businesses in the West Bank. A small number of Palestinian teenagers and young men were killed in the course of the investigation. In some cases they were shot by Israeli soldiers after they threw homemade bombs at them. There was at least one case of a revenge kidnapping/murder of a Palestinian youth, in which the Israeli police arrested the perpetrators shortly after.

Meanwhile, Hamas resumed their familiar tactic of launching rockets into civilian neighbourhoods in Israel from Gaza. Early in July, Israel responded to these rocket attacks by launching a series of air strikes against Hamas in Gaza and Israel remained on the offensive from the air until agreeing to a cease-fire proposed by Egypt earlier this week. Hamas rejected the ceasefire and issued a series of demands which Israel in turn rejected, and now appears to have begun a ground invasion of Gaza. Over two hundred Palestinians have been killed and close to two thousand injured. Israel has not suffered comparable losses and injuries due to the efficiency of her Iron Dome anti-rocket defense system and the incompetence of the terrorists.

All of this is merely the latest chapter in what has become for most of us, a very old story indeed, the perpetual Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even more tiresome than the conflict itself is the fuzzyheadedness of the debate over which side in the conflict is in the right. It is not a simple matter of who fired the first shot.

Those who would make a case for the Palestinians against Israel on humanitarian grounds, emphasize the disparity between the number of casualties and injuries on the two sides and the strength of the one versus the weakness of the other. It does not at all follow from this that Israel is in the wrong, however. It is bad ethics to assert that “might makes right” but it is just as bad if not worse to assert the exact opposite, which is the fundamental truth to be refined from the dross in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. An established, civilized, country like Israel, with the resources and competent military necessary to protect its people and society from those who attack it, does not thereby lose the right to use that force against a weaker enemy.

If Israel’s strength and military efficiency as an advanced, civilized nation do not negate her right to use force against a weak enemy, they do invalidate the picture that Israel’s supporters and defenders frequently try to portray of Israel as a little David surrounded by big Goliaths. Israel, which in terms of her own region is a superpower, is by no means locked in a perpetual struggle for her own existence. The will for her destruction is certainly present among her Arab and Islamic neighbours, but these have never possessed the means to translate that will into reality and they have no realistic prospect of gaining those means anytime in the near future. They were defeated when they attacked her as a newly born nation having just gained her independence and she is far stronger and better prepared to repel their attacks today. The only real threat to her survival is the long-term demographic threat which Patrick Buchanan warned her about in The Death of the West and which Jean Raspail illustrated decades earlier in his novel The Camp of the Saints. Israel is hardly unique in this, for this is a threat hanging like Damocles’ sword over the heads of every civilized, First World, Western nation.

Indeed, the strongest weapon Israel’s enemies possess is the weapon of international public relations, a weapon armed with the ammunition of the stupidity of Israel’s own political leaders. Being justified in the use of force is not the same thing as being wise in using force. As Peter Hitchens pointed out in the Daily Mail five years ago, and recently reminded us on his blog, by using this kind of force in Gaza, Israel has done exactly what Hamas wants them to do. Hamas, like all similar organizations, is a parasite that feeds off of the suffering of the people in whose name it acts. It exploits that suffering to gain for itself the zeal and obedience of its followers and the sympathy of international opinion.

This is the truly decisive factor in the debate. Israel is a legitimate state, the political expression of an established, civilized, society, that genuinely seeks the well-being, security, and interests of the people and society it governs and represents. Hamas is an organization that preys on the people of whom it has appointed itself the representative, hiding behind them as human shields, and throwing them against its hated enemies as human ammunition. If we must pick sides, clearly the only sane choice is to pick Israel’s side.

That having been said, Israel is by no means an innocent party in this conflict. Months before the kidnappings, the most recent round of peace negotiations broke down, largely due to the Netanyahu government’s insistence upon building large Jewish settlements on the West Bank. With regards to the kidnapping, Israeli authorities knew from very early on that the teenagers had been shot, just as they knew that the kidnappers, while members of Hamas, were renegades estranged from the organization’s leadership. It does not take a genius to figure out that the motivation for withholding this information was to garner popular and international support for a crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank, conducted under the guise of an investigation. While one can hardly blame Israel for wanting to crackdown on the terrorist group all of this subterfuge raises the question of what role the Likud’s historic dream of territorial expansion, the “Greater Israel” concept, plays in all of this. It is difficult to imagine a reason for Netanyahu’s settlement policy in the West Bank that does not arise out of this concept, as the policy otherwise threatens the prospects of peace and Israel’s own security.

If Israel, as the legitimate state representing an established, civil society is the sane side to support in her conflict with terrorist organizations that target her civilian population while hiding behind their own the support must be heavily qualified. Just as a humane sympathy for the dispossessed and displaced Palestinian Arabs, Christian and Muslim, a noble sentiment in itself, becomes disgraceful when it is translated into justification for the terrorist actions of groups like the PLO or Hamas so support for Israel as a civilized, functional, society and state goes too far when it becomes unconditional support for all of her actions. Israel certainly is justified in taking action against the terrorists who launch rockets into her civilian neighbourhoods. The fact that those rockets have done little to no real harm due to the effectiveness of her anti-missile system does not lessen this justification. She would be wiser to exercise restraint, however, if for no other reason than to avoid giving her enemies the international sympathy they are looking for. Her friends and supporters would do well to advise her that while they support her taking the actions necessary to secure her society this does not mean that she has a blank cheque to pursue whatever other goals she wishes at other peoples’ expense.