The Antichrist 5: The Destiny of Israel

Honor to those who are veterans today, thanks to those who honorably serve in the defense of their people and in defense of the weak in the world.

Now the fifth installment, the destiny of the nation of Israel. You might remember:

1. The Title "Antichrist"

2. The Beast from the Sea

3. Things will get worse and worse...

4. A Rebuilt Temple?

5. The Destiny of Israel
The Zionist movement of the early twentieth century saw the creation of the nation of Israel as the fulfillment of prophecies in the Old Testament relating to the gathering of Israel back from the ends of the earth. Verses like Isaiah 43:6 no doubt played a strong role in this drive:

"I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth..." (RSV).

Isaiah 11:12 is another, "He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth" (ESV).

It is easy to see how verses like these could have been taken as a banner call for Jews to return to Israel to reconstitute the nation of Israel.

One important thing to realize is that, of course, Israel did return from a dispersion in 538BC. The first verse above speaks to the context of the Babylonian captivity, after the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem and taken a good number of Jerusalem elite back to Babylon as slaves. This is the original context of, say, Jeremiah 32:37:

"Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety" (ESV).

Passages like these, in effect, have been fulfilled for 2500 years. Ezekiel 37 pictures Israel coming back to life and God bringing them "to their own land, and I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king over them all and they shall no longer be two nations and two kingdoms" (37:21-22). Like the temple of Ezekiel 40, the return didn't quite play out as grandly as this passage pictures.

But Israel did return. And the New Testament largely reinterpreted language of a Davidic king such as Ezekiel 37:24 in terms of Jesus as the Davidic king for all time.

The infamous Gog and Magog passage in Ezekiel 38-39, taken during the Cold War to predict an attack by Russia on Israel in the end times, is sandwiched between the restoration of Israel in 37 and the rebuilt temple in 40. We've already seen that these passages were fulfilled on a small scale with the restoration of Israel in 538BC and its temple in 516BC and that the New Testament authors would have taken some of the unfulfilled aspects of these passages figuratively of Jesus and his atonement.

So the literal meaning of the chapters in between surely refers to that time as well, perhaps to the judgment of Babylon (which Jeremiah 25:9 also considers the foe from the north), where Ezekiel was captive.

The Isaiah 11 passage above is often taken as a messianic passage ("a shoot will come from the stump of Jesse," 11:1). 11:6 speaks of the wolf living with the lamb, an image often taken of the messianic kingdom. 11:11 speaks of the return of God's people from Assyria and Egypt, which perhaps recalls the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722BC.

This thought raises some big questions, such as how literally we are meant to take these comments. For example, it seems doubtful that the image of a wolf lying down with a lamb was meant literally, but is meant to symbolize a time of great peace. Even more to the point, it would be hard to fulfill 11:11 literally in the way Isaiah would have been thinking, for the captives of the Assyrian captivity are effectively long, long lost to history.

And even at the time of Christ, Jerusalem could not have held all the Jews in the rest of the world. There were apparently more Jews living in a fifth of the city of Alexandria at the time of Christ than there were in the whole city of Jerusalem. The idea of all Jews returning to Palestine from the Diaspora is not physically possible and wasn't even 2000 years ago.

So was the creation of the nation of Israel in 1948 a spiritual fulfillment of prophecy (since it doesn't seem to have been a literal one)? I won't say it wasn't. It would be in the spirit of gathering Israel from where God had scattered it. At the same time, I think I would have seriously cautioned the Zionist movement in the early twentieth century from thinking Jews had some divine right to Palestine on the basis of the Scriptures above. The Scriptures above reflect a different point in time and mostly speak to a different dispersion.

From Paul's perspective in the New Testament, there is no longer a premium on the political nation of Israel. He does believe the people of Israel have a place in the kingdom, but he seriously downgrades the earthly city in Galatians 4. His allegory of the Sarah-Hagar story considers Hagar the earthly Jerusalem and tells the Galatians to cast out the slave woman as an orienting principle. He means the Jewish law, of course, but he links it to the Jerusalem of his day.

New Testament books like Hebrews and John, which I believe were written after Jerusalem's destruction, seem to reorient space heavenward accordingly. They do not have the sense of a restored earth that we find in other NT writings. In Hebrews 12:22 it is the heavenly Jerusalem to which the audience has come, not the earthly one, "for we have here no city that remains" (13:14). In John Jesus goes to prepare a place in heaven for his followers, "that where I am, there you may be also" (John 14:3). The new Jerusalem of Revelation 21 does not arrive until after the judgment has been fully accomplished.

In short, there was no basis in the New Testament for a Christian in 1948 to have expected the nation of Israel to be reconstituted as a political entity. Quite the contrary, Paul had redefined Israel in terms of those who have faith in what God has done by raising Jesus from the dead: "not all who are descended from Israel are Israel and not all are children of Abraham who are his descendants" (Romans 9:6-7).

But what of Romans 11:26--"and then all Israel will be saved"? Does this statement not refer to those in ethnic Israel who were experiencing a "hardening" in Paul's day? Yes, it does. Paul teaches here that the vast majority of ethnic Jews would believe on Jesus as Messiah around the time of Christ's return, which he expected to take place much sooner than it has.

But notice that Paul is saying nothing about the reconstitution of Israel politically. Indeed, Israel had not even been destroyed at this time. Paul is saying that, around the time of the second coming, the vast majority of Jews will become believers. He says nothing of where they will be when they become believers.

The long and short of all these things is that it would be perilous to make contemporary political decisions in relation to the nation of Israel and the Middle East on the basis of supposed biblical prophecy. The Jews hold a place of honor for the Christian as those to whom the oracles of God were entrusted (cf. Rom. 3:2). It was, "to the Jew first, and also to the Greek" (e.g., Rom. 1:16).

But it would also go against the spirit of the Bible to think this honor gives political Israel any excuse to act unjustly. God shows no partiality is equally a part of these texts, and God judges Israel when they violate His commands (cf. Jer. 7:4-11). If there is a NT message on this score, it is that God loves the Palestinian just as much as the Jew or the Iraqi or Iranian.

Present day Israel is not the Israel of Romans 11:26. The overwhelming majority of Israelis today do not believe Jesus is the Messiah. In fact most of them are not even particularly observant Jews. It is illegal to try to convert a Jew to Christianity in Israel. Meanwhile, Nazareth and Bethlehem are predominantly Christian cities, even though their population is overwhelmingly Palestinian in make up. There are far more Palestinian Christians than there are Jewish Christians today in Palestine.

These are warnings to American Christians, who unthinkingly have sent significant amounts of money in the past to Jewish organizations whose members are, if anything, hostile to Christianity. And to the extent to which Israel oppresses the Palestinians, they are violating commands in the Jewish law with regard to the stranger in their midst. Of course the Palestinians would question who is the stranger in whose midst.

The conclusion of the matter is to do justice and to love mercy toward both Jew and Palestinian. But it is dangerous in the extreme to use any Scripture such as those we have mentioned above as any factor whatsoever in making political decisions in the world today.