Israel Matters – Present Day Israel

In these continuing articles we are considering the place of Israel in God’s purposes, not just the past but the present and the future. These articles are taken from a weekly radio podcast of the same name.

How do we as believers in Jesus look at present-day Israel?  A question made more urgent by the focus on Israel and the Jewish people in world events.  In the last article we considered the everlasting covenants that God made with Abraham’s family, to be their God for a thousand generations, a poetic way of saying “forever.”  Psalm 105 and Jeremiah 31 were our biblical references. 

A lot has happened in the relationship between Israel and God in the 4,000 years since the covenants were made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  There has been two thousand years of history as recorded in the Old Testament.  And there has been another 2,000 years of history since the time of the New Testament. 

To help us zoom out on those 4,000 years, including the present, I want to take us back to Romans 11.  In verse 3, Paul writes “By no means has God rejected Israel.”  And then in verse 25, he states that “Israel has experienced a partial hardening toward God, including God’s Messiah.”  And he prophesies a time frame for that partial hardening, namely “until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in.” Then, amazingly, he further prophesies that “in this way all Israel will be saved.”  This partial hardening is still the case today. Devout rabbis would agree that most Jews need to open their eyes to their God. And as Christians, we would add that a saving knowledge of Jesus is essential to that. As we just said, Paul prophesies that this is coming. Romans 11:26 “All Israel will be saved, as it is written, The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob, and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.”

I love to sing the hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.”  I’m sure you do too.  And if we think of God’s faithfulness in relationship to Israel – still faithful to her after 4,000 years and still working to bring her to full salvation – then we can only marvel at His patience and perseverance.

I want to shift gears for a few moments…. to the land. 

In Psalm 105, we saw how the everlasting covenants included the land.  “To you I will give the land of Canaan as your portion for an inheritance.”  Over 4,000 years of God’s covenants with Israel, the land has always been central, whether Israel was in the land or in exile from the land, whether it was ruled by a faithful king like David, whether the land was divided into Israel and Judah by unfaithful kings, conquered by the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans.

Today’s Israel is in the process of returning to the land after being exiled by the Romans 2,000 years ago.  Exiled to the four corners of the world. And today, returning from all four corners. The Lost Tribes of Dan and Manasseh are returning from Ethiopia and India.  And Jews from Judea have been returning from Europe for the past 145 years, beginning in the 1880’s. In 1880, there were 40,000 Jews, today, there are 8 million Jews in Israel.

Not all believers assume that modern Israel is a fulfillment of prophecy.

Is modern Israel a “God-thing?”

We have seen how the covenants with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are everlasting and that they include an inheritance in the land of Canaan. That raises the question, “Is modern Israel a fulfillment of prophecy?”  Is it a God-thing?  Is modern Israel the Israel of the Bible?  I have a good friend who is an influential pastor.  He once told me, “When it comes to modern Israel, that’s where I get off the bus?”

The idea that modern Israel is a fulfillment of prophecy has not always been obvious to me either. Even 30 years ago, when I had what I would call the revelation that God has not rejected Israel, I didn’t pay much attention to modern Israel. In fact, I assumed that the prophetic Scriptures were all about the 70-year exile to Babylon, 600 years before the birth of Jesus. I really hadn’t read the prophets and certainly wasn’t aware that every one of them except Jonah, spoke of a return to the land.

Ezekiel is a good example. He wrote from Babylon and was certainly referring first to the 70-year exile in his writings. But prophecy can have more than one time and degree of fulfillment and that is the case with Ezekiel. His prophecies are of a much bigger picture than the return from Babylon. He spoke of an exile to many nations and a return from many nations. In Ezekiel 36:19, God says: “I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed through the countries.”  Jeremiah speaks several times of God’s people being scattered and re-gathered from the four corners of the earth – the north, the south, the east and the west.

The other aspect of a broader application than just to Babylon is the spiritual one.  We will see in a future article that when God brings the Jews back from exile, from the four corners of the world, there will be a deep spiritual turning. Ezekiel speaks of new hearts and new spirits.  Zechariah speaks of deep repentance and washing in the Spirit. Paul says that all Israel will be saved. This did not happen after the return from Babylon. In fact, the return from Babylon was very limited. Many of the Jews who had been exiled to Babylon stayed there. They had become very comfortable and remained for another 1500 years, until 1948.  Only then did they return to Israel, when Muslim governments turned on them in anger at the formation of the state of Israel, 123,000 Jews were forced out of Iraq between 1948 and 1951. 

As we ask the question, is modern Israel a God-thing and a fulfillment of prophecy, Amos 14 is a very important Scripture. It may be familiar to you. It speaks of God raising up the fallen booth of David, of days coming when the plowman will overtake the reaper, mountains dripping with sweet wine and ruined cities being rebuilt.  But as an answer to the question, do the prophecies simply refer to Babylon, it is very clear.  Listen to Amos 14:15: “I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them,” says the LORD your God.

As we have said, the Jews were again uprooted and exiled by the Romans, in 70 AD and 135 AD.  And they have remained scattered for 2,000 years, until the re-gathering that began in the 1880’s and continues today. Could they be uprooted again?  We don’t know the future.  But we can say that God continues to watch over Israel, to keep His covenants with them, and that He is fully involved in Abraham’s family today.  Israel matters to God and that should matter to believers in Jesus.

To be continued…