Plot Twist | The Podcast Team

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Few words in Christian conversation carry as much history, theology, emotion, and political baggage as the word Israel.
In the Bible, Israel can refer to a man, his descendants, a covenant people, the northern kingdom, the land, a faithful remnant, or the Jewish people. Today, the same word is also used for the modern State of Israel, established in 1948.
Those things are related, but they aren't automatically interchangeable.
So before we ask what Christians should believe about modern Israel, the land, or the future of the Jewish people, we need to begin with a more foundational question:
What does the Bible mean when it talks about Israel?

Before we get into Israel, one quick clarification about how we're approaching the Bible.
We're going to begin with what passages meant in their original context, then follow those themes and promises through the larger biblical story, allowing the New Testament to show us how they reach their fulfillment in Jesus. That matters especially with a subject like Israel, where it's easy to take a promise from one part of the Bible and apply it directly to the modern world without first asking where that promise goes in the rest of Scripture.
With that in mind, let's go back to where Israel's story begins.

To understand Israel, we have to begin before Israel existed.
Genesis 3–11 tells the story of humanity's rebellion and its consequences. Humanity chooses its own wisdom, violence spreads, relationships fracture, and the nations scatter at Babel.
Then, in Genesis 12, God calls Abraham.
God promises to bless Abraham, make him into a great nation, and, through him, bless **all the families of the earth.**²
That last part is essential.
God wasn't choosing Abraham instead of everybody else. He was choosing Abraham for everybody else.
God's answer to the fractured nations would come through a particular family. After humanity's rebellion at Babel, God does not abandon the nations or choose Abraham because the rest of the world no longer matters. He calls Abraham so that, through him and through the family that comes from him, the nations can be brought back into God's blessing.
As Abraham's family grows into the nation of Israel, Israel inherits that calling. Israel is not chosen merely to receive God's favor, protection, land, or promises as private possessions. They are chosen to become a people through whom the character, holiness, justice, and mercy of God can be made known to the world.
That means Israel's election is connected to a vocation. They are called to live as God's covenant people, to worship Him faithfully, to practice justice, and to display what life with God is meant to look like. Their relationship with God is never meant to be an end in itself. It is meant to serve God's larger purpose of blessing the nations.
They are chosen because God intends to work through them for the sake of the world.
This also helps us understand what the Bible means by blessing. Israel's vocation was never simply to become prosperous, powerful, or secure as a nation. They were blessed so that God's life and presence could reach the nations through them. Traced through the biblical story, blessing is ultimately about the fullness of life in God's presence. In Genesis 12:2–3, God promises to bless Abraham so that he will become a blessing to the families of the earth. Psalm 67 makes the same connection, asking God to bless His people so that His ways and salvation may be known among the nations. And in Revelation 21–22, that blessing reaches its fullest expression: God dwells with humanity, creation is restored, and the river of life flows from God's throne.
God's plan is to work through Abraham and his family to bring His blessing back to humanity.

When we call Israel God's “chosen people,” it's easy to hear that through our modern understanding of being chosen: chosen because you're special, chosen because you're preferred, chosen instead of someone else.
But that's not how Israel's chosenness functions in the biblical story.
God's choice of Israel goes back to the promise He made to Abraham. Abraham was chosen so that **all the families of the earth would be blessed through him.**² As Abraham's family becomes Israel, that purpose carries forward.
Israel is chosen from among the nations, for the sake of the nations.
That's why what happens at Mount Sinai matters so much. After rescuing Israel from Egypt, God tells them:
**“You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”**³
This isn't simply a description of Israel's privileged status. It's a description of their calling.
Priests were set apart for God and served where God and His people met. In a similar way, Israel was set apart from the nations with a particular vocation: to make the God who dwelled among them known to the world.
Their worship, laws, justice, treatment of the vulnerable, Sabbath, festivals, and life in the land were meant to form them into a people who reflected God's character. Israel wasn't supposed to look like every other nation with a different religious system added on top. They were supposed to show the nations what life under Yahweh's rule looked like.
Moses makes that outward purpose clear in Deuteronomy. He tells Israel that if they live faithfully according to God's commands, the surrounding nations will see their wisdom and ask what other nation has a god as near to them as Yahweh is to Israel.²⁰
Israel's covenant life was meant to make something visible. The nations were supposed to look at Israel and learn something about Israel's God.
This also helps explain why the prophets take Israel's idolatry, injustice, exploitation, and violence so seriously. Israel's sin isn't merely private failure. They have been entrusted with God's name and a calling to represent Him, yet they repeatedly live in ways that contradict both. Isaiah describes this outward calling as being “a light to the nations,” so that God's salvation might reach to the ends of the earth.²¹
None of this means Israel earned its calling or was chosen because it was morally superior to everyone else. Moses explicitly tells Israel that God didn't choose them because they were larger or more impressive than the other nations. His choice was rooted in His love and His faithfulness to His promises.²²
Israel's election, then, is rooted in grace, but grace doesn't eliminate vocation. Being chosen means being entrusted with something.
God gave Israel His covenant, His presence, His instruction, the land, the priesthood, and eventually the temple as part of His larger purpose to restore His blessing to the world. And because Israel had been entrusted with so much, their calling also carried greater accountability when they were unfaithful.
Election and vocation belong together.
Israel wasn't chosen because the nations didn't matter.
They were chosen because the nations did.
And that helps us see something else about Israel's identity. Israel certainly was a family descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Ethnic descent was real and significant. But as the biblical story unfolds, we also see that physical descent and faithful participation in Israel's covenant life were related without being identical.

Israel's identity was genuinely genealogical. Abraham had Isaac. Isaac had Jacob. Jacob's descendants became the tribes of Israel.
But the Old Testament also shows that ancestry wasn't the only thing that mattered.
People like Rahab and Ruth weren't born Israelites, yet they were welcomed into Israel's covenant community and eventually became part of the family line of Israel's Messiah. The “mixed multitude” that left Egypt with Israel was included in the community, and the Torah made provision for foreigners who joined themselves to Israel's worship and covenant life.
At the same time, being born an Israelite didn't guarantee faithfulness to Israel's covenant calling.
Circumcision is a good example. It was the physical sign of God's covenant with Abraham and his descendants.⁴ Yet Israel's prophets repeatedly called people who were already physically circumcised to become “circumcised” in heart. Their ancestry and outward covenant sign were real, but neither guaranteed that they were living faithfully as God's covenant people.
So we shouldn't choose between two extremes. Israel wasn't merely an ethnicity, but neither was ethnicity irrelevant. Israel was a real family descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that God had formed into a covenant people with a particular calling.
And that distinction between physical descent and faithful covenant participation becomes increasingly important as Israel's story moves toward Jesus.

Sometimes Christians tell the biblical story as though Israel was an experiment that didn't work.
Israel tried. Israel failed. So God sent Jesus to start something new.
But Jesus doesn't arrive outside Israel's story.
He arrives as its climax.
Jesus is an Israelite. He is descended from Abraham and David. He is Israel's Messiah and King. He comes preaching to Israel, gathering twelve disciples, announcing God's kingdom, confronting Israel's unfaithfulness, and bringing Israel's story toward its intended goal.
That's why Matthew begins his Gospel by identifying Jesus as the son of David and the son of Abraham.⁵ Before Jesus does anything, Matthew wants us to know where He belongs in the story.
Matthew then begins showing us something remarkable.
Jesus doesn't merely belong to Israel's story. The Gospel writers present Him as the one who takes Israel's story onto Himself and carries it forward faithfully.

Matthew begins making this connection almost immediately.
After Joseph takes Jesus to Egypt and later returns with Him, Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1: **“Out of Egypt I called my son.”**⁶
What's interesting is that Hosea wasn't originally talking about the Messiah. He was talking about Israel.
The full verse says, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”
Matthew knows that. He isn't taking a random prophecy about Jesus and claiming it came true. He's deliberately connecting Jesus' story to Israel's story.
Israel was God's “son,” called out of Egypt. Now Jesus, God's Son and Israel's Messiah, comes out of Egypt as well.
And Matthew keeps making the connections.
Israel goes into Egypt. Jesus goes into Egypt.
Israel comes out of Egypt. Jesus comes out of Egypt.
Israel passes through the waters. Jesus passes through the waters of baptism.
Israel enters the wilderness. Jesus enters the wilderness.
Israel is tested in the wilderness and fails. Jesus is tested in the wilderness and remains faithful.
Israel receives Torah at the mountain. Jesus ascends a mountain and teaches, declaring that He has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them.⁹
Matthew isn't stringing together interesting parallels. He's telling us who Jesus is.
Jesus is Israel's faithful Messiah, carrying Israel's story forward and fulfilling the vocation Israel was given.
Where Israel was unfaithful, Jesus is faithful. And through Him, the promise made to Abraham begins reaching the nations.
This isn’t God abandoning Israel’s story and starting over. It’s the same story moving toward the purpose God had intended from the beginning.

At this point, an important question naturally comes up.
If Jesus fulfills Israel's story, and the blessing promised through Abraham is now going out to the nations, does that mean Israel has been replaced by the church?
This is where the phrase “replacement theology” often enters the conversation.
Usually, the phrase describes the idea that Israel was once God's people, but after Israel rejected Jesus, God rejected Israel and replaced them with a new and unrelated people called the church.
But that's not the story we've been tracing.
God doesn't abandon His plan for Israel and start over. Israel's story reaches Jesus.
Jesus is Abraham's offspring, Israel's Messiah, and the faithful Son who carries Israel's calling forward. And through Him, the blessing God promised to bring through Abraham's family begins reaching the nations.
So the question isn't really, “Did the church replace Israel?”
A better question is: What happens to Israel's covenant family when Israel's Messiah comes and Gentiles begin following Him?
Does God now have two separate peoples? Do Jewish believers stop being part of Israel and become part of something else called “the church”? Do Gentiles become Israel? Does ethnic identity still matter?
These are not questions we're imposing on the New Testament. They're the questions the earliest followers of Jesus actually had to wrestle with.
And to understand their answers, we need to remember something that's easy for modern Christians to forget:
The first church was Jewish.

It's easy for modern Christians to talk about “Israel” and “the church” as though Christianity began as a Gentile religion that later had to figure out what to do with Jewish people.
Historically, the opposite is true. Jesus was Jewish. His apostles were Jewish. The earliest disciples were Jewish. Pentecost took place in Jerusalem during a Jewish feast among Jewish worshipers. The earliest church was a Jewish movement centered on the claim that Israel's Messiah had risen from the dead.
The surprising development in Acts isn't that Jews are allowed into a Gentile church. It's that Gentiles are being welcomed into Israel's Messiah without first becoming Jews.
That created enormous theological questions for the early church, and much of the New Testament is working through their implications.

Paul gives us one of his clearest pictures in Romans 11.¹³
He describes an olive tree. He doesn't describe one Jewish tree that God cuts down and replaces with a Gentile tree. There is one tree.
Some natural branches are broken off because of unbelief. Wild branches, representing Gentile believers, are grafted in. And Paul says the natural branches can be grafted back in again.
The image preserves both continuity and discontinuity.
God hasn't abandoned the story He began with Abraham. But belonging to that covenant family can't be reduced to physical ancestry.
Both Jew and Gentile now stand in relation to the same Messiah. Jewish ancestry doesn't remove the necessity of faith, and Gentile faith doesn't make someone ethnically Jewish.
And Paul immediately warns Gentile believers not to become arrogant about their place in the tree. They are wild branches who have been graciously grafted into a story that wasn't theirs by birth. Whatever conclusions we draw about Israel, Romans 11 leaves no room for Gentile superiority or contempt toward Jewish people.

Ephesians 2 makes the same point from another angle.¹⁶
Paul reminds Gentile Christians that they were once outsiders: separated from Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.
But in Christ, those who were far away have been brought near. Jesus doesn't create two parallel covenant peoples who remain eternally separated.
He creates one new humanity.
That doesn't erase ethnicity. Jewish believers remain Jewish. Gentile believers remain Gentile. Revelation still pictures God's redeemed people as coming from every tribe, language, people, and nation.¹²
Unity isn't sameness.
The gospel doesn't create one new ethnicity. It creates one covenant family made up of many ethnicities, united in Israel's Messiah.
This also helps us understand why Paul can say that “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel” (Romans 9:6). Physical descent from Abraham is real and significant, but ancestry alone has never guaranteed covenant faithfulness. Israel's own Scriptures had already made that distinction, calling physically circumcised Israelites to be circumcised in heart.
Now that Israel's Messiah has come, that question becomes unavoidable: What about Jewish people who don't believe in Jesus?

The New Testament doesn't teach that Jewish ethnicity automatically saves someone. Paul is clear that salvation comes through Christ.¹⁷
But neither does the New Testament give Christians permission to conclude that God simply stopped caring about Jewish people.
Paul agonizes over the unbelief of his fellow Israelites. His posture isn't contempt. It's grief, prayer, hope, and confidence in God's faithfulness. He can insist that unbelief matters while also saying that Israel remains beloved for the sake of the patriarchs and that God's gifts and calling are irrevocable.
And we shouldn't forget that the gospel went first to Israel. Jesus' earliest followers were Jews who believed Israel's Messiah had come. As Paul says, the gospel is **“first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.”**¹⁸
The nations weren't invited into the story because Israel stopped mattering. They were invited because God's promise through Israel was always meant to reach them.

Before we move from biblical Israel to the modern State of Israel, there's one major question we still need to address: What happens to the promise of land?
The land was central to Israel's story. God promised it to Abraham and his descendants, Israel received it as an inheritance, and it became the place where God would dwell among His people. This wasn't an insignificant or temporary detail. The land was woven into Israel's covenant life and calling.
So if Israel's story reaches its fulfillment in Jesus, what happens to that promise?
The New Testament doesn't simply abandon it. Instead, it begins describing Abraham's inheritance on a much larger scale.
Paul says in Romans 4:13 that the promise to Abraham and his offspring was that they would **inherit the world.**¹⁰
Jesus says the meek will **inherit the earth.**¹¹
And Revelation ends with God's people not confined to one particular land, nor escaping the earth for heaven, but with heaven and earth brought together as God dwells with humanity in a renewed creation.¹²
The promise hasn't gotten smaller.
It's gotten bigger.
That doesn't necessarily answer every question about whether the particular land still has a future role in God's purposes. But it does mean the New Testament places the land promise within a much larger inheritance.
That fits the direction of the entire biblical story. Humanity begins in Eden, a particular place where God dwells with His people. Israel is later given a particular land where God dwells among them. Within that land is the temple, the place of God's dwelling presence. Then Jesus comes as God's presence among His people. And the story ends with God's presence filling the whole renewed creation.
So the land isn't discarded as though it never mattered. What Israel experienced in a particular place was pointing toward something larger: the whole creation becoming the dwelling place of God with humanity.
That matters when we begin asking questions about the modern State of Israel. If the New Testament expands Abraham's inheritance toward the whole renewed creation, we can't simply assume that every Old Testament land promise should be carried forward unchanged and applied directly to a modern nation-state.
We have to ask how those promises have developed through the biblical story and how the New Testament teaches us to understand them in light of Jesus.

Only after working through the biblical story are we in a position to ask about the modern State of Israel.
There is real continuity between the Jewish people today and ancient Israel. The Jewish people have preserved an ethnic, cultural, and religious identity rooted in the people and story of the Hebrew Scriptures. That connection shouldn't be minimized.
But the modern State of Israel is not simply biblical Israel restored under a modern government.
In Scripture, Israel is first and foremost a covenant people. God calls Abraham and his descendants, rescues Israel from Egypt, enters into covenant with them at Sinai, gives them Torah, priesthood, sacrifice, land, and temple, and calls them to be a kingdom of priests among the nations.
The State of Israel, established in 1948, is a modern political nation. Its citizens are governed by a modern civil government, not the Mosaic covenant. It doesn't have the biblical priesthood or sacrificial system, and citizenship isn't determined by covenant faithfulness to Yahweh. Not all Jewish people are citizens of Israel, and not all Israeli citizens are Jewish.
So there is an important distinction between the Jewish people, biblical covenant Israel, and the modern State of Israel. Those categories are related, but they aren't interchangeable.
And that distinction directly affects how we read the Bible.
When God makes a promise to Abraham, speaks to Israel through Moses, establishes a covenant with David, or promises exiled Israel a return to the land, we can't simply see the word Israel and assume the passage is speaking directly about the modern State of Israel.
We have to follow the promise through the biblical story.
How was it understood in its original context? How does it develop through Israel's history? And most importantly for Christians, how do Jesus and the New Testament writers understand its fulfillment?
That doesn't mean the modern State of Israel has no possible significance in God's purposes. It means we shouldn't assume that significance simply because a modern country bears the biblical name Israel. If we believe Scripture assigns the modern state a particular prophetic or covenant significance, we need to show that from Scripture.
And that brings us directly to the question of 1948.

Many Christians believe the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 was a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The basic argument is understandable: the Old Testament repeatedly promises that God will gather scattered Israel, return His people to their land, and restore them after exile. When a Jewish state was established in the historic land of Israel after centuries of Jewish dispersion, many Christians saw those events as the fulfillment of those promises.
Passages such as Ezekiel 36–37, Isaiah 11, Jeremiah 30–33, and Amos 9 are often read this way.
But there's an important interpretive question we have to ask: Were those prophets describing the establishment of a modern Jewish nation-state thousands of years later, or were they describing Israel's restoration from exile as part of the larger restoration that ultimately reaches its fulfillment in Israel's Messiah?
Take Ezekiel 36–37. Ezekiel doesn't simply envision Israelites returning to a particular piece of land. He describes God cleansing His people, giving them a new heart and a new spirit, putting His Spirit within them, raising them from death, reuniting Israel, placing one Davidic king over them, establishing an everlasting covenant of peace, and dwelling among them forever.
So if we identify the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy, we have to account for the whole prophecy, not simply the part about returning to the land.
The New Testament picks up many of these same restoration promises and connects them to Jesus, the gift of the Spirit, the new covenant, the resurrection, and ultimately the renewal of creation. That doesn't make the Old Testament promises irrelevant or erase the Jewish people from the story. But it does mean Christians can't interpret those promises as though Jesus hasn't come.
Could the return of Jewish people to their ancestral homeland and the establishment of Israel in 1948 have significance within God's providential purposes? Certainly. Christians can reasonably debate that question.
But saying “God may be at work in this historical event” is different from saying “this event is the direct fulfillment of this biblical prophecy.” The second claim requires us to demonstrate that connection from Scripture.
So the question isn't simply whether something remarkable happened in 1948. It did.
The question is whether Scripture tells us to identify that event as the fulfillment of Israel's prophetic restoration promises.
And to answer that, we have to read those promises in their original context, follow them through the biblical story, and pay attention to how the New Testament understands their fulfillment in Jesus.
Christians may still come to different conclusions about the land, the future of ethnic Israel, or the significance of 1948. But those questions come at the end of the biblical story we've been tracing, not the beginning.
So before we allow modern events to define what we mean by Israel, it's worth returning to the larger story Scripture has been telling all along.

Israel is a real people with a real history and a real covenant calling. Israel was chosen from among the nations for the sake of the nations. They were called to be a kingdom of priests, a people through whom God's character, presence, and blessing would be made known to the world.³
That calling gives us the thread running through Israel's entire story: Abraham, the exodus, the land, the covenant, the temple, the kings, the prophets, the exile, and the hope of restoration.
Then Jesus comes.
He doesn't erase that story or replace it with a different one. He brings it to its fulfillment.
Jesus is Abraham's offspring, David's King, Israel's Messiah, and the faithful Son. Through Him, the blessing promised to Abraham reaches the nations. Gentiles who were once far away are brought near. Jews and Gentiles are brought together in one new humanity. And the people of God become what Israel was always called to be: a kingdom of priests drawn from every tribe, language, people, and nation.¹⁹
Christians will continue to disagree about the land, the future of ethnic Israel, Romans 11, prophecy, and the significance of 1948. Those are real questions, and they deserve careful study.
But underneath many of those disagreements is a deeper question: How does the coming of Jesus change the way we understand the promises that came before Him?
Christians on every side of this discussion would affirm that Jesus is central. The disagreement is often about what that actually means for how we read Israel's story.
Do promises given to Israel continue alongside their fulfillment in Jesus, awaiting a particular future fulfillment for ethnic or national Israel? Or does the New Testament show those promises reaching their intended goal through Jesus, expanding through Him to include the nations and, ultimately, the whole creation?
That's the interpretive question we've been tracing throughout this article.
The argument isn't that Israel stopped mattering when Jesus came. It's almost the opposite. Israel matters because Jesus can't be understood apart from Israel's story. He is Israel's Messiah, Israel's King, and the faithful Son through whom Israel's calling reaches its goal.
But the reverse is also true:
Once Jesus comes, Israel's story can't be understood as though He hasn't.
As Christians, we can't move directly from an Old Testament promise to its modern application without asking how that promise develops through Jesus and how the New Testament teaches us to understand it.
And what we find is not that Yahweh's promises to Israel have been abandoned or replaced. We find those promises reaching their fulfillment in Israel's Messiah.
The blessing promised to Abraham goes out to the nations through Jesus. Israel's calling to be a kingdom of priests expands into a people from every tribe, language, people, and nation. The promised inheritance expands toward the whole renewed creation. And the hope of God's presence among His people becomes the hope of God dwelling with humanity forever.
So Israel's story doesn't become less important when we get to Jesus.
Jesus shows us what Israel's story was ultimately for: through Israel, God would bring His blessing, His presence, and His restoration to the world.

² Genesis 12:1–3 — God's call of Abraham, the promise to bless the families of the earth, and the blessing-and-cursing language.
³ Exodus 19:5–6 — Israel's calling to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
⁴ Genesis 17 — Circumcision as the sign of God's covenant with Abraham and his offspring.
⁵ Matthew 1:1–17 — Jesus' genealogy and His connection to Abraham and David.
⁶ Matthew 2:15; Hosea 11:1 — Matthew applies “Out of Egypt I called my son,” originally referring to Israel, to Jesus.
⁷ Exodus 4:22–23 — Israel described as God's son.
⁸ Psalm 2:7; 2 Samuel 7:14 — Sonship language associated with the Davidic king.
⁹ Matthew 4–5; Matthew 5:17 — Jesus' wilderness testing, mountain teaching, and declaration that He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets.
¹⁰ Romans 4:13 — Abraham and his offspring described as inheriting the world.
¹¹ Matthew 5:5 — The meek will inherit the earth.
¹² Revelation 7:9; 21–22 — The nations represented among God's people and God's dwelling with humanity in renewed creation.
¹³ Romans 11 — The olive tree, natural branches, Gentile grafting, warning against arrogance, and God's continuing concern for Israel.
¹⁴ Isaiah 11:1 — A shoot coming from the stump of Jesse and a branch bearing fruit.
¹⁵ Romans 9:6–8 — Paul's distinction between physical descent and the children of promise.
¹⁶ Ephesians 2:11–22 — Gentiles once separated from Israel's covenant promises are brought near in Christ, who creates one new humanity.
¹⁷ Romans 10:9–13 — Salvation through faith in Christ.
¹⁸ Romans 1:16 — The gospel as God's power for salvation, “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.”
¹⁹ Revelation 5:9–10 — God's redeemed people from every tribe, language, people, and nation described as a kingdom and priests.
 Deuteronomy 4:5-8
Isaiah 49:6
Deuteronomy 7:7-8