The Ted Cruz-Tucker Carlson debate might be old news, but the dispute over the New Testament meaning of “Israel” is not. Cruz made a crude argument from the Bible that he claims mandates Christian support for the state of Israel. Tucker Carlson denied any connection between biblical Israel and the modern state, using arguments made by many Christians today, especially Lutherans and the Reformed, often called “fulfillment theology.”
Fulfillment theology teaches that the church is “the new and true Israel,” yet the New Testament never once says this. Those who subscribe to fulfillment theology say “the Israel of God” in Galatians 6:16 refers to the Gentile church, but its contextual referent is Jews who accept Jesus as Messiah. For Paul says in this passage, addressed to a Galatian church that is nearly or all Gentile, that in comparison to the new creation, circumcision is unimportant: “For all [Gentiles] who walk by this rule [the new creation], peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God [Jews who walk by the new creation].”
As Pastor Rich Lusk laid out in a recent article at The Federalist, fulfillment theology maintains that the presence of Jews in the land of Israel “in no way indicates God’s covenant blessing or the fulfillment of a covenant promise” (emphasis original).
This would suggest that Jesus was naïve when he proclaimed that every stroke of the pen in Torah and the Prophets was God-given (Matthew 5:17-18), for Torah teaches that Israel is God’s “firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22), and both Torah and the prophets predict a worldwide return to the land when it will be more prosperous and numerous than that of the fathers (Deuteronomy 30:4-5; Ezekiel 36:24-25; 37:11-14). Jeremiah prophesied that as long as the sun, moon, and stars are in the sky, the offspring of Israel will never cease being a nation before God (Jeremiah 31:35-36).
On close inspection, fulfillment theology is like the Greek myth of Procrustes, a bandit who forced his victims to fit onto his iron bed by cutting off their legs if they were too long or stretching their legs if they were too short. It ignores the Bible where it does not fit its system.
For example, fulfillment theologians argue that today’s Jews in Israel have no relation to biblical Jews by suggesting that Jesus called all Pharisees “children of the devil.” Since most of today’s Israel is like the Pharisees who rejected Jesus, they cannot be the true Israel, which consists only of Jews who accept Jesus.
But if Jesus regarded Pharisees as children of the devil, why did He exhort His disciples to “teach and protect whatever the Pharisees tell you” (Matthew 23:3)?
Fulfillment theology also regards today’s Judaism, as Pastor Lusk puts it, as “an idolatrous faith” and a “returning to paganism” because it does not accept Jesus as Messiah. But this approach is light years from that of the apostle Paul, who said of his fellow Jews who had not seen Jesus yet, that they “are [present tense] beloved by God because of the Fathers [the patriarchs].” And their “calling” as God’s chosen people is “irrevocable” (Romans 11:28-29).
Fulfillment theologians also regard the oft-repeated Old Testament land promise as fulfilled in the church and therefore not to be taken literally in New Testament times. But here again, this theological system breaks apart on the rocks of the biblical text.
The New Testament repeats the land promise three times. The author of Hebrews says God led Abraham to a place to receive as an inheritance, and that Isaac and Jacob were heirs with him of the same promise (Hebrews 11:9). Before his martyrdom, deacon Stephen said God promised to give Abraham this land as a possession and to his offspring after him (Acts 7:4-5). Paul tells the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia that the God of this people Israel chose our fathers, and after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, He gave them their land as an inheritance (Acts 13:17-19).
The massive return of Jews to the land beginning in the 19th century was a fulfillment of prophecies in the Septuagint (the Bible for the early church) that one day there would be an apokatastasis, a return to the land by Jews from the four corners of the earth (Jeremiah 16:15; 24:6; 50:19; Hosea 11:11).
Was this referring to the return after exile in Babylon? Not for the apostle Peter. In his second speech in Jerusalem, after Jesus’ resurrection, he says the apokatastasis is still to come (Acts 3:21). In other words, the resurrection did not fulfill all the biblical prophecies, and sometime in the future there would be a worldwide return to the land.
The fulfillment model not only fails to do justice to the actual Bible but also caricatures Christian Zionism, rooting it all in dispensationalism. But New Christian Zionism has nothing to do with dispensationalism, which features an unbiblical rapture and elaborate eschatologies that promise more than we can know from the plain sense of Scripture.
New Christian Zionism goes back to the early church and was revived in the 16th century when Puritans in England and Pietists on the Continent used the Reformation emphasis on the plain sense of Scripture to discover that Calvin and Luther were wrong to assume that every Old Testament prophecy was about the future Gentile church. There were too many prophecies that clearly were Israel- and Jewish-specific.
New Christian Zionism takes seriously Paul’s warning to “understand the mystery” of Israel and his inspired declaration that the “whole lump” of Israel is holy, even its broken-off branches (Romans 11:16, 25). It cautions Gentile Jesus-followers not to think they are above the “root” instead of remembering that “it is not you who support the root but the root that supports you” (verse 18). It wants to heed Paul’s admonition to “not become proud but stand in awe” of God’s “mystery of Israel” (verses 20, 25-26). It listens to what Scripture insists on, that Paul’s “kinsmen according to the flesh” are “Israelites” and that to them still “belong the adoption … and the promises” (Romans 9:3).
Does this mean the state of Israel is a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy, as Cruz suggested? No. Nor does it mean Christians must ratify every policy of the Israeli government. But the last two centuries have shown that God’s covenanted people need a state to protect them from those who would destroy them. And Gentile Jesus-believers who believe God redeems by grace and not works — and superintends the history of redemption by His sovereign decree and not human performance — should not despise the people from whom our Savior and salvation have come (John 4:22; Romans 9:5).