Transcription
Paul tells the church, "Don't get uppity about the fact that you've replaced Israel. You've been grafted in now. Their hearts are hardened so that the Gentiles can be brought in. Don't get a big head, because God can do the very same thing to you."
I was reading Replacement Theology within this paper's earliest section regarding the church. Yeah, Replacement Theology is very common. It is the dominant view within Christianity. That is certainly fair to say because of Reformed Theology and the various manifestations of Reformed Theology and Covenant Theology. What we think of as Dispensational Theology is a minority view within the Christian church. I know that's hard for Dispensationalists to hear, and I was raised in a Dispensationalist context as a Christian.
I think both sides of the argument make legitimate points. I'm somewhere in between this. I think the church has replaced Israel, but I don't think that Israel has been replaced or set aside in God's eschatological program. Whereas replacement theologians would say that, just point blank. I think that goes too far. I think there is a place for Israel specifically in God's eschatological program yet to come. But Replacement Theology is certainly the dominant view and not Dispensational Theology.
Reading the Old Testament, you see so many prophecies about the restoration of Israel as a nation within the eschatological plan of God. I'm not talking about the state of Israel, but Israel as a nation in the land, in the messianic age. And allegorizing everything within a Replacement Theology always seems to me like going too far. Like, okay, God is promising them land and that's not a land. God is promising them harvest and prosperity and peace. Okay, but those things are now in the church and they are all spiritual and the harvest must be something different.
Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of the... I mean, statements about Old Testament Israel are applied to the church in the New Testament, point blank. We're a kingdom of priests, that's said of the church, not just Israel. We are the people of God. We are the temple of the living God. That's the church. It's not Israel, it's the church. There's a lot of Old Testament language used of Israel that gets applied to the church in the New Testament. I don't know how many times we ran into this in our study on the podcast in the use of the Old Testament in the book of Revelation. It's everywhere. It's everywhere in the New Testament. This is why it's the dominant view.
But again, I tend to think that some of the statements that are made just are taken a little bit too far in their application just to essentially squeeze out any eschatological role for Israel or God's ongoing interest in the Old Testament people of God. I don't think that's all been abandoned. I don't know how you can hold that view and read in Romans 10 and 11 where God tells the church, which is mixed, Jew and Gentile now, Paul tells the church, look, don't get uppity about the fact that you've replaced Israel. You've been grafted in now. And Israel now is, they're in a time of unbelief. Their hearts are hardened, you know, so that the Gentiles can be brought in. Don't get a big head because God can do the very same thing to you.
I think that warning is serious. God can do it. He's not bound, you know, to replace and displace Israel. There's still a plan there. And God's going to accomplish that plan no matter what. And even if it's at the expense of the Gentile, he'll do it. And also the statement of Paul explicitly that, okay, the Jews, and he's talking about the rabbinic class, they don't believe, they're in rebellion. They have become enemies of everybody, but they are still beloved because of the promise, and the fathers. And Paul talks about that there is no way that the calling of God could be broken. The promises of God are, I'm trying to remember what Paul's wording is there, but the idea that they're not revocable.
That's not completely true because if there's apostasy, they are revocable. We recorded the podcast today in 1 Samuel 2, and there's a specific example in there about God making a promise "forever", then basically saying, forget it. I don't want to telegraph what it is. You'll have to go listen to the episode. But it's another example of fundamentally misunderstanding election. God doesn't tie his own hands. He doesn't do that. God is free to do what he wants. And he will to accomplish the ends that he wants.