No Holy Land: Does Israel Still Have a Biblical Claim on the Middle East?

“From the Nile to the Euphrates” (Gen 15:18). The land God gave to his people included today’s Palestine, Jordan, parts of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. “It would be fine if they took it all,” said U. S. Ambassador to Israel and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee.

I am Reformed and there is a long history in my tradition of respecting ethnic Jews as special in God’s sight. The history of redemption centers on the people of Israel. Jesus and his disciples were Jews. “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:24). Yet, as in the day when Jesus said this, there is a strong reaction against considering Jewish Christians true Jews at all. And there is a deep hostility of radical Israeli Zionists to Christians and Muslims in territories they believe belong to them from biblical times. Christianity in the West Bank, including Bethlehem, is being erased by ultra-orthodox settlers under the protective umbrella of the Israel Defense Forces. The crucial question for Christians is not whether God gave Israel land “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” but whether this covenant is obsolete and we now have a universal horizon of God’s kingdom.

The Sinai Covenant Was Conditional

God did promise to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan. When they entered, they were not to claim their own righteousness as the cause but God’s promise to the patriarchs (Deut. 9:6).

The book of Joshua that records the holy wars of God’s people against the idolatrous and violent tribes occupying his land records the solemn oath that the people swore, a renewal of the Sinai covenant. Throughout the book of Joshua, God is the victor, even while the Israelites failed to complete their commission. Nevertheless, he grants the land to the twelve tribes. “Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass” (Josh. 21:45). God fulfilled his promise to give them the land. That promise was fulfilled that day.

But now, as they stand on the plains, they renew the Sinai covenant. Joshua almost dissuades them from making this covenant, knowing that they are already carrying little idols in their pockets.

Then the people answered, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods, for it is the LORD our God who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed. And the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.”

But Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the LORD, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you, after having done you good.” And the people said to Joshua, “No, but we will serve the LORD.” Then Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the LORD, to serve him.” And they said, “We are witnesses’” (Josh. 24:16–22).

The conditionality of this national covenant (distinct from the Abrahamic promise of a worldwide family in Christ) is evident especially in the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy 28. One cannot read that chapter and conclude that God gave Israel the land unconditionally. In fact, Joshua told the people that if they violate the covenant, God will send the same curses he brought upon their enemies, “until you perish from off this good ground that the LORD your God has given you” (Josh. 23:12–13).

The Sinai Covenant Was Broken

This covenant was broken, as we know. “Like Adam, they transgressed my covenant” (Hos. 6:7). Like the Adamic covenant, the Sinai covenant was based on works: “All this we will do.” But their failure is not the last word. The promise God made to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:15 and to Abraham in Genesis 15 will be fulfilled in a new covenant based on a better mediator and better promises—unconditional ones, where God alone is the promise-maker:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more’” (Jer. 31:31–34).

Dispensationalists, who support Christian Zionism, interpret these prophecies as a revival of the Jewish state. Amos 9:10–11 is often used to support the founding of the nation of Israel in 1948:

“In that day I will raise up
the booth of David that is fallen
and repair its breaches,
and raise up its ruins
and rebuild it as in the days of old,
that they may possess the remnant of Edom
and all the nations who are called by my name,”
declares the LORD who does this.

However, at the Council of Jerusalem, James quoted this passage as being fulfilled in the ingathering of the Gentiles in this era of mission:

And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written,
“After this I will return,
and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen;
I will rebuild its ruins,
and I will restore it,
that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord,
and all the Gentiles who are called by my name,
says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old” (Acts 15:16–18, emphasis added).

In short, all of the conditional promises of Israel living in the land with God as its king were broken long ago. There is still a promise, I believe, of a great revival among Jews coming to Christ (Rom. 11). Yet the current nation of Israel is not the Israel of the Bible. As Christians, we respect our Jewish roots. Jesus and all the disciples were Jewish. Far from rejecting the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament interprets them as they were intended: promise and fulfillment in Christ. Thus, whatever political stance one takes to the nation of Israel today, it cannot be based on promises made by the people, which were broken, but on other important considerations.

The Sinai Covenant Is Obsolete, but the New Song

So now, the only “holy land” is the people of God, the true children of Abraham from every race, people, and nation through faith in Christ. As anyone who has been to the sites in Israel observes, there is little happiness in that place. Not only different religions but different denominations of Christians and Muslims seem to worship the holy places.

But Jesus said that only those who believe in him are the true children of Abraham (John 8). Paul says that only those who believe in Christ are children of Abraham and “the earthly Jerusalem is in bondage with her children” (Gal. 4:25). Do real Bible-believers take that seriously? Peter tells the Jewish-Gentile church, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9).

The only hope of the world is Christ with his international body, Jew and Gentile united into “one new man” (Eph. 2:15). It is a covenant based on his work, not ours, a kingdom he is building, the uncoerced faith produced by the word and the sacraments, and a better hope. Even the Old Testament saints did not settle for an earthly Jerusalem. “But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:16).

The last book of the Bible gives us a window into the everlasting worship in the City of God:

And they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:9–10).

Tragically, many approaches of Gentile Christian writers in the ancient world were anti-Semitic. They emphasized the end of Israel in the rebirth of God’s covenant blessings to the Gentiles. This is the idea of so-called “replacement” theology that dispensationalists especially reject.

To whatever degree this may be a characteristic of patristic and medieval responses, this is not the Reformed position. Reformed theologians of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emphasized the biblical prophecies that the tents of Israel would be expanded rather than torn down. The promise that through Abraham’s one seed, “all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3) is fulfilled in Christ (Acts 2:25–7; Gal. 3:16). God’s true Israel—consisting of citizens united to Christ—extends to all nations. So, it is not a subtraction of Israel from God’s plan but an unimaginable expansion, beyond all ethnic boundaries, to the ends of the earth. In the light of this unconditional promise, Paul did not see Abraham as the father merely of ethnic Jews: “For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world,” not just of a geopolitical state, “did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith” (Rom. 4:13). So, to his physical descendants, he was father of the Jews, but as heir of the world he was the father of all who believe in Christ (Gal. 3:7).

For Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this did not mean that Jews were replaced by a Gentile church but that there is a “partial hardening” (Rom. 11:25) that will eventuate in a major return of ethnic Jews to their Messiah. Some thought that this was a gradual trend, with Paul as an example, while others came to believe that it would be a major revival: “All Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26).

Yet while Paul’s Jewish contemporaries place their confidence in the law, the land, and the sacrifices, he points them to the reality: justification and salvation through the alien righteousness of Christ. Anyone who has ever entered into Paradise has gone through the door of faith in Christ, foreshadowed in the sacrifices and now made known for all, Jew and Gentile, as the only sacrifice for sin.

Consequently, if Israel today is not God’s holy and priestly nation no other nation—including the United States—can claim to be God’s chosen nation. America is not God’s chosen nation any more than Iran. It is the Christians in Iran and in the United States and elsewhere who form the one body of Christ. All land is common, not holy. Even if the Temple were rebuilt in Jerusalem, it would not matter for Christians. Christ is the true Temple and we are his “living stones” (1 Pet. 2:5). Therefore, such an earthly temple would be a blasphemous parody. Christian Zionists go so far as to believe that the sacrificial system will be restored. This is like rewinding to the middle of the movie. The writer to the Hebrews says that the old covenant is “obsolete” (Heb. 8:13), not incubating until its revival in the end times. The capital of Christ’s kingdom is not in Jerusalem, Rome, or Washington DC, but in heaven, “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Heb. 12:22).