Everybody seems to despise the Jews - Christians think the Church has
replaced Israel, Muslims call them 'descendants of apes and swine’...
Not everybody. At the other end of the spectrum
there are some Christians who think their future hope lies with Israel and
there are Messianic Jews who say: “Gentile Christians who recognize that they
have joined Israel, not replaced it, and Messianic Jews who
identify fully with both the Jewish people and the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua, are
now working together to heal the split between the Church and the Jewish
people.”
It’s almost as if everybody thinks they’re ‘Spiritual Israel’…
…an expression that isn’t even in the Bible!
These people promote the idea of paying pilgrimages to Israel with your cheque
book, celebrating the feasts and being baptised in the river Jordan. They seem
to forget that their Saviour was dead in the tomb with the temple veil ripped
apart, so now our only hope is resurrection to a heavenly destiny.
Come on – enough confusion…what does God think of Israel?
Moses tells us that: “…he kept him (Jacob)
as the apple of his eye” and…
here is what God said through Isaiah: 
“Can a woman forget her
sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea,
they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee on the
palms of my hands…” (ch49)...and later on…
“For a small moment have I
forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I
hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have
mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer…. For the mountains shall depart,
and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither
shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on
thee.” ch54
…said after the annihilation of the kingdom of
Israel!
Well God could hardly have spoken more affectionately but isn’t He just
saying ‘gone but not forgotten’ in a nice sort of way?
Before Israel even entered the Promised Land
Moses told them:
“(For the Lord thy God is a
merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the
covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.”
…and this is what God said through Jeremiah:
“Thus saith the Lord, which
giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the
stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar;
the Lord of hosts is his name: if those ordinances depart from before me, saith
the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before
me for ever. Thus saith the Lord; if heaven above can be measured, and the
foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the
seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord.” ch31
Okay then! That spells it out loud and clear. So what did God actually promise Abraham and his family?
Acknowledgements:
Stern D, Complete Jewish Bible, Jewish New Testament Publications, Clarksville MD, 1998
Photo credit: ezedictionary.com
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