I’ve had numerous conversations recently about how Christians ought to think about Israel and evangelical support for it. You may have seen Ted Cruz’s interview with Tucker Carlson who stated that he learned in Sunday school that Christians ought to support Israel because of what God says to Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you and I will curse him who curses you and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). So does this mean Christians ought to support the nation state of Israel on biblical grounds?
No it doesn’t. The apostle Paul taught that the nation of Israel was cut out of the olive tree, which is Christ, because of unbelief and Gentiles grafted in: “For if the firstfruit is holy, the lump is also holy; and if the root is holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches” (Rom. 11:16-18).
Jesus came to save Jews and Gentiles, and when He died on the cross He abolished the ceremonial old covenant laws that separated Jew and Gentile, in Him created one new man out of the two: “so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity” (Eph. 2:16-17). So the New Testament is the new Israel, the Abrahamic people of faith. Modern Jews and the nation of Israel are not the people of God and therefore no religious loyalty and or blessing is upon them. Dispensationalism misses this and teaches that the temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt along with blood sacrifices, misunderstanding many prophecies, the entire point of the Levitical sacrificial system pointing to Christ, and the book of Hebrews that explains this all in detail. Bad eschatology makes for bad foreign policy.
Christians who understand this are divided on the timing the Jews’ return to the Lord. The Jewish branches were cut off, but the Lord will graft them in again: “For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:23-26). Jesus gave the great commission to the apostles to disciple the nations, and once the fullness of the Gentiles have come to the Lord then the Jews will come back as well. Some believe this happened in the first century as we see in the book of Acts many Jews coming to the faith. But like the Puritans and many others I believe that Paul teaches the Jews will come back near the end of history (at least this part of history), when the Gentile nations have been discipled. In Romans 11:15 Paul indicates this will occur just before the resurrection: “For if their being cast away is the reconciling of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?”
The cutting out of the Jews, which happened definitively in A.D. 70 when the temple was destroyed (exactly as Jesus predicted in Matthew 24), meant the gospel would go to the nations—“the reconciling of the world”—and when they are grafted in again that will mean “life from the dead.”
This is our glorious and sure hope. It has nothing to do with supporting the modern Israeli state.