The Eudaimonia Blog

“‘Bishara, I’m going to ask you a question,’ she said, stirring her cream into her western-style coffee and staring me intensely from across the table. ‘I think you are a fine person and a real Christian. But I need to know plainly: do you believe that Israel’s possession of the land is the fulfillment of prophecy? Do you believe that God promised this land to them and no one else?’ I stared back at her with a mixture of pity and sorrow in my heart, ‘No,’ I told her simply. For me, it was not a complicated issue. I was born here. This was my homeland. What other justification did I need? Why did I need Bible verses to support the simplicity of the fact? ‘What do you say about Genesis 17:8 which declares that God promised this land to Abraham and his seed forever?’ We had already wrestled with such verses at the college. Again my answer was simple, ‘Galatians 3 tells us that Christ is the seed of Abraham, ‘I replied with all the gentleness I could muster. ‘It tells us ‘if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.’ ‘Okay then.’ She sighed heavily. ‘That’s all I needed to know. Our ministry will no longer be able to support the college.’”

Palestinian Christian Bishara Awad shares in this excerpt from his book (see previous post) a conversation he had with one of the largest supporters and donors of the Bethlehem Bible College in its early stages in the 1980s. Earlier in the chapter in which he recalls this moment, he also speaks of going to a ministry gathering with this friend (now former donor), where the focus of the meeting was raising money in order to buy a tank for the Israeli Defense Forces. As a member of the group stood up in the meeting and said, “I believe the Lord is calling us to raise the money to buy a tank. Who is ready to give sacrificially for this cause?” Awad writes, “I could not believe what I was hearing. A tank?” This individual continued, “Remember, world redemption depends on Jews being back in the land that God promised to them! Who will make a pledge? . . . God sees your sacrifice in these end times.”

This (mis)understanding of the Bible among North American Christians has had a grip on the evangelical landscape for more than 150 years, a system of theology known as dispensationalism. In the early 2000s, this faulty framework for coming to the Bible was popularized in the “Left Behind Series” and even before the best-selling novels came out some twenty years ago, in the decade of the 1970s, the second best selling book in the United States, next to only the Bible itself, was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth which taught the same, again, faulty theology. When I came to Christ in early 1990, there were a plethora of churches that espoused the teachings of dispensationalism by simply called themselves “Bible churches.” The influence of dispensationalism has been great and has also impacted foreign policy as the “evangelical voting bloc” has been directly involved in shaping US politics and subsequently US policy on the unwavering alliance and commitment to the national interests of Israel.

Now, to dive too far into the complexities of foreign policy is far above my paygrade, so let me try and stay in my lane here by simply addressing the theological concerns with dispensationalist thinking. While in the 1980s, the wealthiest and most influential evangelical Christians were in large part shaped by dispensationalism and Awad as a Palestinian Christian was essentially left without a voice, he was bang on in replying to his donor friend who would withdraw her support from his ministry, that Galatians 3, v. 29 says “if we belong to Christ, we are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.” What the Apostle Paul was saying there is that now that Christ has come, lineage to Abraham’s line is now on the basis of faith, not genetic code, that all who share the faith of their father Abraham can now be counted as belonging to the New Israel of God. Jesus Himself pulled no punches when he calls out the Pharisees who are claiming Abraham as their father, that instead they are children of the devil. And the reason for this serious charge as Jesus said is because, unlike the Pharisees, “Abraham saw my day and was glad” (John 8:56). Jesus was saying, that it was the forward-looking faith of Abraham that anticipated God would send His Messiah into the world. He was describing that there is a continuity with all who believed God and His promises in the Old Covenant by faith and all who trust in His Jesus today, also by faith. Or as Paul says in Romans 9:6, “Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.” What Paul was saying is that the true Israel of God is founded in those who come to the Son by faith.

Therefore, the promises of God still stand, but they are realized in Jesus who was the true Israel and true Son of God. When God says to Moses in Exodus 4:22, to tell Pharaoh that Israel is “my firstborn son,” what we see in Jesus is that He is the realization of all of God’s promises to Israel (Colossians 1:15). Therefore, the promise of “the land” in the Old Testament is realized in the Great Commission, in Jesus’ call to His disciples to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19). The point of the land promise in the Old Testament was that God’s people might dwell with God and be with Him, and now in Jesus, they are able to do that (Matthew 1:23) and the promise of land can now be found in the place of that dwelling today, indeed in “the whole earth.” The whole earth is the inheritance of God’s children (compare Psalm 37:11 with Matthew 5:5 and how the promise to the meek and their inheritance is now universal, rather than local, as far as the land goes). Therefore, from a Biblical framework, there are no longer any Divine promises tied to the actual land of Israel today. It is “Holy Land” in the sense that it is a place of deep remembrance for the ministry, life, death, work and resurrection of our Lord. But it is not “Holy Land” in the sense of any longer belonging to biological descendants of Abraham, at least not from a divine/Biblical perspective.

Dispensationalism really made a mess of things and now it is our responsibility as children of God (as Abraham’s seed) to right the wrongs by teaching and thinking rightly on a Biblical understanding of God’s relationship to Israel, the land and now today His Church.