Israel

Israel is, first, the name God gave Jacob after their nighttime struggle at Peniel, “for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed” (Gen. 32:28), and by extension the nation descended from him. In New Testament typology the nation is itself a pattern: God’s own son, called out of Egypt, whom Jesus fulfills as its true antitype where Israel failed.¹ What relationship the church now bears to that ancient people divides covenant theology and dispensationalism.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to Israel as such. Its covenant theology chapter touches historical Israel only through the wider question of how the Old and New Covenants relate, a question 1689 Federalism answers differently from the covenant theology of the Westminster Confession.

Biblical Basis

Jacob receives his new name directly from the being he wrestled: “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed” (Gen. 32:28). The nation that takes his name is, in turn, called God’s own son and brought out of Egypt (Exod. 4:22-23), chosen “not because you were more in number than any other people… but it is because the LORD loves you” (Deut. 7:7-8).

Matthew reads this same sonship pattern typologically. After Joseph flees to Egypt with the infant Jesus, Matthew reports that the family’s return “fulfilled what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’” (Matt. 2:15), quoting Hosea’s own description of Israel’s exodus (Hos. 11:1). McCormick reads Matthew’s citation as deliberate: Israel and its kings were already types of God’s son, so that “Jesus fulfills the Davidic covenant and is in the ultimate sense God’s true Son; thus he is the antitype of which both the king and the nation are types,” concluding that “Jesus is the true Son of God, he is the true Israel.”¹

Historical Development

The united and divided kingdoms. Israel’s own political history runs through repeated stages after Joshua led the nation into Canaan. Judges raised up by God delivered the people from surrounding nations until Israel rejected God’s kingship and demanded a king “like all the nations” (1 Sam. 8:5). Saul, David, and Solomon ruled in succession, and after Solomon’s death the kingdom split in two: Rehoboam retained Judah in the south, while the ten northern tribes made Jeroboam king over what kept the name Israel, ruling first from Shechem and finally from Samaria (1 Kings 12). Every king of the northern kingdom “did what was evil in the sight of the LORD,” and in 722 BC Assyria conquered Samaria and deported its people, ending the northern kingdom as divine judgment for that persistent unfaithfulness (2 Kings 17:6-23).

Opposing Views

Covenant theology reads the church as continuous with, not a separate people alongside, Old Testament Israel: the church is Israel’s own promised remnant come to fruition, not a second people running on a parallel track. Sears argues that Paul draws exactly this distinction in Romans 9: “there is a spiritual Israel who is not the same as biological Israel,” so that God’s promises to Israel were always aimed at this spiritual remnant rather than at every physical descendant of Jacob without exception.² Dispensationalism instead holds that “the church is a distinct body in this age, separate from Israel,” so that God is working out “two purposes… related but not synonymous… in the world today,” one for Israel as an earthly people and a separate one for the church as a heavenly people.³

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t Paul’s statement that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26) promise a future, large-scale conversion of ethnic Israel, whatever relationship the church already bears to Israel now? Bavinck reads “all Israel” as pointing back to the “remnant chosen by grace” Paul has already described earlier in the chapter (Rom. 11:1-10) rather than forward to a future mass conversion: “all Israel” is “the plērōma that in the course of centuries will be brought in from Israel,” so that Israel’s own elect are gathered gradually, the same way the church’s fullness from the nations is gathered, rather than all at once at history’s end.⁴ Other Reformed interpreters read the verse as still anticipating a future, large-scale turning of ethnic Israel to Christ, without adopting dispensationalism’s Israel/church distinction. Sears takes this position at length, arguing for a future, though not necessarily universal, salvation of ethnic Israel.⁵

Related Doctrines

References

Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 229-230. ↩ ↩²
Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 82. ↩
Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism (Chicago: Moody Press, rev. ed. 1995), 39-40. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩
Philip Chase Sears, “Introduction,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 28-29. ↩