Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

And one of the most contentious topics right now is this question of whether we should support Israel in its ongoing fight against Hamas and now against Iran.

And there are people who I respect who answer both sides of that question.

But I wanna look at one particular argument that is sometimes made.

It was made recently by Senator Ted Cruz in his Tucker Carlson interview.

It's this argument that Americans need to support Israel attacking Iran because the Bible says that those who bless Israel will be blessed.

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It's a beautiful community.

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Sanez who asked about St. John Chrysostom's view of St. Peter, and on and on.

I love answering your questions each Monday and each Friday, and I hope that you enjoy having ad-free versions of these episodes.

But now I wanna explore this Ted Cruz clip and then explore whether this theology is biblical or not.

I'm talking about the political entity of modern Israel.

Yes, and that is, uh, that is- Do you believe that's what God was talking about in Genesis?

Yes, I do.

But, but- That country's existed since when?

Uh, for thousands of years.

Now, there was a time when it didn't exist and then it was recreated.

So the passage that Ted Cruz is trying to remember is, in fact, from Genesis.

More particularly, it's Genesis 12:1-3, in which God makes a couple of very important covenantal promises.

First, he tells Abraham, I will make of you a great nation.

And then he says, I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse.

And by you, all the families of the Earth shall bless themselves.

Now, this is the beginning of what is known as the Abrahamic covenant, and it contains promises both to Abraham personally and to the great nation formed by his descendants.

Well, for many evangelicals, particularly, as I say, coming from a dispensationalist theology, that great nation is obviously Israel.

Not just the ancient kingdom of Israel formed by God, but also the modern state of Israel formed by the United Nations.

And it's that view that Ted Cruz is articulating here, and it's a rather common one in the evangelical world.

I would suggest this is why people misremember that passage in Genesis 12 as saying those who bless Israel, even though Israel didn't exist in Genesis 12.

For instance, in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks, the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission put together an evangelical statement in support of Israel, announcing their support for Israel and also declaring that Israel had both the right and the duty to defend itself against further attacks.

And the only biblical citation offered anywhere in the document was the SBC applying Genesis 12:1-3 to the modern state of Israel.

And look, on the surface, that reading makes complete sense.

God is making a promise about a great nation formed by Abraham's descendants and the modern Israelis are Abraham's descendants according to the flesh.

But that reading of Genesis 12 is pretty explicitly rejected throughout the New Testament.

Most strikingly, St. Paul argues that it is instead men of faith who are the sons of Abraham.

And to prove his point, Paul cites to this very same passage from Genesis 12 to show that instead it is those who are men of faith who are blessed with Abraham who had faith.

So, how do St. Paul and the Southern Baptist Convention manage to interpret the same passage of scripture in opposite ways?

One to say it's about the faithful, including faithful Gentiles, and the other to say it's about Israelis and ethnic Jews.

Well, the whole dispute turns on a simple question.

How do future generations inherit the Genesis 12 promises that God is making to Abraham?

Who are the sons of Abraham that God is making promises about?

In Romans 9, St. Paul answers that directly.

He says that not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants.

And to prove this, he points to two examples from Genesis.

First, that God's covenant continued on through Isaac, not through his older brother Ishmael.

And then from Isaac, the covenant passes to Isaac's younger son Jacob, who becomes Israel, after Jacob's older brother Esau, the father of the Edomites, repudiated his birthright.

Now, Paul's point is really simple.

If God's covenant with Abraham was inherited according to the flesh, you know, the way that property is divided up when a parent dies, for instance, then the covenant would have gone to the firstborn.

So then the Ishmaelites, not Isaac, would be God's covenant people, not the Israelites.

Or, a generation later, it would have been the Edomites and not the Israelites were the covenant chosen people.

So it is completely self-refuting for a Jewish person to say, We should understand the promises of Genesis 12 according to the flesh, since that would mean we should side with their Ishmaelite or Edomite neighbors and not with the Israelis.

So what is the alternative view if it's not according to the flesh?

Well, then it's all about faith and the promises of God.

As St. Paul explains, It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are reckoned as descendants.

And he calls Abraham the father of all who believe, Jewish or Gentile, and says the covenant applies to those who share the faith of Abraham, for he is the father of us all.

So to be a son of Abraham, in this sense it matters, is not about your race or your ethnicity.

It's about whether or not you hold to the faith of Abraham.

And Paul is not alone in teaching this.

Well before him, John the Baptist was out there warning his fellow Jews, Do not presume to say to yourselves that Abraham is our father.

For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

And Jesus himself warned his Jewish persecutors, If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did.

And he says instead, You are of your father the devil and your will is to do your father's desires.

So Abraham's sons, biblically, are the ones who keep the faith of Abraham, whether or not they're blood relatives.And it's to us that the promises of Genesis 12 apply, not to whoever happens to be related to Abraham by flesh.

Now, Paul describes this explicitly in terms of an olive tree in Romans 11.

Those born into the old covenant are what he calls the natural branches.

This is the faith that they grew up with, after all.

But some of those Jews rejected the faith by rejecting the prophesied Jewish messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

So Paul talks about them as branches which are now broken off from the tree, and in their stead, faithful gentiles who have heard the gospel have been grafted in.

And Paul holds out hope, even for the Jews who've rejected Christ, saying, If they do not persist in their unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again.

Now, when Paul says that the gentiles and some of these Jews have been grafted in, what is it that they're being grafted into?

Well, as he says in the next verse, they're being grafted into Israel.

And he makes this point elsewhere, reminding the gentiles, for instance, how they were once separated from Christ and alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, but have now been brought near in the blood of Christ, forming one people from the Jews and gentiles in Jesus's body, the church.

Now, in the Old Testament, one of the promises of the coming Messiah was that he would assemble the outcasts of Israel and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

And when Jesus comes into the world, that is exactly what he announces that he's doing.

He declares, I have other sheep that are not of this fold.

I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice.

So there shall be one flock, one shepherd.

So the argument here is not that God abandoned Israel or that he abandoned the Jewish people and then formed some new people called the church.

It's rather that the promises of God have always been tied to faith, going all the way back to those covenantal promises in Genesis 12.

And these were inherited by the Jewish faithful, along with the gentile faithful, who were then gathered into one body by the Jewish Messiah.

But if that's right, then it means that church is the gathered together remnant of Israel assembled into the flock of Christ.

Or to put it in the terms of Saint Paul, it means that the church is the Israel of God.

But what happens if you get this wrong?

What happens if you think that God's promises to Israel are about an ethnic group instead of a church?

Well, it's going to screw up a lot more than just your foreign policy.

It's going to undermine your ability as a Christian even to claim to be part of the new covenant.

That's because the new covenant is formed with the house of Israel.

We see this explicitly in Jeremiah 31.

God talks about how the people of Israel have broken the covenant that God made with their fathers, covenants like the one with Abraham.

But rather than abandoning them, God promises instead to make a new covenant with the house of Israel, saying, I will be their god, and they shall be my people.

But notice both halves of this promise, that there's going to be a new covenant in which God forms his people anew, and this new covenant is with the house of Israel.

Now, Jesus fulfills this at the Last Supper when he institutes the Eucharist.

He lifts up the chalice and he declares, This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

In both word and deed, this is a covenantal act.

The Jewish political scientist Daniel Elazar wrote a four-volume work on the history of covenants, and the first volume is all about the biblical concept of covenant.

And Elazar explained that sealing a covenant involves some ritual act, typically a bloody sacrifice, but it could also be things like a common meal.

And he recognized that the Eucharist is an example of this.

And so when Jesus prepares this ritual meal with his disciples that we call the Last Supper, and he inaugurates there a new covenant with them in the blood that he is about to pour out on the cross, that is covenantal formation.

And it's one of the reasons that we know that Jesus actually turned the wine into his blood, since as Hebrews 9 points out, even the first covenant needed blood to be ratified.

But notice, who's the other party to this new covenant?

Biblically, we can say both the house of Israel, Jeremiah 31.

But also clearly, the church.

This is why, as Saint Paul observes, when we come together to celebrate the Eucharist as Jesus commanded, we do it by assembling as the church.

So Christ fulfills his promise to make a new covenant with the house of Israel by making a new covenant with the church and setting his 12 disciples in judgment over the 12 tribes of Israel.

Now, all of that puts dispensationalists into a bit of an awkward position, because if they admit that the new covenant is formed with the church, then they seemingly have to admit that the church is the house of Israel, and thus, that their dispensationalist system separating Israel from the church is false.

But if they deny this, then they have to come up with some inventive kind of explanation to account for the church's relationship to the new covenant itself, and this is how you get dispensationalist theologians, like Dr. Roy Beecham, claiming that Christians don't actually participate in the new covenant in any way.

The church today participates in some soteriological blessings like are promised to Israel in the new covenant.

The church, however, has no legal relationship to the new covenant.

We do not participate in the new covenant in any way.

Hopefully, that puts the matter into clear focus.

The new covenant is formed with the house of Israel, as Jeremiah 31 says.

This means one of two things.

If you listen to prophets like Isaiah and Malachi or apostles like Paul, it means that in the new covenant, even foreigners are going to be incorporated into Israel, into the house of God.

They'll be offering true sacrifice, so that the house of God is now a house of prayer for all people.

If that view is right, then Genesis 12 is not a legitimate justification for saying Christians must support the nation state of Israel and its military actions.

There might be other good justifications, but you can't point to the Bible as one of them.

On the other hand, if you trust the dispensationalists, you can turn the promises of God into promises according to the flesh and instead of according to faith, but you're gonna run into some difficulties.

One of the costs of doing this is that you can no longer claim to be part of one of God's covenants, including the new covenant.

And also, you kind of have to treat Christ as a bigamist with two brides, Israel and the church.

So I think that theological error is dangerous, not just for what it says about foreign policy, but more importantly for what it says about Jesus Christ and about his church and about the promises of God.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg because in saying all of this, we're still left with a conundrum.

What does it mean for the people who have been faithfully trying to follow the old covenant, but who don't believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah?

I do a much deeper dive on the subject right here.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.