In light of current events, it seems pertinent to share a set of three sermons I preached during the Autumn of 2023, on the Biblical, Historical, and Modern meanings of the name “Israel.”

As the title suggests, this second message deals with “Historical Israel.”

Part 1: Biblical Israel, can be found HERE.

If you prefer – the audio of this sermon can be found at the following SoundCloud link:

This audio version was originally written and preached for Dailey Chapel Christian Church, on October 22, 2023. The following transcript has been minimally updated since then.

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Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been working through Romans Chapter 11 together. Chapter 11 is the last of the three middle chapters of Romans, where the Apostle Paul engages in an emotional discussion concerning the tragedy of the majority of the people of Israel rejecting and condemning the Messiah, who God had promised to them and their ancestors.

Because Israel is the main subject matter of this middle section of Romans, and because the name Israel is so important in the Bible, I actually decided several months ago when I was loosely outlining the sermons for this section, that I would devote some time to unpacking what the name Israel means – both how it is used within the Bible, as well as in history outside of Scripture, and how it’s used in the context of our modern world.

I had planned the overall topics of these messages well in advance of the tragic circumstances that occurred in the country of Israel, over the last couple of weeks. And, even though I would have been preaching about this subject anyway, if those terrible things had not occurred, I can still definitely say, that these events, even as they continue to unfold in front of the whole world, have certainly underscored the importance of talking about this subject, and reminded me of the necessity for us Christians to understand what the name Israel means.

I said this last week a couple of times – as Christians, we cannot escape our connection to the name Israel. One of the main points of New Testament theology, is that the Church has been spiritually grafted into the “Olive Tree,” which is Paul’s metaphor for Israel in Romans Chapter 11. 

Even though Israel was the name of God’s Kingdom in the Old Testament period that applied specifically to the Jewish people, the New Testament redefines the name Israel to include people of all nations and races who follow Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. And it also redefines the name Israel to exclude all the Jews who rejected Christ as the Messiah. This is what Paul discusses in Romans Chapter 11, but this idea is not limited to just Paul’s writings. 

This is why, for instance, when James opens his letter to the Church, he addresses it: “To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations…” 

This is why Peter addresses the Church in his 1^st Letter, by applying to us the same blessing that God spoke to the Israelites through Moses on Mount Sinai – telling the Church that we are:

“a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that [we] may declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1^st Peter 2:9, NIV).

As Christians, we cannot escape our connection to the name Israel, because through Christ, we have become a part of what the New Testament defines as the people of Israel.

So, the Biblical definition of Israel, as I said last week, has been narrowed in one sense, to include only those who are saved through Jesus Christ, but also, in another way, widened to include people of all tribes, nations, and languages who accept him. 

This narrowing and widening, together, have made God’s grace and mercy more accessible to people – and whoever does accept it, is part of what we call Biblical Israel. Now, I also said last week, that Biblical Israel is only one definition of the name Israel, and that there are actually three definitions of what constitutes Israel. 

I refer to them as Biblical Israel, Historical Israel, and Modern Israel. These are three different manifestations of Israel, each of them a separate entity, and yet, inescapably tied together in some very real ways that cannot be denied.

Last week, I spent the majority of time discussing Biblical Israel – which is what I just briefly summarized. Biblical Israel was the physical kingdom of the Jewish people in the Old Testament, that was ultimately fulfilled through the death and resurrection of Jesus – and now includes anyone who has put their faith him as Lord and Savior. 

Biblical Israel are the people who inhabit God’s Kingdom, which is a spiritual reality that exists in the world today. On this side of the grave, the Kingdom is invisible. But it becomes visible and tangible through the people of God, through Biblical Israel, when we live according to the example and teachings of Christ and the Apostles. 

But that’s not the only definition of Israel. Paul talks about another Israel in Romans 9, 10, and 11. This is what I call, for the purposes of our discussion, Historical Israel. Paul doesn’t label them the same way; he calls both Biblical and Historical Israel – Israel. Which makes his whole discourse in Romans 9, 10, and 11 a little confusing for us if we’re not paying close attention to what he’s saying. But what he’s saying constitutes a description of two Israels. 

There is a vast majority of unfaithful Jews who rejected Christ, and then there is the Church which includes a minority of faithful Jews which are referred to as the remnant. These are the two Israels that Paul talks about in this middle section of the letter, even though he calls them both Israel. So, the unfaithful majority that Paul describes, is what I call Historical Israel. 

This is what we’re going to talk about for most of this message. It’s this Israel, the people who rejected Christ, that Paul is so torn up about in this middle section of Romans. In 9:3-5 he says:

“I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah…”

In the first verse of Chapter 10, Paul goes on to say that his:

“heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.” In 11:23 he says, that even though they have been broken off of the Olive Tree, “if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again.”

So, Paul has some hope for his people, even though in the first century, by rejecting Christ, many of them were pruned off from Biblical Israel, and began a long dark journey down another road, through history. And as we survey their history down that dark road, we should try to do so, with Paul’s attitude in mind – with hope, that there is a light at the end of their darkness.

It’s with this attitude in mind, that Paul encourages the Gentiles he’s writing to in Romans 11 to not be arrogant about their acceptance of Christ, and to not have an attitude of superiority toward the Jews who rejected Christ. He says in 11:30-31 that:

“Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you.”

This is the kind of attitude we should have, as we survey Jewish history. The proper Christian attitude toward the Jews has always been, and should always remain, an attitude of humility and mercy. Unfortunately, it took the Church some time to learn this, historically speaking.

For much of Jewish history, sadly, they did not have the mercy and humility of the Church on their side. Many times, they had the opposite. Many times, they badly needed the mercy of Christians, and it was nowhere to be found. That’s something to keep in mind as well. The Jews have a deep memory, and they are well aware of the terrible things that were done to them in the past, by so-called “Christians.” 

As Christians today – we should know the darkness of Church history, and how that history has often been antagonistic to the Jews, rather than sympathetic. We need to be aware of that, so that we can separate Christian history, from so-called “Christian” history. Both for ourselves, and for other people who don’t understand these distinctions.

Now, the history that we’re going to survey today is just a short summary, but it’s the best I can do, with the amount of time we have together. And I’m going to start with the history of the Jews after the events recorded in the Gospels, and after the birth of the Church.

Judea as the land of Israel was known at the time of Jesus, was still under Roman occupation while the New Testament was being written, and it would remain that way for about 600 years until the first Muslim armies conquered the area.

But during that 600-year period, and in particular the first 200 years after the birth of the Church, the Jews had an extremely tumultuous relationship with Rome. They fought three wars with the Romans in the first two centuries.

The first war began in A.D. 66, and lasted for eight years. There was a corrupt governor in charge of the region of Judea, who was way out of his league, didn’t understand the precarious nature of the relationship between the Jews and Romans, thought the Romans were superior to the Jews, and because of this he made some terrible blunders in his governance of the Jews.

His name was Gessius Florus, and he is one of the great political idiots of history. Definitely not the last. He levied unjust taxes, he seized money from the Temple treasury, and he arrested any Jewish leaders who he considered to be political opponents. Herod Agrippa II was the puppet king in charge of the Jewish monarchy at the time, but he wasn’t thought of as a political opponent, because he didn’t do anything except sit by and watch all the corruption, while stuffing his own pockets with whatever fell out of the coin purses of the Romans.

Incidentally, this is the same Herod that Paul shared the Gospel with in Acts chapters 25 and 26. But in any case, Agrippa didn’t intervene against Roman corruption which had gotten so bad by 66, that the Jews formed an armed resistance, stormed the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, and defeated them, causing Agrippa, the Roman governor, and the other officials to flee the city.

After that, the Romans tried to quell the rebellion by sending one of their top generals down from Syria with his army, which included the Roman 12^th Legion, and they were all ambushed and completely annihilated. The Jews killed 6,000 Romans, and took the Roman Eagle – the Aquila— and destroyed it. This was a huge embarrassment to Rome. The 12^th Legion was an elite unit, they had a very prestigious history and reputation, and were founded originally by Julius Caesar. The 12^th Legion was like Seal Team Six. Getting destroyed by Jewish rebels would have been like Seal Team Six getting wrecked by a tribe of aborigines in the outback. So, when word got back to the emperor (who happened to be the infamous Nero at the time) that the 12^th Legion was destroyed and the Eagle taken, he took it very personal.

In response to the uprising, Nero sent General Vespasian into Judea with four more legions, and even though Nero died before the conquest was completed, Vespasian and his son carried on the war, and by the end of it, Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple was in ruins, and the persecution of both Jews and Christians had become completely acceptable in the Empire. As far as we know, both Peter and Paul were executed by the Romans during this time.

So then, after the destruction of the Temple, in the next 60 years, there were two more revolts by the Jews. Both of them were more widespread, throughout the Empire, both ended badly for the Jews, and by the time those were put down, there was virtually nothing left of Jerusalem at all.

Emperor Hadrian who was emperor during the third revolt known as the Bar Kokba Revolt, basically bulldozed Jerusalem, renamed it, and started a new colony there. At least half a million Jews were killed under Hadrian’s rule, and those who survived were forced to completely leave all the larger cities and towns. Hadrian also had the entire Sanhedrin crucified, along with many prominent rabbis. He outlawed the Torah, made circumcision illegal, and did everything he could possibly do to erase the Jews from existence.

He obviously failed. But in the wake of his genocide, which is often considered to be the first holocaust – the Jews were almost completely, but not entirely pushed out of the land of Israel. They migrated toward the edges of the country, as well as to neighboring countries, and even to places like Persia (which is modern day Iraq and part of Iran) where there had been a sizeable Jewish community for hundreds of years – since the Babylonian Exile.

But, long story short, the Jews spread out – they went North, South, East, and West. As they had already learned to do for centuries, having been a displaced people for the majority of their history, they established thriving communities everywhere they went, they kept their racial identity together with very strict cultural guidelines based on the Old Testament Law, and they made the religion of Judaism extremely portable by establishing synagogues.

As the centuries progressed, and the western Roman empire disintegrated, there were various Jewish communities all around the Mediterranean and North Africa, all over Europe, and into Asia. And by the early Middle Ages, these communities, depending on exactly where they were located, fell under the dominion of two large civilizations – one controlled by Christendom, and the other by Islam.

I use the term “Christendom” here instead of Christianity, because much of what has been recorded in the history books about Christianity in the Middle Ages is not very Christian at all. It’s Christendom – which is the name for Christianity when it is completely disconnected from the spiritual reality of God’s Kingdom, and gets so intertwined with earthly government that it becomes just another type of empire. That’s what started happening to Christianity in the fourth century, when it was grafted into the Roman Empire as the official state religion.

And by the Middle Ages, Christendom was fully developed, and it was extremely destructive. We’re talking about forced conversions, outlawing of Scripture that wasn’t written in Latin, complete imperial hegemony by the Roman Catholic Church – and corruption of all varieties from the top down. Anyone who wasn’t Christian, living under that authority, didn’t have much of a choice.

The Church’s position was to kill or convert anyone who didn’t go with the flow, even if they were just smaller groups of Christians who believed different things about the Lord’s Supper, or the Bible, or Baptism.

That kind of power and corruption by Roman Catholicism wasn’t really checked sufficiently until the 1500s and 1600s, when individual European states began to get powerful enough to push back.

Anyway, that’s Christendom. What about the Islamic empires that existed at the time? Well, the Muslims were pretty destructive in the Middle Ages as well, but here’s the irony – Jewish communities living under Islamic rule, aside from just a few exceptions, were treated extremely well. They were considered to be second class citizens, but there was no genocide carried out against them by the Islamic states they were living under.

That was not the case for Jewish communities of Western Europe living under Christendom. As the Roman Catholic Church became more and more powerful, it also became increasingly hostile toward the Jews, and the false teaching that Jews were dirty, filthy, Christ-killers worthy of extinction – spread like a virus across Europe.

By the time the Crusades began to unfold in 1095, Jews were viewed predominantly as enemies of Christianity. So, as the Crusader armies were marching across Europe to the Middle East to kill Muslims, they used any Jewish village they encountered along the way as practice. 

None of the historians know for sure how many Jews died at the hands of the Crusaders, but there are some well documented mass genocides that took place in areas where there were larger communities of Jews, especially in France. By the time the Crusaders reached the Holy Land, Jews were actually fighting alongside Muslims because it was better to fight than just be executed.

It’s hard for us to imagine this, but people who professed to be Christians were being led astray, in vast numbers, by the leaders of the organized Church at the time. And, in the midst of that poisonous stew of power, the teaching that Jews were the enemies of Christianity, proliferated. And it spread all over the European world.

The Jews became the scapegoats of anything bad that happened that couldn’t be logically or scientifically explained. And the Dark Ages are called the Dark Ages, because logic and science and rational human thought processes were hard to come by. So, when things like the Black Plague came along in the 1300s – the Jews were blamed for it.

Jewish communities were very clean places. They followed the cleanliness and hygiene laws of the Old Testament, so diseases didn’t spread and devastate their communities as much as in non-Jewish communities. But the superstitious thinking of the European population led them to view this as evidence that the Jews were causing things like the Black Plague – and that just led to more wholesale slaughtering of Jewish communities.

Anyway, we could go on and on about this. The suffering of the Jews throughout history has been unimaginable. They were persecuted, in some way, everywhere they went throughout the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance era. 

There were massacres and expulsions of Jews in almost every Western European country, including England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and so on. Through the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s large numbers of Jews were driven into Eastern Europe and Russia, looking for safe havens, which they never found. They were persecuted, driven out, or corralled into tiny slums, and massacred in Eastern Europe and Russia as well.

None of this stopped until the late 1940s. It took WWII, and the aftermath of it, to end state sponsored genocide of Jewish communities. One of the big takeaways from all this history, is that the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 40s actually began almost two thousand years earlier, and just kept repeating itself. Nazi Germany was the culmination of it.

What Hitler did to the Jews was not a new thing in their history – it was the largest and most devastating holocaust, but there were many holocausts before that – going all the way back to the first century with the Romans.

Despite this; despite this two-thousand-year attempt by Satan to influence the thinking of human beings and to wield the authority of human empires in his attempt to destroy the Jewish people, he has failed. No matter how many millions he has killed, there have always been survivors who’ve slipped out of his grasp. And they have continued to thrive.

Why?

Paul says it right there in Romans 11:29 – “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.”

Even though they rejected eternal saving grace in Jesus Christ, none-the-less, the residual favor, and some form of God’s grace has remained on them as a people. That cannot be denied. They are loved on account of God’s relationship thousands of years ago, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The path of Historical Israel down through the ages, is a story of remarkable and miraculous resilience and survival. And even though they’ve been persecuted at various times in history by nearly all the nations they’ve migrated to in the last two-thousand years, there is, most curiously, one nation – one empire – on this Earth, that has not followed that pattern.

And believe me, I looked. I scoured the histories for any example of violence against, or the condoning of violence against Jews by the United States government, and there was nothing. Nothing of state sponsored persecution against Jews. Maybe it’s because our country was born so late in the game, after Christendom had been put in check. It’s not as though our country wasn’t capable of it. We have committed mass genocide in our history.

It is documented that Hitler himself, found inspiration and guidance from the American decimation of the Native American population, when he was trying to plan his destruction of the Jews. I just bring that up, so we don’t get too high on our own sense of self-righteousness as Americans. We have some darkness in our past that has never been fully reconciled, and it still lives on the open-air prison camps (called reservations) that our government designed in the 1800s.

And, likewise, there has been plenty of anti-Semitism in the United States, as well as some violence – such as the shooting that occurred in a synagogue in Pittsburgh a few years back. But, even so, tragedies like that have all been done by individuals, and there haven’t been a lot of them – nothing like what we find in other countries going back through history. We are an anomaly in the history of the Jewish people.

The United States has a special relationship with the historical people of Israel. That cannot be denied any more than their miraculous resilience as a people can be ignored or dismissed. In fact, it was largely due to the decision of one individual Christian American, and his best friend – a Jew – that helped pave the way for the third manifestation of Israel – the Modern State of Israel. More on that story, next week.

For now, in closing, we should ask the question: What can we take away from this? What’s this have to do with us? 

Well, even though we are not a part of physical, historical Israel – we are a part of God’s chosen people. We are a part of spiritual Israel, and we are linked to them. As Paul says in verse 18 of this chapter – “we don’t support the root; the root supports us.” The Law of Moses, the Prophets, the history and the heritage that all led to our Savior, that’s the root – Jesus is the vine, we’re the branches. So, I’ll say it again, we cannot escape our connection to the name Israel, and we also cannot escape our connection to the history of Israel. 

The Jewish people have a very specific legacy. We see it in their history, even back in the Old Testament. It’s the legacy of wandering through this world as foreigners and strangers, always trying to get back to their home, and never giving up their way of life in the process, no matter what has happened to them.

And that’s our legacy too, just in a different way. Peter says as much, in 1^st Peter 2:11-12:

“Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

That legacy of physical Israel, has been passed on to us, in a spiritual way. As the Church, we are the foreigners and strangers in this world, making our way to our heavenly home. And until we get there, we have to keep that home in sight, and live here in a way that reflects the reality of the Kingdom that we’re a part of.

And we do that, as Peter says, by abstaining from sinful desires, by living a good life with integrity, and, as Paul says – by passing along the mercy that God has given to us.

We looked at those verses really quickly a bit earlier, but we’ll wrap this up with that thought again, from Romans 11:30-32. And just a side note, if you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice that I’ve skipped over some verses here in Romans 11, but don’t worry, we’ll get to those. For now, Romans 11:30-32:

“Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.”

That’s the other big idea to take away from this, as we close today: God’s mercy. We are the inheritors of God’s great mercy, and it is our obligation, our calling, to pass that mercy along to others, no matter who they are. And not just His mercy, but the truth of where it comes from.

Sympathy, compassion, forgiveness, truth, love.

These are things that change people’s hearts. These are the things that change people’s lives. These are the things that truly dispel the darkness that this world creates and celebrates and worships. And these are things we have to leave behind us, as we make our way home.

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Part 3: Modern Israel – next time.