Tag: Romans 11

The Three Israels – Part 3: Modern Israel

The Three Israels – Part 3: Modern Israel

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.”

This is the third and final message dealing with “Modern Israel.”

Part 1: Biblical Israel, can be found HERE.

Part 2: Historical 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 29, 2023. The following transcript has been minimally updated since then.

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Our message for today, begins with a story. It’s a story that I never knew about, until almost a year ago, so I’ve been waiting to tell it for a while. Almost two years ago, after church one morning, Mike Lunsford handed me a really thick book. It was a thousand-pager. And he challenged me to read it before I got done preaching through the Book of Romans.

I said, “Challenge accepted.”

I was probably only in Chapter 2 or 3 of Romans at the time, so I don’t know if Mike realized this then, but it was easy for me to accept his challenge, because I knew it was going to be a few years before we would even be close to getting all the way through Romans. I had some time to procrastinate, so the book sat on my shelf for quite a while before I cracked it open.

Then, when Nelly and I were dating, we read it together. I would read a chapter and record it on my phone, and then email her the file, so she could listen to the audio on her earbuds while she was at work. And sometimes she would do that on her off time as well – read and send me the audio.

We’ve been doing that ever since. And we’ve gone through several books this way, including, eventually, this thousand-pager that Lunsford provided. So, anyway, I have to give credit where it is due – if it wasn’t for Mike, we probably would have never picked this particular book to read, and we wouldn’t have discovered this amazing story that it contains.

It’s a story about a 33-year-old farmer from Missouri – a Baptist, born in the grain belt, who would one day change the whole world. That was the hook that got me past the first 20-30 pages of this book. Some of my favorite stories are ones about farmers that change the world, or even save the galaxy – that’s what Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and even Superman are all about you know – they’re all about farmers that do amazing things. And that’s what this story is about as well. Except this story is a true one, about a true man.

Now, this particular farmer from Missouri was born way back in 1884. So, by the time he was 33 it was 1917. And, if you didn’t sleep through your High School history class, then you know that 1917 was a pivotal year on planet Earth – it was a difficult time. So that Summer, this farmer left the fields behind, and reported for duty at the National Guard. Like many Americans at the time, he was answering the call of President Woodrow Wilson, to go fight in Europe – to win “the war to end all wars,” and make the world safe for democracy.

But, before this farmer went off to France, he had to go through training first, so they sent him to Camp Doniphan, on the wind-swept plains of Oklahoma. Back in those days, officers were elected by the men in their companies, and he was very popular, and well liked, so as soon as he enlisted, he was elected to be first lieutenant. The farmer had become a soldier 

He was Harry S. Truman of the 129th Field Artillery of the 60th Brigade attached to the 35th Division of the United States Army.

And at camp Doniphan, his commanding officer put this bright young man, with an aptitude for organization and detail – in charge of the canteen. 

Now, army canteens back then were ways for the troops to purchase items that were not part of their standard issued supplies – things like paper, and smokes, and soda, and candy and that kind of stuff – non-essential items that troops could buy if they had someone in charge of the canteen who was good at keeping it stocked and organized and running smoothly.

And this is the kind of thing that Truman excelled at. He was great at looking at things that were in a state of disorder, or not running as efficiently as they could be, sizing them up accurately, and implementing plans to improve them, or put them in order. And he was also good at finding the right people to help him execute his plans.

So, he utilized all his innate talent in running the army canteen. It was, by no means a prestigious position – but it’s what he was assigned to, so he gave it everything he had. He quickly discovered, that army canteens could actually be quite profitable if the right person was running them, because it was like being a middle man between the civilian suppliers of goods, and the soldiers who had money to spend. The guy running the canteen could buy things cheap, mark things up a little, and make some profit.

To do this, Lieutenant Truman brought on a partner to help with the finances. He was Sergeant Edward Jacobson. Jacobson, you can probably tell from his last name, was a Jew. He was from New York, but his family had moved to Missouri in 1905 – that’s how he ended up in the same army camp as Truman.

I hope no one takes this as racist, but Truman recognized what all of us know – that Jews tend to be pretty good at making money. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, I’m of the opinion that it’s one of the gifts that God bestowed on them as a people, so that they would be able to survive and thrive as foreigners and strangers among the nations of the world.

So anyway, Truman appreciated this quality, and he partnered up with Jacobson, and the two not only became extremely successful business partners, but life-long friends as well. By all accounts, Jacobson was Truman’s best friend, they were like brothers, and they remained so until Jacobson’s death in 1955.

It’s this deep bond of friendship, between the Baptist Farmer and the Jewish Businessman, and more specifically, the respect and trust they had for one another, that lies at the center of this story, and which would eventually have an impact on world history about 30 years after it had an impact on the quality of canteen supplies at Camp Doniphan.

Now, we’re going to come back to Truman and Jacobson in just a bit, but for now, we need to talk about something else that was happening, in the meantime, as 1917 progressed into 1918 and WWI began grinding to a halt. But before we talk about that, so we can get back to Truman and Jacobson, we need to briefly address why we’re talking about this subject at all.

The last couple of weeks, as we’ve been working through Romans Chapter 11, we’ve been talking about the name Israel a lot. Israel being the main subject matter of Romans 9, 10, and 11. And so, as we’ve been working our way toward the end of this middle section of Romans, we’ve been examining what exactly the name Israel means. This name Israel is used in three different ways – I call them the Three Israels: Biblical Israel, Historical Israel, and Modern Israel. Two weeks ago, we started this topic by defining the name Israel from a purely Biblical perspective.

What’s Israel mean in the Bible?

In the Old Testament, it was the people that God chose for Himself out of all nations on the Earth, to lead into the Promised Land through Moses. God built a physical kingdom and named it Israel, after the name He gave to Jacob, the grandson of Abraham.

When Jesus arrived, centuries later, and made a New Covenant. His death and resurrection re-defined the name Israel to include people of all nations who put their faith in him. His sacrifice tore the veil in the Temple apart, and made access to God available to all people who believe in Jesus – and ONLY to people who put their faith and trust in him and follow him.

That’s Biblical Israel – the Israel that we have been transplanted into as citizens of God’s Kingdom, the Israel that will never end and extend into eternity.

But what about those from the people of Israel who didn’t accept Jesus as the Christ? What about them? This is what Paul is addressing in this whole section of Romans – what about the Jews who reject Christ? This is the Israel that we talked about last week, in part two of this three-part sub-series. This is what I call Historical Israel.

They are the Israel that Paul says, was pruned out of the Olive Tree. They took a different path through history, but have none-the-less kept their racial identity, kept their loyalty to the Old Testament (to varying degrees, depending on which specific Jewish denomination they belong to), and they are the Israel that has survived being hunted, corralled, persecuted, and nearly made extinct throughout the last 2,000 years, beginning with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. It’s Historical Israel whose history we surveyed, and I summarized very briefly last week, even though, that was kind of a long sermon.

It’s historical Israel that Jesus prophesied about in Luke 21:20-24:

“When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city. For this is the time of punishment in fulfillment of all that has been written. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people. They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.”

That’s Jesus prophesying about the path of Historical Israel – from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem onward, down through the ages. This prophesy has been repeating itself over and over throughout the history of the Jews. The Romans did terrible things to them and trampled on Jerusalem 30 or 40 years after Jesus said this, but many other countries have done these things as well in the intervening centuries. Just as Jesus said, Jerusalem was given over to the Gentiles…

It was given over to the Gentiles, until recently in world history. Now, we’re treading on shaky ground here, because the Jews are in charge of Jerusalem again, but even though they technically have the city, there is still a mosque and a Muslim shrine sitting on the Temple Mount. So, the Gentiles still have a little bit of a foothold, but it’s a close call.

And this brings us to what I call the third manifestation of Israel – the Israel we are talking about today in part three – the modern State of Israel which exists on the Earth today, and which we hear about in the news on a daily basis. Where did it come from? Between the year 70, and the year 1948 there was, technically speaking, no country on the world map called Israel. So, how did it re-appear after so many centuries?

Was the nation of Israel created in 1948 or was it re-created?

Is this Israel the same Israel that was there before, or is it something different?

Was it brought about by the will of God, or the decisions and actions of human beings, or both?

Does the fact that the Jews are almost completely in charge of Jerusalem mean that the times of the Gentiles are almost fulfilled?

The answers to these questions are an endless topic of debate, even among Christian scholars. They’re ultimately a matter of belief.

Many Jews would say that this Israel today is the same one that existed when Joshua led the Israelites over the Jordan River three or four thousand years ago. Many Christians would agree with them. However, many other Christians would not agree with them. It’s a matter of debate and belief, and whatever one believes about this specific topic, it should not be something to ever break fellowship over. The Church has, over the centuries, become too divided already over opinions that are non-essential to the truth of the Gospel. So, it’s OK to have different opinions and convictions about this particular subject, because there is still an element of mystery to it.

But whatever we believe about it – we still have to deal with the fact that there is a very real country on this globe, with the name Israel, and it is governed by, and primarily populated with, Jewish people.

It’s populated with Jewish people who can trace their collective ancestry, back through history, back to the people who once lived in the land of Judea when Jesus walked the Earth, and further back to their ancestors like King David who ruled in Jerusalem, and further back to those who crossed the Jordan River, and further back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So, how did this modern nation, this political entity baring the name Israel – a name that conjures up all this rich Biblical and extra-biblical history – come to exist?

Well, it goes back to what happened at the end of WWI. At the end of WWI, the British, having defeated the Ottoman Empire (if you want to know how that happened you can watch Lawrence of Arabia). But the British defeated the Ottoman Turks, who had been allied with Germany. And that brought to an end, 400 years of Turkish Muslim rule over the land that had been known as Israel at one time. 

It wasn’t called Israel anymore, and hadn’t been for almost 2,000 years. The Romans had renamed it Syria-Palestine, when they drove the Jews out in the second century. And the name stuck. By the way, if you’ve ever wondered where they got the name Palestine, it’s just the Latin for Philistine.

There were Jews and “Philistinians” fighting in Gaza 3,000 years ago. David killed Goliath on the border of Israel and Gaza. The people living there today are not the same people that lived back then, and we can’t lump all Palestinians together, or all Israelis together either. There are Christian Palestinians, and Christian Israelis, just like there are Christian Texans and Christian Mexicans (for example). The conflict is much more complicated than just cowboys and Indians – good guys and bad guys. But still, the fighting over that particular piece of land is nothing new. As King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

In any case, back to WWI…

By that time, Israel/Palestine had been through the hands of several Muslim empires, known as caliphates, ever since about A.D. 635. During which time, smaller communities of Jews had been slowly migrating back into the region, and back to Jerusalem, just as there were other groups of Jews migrating to other places, and settling in other countries across the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Europe.

The Jews who migrated back to Palestine, and those living under Islamic caliphates, were generally well treated by the Muslim kingdoms they lived in, and that was no different with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire rose to power in 1299, took over rule of Palestine in the early 1500s, and they had controlled it ever since, until the end of WWI.

By 1900, the Ottoman Empire was huge, and it controlled a vast area of the Middle East. And when it was defeated along with the rest of the Central Powers in WWI, the British and the French took control of all that territory, and with the help of Woodrow Wilson, they carved up the Middle East like a Thanksgiving turkey without any regard for the local inhabitants of places like Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

All the tribes in these places, had lived in relative peace for centuries under Ottoman rule. That was no longer the case when Britian, France, and the U.S started running the ballgame.

Most of the problems that exist in the Middle East today, can be traced directly to the creation of all these artificial state boundaries that never existed before, and which completely disregarded the culture of the people living in those places.

Imagine it like this. Say that we have a chili-cook off here at church, and every family brings in their own pot of chili…

I use chili for this analogy because, when it comes to chili, everyone has their own recipes and individual styles. If 20 people make chili, we’ll have 21 different kinds of chili. So, say we have 20 pots of chili simmering in crock-pots all nice and neat, in the social room here at church.

And then, while we’re all having church, Big Bad Dom Nepote wanders off into the social room, pulls out a huge hundred-gallon pot, and proceeds to dump everyone’s chili into that, stir it all together, and then put it all back into the crock-pots, and come back and sit down as if nothing happened.

That’s what our government, along with the British and the French did to the Middle East after WWI. They were trying to make everything equal, and they were trying to create order out of a cultural situation that they didn’t understand – that looked like chaos, but it wasn’t. That caused them to rip apart the centuries of order and structure that were already there. So, they ended up creating disorder and chaos instead.

They couldn’t fathom the idea, that some people don’t like corn in their chili.

Some people don’t like beans in it.

Some like it spicy, and some don’t.

Texas makes chili one way, and Cincinnati makes it another.

So, the British and the French, thinking that all chili was the same thing, made a big chaotic stew that the people living in the Middle East – whether they happen to be Christian, Muslim, or Jew – have been trying to pick through ever since.

Now, what about the Jews? That’s the group we’re primarily concerned with at present. Well, the Jews, or Historical Israel as I refer to them, and as we surveyed last week, had been persecuted in just about every country of Eastern and Western Europe and Russia for almost 2,000 years.

So, in the late 1800s they were finally fed up, and they formed a peaceful, political movement, called the World Zionist Organization, whose stated intention was “to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.”[1]

They wanted to go back to the land of Israel, and form it into a modern nation. But they needed help to do this.

And after WWI, they had the British to help them. The British government was sympathetic to the Zionist movement, so after they took control of the land previously ruled by the Ottomans, including Palestine, they began laying the foundation for the establishment of a Jewish State.

But if this was going to happen, it was going to happen slowly. They weren’t very careful with the creation of the other Middle Eastern states, but they knew with this one, they had to be precise, and there was a lot of disagreement about it, even within Parliament. The British wanted to help, but they dragged their feet on it.

Then WWII happened, and when the whole world saw what the Nazis had done to the Jews, the process of creating a Jewish state was expedited. But by that time, it wasn’t solely a British decision any longer. After WWII it was in the hands of the newly formed United Nations. And the United Nations, at that time, looked to the United States for guidance and leadership.

So, that meant, that the creation of a Jewish state, was in the hands of an international organization that was looking, not just to the United States, but to the Executive Branch of the United States government for guidance and direction about what to do, and about whether or not to do it at all. If this new country was going to be formed, it couldn’t survive without support from the United States, and the President in particular.

Back to the story I started at the beginning of all this.

In all the intervening years between 1917 and 1947, when the U.N. was set to decide this matter – farmer, soldier, Harry S. Truman, had become President Truman. And President Truman wanted nothing to do with being involved in a such a monumental, world-altering decision. He believed it was right for the Jews to have their own country, but there was too much pressure on him to make a decision, in terms of he being the main guy to make it a reality.

He had pressure on him from the Arabs in the region who didn’t want a Jewish State, he had pressure from his own State Department that didn’t want us involved in creating a Jewish State. He had pressure from the British, pressure from the Jews, and pressure from the Christians in our country who supported the Jews.

By late 1947, Truman had been lobbied so vigorously and rudely by all these different groups, including prominent Jewish leaders, that he basically washed his hands of the whole thing, and told the U.N. to do whatever they wanted. He had become completely unapproachable on the issue of a Jewish homeland, and he would not take a single meeting with anyone who wanted to talk about it. Which meant, without U.S. leadership, it probably wouldn’t happen. 

And so, knowing they were nearly doomed, in a last-ditch effort, the most prominent Jewish leader alive at the time, the man with the most influence, who would become Israel’s first President – his name was Dr. Chaim Weizmann – he flew to America to talk to the President.

And Truman knew this man really well, and respected him, but he refused to talk, even to him.

There was only one person in the world that could talk to Harry Truman about this, in that crucial moment of all moments for the Jews, and it was his old friend Eddie Jacobson.

So, one morning, Jacobson flew in from Kansas City, and as the story goes, he walked into the Oval Office, completely unannounced – as only he could – and he had an honest chat with his friend.

At this point, there’s a lot more details that I don’t have time to tell, but when it was all said and done, his friend had convinced him to meet the Jewish leader Chaim Weizmann, and afterwards, the President made it known to the entire world, with all the authority of his office, that he would support the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, and that it would have the full backing of the United States.

The U.N. voted, and passed the resolution in November of 1947, and on May 14, 1948, Israel declared its sovereignty. 12 minutes later, the United States became the first nation to recognize them, and a few minutes after that, the other world superpower – the Soviet Union – recognized them as well. At that point, it was a done deal, at least for the Jews.

The modern State of Israel, though primarily populated with “historical Israel,” cannot be exactly the same, because there are non-Jewish people also living within its borders. And it’s definitely not the same thing as Biblical Israel – as part one of this series outlines very carefully.

Unfortunately, this modern manifestation of Israel has had nothing but war and terrorism ever since it’s formation.

And, if we take the prophecies in the Bible seriously, then the indication from Scripture, is that, that particular piece of land will continue to have war, and terrorism until the day, when a remnant of the Jewish people living there, will choose to call on the Son of God, the one whom their ancestors pierced on the hill of Golgotha outside of Jerusalem.

Those aren’t my words.

That’s not my prediction.

That comes from the prophet Zechariah, who wrote of a time, long in his future, a time that the world has still never seen – a time when the armies of the whole world would surround Jerusalem to finally see it destroyed. And when they do, he says:

“Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights on a day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south. You will flee by my mountain valley, for it will extend to Azel. You will flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him. On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness. It will be a unique day—a day known only to the LORD—with no distinction between day and night. When evening comes, there will be light. On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half of it east to the Dead Sea and half of it west to the Mediterranean Sea, in summer and in winter. The LORD will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one LORD, and his name the only name” (Zechariah 14:3-9, NIV).

There will be peace one day in Jerusalem. But only when the King Returns. That’s how Zechariah puts it.

Paul says it like this, in Romans 11:25-29:

“I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. As it is written: ‘The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.’ As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.”

Now, as we close this topic today, and as we close this section of Romans out, I’m not going to pretend that I understand what all this means. I don’t. Paul calls it a “mystery,” and seems to indicate that when our time is over – when there are no more Gentile Christians left on the earth – when we’ve all been hunted down and killed by the Beast… then, somehow, God will bring the survivors of Historical Israel, and the inhabitants of Modern Israel at that time, back into the Olive Tree of Biblical Israel.

There’s all manner of theories about that, but we don’t know for sure.

That seems to be what Paul is saying, in Romans 11. But, full disclosure, I don’t know for sure what he means. I’m patching together a series of different verses to come to that conclusion, but I don’t know for sure. I want to be clear about that. This is a really difficult topic to understand, even with Paul talking about it so much. And even so, I wish he’d given us just a little bit more. But I guess he said what he was supposed to say, and what God wanted him to say.

What we can be sure of, is what Zechariah boils down for us in verse 9 of that 14th Chapter:

“The LORD will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one LORD, and his name the only name.”

As important as the name Israel is – as important as it is for us to understand what it means and how it’s used and what it really refers to… As much as we, as the Church, cannot escape our connection to the name Israel – Israel is not the name we revere above all other names.

Jesus Christ is the one we give that honor to.

To him, and him alone, be all the glory in Heaven, and on Earth.

I think that’s how we conclude this topic the best – by saying, whatever happens, however it goes down, whatever God has in mind for the Jews… Jesus is still the King. And that’s how Paul closes this subject as well – with a doxology, a praise to God, in the final verses of Chapter 11…

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them?’ For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen” (Romans 11:33-36, NIV).

[1] See, “Zionism: World Zionist Organization (WZO),” at Jewish Virtual Library –

(www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/world-zionist-organization-wzo)

All three of these chapters can be found in the second volume of Totally Righteous: 150 Sermons from Paul’s Letter to the Romans…

The Three Israels – Part 2: Historical Israel

The Three Israels – Part 2: Historical Israel

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 1st 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” (1st 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 12th 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 12th Legion was an elite unit, they had a very prestigious history and reputation, and were founded originally by Julius Caesar. The 12th 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 12th 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 1st 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.