The following "Question" was asked by an attendee at the 2005 Shepherds' Conference (a ministry of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California), and was "Answered" by John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from "General Session #10 John MacArthur - Q&A."  A copy of the CD, cassette tape, or MP3 can be obtained by going to:  www.shepherdsconference.org  ©2005. All Rights Reserved. Grace Community Church.

Questioner

Recently, within our church, there’s been some division and even broken families, regarding teachings that, among other things, say that the church has replaced Israel.  Are these doctrines correct or incorrect?

John MacArthur's Answer

Look, what does the Old Testament say is the future of Israel?  You heard it this morning.  What does Ezekiel 37 say?  That “the valley of dry bones” is Israel and that there’s going to come salvation to Israel and there’s going to come the application of the new covenant to Israel; and God’s going to give them his Spirit, God’s going to make a covenant of peace, He’s going to take away the stony heart, plant a heart of flesh; etc. etc. etc.  The apostle Paul comes along in Romans and says Israel’s going to be saved, because the gifts and callings of God are not subject to repentance.  Is there a future for Israel?  That’s exactly what the Old Testament promises.  My view of Israel’s future has nothing to do with the New Testament, although I think it’s reinforced in New Testament, clearly. 

My view of Israel’s future is related directly to Old Testament promises.  Just take the New Testament out of the picture, okay?  And take a believing Jew like, let’s say, Zecharias, the father of John the Baptist, okay?  He’s a priest; knows the Old Testament really well.  The Messiah is coming, he knows, because an angel told him that he and his old wife are going to finally have a child, and that child is going to be the forerunner of the Messiah.  Zecharias hears this and he explodes, “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, for He has visited and redeemed his people, and raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as He spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets.”  What do you think Zecharias thought?  What do you think he thought the Old Testament promised Israel?  Salvation!  “He’s coming, that we should be saved,” he says, “to perform the mercy promised to our father, and remember his holy covenant, the oath which He swore to our father Abraham.”  He swore it! 

God even passed through pieces in Genesis 18, didn’t He?  To seal that covenant.  He promised it.  It’s not just going to be us, because Isaiah the prophet said that “it would go to the Gentiles also, but God is going to fulfill a covenant with us.” 

There’s no way to interpret the Old Testament, honestly, other than with a consistent hermeneutic, okay?  Whatever the rules of interpretation are with regard to narrative or history, they don’t change with prophecy.  If you’re going to have a literal, historical, grammatical hermeneutic to interpret the Old Testament, then stay with it. 

If you go back to what you heard Al [Mohler] talking about this morning—go back to Deuteronomy 27, 28, 29 in that section of blessing and cursing and ask yourself this, “Were the blessings on Israel literal or figurative?”  Were the blessings for obedience to Israel really intended for the church, or were they intended for Israel?  Well, it’s easy to answer the question, because the blessings and the cursings came in the same event, and if you ask the question, “Were the curses given to Israel intended for Israel?” the answer is “yes” because they all came to pass.  Everything that you heard read this morning—and a whole lot more—out of Deuteronomy 28, you can show in history actually happened to Israel, right down to women eating their own afterbirth and their own children in the horrific siege that came against them.  So, if the curses all came to pass, literally, in the history of Israel, why would we split the hermeneutic and say the blessings were all intended for some nonexistent group of people, but not Israel.  On the basis of what do you make that kind of shift? 

People say to me sometimes, “Are you a dispensationalist?”  I don’t know what you mean by that, but if I think you mean what you mean, no.  But, let me tell you in one sentence what I believe about Israel: that the promises of God to the nation, in the Old Testament, were to the nation and will be fulfilled to the nation.  That has nothing to do—my hope is, you know, as somebody said, “My hope is built on nothing less than Scoffield’s notes and Moody Press.”  That’s not—I’m not looking at systems; I’m just saying, if you’re fair with the text, it seems to me there’s a future for Israel.  If you look in the book of Revelation, eschatologically, you see two witnesses and a great revival in the eleventh chapter of Revelation, which seems to me to launch the revival, and you see a 144,000 Jews out of every tribe…  Once you say it doesn’t mean that—if I can’t trust that it means what it says it means—then why would I trust what you think it means?  You better do a lot of convincing to convince me that you have the inside track on the secret thing that no one can see in the text.

So, I think Zecharias expected, when the Messiah came, that God was going to fulfill the promised redemption to Israel.  Jesus came; the kingdom’s here, “Repent; here’s the kingdom”; they didn’t do it; so what happens He carves out a people; goes out into the highways and byways.  The people who were originally invited, as He tells in the parable, aren’t going to come, so He calls another people—the Church, as constituted—but the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.  Yet, in the future, I believe the Bible indicates that Israel—a remnant of Israel—will be redeemed and there will be a kingdom. 

Listen, I don’t believe for a minute that eschatology is some kind of amorphous blur, subject to 50 different viewpoints.  I just don’t think God operates with that kind of ambiguity. 

When I read the Bible in the beginning, I think it means what it says.  I think the Scripture is precise enough that if God said He created something on the first day, that’s what He did.  If the precision of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 is indicative of how God tells the beginning of the story, then I’m willing to trust him for the same precision at the end of the story.  We have a lot of good discussion about these kinds of things with people who have differing views on eschatology, and I certainly don’t want to buy all of the concoctions that have come up.  I’m not a big eschatological chart guy, with everything in its place, because I do believe that Peter says, “Look, the prophets looked at what they wrote, trying to figure out what it meant.”  So, when you’re looking at eschatology, there are going to be a lot of things that are going to be hard to understand.  Peter said about Paul, “He’s hard to understand!”  If Peter can’t figure out Paul, how are we supposed to figure out John in the apocalypse, down to every horn? 

So, I understand that, but there are some sweeping components of redemptive history, and I just don’t think that the original intended promises of God, given to his chosen people, Israel—who, by the way, He has preserved until today, and I’ve never met a Hittite, a Hivite, a Perezite, a Jebusite, or any other –ite, except an Israelite—so, the fact that God has preserved these people, that they’re back in the land, duly constituted as a nation (however, without the new covenant yet, and I know also the Old Testament says there’s going to be a huge purging of them in judgment)—I just take it at face value that God still has a future for them, because that’s what the Old Testament says.  I just find it very difficult to say, “Well, I don’t think it means that.”  That’s a hard one for me. 

You say, “Well, what about the Israel of God?”  That’s easy.  The Israel of God are saved Jews.  Not everybody who’s a Jew outwardly is a Jew inwardly, right?  Romans 2: it’s not about being circumcised on the outside, but being circumcised on the inside.  Or Romans 9, if you like.  So, I do believe that prophetic literature needs to be taken with the same hermeneutical approach that the rest does. 

I understand the challenge of all this.  That’s one of the reasons that I wrote the book on the Second Coming, as kind of an addendum to the commentaries I did on Revelation.  But, if you want to dig into this a little bit, let me suggest something to you.  I don’t usually talk about my own tapes or CDs, but the series that I did on the end of the first chapter of Luke on Zecharias is really a look at how you understand the transition from the Old Testament to the New.  In fact, I met with Daniel Lappin (?)—Daniel Lappin is probably the most well-known rabbi in America (and we’ve had some great talks; in fact, I’ve even spoken at his organization)—and he said to me one day, “I do not understand the New Testament.  I don’t know how it connects.  I don’t understand it.  Can you give me something that would help me to understand it?”  I said, “How about this…  You’re a rabbi.  Would you like to understand the connection between the Old Testament and the coming of Jesus and the future of Israel from the viewpoint of an Old Testament priest?  Not a New Testament apostle; an Old Testament priest.”  He said, “Absolutely.”  So, I gave him, I don’t know, 6, 8, or however many tapes on the benedictus by Zacharias, because that’s exactly what it is.  There’s an Old Testament saint’s view of what the coming of Jesus means to the promises to Israel in the Old Testament. 

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