37-CHAPTER XXXI LITERAL AND SPIRITUAL ISRAEL

CHAPTER XXXI LITERAL AND SPIRITUAL ISRAEL

"How can it be expected that Israel will experience a literal, national restoration seeing that it is to the spiritual Israel that God grants His blessings? God has never given His promises simply to the literal Israel merely because they were Israelites after the flesh. Upon this the Scripture speaks expressly, especially in the Gospels and the Pauline epistles: ’Think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham’ (Matthew 3:9; comp. John 8:39). ‘For He is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh:but he is a Jew, who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the flesh’ (Romans 2:28-29; comp. Revelation 3:9). ‘Not all who are from Israel are Israel: neither because they are Abraham’s seed, are they all children . . . not the children of the flesh are children of God; but the children of the promise are reckoned for a seed’ (Romans 9:6-8).

"Therefore there is not to be expected for Israel as a people any outward, national, territorial restoration, but it is to the believing remnant, that is, the spiritual Israel, that the hope of Israel belongs, and this in a purely spiritual manner. This is fulfilled to the believing from Israel who belong to the New Testament church, and to the Gentiles whom God adds through the gospel and faith, and thus creates the New Testament people of God, the ’Israel after the spirit.’ ’For we are the circumcision, who worship God through the Spirit... and have no confidence in the flesh (Php 3:3). ’They who are of faith, these are sons of Abraham (Galatians 3:7; comp. 6:16).

"Thus not the whole literal Israel is in the true sense Israel. Physical birth has no eternal value with God, but the spiritual birth; not the literal circumcision as an external observance, but the spiritual circumcision of the heart (Colossians 2:11); therefore in no case the merely literal and outward but the spiritual and inward.

Doubtless ! No one denies it. God’s promises were never unconditional. This is a principle of His government in all times. The realization of the promises is always bound up with the faith of the receiver. In this the faith of the creature is indeed in no sense a desert, an equivalent, a "work," which annuls the character of the free grace of God. But it is the empty hand which the creature stretches out to God and in which He, out of free mercy, places the unmerited gift of His love. But if this empty hand be not stretched out, then God does not give His gifts of grace. Faith is indeed, not the basis but the condition of being blessed. It is thus with Israel. No one will say that it is the literal Israel as such that will have a standing of blessing in the coming kingdom of God, merely on the ground that they are literal children of Abraham. No, the promises of God given to him will only then and there be fulfilled when and where faith is present in Israel.

Therefore the counsel of God takes effect first in only the kernel of the nation believing in the Messiah. Through unbelief the great mass shut themselves out from the promised possession. Upon this follows judgment. Only a "shoot out of the root" remains, the "holy seed," the believing "remnant," out of which new life springs forth (Isaiah 6:13).

(b) But it was not with the spiritual Israel only, but with the literal in general that God established the covenant of the law at Sinai. "Behold, days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which My covenant they have broken" (Jeremiah 31:31-32). Thus it was the very ones who later broke the covenant with whom God had made it, that is, with the literal Israel as a nation, not merely with the "true" Israel, the later "remnant," the "spiritual seed" of the patriarchs. In the same way God’s "firstborn son," whom Pharaoh was to release, was certainly not only the pious in Israel, but Jacob’s whole bodily descendants who had lived some centuries in Egypt, the land of oppression (Exodus 4:22).

God’s "son" whom, according to the prophet Hosea, He had called out of Egypt, was likewise not only the "spiritual" Israel, but at the same time the company of men who presently offered unto the Baalim and burned incense to the carved images (Hosea 11:1-2). But above all, the whole structure of the history in the second book of Moses concerning the giving of the law at Sinai itself proves that God concluded His covenant not with merely a portion, namely with the believing among the bodily descendants of Abraham, but unmistakably with Israel as a people, with the entire company of the bodily descendants of the patriarch whom with uplifted hand He had brought out of Egypt. There is no difficulty in multiplying the proofs. One has only to read a single passage such as 1 Corinthians 10:3-5. Of course the great mass of Israel as a nation has gone the way of unbelief and must finally be broken out of the noble olive tree of the kingdom of God (Romans 11:20). Like the Pharisees of the time of Christ, these, by so doing, make the counsel of God of none effect for themselves (Luke 7:30). But this does not alter the fact that God on His part originally included them in the scope of His covenant.

(c) Seeing that the grace of God confers its free gift only upon faith, the practical outworking is that Israel’s national calling can only operate where true faith is present in Israel. Therefore now only the small company of believers, the remnant,¹ become the representatives of the ideal "Israel." Therefore this insignificant minority becomes the theocratic kernel of the nation, its heart, its true essence, its centre, its representative before God, the true "Israel." Thus thenceforth in the eyes of God only that is really "Israel" which is so inwardly (Romans 2:28-29; Romans 9:6-8; Revelation 3:9), and only the circumcision of the heart is counted as circumcision (Php 3:3; Colossians 2:11).

(d) Nevertheless these two points of view, the national and the spiritual, in no way exclude each other. Exactly here is one of the chief faults in the opposition to a future national restora­tion of Israel, that a contradiction is created which in fact does not exist; so that one does not reach the synthesis of these two opposite poles, their harmonious outlook, the release from tension.

What the Scripture testifies is, that the spiritual will at last occupy the whole frame of the national and literal (Isa. n:9; Zechariah 8:3; Zechariah 14:20-21; Joel 3:17), and the national and literal will reach its fulfillment and transfiguration only through and after this glorious victory of the spiritual (Ezekiel 37:15-24; Isaiah 11:11-13). This will come to pass through the future conversion of Israel as a nation by the appearing of Messiah (Revelation 1:7; Zechariah 12:10-14; Hosea 3:5); and thus the "Jewish miracle" will be wrought, and in this the saying of Adolf Saphir will reach its climax that "the history of Israel is the history of miracle, as it is the miracle of history" (Isaiah 52:8). Thus first will the practical synthesis be found. The tension in the Biblical-prophetic outlook for Israel between "spiritual" and "national-literal" will be resolved only eschatologically, that is, by the history of the End.

Naturally there is no salvation for Israel merely because they are bodily descendants of Abraham. Much rather does the whole prophecy of blessing of the Old Testament refer to the transformed and renewed Israel. The Old Testament gives not a single promise of rule and blessing to the converted Israel, neither while dwelling in the land nor while scattered among the nations because of their sins. But what shall we finally say if it pleases God to declare that one day, through special manifestations of His glory, the whole of Jacob’s bodily descendants then living on earth, shall attain to faith through sight of the returning Messiah: that the people who pierced Messiah shall at last confess Him (Revelation 1:7), and the "natural" branches which were broken off shall be regrafted into "their own olive tree," and so "all Israel shall be saved"? (Romans 11:21; Romans 11:23-24).

It is quite impossible to apply to the church spiritually the term "all Israel" used by Paul in this passage. The fourfold use in the context of the same term "Israel" makes clear in advance that Paul everywhere here uses the word in the same sense of the national, literal Israel. At the beginning (ver. 1) he declares, "I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin," where the word "Israelite" can only be meant in its literal sense of the apostle’s national association. Only a few verses later (7) he says, "What Israel sought that it did not attain," which again can refer only to the literal, earthly, national Israel. And in the immediate context of the section where he uses the term "all Israel" he has spoken directly of Israel in contrast to the Gentiles, so that this also beyond doubt can refer only to the earthly, literal people ("hardening in part [only] hath befallen Israel [and only] until the Savior of the Gentiles" has come in:ver. 25). And when he then, in the conclusion which he draws from the fact, immediately, in the very same sentence, declares that thus "all Israel" shall be saved, this closest possible connection makes it completely incon­testable that here, also, as in the three other places of this chapter, he speaks of Israel literal, not in some "spiritualized" sense, (that is, perhaps, the church). From the wider connection also of Romans 11:1-36 it further arises beyond doubt that the apostle speaks of the literal Israel (in part believing, in part unbelieving), even of the "natural branches" which have remained in "their own" olive tree, as well as of the "natural branches" which have been broken off from "their own" olive tree; so that at present only a portion of this Israel will be saved through faith; but by like faith, at the time of the End, when the broken off branches have been again ingrafted, then Israel shall be saved. The expression "all" stands in unmistakable contrast to the former two-fold division, that is, the natural branches which have remained in the olive tree and those which have been broken off. So shall this two-fold division be at last removed. Through the conversion of the Jews at the appearing of Messiah the faith of the little remnant extends to the whole body. TheliteralIsraelhasthusbecomespiritualIsrael. Abraham’s descendants according to the flesh have by conversion and regeneration become true sons of the patriarch and thus at the same time Israel according to the spirit (Galatians 3:9). Thenceforth the national is identical with the spiritual. The " remnant" hasbecomethewholepeople, and the saved national people are at the same time both literal descendants of Abraham and also his spiritual seed.

Thus is relieved the seeming conflict in the prophetic state­ments. Only in this manner will justice be done to the whole of these two lines of God-given prophetic words: on the one side the strong emphasis, expecially by John the Baptist, by the Lord Himself, and by Paul, that the bodily and the national is not the decisive factor, but the genuinely spiritual and inward; and on the other side the equally strong emphasis by many prophets that with the setting up of the coming kingdom of God there is connected a national restoration of Israel. The national will be spirit-filled and the spiritual will extend itself victoriously through the whole range of the literal and national. But by this our opening objection to the restoration of the national Israel in the visible kingdom of Messiah loses all force.

Notes ¹Isaiah 1:9; Isaiah 6:13; Isaiah 10:21; Isaiah 11:11; 1 Kings 19:18; Ezekiel 5:1-4; Romans 11:1-10.