Are we commanded to support the modern state of Israel

Gavin Ortlund

Recently, Tucker Carlson {journalist} and Ted Cruz {USA politician} had a conversation that highlighted a huge divide among contemporary Christians, especially American evangelicals: the relationship between the Bible and American foreign policy.... The word “command” came up in that clip and several times later in the conversation
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I want to engage with this question—not to attack Ted Cruz, whom God bless—but because his comments represent a set of theological assumptions that many modern Christians hold and that I believe we need to examine.

First, there is the identification of Israel as God’s covenant people in the Bible with the modern nation-state of Israel, founded in 1948.
Second, there is the application of biblical promises such as Genesis 12:3—something we will examine directly—to contemporary American foreign policy.
Third, there is the association of current events in the world and at the national level with biblical end-times prophecies, often interpreted within a framework called dispensationalism, which we will describe.

Many sincere and wonderful Christians hold these views, but historically they are unusual. Without intending to provoke anyone, I have to say strongly that some beliefs now taken for granted as the "Christian view" were not the Christian view throughout church history; in fact, they simply did not exist until very recently.
Before getting into theology, let me clarify that I personally support the idea that the United States should support Israel as an ally currently facing incredible evil. I am also deeply concerned about the rise of antisemitism in the world today, which is such a dark and wicked phenomenon.
But what exactly should that support look like?...
My concern is that we must not misuse theology when appealing to contemporary Christians about foreign policy. Our foreign policy should be informed by biblical principles of justice, wisdom, and compassion—not by an excessively literal reading of particular biblical passages extracted from the unfolding biblical narrative.
I hope this can be a pastoral approach for people thinking about how to serve others: the New Testament identifies anyone who trusts in Jesus as the true Israel—as a member of the true Israel and a child of Abraham.
Paul documents this in Galatians 3, where he quotes the Old Testament and says that the recipients of this blessing are those who trust in Jesus. The passage Paul quotes is Genesis 12:3, the verse Ted Cruz referred to. It comes from God’s call to Abram, later called Abraham, and refers to his descendants, with whom God establishes a special covenant. The central part of the promise says, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” The election of this particular nation, Israel, had the purpose of blessing all the nations of the earth.
From the beginning, God’s concern and interest in Israel had this universal horizon. The promise of Genesis 12:3 is repeated throughout the Old Testament—in Genesis 26 with Isaac and Genesis 28 with Jacob, the other patriarchs. It is fascinating to study how this develops in the Old Testament. You find the promise on the lips of non-Israelites such as Balam in the Book of Numbers, and it is constantly echoed in the Psalms, the prophets, and elsewhere. We could look at an example from Psalm 105.
As the story develops, this promise becomes intertwined with a wide range of other promises God makes to his covenant people. The development of Old Testament eschatology—the teaching about the last things—is fascinating.
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The point for us is that the New Testament teaches that all those promises made to Israel find their fulfillment in Christ. All God’s promises are “yes” in Christ. Gentiles who believe in Jesus are grafted into the people to whom these covenant promises were made, and they become their recipients.
As Paul says in Galatians, those who have faith in Jesus are children of Abraham and receive the Abrahamic blessing. This is the message of the Gospel: reconciliation with God and forgiveness of sins through Christ, with everything that entails.
To visualize it, we can use the image of an olive tree, which Paul uses in Romans 9–11. This is probably the most important New Testament passage concerning the nature of Israel. In the first century, a crisis emerged: the Jewish people had not accepted their Messiah, yet Gentiles were streaming into the Church. The question arose of how these two groups would relate to each other. For example, did Gentiles need to be circumcised? The first church council, in Acts 15, said no.
This is the question Paul addresses in Romans 9–11. Can we make sense of all this?
The first thing he says is that not everyone descended from Israel belongs to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham simply because they are his physical descendants. In other words, being a physical descendant of Abraham is not enough to guarantee that one receives the promises made to his descendants. One does not enter the sphere of covenant blessing merely by being a biological descendant; one must embrace the one for whom Abraham was chosen from the beginning—the Messiah, Jesus.
The metaphor is an olive tree. In Romans 11, branches are broken off so that other branches, shoots from a wild olive tree, can be grafted in and receive nourishment from the root. This is a real process called grafting: a branch from one tree can be joined to another and become part of it. That is the metaphor Paul uses to describe Gentiles being grafted into God’s covenant people.
Incidentally, this is not replacement so much as addition. It is not that you throw away one tree and replace it with a new one.
There is one tree. That is the simple point I want to emphasize in this video: there are not two different trees, one for the Church and one for Israel. God has one coherent plan of salvation unfolding through the story narrated by the Bible. Since God’s people today are defined not by ethnicity but by faith in Jesus, anyone who has faith in Christ and is baptized in the name of the Trinity—whether Jewish, Palestinian, American, Chinese, Brazilian, or anything else—is Abraham’s people and inherits all the promises of God’s covenant with Israel. If you are united to Israel’s Messiah, you therefore inherit all the promises of Israel.
This is also the language Paul uses in Galatians 3: access to the blessing of Abraham comes through faith in Christ.
Therefore, we must clarify that the entity to which the promise in Genesis 12:3 was made is ontologically distinct from the modern nation-state of Israel. The first was a theocracy, where, for example, people could be stoned for certain crimes. The second is a democratic republic with a heterogeneous population of Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, and others.
I want to insist again that this does not mean we should lack deep concern for the modern state of Israel. God bless Israel. I pray for Israel. It simply means that the modern state is not the same thing referred to in the Bible in verses such as Genesis 12:3, in a way that obligates all contemporary Christians to support a particular foreign policy.
Sometimes it is argued that the formation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 fulfilled particular biblical prophecies. Without going too deeply into the details, I will make one observation: theological framework involved in that judgment has simply never existed throughout church history. Dispensationalism is a modern innovation, arising primarily in the nineteenth century and spreading during the twentieth century, for example through the Scofield Reference Bible. Some people dispute its details, but overall this theological view simply did not exist among the church fathers, in the medieval Church, among the Reformers, or among the Puritans in the modern era. It was not how Christians historically interpreted the relationship between Israel and the Church.
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There is much more that could be said, but let me conclude with a pastoral word, because I genuinely feel the darkness at this moment. I am heartbroken by the evil present in the world. We live in such unstable times. Things that were established after the Second World War and remained positive through the second half of the twentieth century now seem to be shaken, disrupted, and made more precarious at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I mentioned the rise of antisemitism, which seems to be increasing. I regard antisemitism as demonic, and it therefore seems that demons are at work. There is the brutality and chaos of the world right now, which I think all of us feel: wars breaking out, families divided by immigration policies, so much fear and anger, unrest, and everything else. Without making a specific judgment about these controversial matters, I think we can all recognize that tremendous evil is at work in the world, and people are searching for hope.
(...) beneath all these theological questions lies a deeper need: to place our hope in the right place. That is what guides a video like this from a pastoral perspective. I deeply desire for Christians to place their hope in the true hope, and there are many ways we can drift away from it. (...) Christ’s return will straighten everything that is crooked. We can live with confidence that truth and goodness will ultimately prevail. (...) we all go through moments when it honestly seems as though evil is winning. You feel like a little hobit facing Sauron, thinking, “We will never make it. There is no way this evil can be defeated.” Many of us feel that way these days. I find myself needing to return to this every single day.
For those of us who follow Jesus, we must remember that we have a hope that nothing happening in this world can take away—current global or national events, or the personal crises we may be experiencing. Our ultimate hope is something no one can stop: the return of Christ, who will straighten everything that is crooked, restore perfect shalom to the world, and bring salvation to those who await him.
The positive aspect of living in times of upheaval is that people are searching for hope. We have real opportunities to tell people that heaven is real, that heaven is literally a place—I say “literally,”... —the resurrection of the body and eternal life are real, peace in your heart is real, and forgiveness that makes you white as snow is real. Hope is real. God is real. It is all found in Christ.
I want to proclaim that message as loudly as possible. In the midst of upheaval, let us focus on this and share it with others. This is not a complete treatment of theology, but thank you for watching.
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Dr Gavin Ortlund is a pastor, author, speaker, and apologist for the Christian faith. He is a husband to Esther, and a father to Isaiah, Naomi, Elijah, Miriam, and Abigail. He serves as President of Truth Unites, Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville, and Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary.
Gavin has a Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary in historical theology, and an M.Div from Covenant Theological Seminary.

i class="fa fa-youtube"> The original video can be found here on the YT