Israel in Prophecy — the Series - Who Is Israel?

Israel in Prophecy — the Series

Who is Israel?

_______________

Following making a second covenant (Deu 29:1) with the uncircumcised children of the nation that left Egyptian bondage,

Moses spoke the words of this song until they were finished, in the ears of all the assembly of Israel:

Give ear, O heavens, and I [Moses] will speak,

and let the earth hear the words of my mouth.

May my teaching drop as rain,

my speech distill as the dew,

like the gentle rain upon the tender grass,

and like showers upon the herb.

For I will proclaim the name of the Lord;

ascribe greatness to our God!

The Rock, his work is perfect,

for all his ways are justice.

A God of faithfulness and without iniquity,

just and upright is he..

They have dealt corruptly with him;

they are no longer his children because they are blemished;

they are a crooked and twisted generation.

Do you thus repay the Lord,

you foolish and senseless people?

Is not he your father, who created you,

who made you and established you?

Remember the days of old;

consider the years of many generations;

ask your father, and he will show you,

your elders, and they will tell you.

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,

when he divided mankind,

he fixed the borders of the peoples

according to the number of the sons of God [Israel].

But the Lord’s portion is his people,

Jacob his allotted heritage (Deu 31:30 & 32:1-9)

Moses speaks of the Lord, the Logos. “They” are the nation that left Egypt, as well as their children that learned the ways of their fathers (Ezek 20:18, 21). The Lord’s heritage forsook Him, scoffed at Him (Deu 32:15), and forgot the One who gave the nation birth (v.18). And because of their blemish of lawlessness, they were not accepted even though they were penned in God’s rest (Ps 95:10-11) on the tenth day of the first month (Josh 4:19), penned as the paschal lamb to be sacrificed for the household of God.

The Lord saw it and spurned them,

because of the provocation of his sons and daughters.

And he said, “I will hide my face from them;

I will see what their end will be,

For they are a perverse generation,

children in whom is no faithfulness (vv. 19-20)

This was the history of the physically circumcised nation, and this is the history of the spiritually circumcised nation. The Lord has hidden His face from Israel to see what the nation’s fate will be. And what He saw and now sees is a nation that whores after every god imaginable, making of sticks and stones and the works of their hands idols to which they sacrificed and continue to sacrifice their firstborn sons and daughters. One nation, Israel. One nation that goes from physical to spiritual. One history that goes from worshiping touchable abominations to worshiping intangible imaginations. The inheritance of the Lord has, truly, many disciples being called, but few chosen (Matt 22:14). For the many have learned the ways of their physical fathers, not their Father in heaven. Their statutes form the faith once delivered, but delivered in the 3^rd and 4^th Centuries.

The tendency of the Sabbatarian Churches of God, a theological division within greater Christianity and the division in which The Philadelphia Church finds itself, has been to believe that Christ Jesus controls every act or action of the spiritually holy nation of God. Therefore, more than a century ago pseudo Sabbatarian scholars determined that greater Christianity, because of its attempt to enter God’s rest on the following or 8^th day, cannot be the Body of Christ, but must necessarily consist of “nominal Christians” in counterfeit fellowships. The reasoning is that Jesus would never have allowed such a grievous violation of the laws of God to enter His Body; hence, when Sabbatarians researched the history of the “true Church,” Sabbath-observance was the trace used to track the Church. Unfortunately, to prevent the gates of hell from prevailing against the Church, the would-be scholars assigned Sabbath observance to schisms in the Body that did not keep the 7^th-day Sabbath.

But Christ Jesus as the Logos hid His face from a wicked and perverse nation and watched to see what the nation’s fate would be as the priests of Israel who sat in Moses’ seat lead the nation into captivity. As the Logos, Christ Jesus did not stop circumcised Israel from burning their firstborn children to Molech. Rather, after watching and because the nation would not keep His commandments, nor walk in His ways, and would not keep His Sabbaths, the Lord said, ‘“Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life, and I defiled them through their very gifts in their offering up all their firstborn, that I might devastate them. I did it that they might know that I am the Lord”’ (Ezek 20:25-26 emphasis added). He did not initiate the practice of circumcised Israel burning their firstborns, nor did He stop them. He observed them to see what the nation would do—and when the nation’s fate became apparent, He acted in a manner that revealed the awfulness of this practice to the nation. But Israel as a nation was not appalled by its sin. It took its practice of burning firstborns into the captivity from which it never returned.

When the early Church accepted false teachers as genuine ministers of God, a problem that Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude address, Christ Jesus as the Head of the Son of Man didn’t remove those who were false. He didn’t strike them dead. Rather, He allowed them to flourish until the spiritual nation, like its physical counterpart, defiled itself through its lawlessness. He, then, delivered the nation to Satan, the spiritual king of Babylon, so that through the destruction of the flesh, the spirit of some might be saved. Christ Jesus did to the greater Church exactly what the Apostle Paul commanded that the saints at Corinth do with the one who had his father’s wife (1 Cor 5:1-13). This was what the Logos did with the physically circumcised nation. As such, the Lord is consistent in His methodology. Satan is useful in destroying the flesh, in revealing the sinfulness of sin. Thus, Satan will be kept alive until a thousand years into the day of the Lord. He will then be loosed from the bottomless pit for long enough to remove the dross that has accumulated atop the spiritual nation of Israel during Christ’s millennial reign.

Disciples are, indeed, the children of God—but the reasoning that would have Christ immediately striking dead anyone who harmed these children is fallacious. Disciples are today the temple of God (1 Cor 3:16-17), but they are not many temples. They are not many nations. They are one temple, in one city, in one nation. And it is apparent that because disciples cannot today get along with one another, but divide and splinter into many slivers, with the larger divisions headquartered the farthest from the Jerusalem above, many are called but few will be chosen (Matt 22:14). The ones who will be chosen are one with Christ Jesus. The ones chosen will leave spiritual Babylon, with its underhanded and disgraceful ways, with its mindset of lawlessness, and will mentally journey to Judea where they will live as Israel. The ones chosen (as well as the many who will not be chosen) are presently being observed by the Lord to see what their fate will be. He is not intervening (with very few exceptions) to stop them from sinning, or to stop others, especially brethren, from taking advantage of them. He is observing, and recording. He is not forcibly correcting Israel, the spiritually holy nation of God, just as He did not prevent the physically circumcised nation from sinning. He will address their lawlessness by, again, turning them over to Satan, even to the point where the Jerusalem above was as desolate as the Jerusalem below was desolate following when Nebuchadnezzar took Israel captive.

The Israel of endtime prophesy is the holy nation of God, which, when the Son of Man is revealed (Luke 17:26-30), will be spiritually naked. This holy nation will not be today’s greater Church, or even today’s Christian Sabbatarian fellowships. It will not be the physically circumcised nation; i.e., Judaism. Rather, it will be all of humanity that hasn’t taken the mark of death (the tattoo of the Cross — chi xi stigma) unto itself. For all who endure to the end shall be saved. Endtime Israel is the nation that shall be saved from sin (Egypt) and death (Assyria), with its recovery from the north country (death) being the remembered event that causes its recovery from sin to be forgotten.

So who Israel in prophecy is cannot be answered by saying, “The Church.” The firstborn son of the last Eve, like the firstborn son of the first Eve, will slay his righteous brother, and will be marked for death. These two sons—a spiritual Cain and Abel—will account for most of Christianity and Judaism. Thus, the single nation that will remain when Christ returns does not, today, identify itself as Christian. It receives its calling and birth from above when the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh. It is today hostile to Christianity, and as such, unblemished by the Cross, Death, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. It is the third part of humanity that during the last half of the seven endtime years of tribulation will be tried by fire, being refined as silver is refined, and will be tested under pressure, being tested as gold is tested (Zech 13:9). It is a chosen generation, the great harvest of the earth. And today, it has no knowledge of what will happen to it once the Son of Man is revealed.

(to be continued)

[ Home ]