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THE HOPE OF ISRAEL

TONY BENSON

THE FUNDAMENTAL importance of this subject to Christadelphians is easy to demonstrate. When Brother John Thomas was prevailed upon to write down the substance of the message which he preached throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain he chose to call the resulting book Elpis Israel, the Hope of Israel, because he believed that this phrase encapsulated the true gospel message. To this day the magazine which bears the title of our community, The Christadelphian, is declared to be “dedicated wholly to the Hope of Israel”.

This subject, so fundamental to Christadelphians, is not part of the beliefs of Christendom. One looks in vain amongst its many churches and sects for any use of the phrase “the hope of Israel”. Some believe in the return of Jesus Christ to the earth; some believe that there will one day be the Kingdom of God upon the earth; but nowhere is there a true understanding of the way in which these vital teachings are based upon the promises which God made to the fathers of old, and which primarily concern the nation of Israel. In the compass of one article it will not be possible to go to these Old Testament promises and expound them in detail. Instead we shall mainly restrict ourselves to the New Testament and show how vital the Old Testament promises are to the understanding of the New.

Traditional emphasis

The superficial reader of the New Testament may be surprised at the great emphasis which Christadelphians have traditionally placed upon the Hope of Israel. It must first be stated that no one who does not believe in the full inspiration of the Scriptures will be able to see its true importance, for unless there is a belief that the words of the Old Testament writers are no less the Word of God than the words of Jesus himself due weight will not be given to the many references in the New Testament to the Old. It is true that there are no detailed statements in the Gospels as to what the promises to the fathers were, but this is not because these promises are of little importance, but because the New Testament does not repeat in detail what was revealed in the Old.

We read many times in the New Testament of the gospel, the ‘good news’ as the word means. It is generally assumed that the good news is that Jesus Christ has died and was raised again in order that our sins may be forgiven. This is indeed good news, but it is not primarily what the New Testament means by the gospel. At one stage in his ministry Jesus sent forth the twelve apostles “to preach the kingdom of God”, and they therefore “departed, and went through the towns, preaching the gospel” (Lk. 9:2,6). The gospel the twelve preached was thus the Kingdom of God. They certainly did not preach about the death and resurrection of Jesus, for they did not understand this themselves, as the same chapter reveals (vv. 44,45). They would, however, have known the promises made to Abraham and David, and the teachings of the prophets, which concern God’s purpose to set up a worldwide Kingdom centred on Israel and ruled by His Son the Messiah, the anointed one. Moreover, they had come to recognise Jesus of Nazareth as that anointed one, the Christ, for again in that same chapter it is recorded that in response to the question of Jesus, “But whom say ye that I am?”, Peter declared, “The Christ of God” (v.20).

What then of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Is that not also part of the gospel message? Clearly it is, for Philip preached “good tidings concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 8:12, RV; the AV inexplicably fails to bring out here that the verb is euaggelizo, to preach the gospel). However, the gospel is primarily that of God’s purpose to set up His Kingdom in fulfilment of the promises to the fathers of old, and secondarily that His Son died and rose again to open the way for sinners to be able to live in that Kingdom.

The promises to Abraham

The good news that there is forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ is in fact implicit in the promises to Abraham. The sin of Adam and Eve caused the curse of sin and death to pass upon the whole human race. The opposite of cursing is blessing, and the promises to Abraham begin with the promise of universal blessing:

“And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed” (Gal. 3:8).

This blessing is that of the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God is the means by which sin will first be restrained in the earth, and then ultimately removed altogether, enabling death itself to be no more. Thus will be removed the curse that came upon the earth when Adam and Eve sinned.

This blessing, this removal of sin and death from the earth, becomes a matter of individual response, however, as the Apostle Peter makes clear in his preaching to the Jews:

“Ye are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, And in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed. Unto you first God, having raised up His Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities” (Acts 3:25,26).

As individuals we need to be turned away from the way of sin that leads inevitably to eternal death; and the inspired preaching of the apostles, recorded for us in the Scriptures, about the death and resurrection of Christ, causes us to “Repent... and be converted, that (our) sins may be blotted out” (v.19). If we do this we come under the covenant which God made with Abraham.

The means by which we come under this covenant is baptism. Repentance means to have a change of mind, and conversion means to change direction. Having had our minds changed by the preaching of the gospel, and desiring to change direction from the way that leads to eternal death in the grave to the way that leads to eternal life in the Kingdom, we are required to mark that change by complete immersion in water. By this we “put on Christ” and become “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:27,29). Immersion in water is practised by other sects, but they do not give to it the prime importance that the Scriptures demand of us. They do not recognise that salvation is only to be found in being part of Abraham’s seed, heirs to the promises made to him, and that the only way to become Abraham’s seed is by baptism, following a belief in the gospel of the Kingdom and the name of Jesus Christ.

The new covenant

Returning to Peter’s words in Acts 3:25,26, we are powerfully reminded there of the fact that our hope is the Hope of Israel. Peter was speaking to Jews, and he states that “the covenant” is that “which God made with our fathers”. God’s purpose is primarily with the Jews; God sent His Son “Unto you first”. Jesus spoke of a covenant when he instituted the memorial feast: “this is my blood of the new testament (or covenant), which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Mt. 26:28). There is only one covenant for the remission of sins; the covenant which all believers remember at the memorial feast is the covenant which God made with the Jewish fathers referred to by Peter.

That this covenant refers primarily to Israel is clear from Hebrews 8:8-12. Here the writer quotes at length from Jeremiah 31 regarding the “new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah”, a covenant which involved the Jewish nation turning to God so that “their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more”. It is sometimes argued that the use of this quotation in the New Testament means that its real application is to believers in Christ in this present age. However, this is not so, for Jeremiah 31 and the surrounding chapters are clearly about the full restoration of Israel and their reconciliation to God at the beginning of the Millennial Kingdom. The new covenant, the covenant which God made with Abraham, and which is fulfilled in the work of Christ, applies primarily to the Jewish nation, and those of them who survive the dreadful events surrounding Christ’s return will come under that covenant and be cleansed from their sins at the commencement of the Kingdom. However, God has graciously offered to Gentiles in this present age the opportunity to turn to Him and be forgiven their sins, being counted as righteous through their faith, as Abraham was (Rom. 4:3,11,12), and being required to demonstrate the reality of their faith by their works, as Abraham did (Jas. 2:21-24).

That God’s purpose with Israel has not been nullified by their disobedience is made clear in Romans 11. The olive tree of Israel is not cut down, it is merely a question of some of its branches being cut off; and those amongst the Gentiles who respond to the gospel message are regarded as grafted into this olive tree (v.17). The blindness of Israel has not caused God to change His mind regarding Israel, for “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (v.29); and when Christ, the great Deliverer, comes, he “shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: for this is My covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins” (Rom. 11:16,27, citing Isa. 59:20,21). The matter is summarised in Romans 15:8,9, where Paul declares:

“Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers: and that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy”.

Jesus Christ came primarily to the Jewish nation, to fulfil the covenant made with their forefathers. The bringing of the Gentiles into that covenant is a secondary thing. We Gentiles have no right to question this, for God does what He wills. Rather we should be thankful that He has shown such mercy to us sinners, and glorify Him accordingly.

The promises to David

We have concentrated so far in this article on demonstrating how forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ fits into the Hope of Israel. We have been concerned largely with the promises to Abraham and the blessing which comes through his seed. We turn now to the promises to David, the promise of the everlasting reign of one who is both a descendant of David and the Son of God. The promises to Abraham involve this everlasting reign too, of course, but we will concentrate here upon the fulfilment by Christ of the promises to David.

The New Testament opens with the statement that Jesus Christ is the son of David, and Matthew 1 as a whole shows how he fulfilled the promises to David. The genealogy in verses 1-17 shows how Jesus was of the line of David (and Abraham too, of course) in accordance with the promise to David: “I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels” (2 Sam. 7:12). The remainder of the chapter shows how he was also the Son of God, in fulfilment of 2 Samuel 7:14: “I will be his father, and he shall be My son”. Even the very structure of the genealogy connects with David, for it is divided into three parts with fourteen generations in each, and the Hebrew name ‘David’ has three letters with a total numeric value of fourteen.

The succeeding chapters add to the theme. In Matthew 2:1-6 Jesus is shown to have been born in Bethlehem, the city where David was born, in accordance with the prophecy of Micah 5:2. His upbringing in Nazareth is shown to have been the fulfilment of the message of the prophets concerning one to come who would be entitled “the Branch”, for Nazareth means ‘Branch-town’. One of these branch prophecies is Isaiah 11:1, which speaks of the Messiah as shooting forth from the apparently dead stock of Jesse, the father of David. At the baptism of Jesus the words were pronounced, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:17). This is a quotation from Isaiah 42:1, but it is also a link back to David, for again we have here a reference to 2 Samuel 7:14 in the words “My

Son”. The Davidic connection is strengthened, firstly by the fact that the name ‘David’ means ‘Beloved’, and secondly that David was similarly pronounced to be acceptable to God at the beginning of his work (Acts 13:22 with 1 Sam. 13:14).

In the early chapters of Matthew the theme of the fulfilment by Jesus of the promises to David is an underlying one. In Luke 1 it is brought out openly, with the same twofold link to the promises to David being emphasised: that Jesus is both son of David and Son of God. “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest” (v. 32) says the angel, and reinforces this by saying how Jesus would be the Son of God, by God’s power being brought to bear on Mary so that she conceived (v.35). The angel says also: “the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end” (Lk. 1:32,33), showing his Davidic origin.

Israel restored

This Kingdom is to be that of David, the kingdom of Israel restored, that kingdom which was in fact the Kingdom of God, as David himself said (1 Chron. 28:5). The eleven apostles looked for its restoration under Christ after his resurrection, asking him: “wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). They were not wrong in their expectation, only in the timing. Jesus had earlier promised them a prominent place in the rulership of that kingdom:

“in the regeneration (the restoration of the kingdom to Israel) when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Mt. 19:28).

Later the Apostle Peter, this time speaking in the power of the Holy Spirit, spoke of the ascension of Christ to dwell in heaven “until the times of restoration of all things, whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets which have been since the world began” (Acts 3:21, RV). The Kingdom of Christ, the Kingdom of God to be established when Christ returns, is to be the restored kingdom of Israel. It will of course be very different from the Old Testament kingdom of Israel in that it will be ruled by Christ and the immortalised saints. not by weak fallible mortals, and in that it will not be limited to one small portion of the globe. but will extend into all the earth.

The house

There are, however. other themes in the promises to David than that of the Kingdom. Nathan said to David: “the LORD telleth thee that He will make thee an house”. The promised seed would “build an house for My name” (2 Sam. 7:11,13). This will certainly be fulfilled in the temple which is to be rebuilt as recorded in Ezekiel 40-48, but there is also “a spiritual house” to be built, constructed of the saints as “living stones”, with the Lord Jesus Christ as the foundation, “a living stone. rejected indeed of men, but with God elect. precious” (1 Pet. 2:4,5, RV). This is the house spoken of in Hebrews 3:1-6, over which Christ is the Son of whom it is said, “whose house are we”.

In the latter passage we move towards a related idea, that of the people who live in the house, the household, rather than the building. Jesus is the Son, the head of the household, there by right. We can only be there through him on condition that “we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end”. The common words for house in both Hebrew and Greek (bayith and oikos respectively) carry the idea of household as well, as does the English word ‘house’ (as in the House of Windsor for the royal family, for example). Just as the promises to Abraham involve Christ as the seed, and the saints as making up the seed through him, so the promises to David involve Christ as the Son over the house, and the saints as making up the house through him.

Israel’s return

Despite the fact that most of Christendom believes in the immortality of the soul and eternal life in heaven, the doctrine of the return of Christ and the Kingdom of God is so prominent in the Scriptures that place is usually found for it in their beliefs. Often this is only in the form of a coming of Christ to reign in the heart of believers, a doctrine which is foreign to the Scriptures. However, there is some place for a return of Christ to the earth in the stated beliefs even of the Roman Catholics and Anglicans, and it is quite prominent in the beliefs of some of the smaller denominations. What is absent from these beliefs is a true understanding of the Hope of Israel, of how Christ is returning to fulfil the promises to Abraham and David, to rule over Israel, with the other nations of the earth in subjection to Christ as Israel’s king.

Christadelphians are not the only ones to see in the return of Israel a sign of the return of Christ, a sign that the kingdoms of men are coming to an end. What is not generally recognised is that the significance of the return of Israel is that they must of necessity return for there to be a nation of Israel over which Christ can rule. This return is not of course complete as yet; considerably more Jews still live outside Israel than within; but what has occurred already establishes the basis for the coming Kingdom. The current nation of Israel is far from being in the right spiritual state to be the Kingdom promised in the Scriptures, but there has to be a nation there to repent and acknowledge Jesus as their promised Messiah.

The Old Testament picture of the Kingdom of God is essentially a picture of Israel restored, with the consequent blessings spreading throughout the earth. We often quote the prophecies about the scattering of Israel and the desolation of the land to be found in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. We do not often think of the blessings given in the early verses of these chapters, because these blessings have never been fulfilled to any great extent in Israel’s history. The condition for those blessings to be fulfilled will exist in the Millennial Age, however, namely that Israel will keep God’s commandments; and it will be found that the phrases and the ideas occurring in these verses form the basis for much of the language of later prophecies about the coming Kingdom.

Take, for example, Leviticus 26:5,6:

“your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land”.

Various familiar passages about the peace and prosperity of the Millennial Kingdom come to mind on reading these words—Amos 9:13, Micah 4:4 and Zephaniah 3:13, to give but three. The blessings of the Kingdom Age are essentially blessings that come upon the restored nation of Israel, but which spread throughout the world as the nations acknowledge the rule of Israel’s king.

It is thus to Zion that the nations look for instruction and guidance, “for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isa. 2:3), and “many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem, and to intreat the favour of the LORD” (Zech. 8:22, RV). It is from Zion that blessings flow to all nations:

“In days to come shall Jacob take root; Israel shall blossom and bud: and they shall fill the face of the world with fruit” (Isa. 27:6, RV).

Our hope

There is but “one hope of(our) calling”, as well as there being one body, one Spirit, one Lord. one faith, one baptism and one God (Eph. 4:4-6). The hope of the believer in Christ is mentioned on several occasions in the New Testament: “hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2); “the hope of righteousness” (Gal. 5:5); “the hope which is laid up for you in heaven” (Col. 1:5); “the hope of eternal life” (Tit. 3:7). If there is but one hope then all these hopes must refer to the same thing, and that one hope is the Hope of Israel, the hope for which the Apostle Paul was bound in chains (Acts 28:20).

The gospel is a matter of hope. It is not a gospel of present fulfilment, of blessings now. That is the gospel of humanism, which the mainstream churches have more and more laid hold of It is true that to have come to Christ in the way appointed (belief, repentance and baptism), and to know that one’s sins are forgiven, is indeed a great blessing. It is true that the new way of life in Christ, enjoyed in fellowship with others of like precious faith, brings many blessings. Yet if the gospel concerned this life only all would be vanity; and the gospel is only a gospel, that is, glad tidings, because it promises life for ever in God’s Kingdom, freed from sin. This is still a matter of hope, for it depends on the return of Jesus Christ to the earth to fulfil the promises to the fathers of old in setting up the Kingdom.

Inextricably linked with the Hope of Israel is resurrection from the dead. Since death claims all but the small proportion of the saints who are alive at the return of Christ, resurrection is a necessity. Otherwise the Hope of Israel is no hope at all, for death is the cessation of being. Hence Christ was able to dismiss the arguments of the Sadducees against resurrection by citing the fact that, many years after their death, God referred to Himself as “the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”, and drawing the conclusion: “He is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto Him” (Lk. 20:37,38). Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did not see the fulfilment of the promises, yet these promises clearly involved them personally. They died in hope of receiving them in the day of resurrection and judgement. Since the promises were to Abraham and his seed, and all in Christ are part of the seed, it follows that those in Christ also live and die in hope of resurrection; the gospel is for all such a matter of hope and not present possession.

Thus Paul cried out to the council: “touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question” (Acts 23:6, RV). For him the hope of Israel and resurrection were inextricably intertwined. In his defence before Felix he declared that his belief in “all things which are written in the law and in the prophets” gave him “hope toward God, which they (the Jews) themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead” (Acts 24:14,15). We are not the only ones to profess a belief in the full inspiration of Scripture, but who else takes what the Old Testament says at its face value and places his hope in the fulfilment of the promises made to the fathers, and the resurrection of the dead? In the words, “which they themselves also allow”, Paul witnesses to the fact that his hope was that of the Jews. This fact he amplified before Agrippa in the words:

“And now I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers: unto which promise our twelve tribes... hope to come” (Acts 26:6,7).

What Paul had come to know, and what his fellow Jews had not grasped, was that it was only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that sinners could be counted righteous and have part in that hope. In the other passages quoted above where the word ‘hope appears, the hope referred to may readily be seen to be synonymous with the hope of Israel, the hope of resurrection to eternal life in the Kingdom. The “hope of the glory of God” is in fact the hope of being made sinless and immortal following resurrection at Christ’s coming, and the “hope of righteousness” is similarly explained, as is “the hope of eternal life”. “The hope which is laid up for you in heaven” does not mean that we go to heaven to receive it; it means that our hope is in Christ. the seed through whom all the promises are fulfilled, and who is now in heaven at the right hand of God.

We quoted above the words of Hebrews 3:6 that Christ is “a son over his own house”, in fulfilment of the promises to David. We can be part of that house—“whose house are we”;— but only “if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end”. We cannot “hold fast the confidence... of the hope” if we are not sure what it is. It is no longer “the hope” if we allow it to be mixed with the false hopes of others, or if we believe that other hopes are equally valid. Let us “hold fast the confession of our hope that it waver not” (Heb. 10:23, RV).

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