According to the Bible, “Who is Israel?”
Few questions have greater consequences for the way we understand the Bible than the deceptively simple question, “Who is Israel?” Our answer affects how we understand the covenants, the promises to Abraham, the identity of God’s people, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, the Church, and eventually biblical prophecy itself.
For many Christians, the answer may seem obvious because we have already inherited assumptions about what the word Israel must mean whenever we encounter it in Scripture. But one of the central lessons of the New Testament is that we must allow Jesus and His apostles to show us how the Old Testament promises reach their fulfillment in Christ. The New Testament does not discard Israel’s story. It reveals where that story was always leading.
This semester therefore begins with an important question of interpretation: How should Christians understand the Old Testament now that Christ has come and the New Testament has shed greater light upon it? From there, we will follow the biblical story of Abraham and his children, the people called Israel under the Old Covenant, Jeremiah’s promise of a New Covenant, Paul’s “mystery” concerning Jew and Gentile, and the remarkable way Jesus Himself fulfills and retraces Israel’s story.
The question is not whether one group of people simply “replaced” another. The more important biblical question is how God has brought His covenant promises to fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and how all who belong to Christ are related to those promises. Paul tells Gentile believers that they are no longer “strangers and foreigners,” but “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19), and that in Christ they are “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29).
As we work through these studies, the goal is not to begin with a theological label and force Scripture into it. It is to follow the biblical language carefully and allow Scripture itself to answer the question: Who are the people of God under the New Covenant, and what does their identity have to do with Jesus Christ?
That question becomes foundational for everything that follows. Before we can properly understand Israel and the promises in the 3rd Semester, or eventually approach Daniel and Revelation, we first need to understand how the New Testament itself identifies the people to whom those promises belong.
Week 1- How are We to Understand the Old Testament now that the New Testament has Shed a New Light on it?
Week 2- According to Jeremiah 31, Who was to Receive the New Covenant?
Week 3- Is the children’s song “Father Abraham” merely Wishful Thinking?
Week 4- According to the Old Testament, Who is Israel?
Week 5- The Ephesians Mystery: Gentile Salvation or Equal Heirs of the Promise?
Week 6- Have Christians been Added to Israel?
Week 7- Did Jesus Recap the history of Israel to become the King of New Covenant Israel?
Optional external reading material:
Did New Testament writers misquote the Old Testament?
