THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE & THE INCONVENIENT EXISTENCE OF ISRAEL

The Day of the LordCovenant & Controversy
Written By Bill Scofield

The message of the Bible has an explicitly eschatological thrust centered on the future redemption of Israel. There is simply no way around it. This message was not only handed down to the Jewish people; it hinges on their own redemption. That is, “if their rejection brings reconciliation to the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?”[1]

Christian history has generally been very averse to this basic view of the Scriptures; preferring instead to spiritualize the thrust of the Bible’s message. That is, it was speaking symbolically of spiritual realities, not of natural realities. Various movements across church history have only needed a decade or two of prosperity before the message of the Bible is reinterpreted. Yet, history has a way of scrutinizing truth claims. When we lose our way, God often grants evidence that history is indeed being driven by a divine agenda.

The story we find filling the pages of the Scriptures is not simply that history is moving toward a certain end, but that God’s plan is what is driving it. God’s plan for the planet is articulated in a narrative of history. The redemption story of the Scriptures begins and ends with eternal life, a pristine creation, and with God dwelling on the earth with mankind. A natural tension is infused into the narratives of the Bible because from the earliest interactions with the God of Israel, proper behavior was framed around the expectation of something in the future. Thus, everyone who interacted with God in the Scriptures walked away looking to the future for redemption. From the beginning of the narrative, Genesis 3 leaves the characters (as well as the reader) lingering in anticipation for the seed of the woman and his coming conflict with the serpent. This story alone significantly shapes the rest of the Bible and generates the expectation for a resolution to the problems introduced by the account of man’s sin.

In some places, God reveals what will occur at an undisclosed time. At others, he specifies (in Hebrew) that it will be in the “acharit hayomim”—that is, in the latter days. Jacob prophesied over his sons:

Assemble yourselves that I may tell you what will befall you in the latter days.[2]

Moses also framed the future of the people of Israel along these lines:

When you are in distress and all these things have come upon you, in the latter days you will return to the LORD your God and listen to His voice.[3]

Again in Deuteronomy 31:

Evil will befall you in the latter days.

These, along with many other examples, naturally leave a tension within the storyline since the various figures in the stories must now learn to live in light of these anticipated days that they may not even experience in their lifetime.

We can see this dynamic playing out across the pages of the Apostolic Writings as well. Jesus’s earliest disciples regularly anchored new disciples into the hope of future redemption. Assuring new disciples that “the night is almost gone; the day (that is, the redemption) is near,”[4] and exhorting them to “put all your hope fully in the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus, the Messiah.”[5] Moreover, when they wavered from this emphasis, Paul and the other apostles argued that perseverance was the result of maintaining the hope for eschatological redemption.

Hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees? Now if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.[6]

In this way, the Jesus movement that emerged as a result of the Apostles’ teachings was thoroughly tethered to the hope of future redemption.

After His resurrection, the Messiah spoke to these early followers over the course of a month and a half about the kingdom of God—a common eschatological theme within Judaism at the time. The disciples clearly perceived this familiar future thrust to the things He was saying. They responded, “Lord, are you restoring the kingdom to Israel at this time?”[7] Their question betrays a couple of things. First, this focused time with Jesus reinforced a future thrust to the Gospel message. That is, none of them thought the redemption had occurred because of His death or resurrection. Secondly, we see that future hope was clearly tethered to the restoration of Israel. This has been an expectation since the time of Moses and the writing of the Torah. As I’ve written in many other places,[8] the redemption of Israel throughout the Hebrew Bible is the trigger for the redemption of the nations. This assumption is carried forward and reiterated by the teachings of the apostles.

What occurred over the following decades and centuries was a slow loss of the eschatological faith held by the earliest disciples of Jesus. What we have come to know as ‘church history’ is the process of detethering the Bible from this explicitly apocalyptic hope. The decades following the Messiah’s resurrection turned into centuries. The redemption’s delay increasingly required explanation. This dynamic gave rise to the spiritualization of the redemption in Christian theology. The inconvenience of needing to wait for Israel’s redemption for their own redemption proved too much to bear theologically—especially in periods when persecution ceased and the church gained influence and power. The very existence of Israel still awaiting redemption (resurrection, exaltation, cleansing from sin, etc…) has always insinuated, if not signaled, the anticipation of a future hope for redemption. The loss of this eschatological thrust for the Gospel message here coincided, as it always does, with a redefinition both of the redemption and of ‘Israel’. The redemption of the prophets—resurrection, the restoration of David’s throne in Jerusalem, the purging of wickedness from the earth—eventually gave way to a realized redemption. This redemption emphatically did not have Israel as a central feature, having exchanged the old, ethnic program for a new, universal plan.

It is no secret that we disciples of Jesus are in another pivotal moment again. Israel and the Jewish people once again pose a theological threat to the realized redemption that church is attempting to manifest to the world. The reality is that creation continues to groan and to feel the labor pains that will lead to the glorious redemption the prophets announced. The earth will be restored,[9] the dead will be raised,[10] the kingdom restored[11]—all awaiting the future redemption of Israel. As inconvenient as this may be to many of our triumphalist theologies and lofty ministry goals, we Gentiles must learn to linger in the awkwardness of the delay. The redemption tarries. It waits for that afflicted people of Abraham scattered among the nations. To walk near to God’s heart in the days ahead we will have to join our Jewish brethren in the hope of Israel and in the pain of its delay.

Maranatha.

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. What might it look like for you to “join [y]our Jewish brethren in the hope of Israel and in the pain of its delay”?

  2. How do you feel about waiting for the “latter days”?

  3. How can you renew your hope in these days of waiting and avoid getting impatient and attempting to change the Lord’s story?

 
 
Bill Scofield
Next

THE FUTURE PULLING US FORWARD