Who is Israel? Ask ten Christians that question, and you may get several variations on a few common answers.
Yes, Israel is a nation state on a map, located in the Middle East. But when it comes to the Bible, Israel is much more than that. Both good and bad theology attempt to answer the question of whether or not that nation state is “God’s chosen people,” with passionate defenders in both camps.
In answering that, we’re usually told to either a)support the nation state of Israel because they’re God’s chosen people no matter what they do, or b) oppose the nation state of Israel because they’ve violently divorced themselves from the new covenant in Jesus, by word and deeds.
But in the discussion about politics and the geographic Israel created in 1948—its history, intelligence operations, wars, media campaigns, social media influencer appeals, diplomatic actions, and more—we’re asking the wrong question.
“Who is Israel?” is largely irrelevant. What matters much more is what we do, and what Christ says about that.
Debating the definition of Biblical Israel (those of the Abrahamic covenant in direct lineage, and/or those gentiles grafted in through faith in Jesus Christ) is a distraction designed to get God’s people off mission—to sin by getting hung up on worldly affairs and effectively disengaging from every sphere we might otherwise influence if we were to keep Jesus in focus one hundred percent of the time.
For those of us calling ourselves Jesus followers, our job isn’t to define Israel. Our job is to get about His business.
The problem is that as a collective, God’s people have never been very good at following Him, and that’s been from the beginning.
First Kings
When he took charge of the nation, he was still rather young, but as he grew older he committed atrocities enumerable. He erected pagan altars, practiced divination and astrology, embraced every kind of sexual perversion, and worshiped demonic entities. He even sacrificed his own children to pagan gods.
And there’s no debate about it: He was one of God’s chosen people. His name was Manasseh and he was the 18th king of Israel.
“Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem fifty-five years. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had demolished; he also erected altars to the Baals and made Asherah poles. He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them. He built altars in the temple of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, “My Name will remain in Jerusalem forever.” In both courts of the temple of the Lord, he built altars to all the starry hosts. He sacrificed his children in the fire in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, practiced divination and witchcraft, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger. He took the image he had made and put it in God’s temple.”
— 2 Chronicles 33:1-7 NIV
And Manasseh was hardly an outlier; in fact, you could say with scriptural and historic authority that the vast majorty of Biblical Israel’s leaders perpetrated evil, sometimes in isolated incidents (I’m looking at you, David) and sometimes (like Ahab) habitually.
Of the 43 kings of Israel and Judah1, only seven did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. For those of you into statistics, that’s a pathetic 16%. And even among those who didn’t categorically do “evil in the eyes of the Lord,” practically all of the time, you’ll find that most would more aptly be defined as “so so” in the area of Godly leadership. That is to say, they either started good and became bad (Solomon, Joash, Amaziah), or had a complex run of it from the get-go (Ishbosheth, Jehu).
Again, some of these were anointed by the prophets of the Lord to lead the nation when it stood as a testament to Yahweh among the pagan nations, long before Jesus would take the stage in the flesh and change everything.
God’s Chosen People
If you’re at all familiar with the Bible, you’ll recognize the phrase, evil in the eyes of the Lord. If you do a Blue Letter Bible search of that term, you’ll find two pages of hits, all of them in the Old Testament.
In the book of Judges the phrase, “Again, the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord,” is repeated four times. Time and time again the people perpetrated evil—and not the being-mean-to-the-guy-on-Facebook variety of evil, but real, bloody, sexually perverse evil.
It was enough for the prophet Samuel to cry out in exasperation,
“Why did you not obey the Lord?”
— 1 Samuel 15:19
You can almost hear him slam his head on the desk at the stubbornness of God’s people, those who had seen miracles innumerable with their own eyes, again and again. As Moses was getting the Ten Commandments Aaron was at that moment leading God’s chosen people in idol worship, and possibly overt sexual perversion as well.2 The priests needed the apostles and prophets to keep them on track, and so do we.
This is the history of why being God’s chosen people wasn’t enough; they needed a Savior. This is why Jesus came in the flesh, to reconcile sinful people to the Lord who’d had enough of their constant propensity toward evil. God decided to dispense with the constant cycle of uncleanliness and sin offerings, and the traditions that created even more sin by those responsible for keeping His temple holy. He broke down the physical and spiritual barriers between us and Him and in the process, relocated the Holy of Holies to within us. In that moment, everything changed.
We call this the new covenant: He chose to dwell within us—no middleman, no constant striving to make amends for our mistakes—a simple, one-time reconciliation with the Father, thanks to Jesus who took the penalty upon Himself on our behalf.
“So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
— Galatians 3:26-29
His Holy Spirit residing within us is the governor that keeps us in check, so long as we listen and respond accordingly. So why then do so many Christ followers believe that the nation state in the Middle East calling itself “Israel” gets a free pass to do completely un-Jesus like things?
“We’re Christians. We Support Israel.”
A few years back I was at a church pre-service meeting. The state of Israel had been in the news that week for launching another salvo of missile strikes against someone. The ministry leader was discussing how he’d “gotten into it” with a guy online who thought Israel was perpetrating evil. When one of the guys there asked what was wrong with what the guy online had said, our leader replied with an incredulous air of authority designed to end the conversation, “We’re Christians. We support Israel,” and he punctuated it with a chopping motion of his hand as if to emphasize that this is the hard truth, no matter what the circumstances.
But that’s not Biblical.
Nation states are merely large groups of people who’ve organized to provide a level of protection for one another. People within them either follow Jesus or they don’t. Nation states themselves don’t; they’re not designed to. Some nations honor the teachings of Jesus better than others, but they can never attain the collective accountability to say they’re God’s chosen people. Not the least reason being because so many of them reject Jesus outright.
So, going back to that ministry leader and his claim that, “We’re Christians, we support Israel.” My response is: No. No, we don’t. I follow Jesus and that’s all that really matters. Everything flows from that.
If the secular State of Israel follows Jesus, I’ll support their efforts. But they don’t. By their charter, they reject Jesus outright. But before we get on our high horses, we need to be honest and recall that the United States doesn’t follow Jesus, either. These aren’t curses, they’re just additional reminders that God’s covenant is not with a nation in totality, and absolutely not in perpetuity; God’s covenant is individual, and based on personal responsibility and faith.
I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.
It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.
— Romans 9:2-8
In other words, being one of God’s people is a choice incumbent on each person choosing to accept Jesus Christ. That’s it.
The greatest of all commandments is to have no other gods before the Lord. How does a nation state that rejects Jesus elicit such blind devotion from those who purport to follow Him?
They committed evil in the eyes of the Lord
Hear me, Church. This is not an indictment on the nation state of Israel. Everyone can do evil, whether they’re God’s chosen people or not (as we discussed earlier with the kings of Israel and Judah). If you or I go out and murder someone tomorrow, or yell at our spouse, or harm one of our children, that will still be evil whether we’ve given our lives to Jesus or not.
Both Jews and the nation state of Israel have perpetrated tens of thousands of documented evils in their long history, but so have my father’s people, the Mexicans, and the Spanish who conquered them. My mother’s people, the Germans, have been on the giving and receiving end of atrocity. So have my mother’s other people, the Irish. And America has an equally ugly history of not remotely following Jesus at times.
These are historical facts, and as a historian and a writer, that’s what I’m most concerned with: telling the uncomfortable history so we can learn from it, align ourselves with Jesus, and not repeat bad decisions during our time on the stage.
Our Story Isn’t Yet Written
Just like the Israelites of the Old Testament, plenty of God’s people have chosen to reject Him and His ways. It wouldn’t be very hard to compile a modern-day A-Z list of prominent Christian leaders who’ve committed evil in the eyes of the Lord, from Tony Alamo to David Yonggi Cho, from Doug Wilson to Ravi Zacharias, there’s no shortage of examples of those who’ve lost their way.
“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.
That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;to be made new in the attitude of your minds;and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”
— Ephesians 4:17-24
But while there’s still air in our lungs, it’s never too late to repent and turn back to the Lord. Jesus provides that option of a postscript to everyone, even the worst of sinners this world has to offer:
“The Lord spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they paid no attention. So the Lord brought against them the army commanders of the king of Assyria, who took Manasseh prisoner, put a hook in his nose, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon. In his distress he sought the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his ancestors. And when he prayed to him, the Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea; so he brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord is God.
He got rid of the foreign gods and removed the image from the temple of the Lord, as well as all the altars he had built on the temple hill and in Jerusalem; and he threw them out of the city. Then he restored the altar of the Lord and sacrificed fellowship offerings and thank offerings on it, and told Judah to serve the Lord, the God of Israel.
— 2 Chronicles 33:10-13, 15-16
One of the saddest aspects of modern Christianity is its lack of understanding about what Jesus actually came to do. Sadder still is that so many continue to excuse evil in the eyes of the Lord merely because it’s perpetrated by those who claim unaccountability as a birthright.
But thanks to Jesus, it’s never too late to add a postscript to our stories. We can ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to us our blind spots, our misguided loyalties, and the psychological conditioning that prevents us from seeing things the way the Lord does. Salvation isn’t a promise to an isolated group carrying on as if He doesn’t exist. Unless we realize that tearing down curtains and temple walls was part of the great rescue plan to establish a temple within the hearts of every individual image bearer, we’ll continue to revere places and things, and even nations, that have little to do with Jesus.
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Footnotes:
1 The kingdom of Israel was split in the aftermath of Solomon’s death in 930 B.C.E. The northern tribes, led by Jeroboam, revolted against Solomon’s son Rehoboam, leading to the formation of two separate kingdoms, Israel and Judah respectively.
2 Petroglyphs at Jabal al-Lawz (or Jabal Maqla) in Saudi Arabia where the Israelites would have been encamped depict what appears to be dancing and sexual acts.