Securing the Jewish Inheritance

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the blatant Jew hatred that erupted worldwide after the Holocaust-style atrocities committed by genocidal Arabs in Israel on October 7, 2023. Having sojourned on this planet for more than threescore years, I have learned enough both of biblical truth and of human history to realize that this is a constant feature of our collective story. The Jewish people are the visible remnant of God’s Covenant Nation of Israel, and therefore are the perpetual targets of satanic hate, whether it originates from Iran’s mosques or from America’s lecture halls and pulpits.

It’s the pulpit part that bothers me as much as it surprises me. Christians of all stripes – Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Messianic, Hebrew Roots – should know better. We should understand that salvation comes from the Jews, as Jesus (Yeshua) himself said (John 4:22). We should know what Paul, the Jewish apostle, said about his kinfolk being genuine Israelites and having much advantage because they have the oracles of God, the adoption into God’s covenant family, the covenants, the giving of the Torah (the word of God), the worship of God, and the promises of God. According to Paul, to the Jews belong the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel), and from them comes Messiah (Christ) (Romans 3:1, 9:1-5). We should know this because we should know our Bible, but we don’t. We have either outsourced biblical knowledge to the experts, or we have jettisoned the received wisdom of the ages in favor of a ridiculous notion that Jews are something other than the people of Israel.

Professing to be wise, we have become fools, and missed the fact that the Jewish people, simply by their existence, are the greatest evidence that there is a God Who is willing and able to come through on His promises. We should rejoice that the Jewish people have returned to the land God promised forever to their ancestor Abraham. After all, that’s the only promise God says He will fulfill with all His heart and soul:

“I will rejoice in doing them [the Jewish people of Israel] good, and I will plant them in this land [Israel, from the river to the sea] in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.

Jeremiah 32:41 (ESV)

We should rejoice because the fact that God comes through on His promises to the Jewish people means He will come through on His promises to redeem all Israel and the nations. In other words, when the Jewish inheritance in the Land of Israel is secure, then the inheritance of all the rest of us will be secure.

So why do Christians of all stripes join with genocidal Islamists and godless progressives in condemning the Jewish nation of Israel for doing exactly what they should be doing? There are many answers, and I will not address them here. I am more interested in declaring my unwavering support for the Jewish people of Israel in their existential struggle against the same demonic forces that have sought to annihilate them since Ishmael threatened his half-brother, Isaac. Those forces motivated –

• the Egyptians who enslaved the Israelites
• the Amalekites who attacked them as they left Egypt;
• the Philistines of Gaza who contested their presence in the Promised Land;
• the Persians who tried to eliminate them under Haman’s genocidal plot;
• the Greeks who tried to do the same in the time of the Maccabees;
• the Romans who waged wars of annihilation against the Jews twice in three generations;
• and the Roman church and its Protestant daughters who excused their anti-Jewish hate by claiming the Jews are cursed of God.

Those same demonic forces moved the Third Reich to carry out the most effective plan of Jewish annihilation to date, and they are now moving the Islamists and their supporters who still contest the fact that God designated Isaac, not Ishmael, as Abraham’s heir.

This biblical-historical record is a large part of my reason for supporting the Jewish State of Israel in this war to eliminate Hamas, regain control of Gaza, and finally secure the land of Israel as the home of the Jewish people. It’s what God said He would do, and He has been doing it for nearly two centuries. Anyone who learns the history of the modern State of Israel can see the hand of God in the process. Since God Himself is involved, I choose to align with Him, and that means I support my Jewish kin.

They are my kin, spiritually at least. That’s another thing Christians of all stripes have overlooked. What do we suppose Paul meant when he wrote that we from the nations are grafted into the olive tree of Israel (Romans 11:17-24)? Why did he write that in Messiah we become Abraham’s seed (descendants) along with the Jews (Galatians 3:23-29)? Did he think that we non-Jews would replace the natural heirs? That’s not likely since Paul, the Jewish scholar, drew his inspiration from promises in the Hebrew scripture like this one in Isaiah:

Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

“And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” The Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares, “I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered.”

Isaiah 56:3-8 ESV

These “foreigners who join themselves to the Lord” are us. Thanks to the testimony of the Jewish Messiah, we are the ones God is talking about in this promise:

“Thus says the Lord of hosts: Peoples shall yet come, even the inhabitants of many cities. The inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, ‘Let us go at once to entreat the favor of the Lord and to seek the Lord of hosts; I myself am going.’ Many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem and to entreat the favor of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’”

Zechariah 8:21-23 ESV

God is with the Jews, and that’s why I am glad to go with them to Zion, the Holy City of Jerusalem where God has placed His Name. That’s why I support Israel in this current war, and in all struggles against their enemies, because their enemies are the enemies of the God we all worship: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

My unqualified support of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel is because I am an unapologetic Christian Zionist, but it’s also because I am a Hebrew of the exiled House of Joseph. Up to now, we who identify as Ephraimites of the House of Joseph have been marginalized and disregarded as heretics, as a lunatic fringe, and as adherents of a form of replacement theology who seek to displace the Jewish people by claiming we are the true Israel. Sadly, these charges have some basis in truth for some Hebrew Roots believers, but not all.

If I could assign another label to myself, then I would, but it seems we are stuck with the terms, Two House, Ephraimite, and House of Joseph. Those terms come directly from scripture, starting with the much-vaunted New Covenant as stated in Jeremiah 31:31-34, and again in Hebrews 8:8-12 –

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue in my covenant, and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”

Hebrews 8:8-12 ESV

God makes His New Covenant with the Two Houses of Israel: the House of Judah, meaning the Jews, and the House of Israel (also called the House of Joseph), meaning the non-Jewish people who come into the Hebrew nation of Israel. I’m not Jewish, so I must be part of the other House. I could claim physical descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel, whom God promises to restore just as surely as He promises to restore the Jewish tribes, but who would believe me? I believe my Scottish ancestors are among the many peoples around the world partially descended from Israel’s exiled tribes, but that’s not as important as the fact that my Jewish Israelite Messiah opened the way for me to enter a covenantal relationship with the God of Israel and with the Jewish people who have kept the nation of Israel intact through millennia of exile and persecution.

Since I know my own identity, and since I expect God to sort out my inheritance in time, I have no need nor desire to contest the inheritance of my Jewish kin. In fact, I am more motivated to help them secure and protect their inheritance in the Promised Land. As I have said, if when the Jewish inheritance in the Land of Israel is secure, then the inheritance of all the rest of us will be secure. That’s a scriptural principle: “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16, 2:9), as Paul says, echoing the Hebrew scriptures: “Judah shall go up first,” (Judges 1:2, 20:18).

Even so, I make no claim for even a square foot of land in Israel. Let my Jewish kin have it all. Whatever my God chooses to give me, should He choose to give me anything, I am content. The most important thing is to do as He bids, which means helping my Jewish Israeli kin fulfill their destiny. That’s how we will all see the full revelation of Messiah, the final redemption of all Israel, and the blessed era of peace for all nations.

 

Cover Image: Flag of Israel at sunset in Judea. Photo by Isaac and Jacob Lind, January 2024.