Are modern Jews still God’s chosen people?
Question 10029
The question of whether modern Jewish people are still God’s chosen people sits at the intersection of some of the most important and most contested doctrines in Christian theology. The answer you give depends heavily on how you read the Old Testament promises, what you understand the relationship between Israel and the church to be, and whether you believe God’s unconditional covenants can be modified or transferred. These are not peripheral questions.
The Promises God Made and Whether They Still Stand
The covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis 12, 15, and 17 was unconditional. Unlike the Mosaic covenant, which carried the structure of a suzerainty treaty with blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, the Abrahamic covenant was a unilateral divine commitment. When God cut that covenant in Genesis 15, Abraham was in a deep sleep while God alone passed between the pieces of the slaughtered animals. The form of the ceremony, which normally required both parties to walk through the pieces as a pledge of mutual commitment, was here enacted by God alone. He was binding himself without reciprocal obligation from Abraham. That covenant includes specific, concrete promises: land, descendants, and blessing extending to all the nations through Abraham’s seed.
Romans 11:29 addresses this directly: “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Paul writes this in the context of discussing Israel’s present condition and future restoration. The specific calling of the Jewish people as a nation within God’s redemptive purposes has not been cancelled by Israel’s rejection of the Messiah. It has been set aside temporarily, but the underlying calling remains. The same unconditional covenant that guaranteed the promises in the first place guarantees that they will ultimately be fulfilled.
Chosen Does Not Mean Currently Saved
It is important to be precise here, because the word “chosen” can be misread in two very different directions. To say that modern Jewish people remain God’s chosen people is not to say that they are currently in a saving relationship with God or that they have no need of the gospel. Every Jewish person, like every Gentile, stands under the judgment of God and in need of salvation through Jesus the Messiah. Romans 11:25 describes Israel’s present condition as a “partial hardening.” Romans 10:1 records Paul’s heartfelt prayer for their salvation: “my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.” One cannot pray for the salvation of people who already have it. The fact that they are chosen in the covenantal sense does not mean they are currently saved in the personal sense.
The distinction is between God’s national, covenantal purposes for Israel as a people, which remain in force, and the personal, individual standing of Jewish people before God, which requires faith in Jesus exactly as it does for Gentiles. There is no other name by which anyone must be saved (Acts 4:12), and that includes Jewish people. The irrevocability of the calling does not provide an alternative route to salvation; it guarantees that the nation as a whole will ultimately come to faith in their Messiah.
What This Means for Israel’s Future
Romans 11:25-27 outlines the trajectory: the partial hardening of Israel will continue “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in,” and then “all Israel will be saved.” The reference is to all the Jewish people alive at the moment of the Second Coming, who will look on the one they have pierced (Zechariah 12:10) and mourn for him, and be saved. This is a national event of staggering proportions: the people who, as a nation, rejected their Messiah two thousand years ago will, as a nation, receive him at his return. The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable precisely because they guarantee this outcome.
The modern state of Israel is significant within this framework as consistent with the prophetic expectation of a Jewish presence in the land before the end-time events. The prophets describe a Jewish people regathered to the land before the events of the Tribulation period, and the re-establishment of the modern state after nearly two millennia of diaspora is not something to be passed over as historically incidental. Specific claims about individual political events go beyond what the text warrants, but the broad pattern is consistent with what the prophets described.
So, now what?
The church’s responsibility toward the Jewish people is to pray for their salvation and to bring them the gospel of their own Messiah, not to treat them as a special case beyond the need for faith in Jesus, and not to regard them as abandoned by a God who changed his mind. Antisemitism has no place in a church that reads Romans 11, because the tree from which Gentile believers are a wild olive branch graft is Jewish at its root (Romans 11:17-18). The Jewish people are loved on account of the patriarchs, and God does not go back on his word.
“For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Romans 11:29
