Are modern Jews still God’s chosen people?

Question 10029.

Are the Jewish people still God’s chosen people, or did their election end when the nation rejected its Messiah? I answer without hesitation that Israel remains God’s chosen people, because the calling that made them so was never conditional on their performance and has never been revoked. This is one of the places where I part company most sharply with a great deal of popular teaching.

The question matters far beyond academic theology. If God can cast off the people He solemnly chose, then His promises to you and me rest on shifting sand. But if His calling of the Jews as His chosen people still stands after all their failures, then His faithfulness is the bedrock on which every believer can build. So let me show you why I hold that Israel is chosen still.

Why the Jews Are God’s Chosen People

Israel became God’s chosen people not because of any greatness of their own but because of His love and His oath. Moses told them that the Lord set His love on them and chose them, though they were the fewest of all peoples, because the Lord loves them and keeps the oath He swore to their fathers (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). Their election was an act of grace from the beginning, grounded in God’s word rather than their worth.

The Hebrew idea behind their choosing, the verb bachar, means to select or single out for a purpose. Israel was chosen for a role in God’s plan, to receive His word, to carry His promises, and to bring the Messiah into the world. That purpose was not cancelled by their unbelief; if anything, their preservation through every attempt to destroy them testifies that the choosing still stands.

So when I call the Jews God’s chosen people I am not making a sentimental or political statement. I am repeating what Scripture says about a people God singled out by covenant. The choosing was His doing, and what God has done He does not casually undo.

An Irrevocable Calling

The clearest New Testament statement comes from Paul, who agonises over his kinsmen’s unbelief and yet insists that God has not rejected His people (Romans 11:1-2). He asks the question directly, has God rejected His people, and answers, by no means. The chosen people remain chosen even in their unbelief, because the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29).

That word irrevocable settles the matter for me. God does not extend a calling and then withdraw it when the people fail, for if He did, no calling of His would ever be safe. Paul’s whole argument in Romans 11 is that Israel’s present unbelief is neither total nor final, and that a future awaits the chosen people that will vindicate every promise made to them.

This is why I reject the teaching that the Church has quietly replaced Israel and inherited her titles. I take up that error at length in my article on replacement theology. God has one people of promise in Israel and another body in the Church, distinct programmes that He is working out side by side, and neither cancels the other.

The Unconditional Covenants

The reason the chosen people remain chosen is that their standing rests on unconditional covenants. When God cut the covenant with Abraham, He alone passed between the divided pieces while Abraham slept, taking the whole obligation on Himself (Genesis 15:12-18). A covenant that God swears by Himself cannot be broken by the failure of the other party, because the other party was never the guarantor.

The land, the seed and the blessing promised to Abraham were confirmed to Isaac and Jacob and never rescinded. Dispensational teachers such as those at Ariel Ministries have laboured to show how these covenants read most naturally when taken at face value, promised to a real people in a real land. I find that reading far more honest than one that spiritualises the promises away from the very people to whom they were sworn.

Because the covenants are unconditional, the chosen people cannot forfeit their election by unbelief, though they can and do forfeit blessing and enjoyment of the promises for a season. The promises wait, secured by the oath of God, until the day the nation turns to its Messiah.

Chosen Is Not the Same as Saved

I must add an honest qualification, or I will be misunderstood. To say that the Jews are God’s chosen people is not to say that every Jewish person is automatically saved. National election and individual salvation are different things. Israel is chosen as a people for a purpose, but each person, Jew or Gentile, must come to God through faith in the Messiah, Jesus.

Paul, a Jew who loved his people fiercely, still wrote that his heart’s desire and prayer was that they might be saved (Romans 10:1), which shows that being one of the chosen people did not, in his mind, remove the need for personal faith. The nation is elect; the individual still needs the new birth. Holding those two truths together keeps me from both replacement theology on one side and presumption on the other.

So I honour the Jewish people as God’s chosen nation while praying, as Paul did, that they would come to know their Messiah. The choosing guarantees a national future; it does not excuse anyone from the gospel.

A Future for the Chosen People

The best is still ahead for Israel. Paul looks forward to the day when the hardening that has come upon part of Israel will be lifted and all Israel will be saved (Romans 11:26), a national turning to the Messiah at the end of the age. The chosen people, so long in unbelief, will look on the One they pierced and mourn, and a nation will be born to God in a day.

This future is why the survival of the Jewish people through every century of persecution is so telling. A people scattered, hated and hunted, yet preserved and regathered, stand as a living witness that God keeps His word. I explore that hope further in my article on the future of ethnic Israel. The covenant people have a destiny that unbelief has delayed but cannot destroy.

So when I look at the Jewish people today, I do not see a nation God has finished with. I see the chosen nation of an unbreakable covenant, awaiting the day when their Messiah returns and every ancient promise is kept to the letter.

Why This Truth Anchors Your Own Hope

Let me bring this home to every believer, Jew or Gentile. The faithfulness of God to His elect nation is the guarantee of His faithfulness to you. Paul makes exactly that link in Romans 11, warning Gentile believers not to grow proud, since the same God who keeps His word to Israel is the God who has grafted them in.

If God kept faith with a people who broke His law, worshipped idols and rejected His Son, and still calls them His covenant people, then He will surely keep faith with those who have trusted that Son. His promises to you are as secure as His promises to Abraham, because they rest on the same unchanging character.

So the doctrine of Israel’s election is not a distraction from the gospel; it is one of its firmest supports. The God who does not abandon His chosen nation will not abandon His children. That is a rock worth standing on.

How Then Should We Regard the Jewish People?

If the Jews remain God’s elect nation, that conviction ought to shape how believers treat them. It leaves no room whatever for the antisemitism that has stained so much of church history, often dressed up in theological language about a rejected nation. To despise the people God still calls His own is to set oneself against the very faithfulness we depend on.

At the same time, honouring the covenant people does not mean flattering them or pretending they have no need of the gospel. The kindest thing I can do for any Jewish friend is the same kindest thing I can do for any Gentile: point them to the Messiah who alone saves. Paul held love for his people and longing for their salvation together, and so should we.

So I regard the Jewish people with respect, with prayer, and with a longing to see them meet their Messiah. They are a standing monument to the faithfulness of God, and their future in Him is bright. To watch that future unfold is one of the quiet privileges of living in these last days.

So, now what?

Read Romans 11 slowly and let Paul’s astonished conclusion sink in: the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. If that is true of the chosen nation in their unbelief, how much more is it true of you in Christ? Pray, as Paul did, for the salvation of the Jewish people, and rest your own hope on the faithful God who never breaks His word. Does your confidence rest on your performance, or on the character of the God who keeps every promise He makes?

“For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” (Romans 11:29, ESV)