Is modern Israel prophetically significant?

Question 10065.

Is modern Israel prophetically significant? My answer is a carefully qualified yes. I believe the return of Jewish people to the land, and the existence of a Jewish state there since 1948, sits squarely within the pattern of what the prophets said would happen before God finishes His programme with that nation.

The qualifications matter as much as the answer, though. Saying modern Israel is prophetically significant is not the same as saying the modern state is righteous, that its policies are above criticism, or that we can now calculate a timetable. Those are separate claims, and I hold none of them.

Why the question divides Christians

Behind this question sits a bigger one: does God still have a distinct programme for the physical descendants of Abraham? If the Church has taken over Israel’s promises, then modern Israel is a political fact and nothing more. If Israel and the Church remain distinct, then a Jewish return to the land is not an accident of twentieth century politics.

I take the second view, and I hold it because of how I read the text rather than because of any political sympathy. The covenants God made with Abraham and David were unconditional, and a promise that depends on God’s faithfulness rather than on human performance cannot quietly expire. I set this out at length in my answers on whether the Church has replaced Israel and whether God still has a plan for Israel.

Paul asks the question directly and answers it himself: “I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means!” (Romans 11:1). Whatever else is debatable, that verse is not.

The prophets describe a second regathering

Isaiah writes that “the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that remains of his people” (Isaiah 11:11). A second recovery implies a first one, and the return from Babylon is the obvious candidate. That earlier return was from one direction; this one is described as from the four corners of the earth.

Ezekiel 36 speaks of God taking the house of Israel from among the nations and bringing them into their own land, and then, afterwards, sprinkling clean water on them and giving them a new heart. The order is worth noticing. Physical restoration comes first, spiritual restoration follows.

Ezekiel 37 makes the same point in vision. The dry bones come together, sinew and flesh appear, and only then does the breath enter them. If that is the pattern, then a modern Israel gathered in unbelief is not an embarrassment to the prophecy. It is the first half of it.

Some argue that these prophecies were exhausted in the return under Zerubbabel and Ezra. That return, though, brought back a fraction of the people from one empire, left the majority in dispersion, and was followed by another scattering in AD 70. The prophets describe a regathering that is worldwide and final, and neither adjective fits the sixth century BC.

What 1948 does and does not prove

For nineteen centuries the Jewish people were scattered, persecuted and stateless, and yet remained identifiably themselves. That survival alone is remarkable, and Jeremiah 31:35-37 stakes God’s reputation on it, saying that Israel will cease to be a nation before Him only if the fixed order of sun, moon and stars departs.

The events of 1948 restored a Jewish state in the land after all that time. I regard that as prophetically significant in the sense that it puts in place a precondition for what Scripture describes: a nation in the land, with a temple site in view, capable of entering into a covenant with a coming ruler as Daniel 9:27 describes.

What 1948 does not do is start a clock. Nothing in Scripture allows me to count years from a political event to the return of Jesus. That is the road to the date-setting Jesus explicitly forbade, and I say more about why in my answer on date-setting.

Modern Israel is not the Israel of the prophets yet

This is where I part company with some enthusiastic prophecy teaching. Modern Israel is a secular state, largely unbelieving, with all the compromises and failures of any nation. Zechariah 12:10 promises a day when “they will look on me, on him whom they have pierced,” and that day has not come.

So I do not baptise every decision of an elected government as the will of God, and I do not think Christians are obliged to defend everything done in the name of that state. The prophets themselves were fiercely critical of Israel while affirming God’s covenant with her. Loyalty to the promise has never required flattery of the nation.

Equally, I refuse the opposite error. Criticism of a policy is one thing; hostility to the Jewish people as such is another, and the Church has an appalling record on that score. Paul warned Gentile believers against arrogance towards the natural branches, and that warning has aged very badly for those who ignored it.

It is worth adding that modern Israel contains a genuine believing remnant. There are Jewish believers in Jesus in that land today, in congregations that are often small and frequently under pressure from several directions at once. Paul says that “at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace,” and that remnant is not a theory.

The word behind the promise

The Hebrew verb shuwb, to turn back or return, runs through the restoration prophecies and carries both senses at once: return to the land and return to the Lord. Deuteronomy 30:1-6 puts them side by side, promising that God will gather His people from the peoples where He scattered them and circumcise their hearts.

Amos ends with a promise that God will plant them “on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them” (Amos 9:15). Whatever you make of the present situation, permanence is promised, and permanence has not yet arrived.

That is why I speak of modern Israel as significant rather than as fulfilment complete. The land promise, the national promise and the spiritual promise are all in the text. Some of it we can see; the best of it we cannot see yet.

What Scripture says is still ahead

Daniel 9:27 describes a coming ruler making a covenant with the many for one week and breaking it halfway through. Jesus, in the Olivet Discourse, points to an abomination standing in the holy place. Paul describes the man of lawlessness taking his seat in the temple of God. Each of those assumes a functioning Jewish worship centre.

Then there is the darkest part. Jeremiah calls it “a time of distress for Jacob” (Jeremiah 30:7), and Zechariah describes the nations gathered against Jerusalem. The regathering of modern Israel sets the stage for suffering before it sets the stage for glory, and honesty requires saying so.

The end of it, though, is national salvation. “And in this way all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). Not a remnant only, not the Church renamed, but the nation looking on the One they pierced and mourning, then receiving Him.

None of that timetable can be dated, and I want to keep saying so. What Scripture gives is a sequence and a certainty, not a calendar. The existence of modern Israel makes the sequence visible in a way it simply was not for the generations of believers who died between AD 70 and 1948.

Holding this without losing your head

Prophecy teaching about Israel attracts a great deal of nonsense, and I want none of it. Newspaper exegesis, where every headline is matched to a verse, discredits the very hope it claims to defend. I have watched Christians embarrass themselves this way for forty years, and the pattern never changes.

The safeguard is simple. Read the text, hold the promises, and refuse to fill in what God has left blank. Imminence means Jesus can come at any moment without a single further sign, which I explain in my answer on imminence. Signs may point to the season that follows His coming for the Church. They are not a countdown.

And keep the gospel in the picture. Paul’s heart’s desire and prayer for his kinsmen was that they might be saved. Anyone who is fascinated by modern Israel prophetically but indifferent to Jewish people evangelistically has misread Romans badly.

The other safeguard is charity towards Christians who read this differently. Godly, careful men have concluded that the promises are fulfilled in the Church, and I think they are mistaken rather than wicked. I would rather argue the text with them than question their faith.

So, now what?

Watch, but do not calculate. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem and pray for the salvation of Jewish people, which are not competing prayers. And let the visible faithfulness of God to an ancient promise strengthen your confidence in the promises He has made to you.

That, for me, is the real weight of the question. If God has kept His word to a nation that broke covenant with Him repeatedly across three thousand years, what exactly do you think He is going to do about His word to you? Is your own confidence built on His faithfulness or on your performance?

“Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came.”

Ezekiel 36:22, ESV