What is the role of Israel during the tribulation?

Question 10076.

The role of Israel during the tribulation is central rather than incidental. That seven-year period is not primarily about the nations, the beast or even the judgements. Jeremiah calls it “a time of distress for Jacob,” and Daniel says the seventy sevens were decreed about “your people and your holy city.”

Once the Church has been removed, God’s dealings return to the nation with whom the covenants were made. What follows is the darkest chapter in Jewish history and the doorway into the brightest.

Israel during the tribulation stands at the centre

Daniel 9:24 states the scope plainly: the seventy sevens concern Daniel’s people and Daniel’s city. Sixty-nine of them ran to the cutting off of the Messiah. The final seven has not yet run, and its subject matter has not changed.

Jeremiah 30:7 gives the period its name: “Alas! That day is so great there is none like it; it is a time of distress for Jacob; yet he shall be saved out of it” (Jeremiah 30:7). Distress and deliverance are held together in one verse.

The Church is absent from Revelation 4 to 18 as an entity on earth, which fits the position I hold on the timing of the Rapture. My answer on the time of Jacob’s trouble develops this.

So when we ask about Israel during the tribulation, we are not asking about a minor thread. We are asking about the main storyline.

Revelation reinforces the point structurally. Once the scene shifts to earth in chapter 6, the subject matter is Jewish throughout: the twelve tribes sealed, the temple measured, the holy city trampled for forty-two months, the woman who bore the male child. Israel during the tribulation is the thread that holds those chapters together.

The word Jeremiah uses for that distress is tsarah, a narrow and pressing anguish, the sort that leaves no room to turn. It is the right word for what is coming.

A covenant that turns out to be a trap

The period opens when a coming ruler “shall make a strong covenant with many for one week” (Daniel 9:27). That agreement evidently gives Israel security, and it appears to permit temple worship, since sacrifice and offering are being conducted when he later stops them.

Isaiah 28:15 describes the leadership boasting, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement,” and God’s answer is that the covenant will be annulled. A nation still looking for a political guarantor finds one, and he is the worst possible choice.

At the midpoint the arrangement collapses. He puts an end to the sacrifices, sets up the abomination of desolation in the holy place, and demands worship. Israel during the tribulation moves overnight from protected partner to hunted people.

Jesus attached urgent instructions to that moment: those in Judea are to flee to the mountains without stopping to collect anything, and to pray that their flight is not in winter or on a Sabbath.

Preservation in the wilderness

Revelation 12 pictures a woman clothed with the sun who gives birth to a male child destined to rule the nations. The woman is Israel, the child is Jesus, and after the child is caught up to God the woman flees “into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days” (Revelation 12:6).

That is exactly three and a half years, the second half of Daniel’s final week. The dragon pursues her, the earth helps her, and he goes off to make war on the rest of her offspring.

God therefore preserves a remnant physically through the worst of it. There is no scenario in which Israel during the tribulation is abandoned, however it looks from the ground at the time.

Where this wilderness refuge is, Scripture does not say. Some have suggested the rock city of Petra in Edom, partly because Daniel 11:41 says Edom, Moab and Ammon will escape the hand of the coming ruler. I hold that lightly, as a reasonable guess rather than a doctrine.

Israel becomes the missionary nation

One of the great ironies of the period is that the nation that stumbled becomes the nation that preaches. The 144,000 are sealed “from every tribe of the sons of Israel,” twelve thousand from each, and immediately afterwards John sees an innumerable multitude out of every nation coming out of the great tribulation.

The connection between those two groups is difficult to miss. Sealed Jewish servants of God go out, and a global harvest comes in. My answer on the 144,000 works through their identity.

The two witnesses of Revelation 11 prophesy for 1,260 days in Jerusalem with power reminiscent of Moses and Elijah, are killed, lie in the street while the world celebrates, and are raised and taken up in full view. The effect is that survivors give glory to the God of heaven.

This was always the design. Israel was called to be a light to the nations, and Israel during the tribulation finally becomes one, under the most extreme conditions imaginable.

There is a lovely reversal in this. For centuries the nations have preached to Israel, often badly and sometimes brutally. In that period Israel during the tribulation preaches to the nations, and the harvest is beyond counting.

The cost

I do not want to soften this. Zechariah says that in all the land “two thirds shall be cut off and perish, and one third shall be left alive” (Zechariah 13:8). The proportions are appalling, and they are stated by God without apology.

The surviving third is then brought through the fire, refined as silver is refined and tested as gold is tested. Then comes the sentence that explains the whole ordeal: “They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.'”

Antisemitism reaches its final and most concentrated form in that period, driven by the dragon who has always hated the woman. Everything from Pharaoh to Haman to the twentieth century has been a rehearsal for it.

And yet the nation is not destroyed. Jeremiah 31:35-37 stakes God’s reliability on Israel’s survival, and the persecutor’s failure is guaranteed before he begins.

The turning

Hosea supplies the mechanism: “I will return again to my place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face, and in their distress earnestly seek me” (Hosea 5:15). The distress is what produces the seeking.

Zechariah 12:10 describes the moment: God pours out a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, “and they shall look on me, on him whom they have pierced,” and there is mourning across the land, family by family.

Jesus told Jerusalem, “you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'” That is a condition, and it will be met. The role of Israel during the tribulation culminates in a national welcome for the Messiah the nation once rejected.

Paul describes the same outcome in Romans 11:26, “And in this way all Israel will be saved,” which is the conclusion of the argument I trace in my answer on God’s plan for Israel.

Notice how long God is willing to wait for that moment. Two millennia of apparent silence towards the nation, and He has not moved on to another people or another plan. Patience of that scale is difficult to take in.

After the storm

When Jesus returns, the surviving nation is regathered fully, cleansed and installed at the head of the nations rather than the tail. Ezekiel 36 promises a new heart and a new spirit, with God’s own Spirit placed within them and the land rebuilt.

The covenants are then fulfilled without further interruption: the land in its full extent, the throne of David occupied by his greater Son, and the new covenant realised nationally as Jeremiah 31 promised.

Isaiah pictures the nations streaming to Jerusalem to be taught, with the law going out from Zion. Zechariah says ten men from the nations will take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

That is the destination. Israel during the tribulation suffers as she has never suffered, and comes out of it as the centre of blessing for the whole earth.

So, now what?

Two responses seem right to me. The first is prayer, and specifically prayer for Jewish people to come to Jesus now, before any of this. Nothing in this doctrine encourages us to shrug and wait for prophecy to grind on.

The second is confidence. God does not abandon the people He has bound Himself to, even when they have spent centuries refusing Him, and even when the discipline is severe. If that is how He treats a covenant, how do you think He is treating you?

“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child.”

Zechariah 12:10, ESV