‘I will create Jerusalem to be a delight,
and its people a joy.
I will rejoice over Jerusalem
and take delight in my people …
Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth …
Before they call I will answer;
while they are still speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
but dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,’
says the LORD.
(Isaiah 65:18-20,24-25, NIV)
Jesus returns. And then the world is transformed. A glorious new age, a golden age, begins. What will it be like? (And: What’s all that about a wonderful ‘millennium’ to come?)
(This is an extended post!)
We’ll dig into these questions in the following post. But to know how to handle them at all, we need to explore first what God says about something else: Is there a ‘Jewishness’, a Jerusalem-centredness, about the end of history?
What follows may be the most intense post in this sequence. But the answer to this question can lead to whole swathes of the Bible coming alive for us, so let’s persevere!
We’ve already seen, in the post on the `rapture`, how this issue – is there a key place in God’s end-time purposes for ethnic Israel? and for the land of Israel in particular? – has implications for whether as the global Church we expect to be delivered before all hell breaks loose here, or whether it seems to be our calling to face the final crisis and the Animal. But it’s a key issue much more broadly, between the more ‘literal’ and the more ‘non-literal’ approaches to the end times; and it’s particularly significant now as we ask, what happens after Jesus returns as King? Is that the end of the planet, or (before He brings in a completely ‘new heaven and new earth’ [Revelation 21:1]) does God have a glorious plan for this earth restored – a purpose in which the Jews are somehow very significant, and where the restored earth is somehow centred on a literal Jerusalem?
But the question is also: What did Jesus mean when He prophesied the fall of Jerusalem in Luke 21:24, by speaking of the ‘times of the Gentiles’ as a period that would start then but clearly have an end? What happens after the ‘times of the Gentiles’ are over? And what about when Paul looks ahead to a time when (Romans 11:25) the ‘full number of the Gentiles’ have joined God’s people, at which point ethnic Israel’s ‘hardening’ comes to an end and they are
used by God to bring ‘life from the dead’ (Romans 11:15), because ultimately ‘God’s gifts and his call’ to them are ‘irrevocable’ (v29)? What does all this tell us about what happens in the time of the End?
Goodbye ethnic Israel?
We are now in another area where – it seems to me – a more ‘literal’ approach to future prophecy makes fascinating sense of many passages that can otherwise seem obscure and therefore be neglected. But not all Bible Christians see it this way. Let me try to summarise the debate.
My impression is that for the majority of British evangelical academics, ethnic Israel, and the land of Israel especially, have no further special part in God’s purposes. And so the Old Testament promises to Israel are often applied exclusively to Christ and the Church (including, of course, its Jewish members). To quote J A Thompson in the Tyndale commentary on Deuteronomy: “It is important for the Christian to realize that in the New Testament the Christian church (Gk. ekklesia) is regarded as the true people of God (James 1:1, 1 Peter 2:5,9,10). Christians are the true ‘Jews’ (Rom 2:29; cf Rev 2:9), Israel (Rom 9:6), Israel after the Spirit (Rom 8:1-11), the seed of Abraham (Gal 3:7,29), the Israel of God (Gal 6:16), the circumcision (Phil 3:3; Col 2:11), the peculiar [or, chosen] people (Titus 2:14; 1 Peter 2:9f; cf Ex 19:5) … [Paul] sees only one Israel into which the Gentiles are grafted [Thompson is referring here to Romans 11:17-24], so that there is no difference between the church and Israel. The true Israel was constituted through a faith relationship and not merely on the basis of physical descent.”(1)
A fair amount of that is unarguable. And he could have strengthened his case further: first by noting how Galatians 3:16 explains that the promises ‘spoken to Abraham and to his seed’, for example about the land of Israel, were in fact spoken not to ‘“seeds”, meaning many people, but “and to your seed”, meaning one person, who is Christ’ – and then, presumably, to anyone of any ethnic background who has come ‘into Christ’. We inherit the promises to Abraham. (And in Romans 4:13 Paul summarises those promises to the effect that Abraham would be ‘heir of the world’ [emphasis mine], not just the land, and says they are for all believers whether Jews or Gentiles [4:16].)
Second, although the Old Testament contains many promises to the Jews, God made it clear that His promises often had a conditional element. God warns Israel in Jeremiah 18, `Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel … [If] I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.` (The same principle is set out clearly in Deuteronomy 28:68, 1 Samuel 2:30 and 2 Chronicles 7:16-21.)
Third, Jesus explicitly warned the Jews of exactly this, that by rejecting Him they were putting themselves outside God’s purposes of blessing: ‘The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit,’ He says in Matthew 21:43; and by the time of Acts 28:25-28 just this seems to be happening. ‘In a word’, then, says Motyer in The Bible Speaks Today commentary on James, ”‘Israel’ is the name of the people of Jesus; it is the true and inalienable title of his church … [Jesus] was leading the Israel of the Old Covenant into its full, intended reality as the Israel of the New Covenant … Those who have put their faith in Jesus for salvation are Abraham’s children and the Israel of God.”(2)
As I say, a good deal of this is unarguable. But there are two huge ‘howevers’.
First, the reinterpretation into (massively glorious!) spiritual terms of God’s promises to Abraham, in Galatians 3 and Romans 4, says nothing about whether they have a double fulfilment. (Bible prophecies sometimes do: think for example of how the messianic psalms can be about David or Solomon and also about the Christ to come; or look at Matthew 2:15, or Isaiah 61:2, or 2 Samuel 7:12-14, or Zechariah 6:12.) The most important fulfilment, obviously, is the eternal one, the ‘promise of the Spirit’ (Galatians 3:14), and also that we – Jews and Gentiles together – are ‘heirs of the world’ (Romans 4:13,16). But this does not rule out a second fulfilment, centred concretely on the land of Israel, for Jesus’ disciples in ethnic Israel. (A classic expression of this is Zechariah 2, which states unambiguously how ‘Many nations will be joined with the LORD in that day and will become my people’ [v11], but then adds equally clearly in the following verse, ‘The LORD will inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land [emphasis mine] and will again choose Jerusalem.’)
Second, there are limits to how far God’s central promises are conditional upon what we humans do. (Thank God for that!) The last part of Ezekiel (see for example 37:22) prophesies the restoration of ethnic Israel (including even Ephraim, the disastrous northern half, which had vanished into obscurity by then), at a time of Jerusalem’s complete failure and devastation. Isaiah 11:12-16 prophesies the regathering of both Israel and Judah ‘from the four quarters of the earth’ – but this promise appears precisely in the context of serious sin and failure, not just of the northern kingdom, Israel (allied treacherously, even as Isaiah was writing, with Syria against Judah), but also of Judah itself; and exactly at the time when God’s purposes were shifting from the Jewish nation as a whole to the righteous remnant (chapters 7 and 8). God still has plans for the northern kingdom, even when its sinfulness is on the verge of bringing it to complete extinction. Indeed, for those of us who believe that the last half of Isaiah predates Jerusalem’s fall, all the wonderful depictions of God’s blessing to Jerusalem in these chapters come when it was already clear that Judah’s sin was so serious that exile was inevitable (39:6). It was at such a time that God gave the most spectacular revelations of its glorious future. When it comes to God’s central purposes for the world, whatever people do, His declared intentions stand firm. (Thank You, Lord!)
So is there evidence in the New Testament of anything so irrevocable in God’s end-time purposes for ethnic Israel?
Romans 9-11 seem to make clear that the answer is Yes. (Please read 11:11-29 at least!) Here Paul states that God does have such a future purpose, and indeed that ethnic Israel’s repentance, coming after ‘the full number of the Gentiles has come in’(v25), will be followed by something dramatic enough to be described as ‘life from the dead’ (v15).(3) The jumping-off point of these chapters is the wonderful promise in 8:38-39: Nothing in the present, and
nothing in the future, can separate us from the love of Christ! Ah – but what if that is only conditional? What can Paul have to say about God’s promises to ethnic Israel (9:3), which now seems to have forfeited its place in God’s love? What price God’s promises to them?
In 9:6 Paul sets out his response to this: ‘It is not as though God’s word had failed’! And he then provides a several-sided answer as to how Israel still shares in the purposes of God. First, indeed, he does make the point that now ‘Israel’ is a complex entity; not everyone who is descended from Israel is Israel in the sense that counts (9:6 again). And then – having explained how Israel has got itself into trouble by its rebelliousness (10:21) – he makes clear that there is still a remnant of ethnic Israel that is yet in the plan (11:1-5). What is crucial for our purposes, however, is what he goes on to say next: God has not rejected His ancient chosen people, and the time will come when ethnic Israel will be brought back into the plan (11:11-15, 25-27). And that, exults Paul, will produce colossal regeneration, nothing less than ‘life from the dead’ (v15). In the culmination ethnic Israel still has a place. God is faithful and His promises are not unreliable: in fact when it comes to something as central to history as God’s overall plan with His chosen people – here is the verse that counts – ‘God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable’(v29, emphasis mine)!
Old Testament Israel and the future
That seems clear enough. But if we really want the facts, the full, glorious picture, we need to be serious about grasping God’s Old Testament revelation, and drinking in the sheer volume of glorious, joyous promises in its less well-known books about ethnic Israel and, often, its land. Again, I personally find the ‘non-literal’ interpretation of all this implausible because it simply doesn’t handle enough of the data. (4)
Where do we begin? Perhaps in the strange thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, prefaced as it is with the enigmatic comment that ‘the secret things belong to the LORD our God’ (29:29). (5) It is difficult to see Deuteronomy 30:3-4 speaking of Israel being banished to ‘all the nations where [God] scattered you … the most distant land under the heavens’, as foretelling the exile in Babylon; surely this sounds much more like the global dispersion of the Jews after AD70. But then when were the next verses fulfilled, verses 5-6?: `He will bring you to the land that belonged to your fathers … He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.` This also didn’t really get fulfilled in the return after the exile; are we not looking therefore at an end-time national repentance and blessing?
Similar questions arise with the predictions in Isaiah 14:2 (where Alec Motyer, who does not support the overall approach we are setting out here, remarks in his superb Tyndale commentary on Isaiah that `What actually happened at the return from Babylon (539BC) in no way fulfilled this … There was [then] no international acclaim or will to help, no reversal of the captor-captive roles`(6) – whereas Isaiah says, `Nations will take [Israel] and bring them to their own place … They will make captives of their captors and rule over their oppressors’); Isaiah 43:5 (‘I will bring your children from the east, and gather you from the west’); Zechariah 10:9-10 (‘Though I scatter them among the peoples, yet in distant lands they will remember me. They and their children will survive, and they will return. I will bring them back’); and Ezekiel 39:21-29, where, strikingly, verse 22 (‘From that day forward’ – that is, from the time of God’s destruction of the mighty forces invading Palestine – ‘the house of Israel will know that I am the LORD their God’) shows that Israel had been brought back to its land in unbelief – and yet God’s promises still held firm. It is hard not to see in these passages, first the dramatic events of 1948 when Israel came back into existence as a nation in Palestine after a gap of nearly nineteen centuries, just as literally minded Bible Christians had long been expecting them to do; and then pointers towards something still greater in store for Israel in the days to come.
There’s much more in Isaiah, particularly about the glory to be centred on Israel in the future – verses often not at all easy to reapply to the Church. Consider just four examples:
“Foreigners will rebuild your walls, and their kings will serve you. Though in anger I struck you, in favour I will show you compassion. Your gates will always stand open, they will never be shut, day or night, so that men may bring you the wealth of the nations – their kings led in triumphal procession. For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly ruined … The sons of your oppressors will come bowing before you.” (Isaiah 60:10-12,14)
“And they will bring all your [people], from all the nations, to my holy mountain in Jerusalem as an offering to the LORD – on horses, in chariots and wagons, and on mules and camels,’ says the LORD. ‘They will bring them, as the Israelites bring their grain offerings, to the temple of the LORD in ceremonially clean vessels.” (Isaiah 66:20)
“Many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.’ The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples.” (Isaiah 2:3-4)
“You will be called the City of Righteousness.” (Isaiah 1:26)
(And compare also Micah 4:2-8 and 7:11-20.)
(I have to admit that for me it’s difficult to think of God making these promises to ethnic Israel and then saying, ‘Well, in fact most of your own descendants won’t benefit from what I promised, but that’s all right because the people who will benefit will be called the new Israel; they will take over your name!’ ‘I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David’, says God in the celebration of His unimaginable restoration in Isaiah 55:3; but in what sense does this promise have value for its recipients, if in the end Jewish identity is irrelevant and the blessing is passed to a [mostly] completely different group of God-fearers?)
Then there’s Daniel. As God reveals the future in this book, ethnic Israel and its land seem central. Daniel 9:24-27 presents an amazing account of the sweep of history ordained by God ‘to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy’. Astonishingly, we seem to be given here, far ahead and accurately, the timing of just when ‘the Anointed One’ (which is what ‘Christ’ means) will come (vv25-26), before he is ‘cut off’. (Tom Wright notes that among first-century Jews there was great interest in calculating when Daniel’s ‘seventy weeks of years’ might be completed, which many saw as happening in their own [and Jesus’] time.(7) He also cites Josephus’ remarkable reference to this passage [in Jewish Wars 6:312-15], where Josephus ‘spoke of an oracle in the Jewish Scriptures which predicted that, at that time, a world ruler would arise from Judea’. (8))
The important thing for us here is that this panorama of salvation history is summarised for Daniel as being ‘decreed for your people and [which should remove any doubts about whether ethnic Israel is intended] your holy city’ (emphasis mine). The panorama concludes (9) (v27) with someone unpleasant (presumably ‘the ruler who will come’ of v26) breaking his word (to Israel?) three and a half years before it all ends, and setting up an ‘abomination that causes desolation’ in the temple in Jerusalem – precisely what Jesus (in Matthew 24:15, ‘spoken of through the prophet Daniel’) and Paul (2 Thessalonians 2:4) highlighted as the key marker of the final crisis. Similarly, in Daniel 12:7 we learn that the final three and a half years head for completion ‘when the power of the holy people has been finally broken’, which sounds like the same national catastrophe (and again surely cannot refer to the Church).(10) So in Daniel too the people of Israel and its city seem central to the final drama.
Then there’s Jeremiah. Jeremiah 3:16-18 hasn’t happened to this day: “‘In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land,’ declares the LORD, ‘[people] will no longer say, “The ark of the covenant of the LORD.” It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made. At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the LORD, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honour the name of the LORD … In those days the house of Judah will join the house of Israel, and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your forefathers as an inheritance.’”
The prophecies concerning the restoration of Israel in Jeremiah 33 also remain unfulfilled (look at the wordings of verse 9 and verse 16 – and verse 18 is particularly interesting in declaring that the Levitical priests will never ‘fail to have a man to stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices’, which appears, like the final chapters of Ezekiel, to speak of an end-time temple in Jerusalem). Verses 25-26 make the central point about ethnic Israel unmistakably clear for us: “This is what the LORD says: ‘If I have not established my covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth, then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant and will not choose one of his sons to rule over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For I will restore their fortunes and have compassion on them.’”
Jeremiah 31:36-37 says the same, and makes strikingly clear too that these promises are not in the end conditional: “‘Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,’ declares the LORD, ‘will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before me.’ This is what the LORD says: ‘Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done.’”
There’s still more. A striking thing about Old Testament prophecy is the way in which the glorious end-time blessing is described as centred very concretely on the land of Israel. To pick just a few of many examples that are worth turning up, we can look at Isaiah 2:1-4, or the end of Amos, or the end of Obadiah which is very specific about the areas of the land that are in view.(11) Again, it’s hard to see how, if we’ve read the whole of Amos or Obadiah, the ‘joyful turn’ of the final verses can be meaningful unless it has a fulfilment in ethnic Israel. We should look at Zechariah 2, which states clearly, ‘Many nations will be joined with the LORD in that day and will become my people’ (v11), then adds equally clearly in the following verse, ‘The LORD will inherit Judah … in the holy land (emphasis mine) and will again choose Jerusalem.’ And then there are the last chapters of Zechariah, which focus on a concrete description of a terrible physical conflict centred on Jerusalem (reminiscent again of Matthew 24:15- 22), a conflict which is the immediate precursor to the Lord’s return to the Mount of Olives in physical form (Zechariah 14:4); and then comes, not the end of the planet, but an era of universal worship centred on the city of Jerusalem (14:16-21).
But the hardest book to grasp or preach, it seems to me, unless you believe in God having an end-time future for ethnic (twelve-tribe) Israel including a rebuilt temple, must be the entire last quarter of Ezekiel, from chapter 36 to chapter 48. The section starts with a prophecy explicitly linked geographically to ‘the mountains of Israel … the ravines and valleys’ (36:1,4). Then comes the famous vision of the valley of dry bones in chapter 37, surely also (primarily) about ethnic Israel: “Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land.” (Emphasis mine.)
But as we read the still-unfulfilled prophecy of the reunification of Ephraim (the lost northern tribes) with Judah (37:15-22), we know we must be dealing with the end times. Then in the next two chapters, God’s dramatic judgement on the invaders ‘from the far north’ also seems to present events there in the land of Palestine as central to the end times.(12) It’s specifically through this judgement – likewise unfulfilled in history so far – that God’s self-revelation is recognised decisively by ‘many nations’ (38:23; 39:6-7,23); and the section leads up to the repeated promise: “‘Though I sent [Israel] into exile among the nations, I will gather them to their own land, not leaving any behind. I will no longer hide my face from them, for I will pour out my Spirit on the house of Israel.’ (Ezekiel 39:28-29, emphasis mine)
Most importantly, Ezekiel goes on to devote several complete chapters to details and measurements of the rebuilt temple that are surely very hard to preach in a symbolic (ie non-literal) manner by applying them to the Church.(13) Then God’s visible presence returns to Jerusalem (43:2-5); and finally Ezekiel rounds off his book with a chapter prophesying the (also as yet unfulfilled) division of the land of Palestine, not among Judah alone but among all the tribes of Israel, including those long-lost northerners.
What can all these chapters be but a prophecy of the end time, and of ethnic Israel’s crucial place in it?
Ethnic Israel in the New Testament
It’s important for us to recognise that in the New Testament too, God’s people among the ethnic Jews and their land once again become central to God’s purposes as the final drama develops.
We’ve already seen this in Romans 11’s depiction of God’s end-time plan for ethnic Israel to bring life to the world; and in the way Paul, writing in a thoroughly non-apocalyptic way about the end times in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, speaks of a crucial sign of the end when the final dictator sets himself up to be worshipped in God’s temple in Jerusalem. We see it also in the Gospels, in Jesus’ deep concern in Matthew 24 to forewarn those living in Judaea
(v16; and keeping the Sabbath meticulously, v20) about events which do seem to be part of the final crisis (vv14,21-22,29).(14). (And this is in a context where Jesus clearly knows He will be rejected by the Jews [23:37]; their role in the events preceding His second coming is not conditional on what they did during His first.) We see it also notably in His answer in Acts 1:6-7: the disciples ask Jesus when He will ‘restore the kingdom to Israel’ (which they anyway would surely have understood in physical terms). His reply is not that they have misunderstood things and this is not what will happen, but specifically that it is not for them to know the times or dates (v7).
As we might expect, we see a clear emphasis on ethnic Israel and its land in Revelation. Revelation 7:3-8 explicitly presents members of the historic Israelite tribes (including the lost northern ones) having some crucial place, which is contrasted with the people ‘from every nation, tribe, people and language’ (emphasis mine) introduced in verse 9 as soon as the list of Israelite tribes is over.(15) Revelation 11:1-3 presents the forty-two month (1260-day) crisis as a period when the ‘Gentiles’ will trample on the ‘holy city’, and also its temple. Revelation 16:12,16 presents matters coming to climax as the Animal and the armies of all the nations gather for battle in the land of Israel.(16) (Just listing these reminds me again of the reasons for feeling that the more ‘literal’ approach makes fascinating sense of the most biblical data. My experience is that the more ‘literally minded’ writers tend to find these passages exciting, Revelation particularly, whereas their ‘nonliteral’ siblings often spend their time describing how difficult and puzzling they are!)
In both the Old and New Testament, then, we see a clear flavour of ‘Jewishness’, a clear place for ethnic Israel, in the events of the end times. Some of us might feel this has implications for what we discussed in the previous chapter: if Christ’s followers among the Jews are so central to the final crisis and its aftermath, this may strengthen the case for thinking the global Church may have been snatched away in the ‘rapture’ before the Animal’s final onslaught. Anyway, in the next post we’ll set out further the implications for what happens after that onslaught, after Christ’s triumphant return: Christ’s followers among the Jews seem to have a special destiny. But first: so, surely, do the godly expressions of each and every nation! – Egypt and Iraq (Isaiah 19:24-25), the Czech Moravians and Danes whom God used to kick-start the modern missionary movement, and the different nations who later have picked up the baton. But then we ask: What about the Palestinians?
It is tragic to see Bible Christians making the mistake of thinking that the ‘Jewishness’ of some of God’s purposes in the future justifies anything at all that the government of Israel may do in the present. A key point of the story of Abraham and Hagar (Genesis 16) is that it’s disastrous to attempt to bring about God’s purposes by means and methods that are not His. God loves Israel – and He loves the Palestinians too, infinitely. (See Leviticus 18:34: ‘The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself.’ Ezekiel 47:22 is also very clear.) As Bible Christians, compelled by the love of Jesus, social justice and the needs of others are our business. That does include the rights of the Palestinians.
But now let’s repeat: equally godly Bible Christians disagree about what we’ve discussed in this chapter. What we’re doing in this book is setting out the more ‘literal’ way of understanding it all, and describing how it makes sense of the biblical data. So then: what is all that about the golden age to come, the ‘millennium’?
This surely is major enough to deserve a separate post…
—
(1) J A Thompson, Deuteronomy (Inter-Varsity Press, 1974), pp148-49.
(2) Alec Motyer, The Message of James (Inter-Varsity Press, 1985),p24.
(3) See the masterly commentary on Romans by Douglas Moo in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series (Eerdmans, 1996), particularly pp712-13 and 724.
(4) One cannot help noticing, for example, the minimal treatment of the very relevant closing chapters of both Ezekiel and Zechariah in both of the respected non-literalist writers Sam Storms (Kingdom Come) and Kim Riddlebarger (A Case for Amillennialism).
(5) The ‘secret things’ make Deuteronomy 30 an amazing chapter. Verses 11-16 set out clearly the Old Testament’s upfront ‘deal’ between God and Israel where salvation is earned through keeping the law. But the rest of the Old Testament experience shows us the vital lesson that humanity needed to be taught about religion and faith: we can never get God’s blessing by earning it like that, but only by grace. And once that learning experience had been lived out and recorded for the sake of all humankind, in Romans 10:5-9 the Holy Spirit returns to these verses and footnotes them remarkably with something unexpected, revealing the ‘secret things that belong to the Lord’ and explaining the way to God that brings life: it’s about Christ, His death, and how we are saved by responding to Him. The ‘secret things belong to the Lord’, says Deuteronomy 29:29; and by the footnoting to Deuteronomy that He provides in Romans 10, God reveals them. Glorious!
(6) Alec Motyer, Isaiah (Inter-Varsity Press, 1999), p117.
(7) Tom Wright, Justification (SPCK, 2009), p40. Of course, the gloriously liberating arrangements of jubilee (Leviticus 25) meant that the Jewish mind was accustomed to thinking in terms of ‘sevens’ or ‘weeks’ of years, as Riddlebarger rightly observes (p179). On the remarkable accuracy of the timing of this prediction, see chapter 9 of John Lennox’s superb book on Daniel, Against the Flow (Monarch, 2015).
(8) In Jesus and the Restoration of Israel, ed Carey Newman, p257.
(9) I’m saving a difficult but important issue here for these endnotes. Obviously Jerusalem wasn’t destroyed within seven years of Christ’s being ‘cut off’ – it was nearly forty years later – and there is more that happens after that in verse 27. But various writers have noticed how this and a good number of other passages make most sense if we postulate that, when (at Calvary, then again in Acts) the Jews rejected God’s offer of great blessing and indeed crucified their Messiah, the ‘prophetic clock’ of God’s purposes for them ‘stopped ticking’; there was a ‘hiatus’, a ‘parenthesis’. So here in Daniel 9 that parenthesis would happen between the sixty-ninth ‘week of years’ when Christ is ‘cut off’, and the seventieth when the Jews and their city take centre stage in God’s purposes again (as the ‘times of the Gentiles’ draw to a close: Luke 21:24; Romans 11:15,25). (Here are the details: Daniel 9:26, where `the people of the ruler who will come` will destroy Jerusalem and the sanctuary, as happened in AD70, is not part of the 69th of the `sevens` in that prophecy, as that `seven` ends in the cross (v26); but it’s not the 70th (v27) either, because in v27 the Jerusalem temple sanctuary destroyed in v26 has come back into existence, been rebuilt (and also the ruler looked ahead to in v26 has apparently now come). So all this in Daniel 9 makes by far the most sense if there’s a gap between the 69th and 70th `seven`: when the Jews crucified their Messiah, God’s prophetic plan for Jerusalem stopped.) And this parenthesis suggestion can also be justified by how it helps make sense of several other puzzling passages: for example, the sudden shift from known historical events in Daniel 11:1-32 to unfulfilled prophecies about the ‘time of the end’ in verses 36-45, featuring a dictator described (v36) in the same terms as the end-time Animal of 2 Thessalonians 2:4; the transition from four empires of biblical times in the first part of Daniel 7 to (apparently) the end times at some later point in that chapter; and, in the New Testament, the way in which, after Israel rejected the gospel, what Peter confidently asserted ‘all the prophets’ had predicted concerning ‘these days’ (Acts 3:24, emphasis mine) ground to a halt until the end times. It’s a suggestion that may also help us with Isaiah 61:2, or Matthew 24. We live, then, in this `parenthesis`, this gap – what Luke 21:24 calls the `times of the Gentiles` – all those years when Jerusalem was no longer central. But still every one of God’s prophesied plans will finally be fulfilled!
(10) And there’s more. Note also Daniel 7:25, where in the crucial three-and-a-half-year period what the end-time dictator does is seek to ‘change the set times and the laws’, something that would not matter to Gentile Christians but might well to endtime Messianic Jews; and Daniel 11:36-45, an account of geopolitical events still unfulfilled and ‘at the time of the end’ (v40), in which the land of Israel is the centre of the storm.
(11) The details at the end of Obadiah, and the end of Ezekiel, as to how the inherited land will be subdivided, surely in their careful specificity demolish the common idea that the land is only promised to Israel because of its immaturity, and Israel will eventually rejoice to find that the promise’s fulfilment is something far bigger than anything to do with the land at all. A father promising his immature children something of this kind, that bears no real relation to the promise’s actual fulfilment, surely doesn’t go into this kind of detail.
(12) I say ‘seems’, because it’s possible that these chapters describe the same events as the attack at the end of the millennium in Revelation 20:8 (cf Storms, p434). But it’s hard to see how the seven months burying corpses of Ezekiel 39:14, or the seven years using up the invaders’ fuel in 39:9, can happen after Revelation 20:9. More probably, the rebels of Revelation 20 are deliberately self-identifying with the earlier invasion; and Satan’s tactics haven’t changed.
(13) They also don’t really fit Storms’ idea (drawn from Hoekema) that the Old Testament prophecies to Israel will be fulfilled, not in a future millennium, but on the new earth (pp208-09). Revelation 21:22 makes the point explicitly that there is no temple in the eternal state, ‘because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple’.
(14) See our post on Matthew 24 in Bible intros 3-1. Verse 20 is a strikingly difficult verse, because whether it refers to AD70 or the end times, no believer in either period was or will be under law about the Sabbath; see Colossians 2:16. Then again, of course, this isn’t about having to break God’s law or die at the hand of the invader; breaking the Sabbath had always been acceptable when the ‘ox was down the well’ (see Luke 14:5). Possibly what we have here is messianic Jews taking the Sabbath very seriously, but for purely cultural or heritage reasons. (This is what the Recabites were commended for in Jeremiah 35, though their unyielding teetotalism was likewise not a universal law. And compare Acts 21:24.) France (Matthew [Inter-Varsity Press, 1985], p341) sees this as AD70, when ‘on a sabbath gates would be shut and provisions unobtainable’, but it seems unlikely that that would still have been an issue when the Roman invaders were on the doorstep.
(15) It surely makes most sense, given the way the tribes are spelled out, to understand this first group as literal ethnic Israel? The long list of tribes seems bizarrely irrelevant if it is really the Church.
(16) A slightly more obscure example could be the ‘woman’ crowned with twelve stars who is at the centre of the events of Revelation 12. Since she apparently gives birth to Christ (v5, cf Micah 5:2-3), it may seem reasonable to identify her as godly ethnic Israel. Then the clear distinction between her and the ‘rest of her offspring … who … hold to the testimony of Jesus’, and whom the dragon starts to persecute worldwide by raising up the Animal (12:17–13:1,13:7), makes complete sense as the distinction between Israel as God’s people and her Gentile offspring. But in that case we should again note the key place godly Israel has in the climactic 1260-day crisis (vv6,14), and the way she is protected by fleeing to the desert (what meaning could we usefully give to that other than the literal?), as Jesus instructed them in Matthew 24:16.
(This is a slightly edited version of a chapter from my A Guide to the End of the World, available on Kindle or in book form from https://instantapostle.com/books/a-guide-to-the-end-of-the-world/ .)
