{"id":588,"date":"2019-02-03T20:01:01","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T02:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?p=588"},"modified":"2019-02-03T20:01:01","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T02:01:01","slug":"renewed-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Renewed Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In the previous post<\/a>, the brief history of Israel as God’s people in the Old Testament was outlined, from its creation to its ultimate dissolution.\u00a0 Despite that dissolution, the prophets promised that God would one day restore and redeem not only the remnant of Judea, but the entirety of Israel.\u00a0 This had been made seemingly impossible by the fact that the ten northern tribes had been ‘lost’.\u00a0 They had not been lost to history.\u00a0 There is clear historical record of the cities and regions in Assyria to which the Israelites had been deported.\u00a0 Rather, over generations of intermarriage and assimilation, the people of the northern tribes became indistinguishable as a particular people.\u00a0 Their identity as a people had been dissolved among the nations, dissolved into the Gentiles.<\/p>\n

This dissolution meant that the northern tribes could only be restored from among the Gentiles.\u00a0 Hints of this are seen already in the Old Testament.\u00a0 Following the return from exile, those “people of the land” who assisted the nascent Judea in rebuilding were reckoned as members of one of the northern tribes.\u00a0 The Hasmonean kingdom, after the Maccabean revolt, extended descent from Abraham to political allies who sealed a covenant with the Judean nation, including the Spartans (1 Macc 12:21).\u00a0 To reconstitute these missing tribes would mean that people like Caleb and the mixed multitude who came out of Egypt alongside Israel would again have to be merged into a renewed, reconstituted nation and people.<\/p>\n

The reconstitution of the ten tribes from among the Gentiles was the means prophesied for Israel’s rebirth.\u00a0 Israel is described throughout the Old Testament as Yahweh’s portion, his inheritance (Ex 34:9; Deut 4:20; 32:9; Ps\u00a0 68:9; 78:71; 79:1; 106:5; Is 19:25; Jer 10:16; 16:18; 51:19; Mic 7:14, 18).\u00a0 God’s people are his inheritance.\u00a0 Yet the promise is that after the Word of God has judged the gods of the nations, Yahweh will inherit from all of them (Ps 82:8).\u00a0 These Gentiles are not naturalized citizens or converts to the religion of Judaism, rather they, like Caleb, are part of one of the tribes of Israel, children of Abraham, and inheritors of all of those promises.\u00a0 “On the holy mountain stands the city he founded.\u00a0 Yahweh loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.\u00a0 Glorious things are said of you, O city of God.\u00a0 Among those who know me I mention Rahav and Babylon.\u00a0 See Philistia and Tyre with Cush.\u00a0 They say, ‘This one was born there.’\u00a0 Then of Zion it will be said, ‘ This one and that one were born in her.’\u00a0 Yahweh records as he registers the peoples, ‘This one was born there'” (Ps 87:1-6).<\/p>\n

The birth of this new people would, in turn, require a new Pascha and a new Pentecost in which the newly founded, renewed Israel would be marked out by blood through shared experience of deliverance.\u00a0 To this end, the New Testament writings portray the death and resurrection of Christ as a new Passover and a new Exodus.\u00a0 Christ is the ‘lamb of God’ (John 1:29, 36; Rev 5:6; 7:17; 14:10; 15:3; 19:6, 9; 21:23; 22:1, 3).\u00a0 Christ dies at the Passover (Matt 26:2; Mark 14:1; Luke 22:1).\u00a0 St. John’s Gospel presents Christ dying at the time of the death of the lambs (John 19:14).\u00a0 St. Paul identifies Christ directly as the Passover lamb who has been sacrificed for us (1 Cor 5:7).\u00a0 Christ’s blood redeems his people as at the Passover Yahweh redeemed to firstborn of Israel from the destroyer (Acts 20:28; 1 Pet 1:9; Rev 1:5).\u00a0 And as at Sinai at the first Pentecost, the sprinkling of Christ’s blood marks out his new covenant people (1 Pet 1:19).<\/p>\n

As was the case with the original series of events from Pascha to Pentecost which marked out and created God’s people Israel, so also the new Pascha and Pentecost are participated in by subsequent generations, making them part of God’s people and inheritance, through ritual.\u00a0 St. Paul makes this point by paralleling the events of the Exodus with Christian mysteries.\u00a0 At the sea, the people were ‘baptized into Moses’ and in the wilderness they ‘ate spiritual food’ and ‘drank spiritual drink’ (1 Cor 10:1-4).\u00a0 They were baptized not only in the water, but in the cloud of the presence of the Holy Spirit (v. 2).\u00a0 Baptism brings the Christian into participation in the death and resurrection of Christ while chrismation brings participation in the new Pentecost.\u00a0 Just as the Passover meal was instituted and proclaimed as a participation in the events of the first Pascha before those events took place, Christ instituted the Eucharist before his death and resurrection.\u00a0 He describes his blood in the Eucharist as the ‘blood of the covenant’ (Matt 26:28; see also 1 Cor 11:25; Heb 12:24) in fulfillment of the blood sprinkled by Moses at Pentecost (Ex 24:8).<\/p>\n

The word typically translated as ‘church’ in the English New Testament is the Greek ‘ekklesia’.\u00a0 This word, which means ‘assembly’, is used throughout the Greek Old Testament to refer to the gathering together of the people of Israel.\u00a0 It has the same meaning in the New Testament.\u00a0 The church is the assembly of Israel, God’s people, which has been renewed and restored, the tribes formerly lost reconstituted from among the nations into which they were dispersed.\u00a0 The phrases “the church replaces Israel” or “the church is a new Israel” are therefore nonsensical once the terms in which the scriptures speak is understood.\u00a0 The church is Israel.\u00a0 Specifically, the church is the assembly of Israel, God’s people, to offer worship, praise, and sacrifice to their God.\u00a0 It is not that God’s people are no longer an ethnic or national entity, it is rather that God’s people and inheritance were never an ethnic entity, and only ever so briefly a national one.<\/p>\n

St. Paul takes this a step farther, and argues that this reconstituted Israel was God’s plan from the very beginning and throughout his people’s history.\u00a0 The God who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that do not exist’ has made Abraham the father of his people Israel and in so doing has made him the father of many nations (Rom 4:13, 16-17).\u00a0 Abraham is the father of all those who believe (Rom 4:11-12).\u00a0 Just as Moses came to redeem a remnant of the descendants of Jacob from Egypt who became the core of the new people of Israel, so also Christ came first to redeem that remnant within Judea (Matt 15:24; John 4:22; Rom 1:16).\u00a0 This remnant was gathered for him first through the ministry of St. John the Forerunner<\/a>.\u00a0 This remnant was preserved by Yahweh the God of Israel throughout the apostasy of the northern tribes and kingdom as exemplified in the ministry of the prophet Elijah (Rom 11:2-5).\u00a0 That judgment would reduce Judea to this remnant was always a part of the prophecy of Israel’s restoration (Rom 9:27-29).<\/p>\n

The fate of the northern tribes represented a theological problem for Second Temple (and later) Judaism which St. Paul sees resolved in the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham in Jesus Christ.\u00a0 The larger part of the nation of Israel, ten tribes, had an all too brief existence marked by continuous apostasy followed by dissolution leaving only the smaller Judah to exist independently for another 140 years.\u00a0 Did this mean that the promises of God had failed or that he had dealt unjustly with them?\u00a0 St. Paul adduces the example of Pharaoh, whom God raised up to power despite his wickedness precisely so that he could display his power to the entire world (Rom 9:17).\u00a0 To this might be added the example of Judas, called by Jesus and given all of the teaching, power, and authority of the rest of the twelve, though he was a devil (John 6:70).\u00a0 Jeremiah had prophesied against Israel from the potter’s house that Yahweh the God of Israel shaped nations like clay and if one turned to evil he would take it, crush it, and remold it anew (Jer 18:1-12).\u00a0 St. Paul returns to this language to show how God was just in his treatment of the northern kingdom, whom he continued to patiently bear with despite their wickedness and their wrath against them, giving them his blessings for 300 years before bringing about their destruction (Rom 9:20-22).\u00a0 The purpose, however, of this patient endurance of Israel’s wickedness was to prepare to start anew and create vessels of mercy prepared for glory, the renewed Israel of God (v. 23-24).<\/p>\n

Later in his Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul uses another metaphor of an olive tree.\u00a0 Here, the purpose of God’s allowing the unbelieving branches of Israel to grow was so that once they were pruned, they would create a place for other, believing branches to be grafted in (Rom 11:17-24).\u00a0 These wicked branches, the greater part of the originally constituted Israel, came to exist and were blessed despite their apostasy to create room within God’s people.\u00a0 They were dispersed to the Gentiles as punishment so that when the Gentiles returned and came to fill their space, they would be restored and in the end, all Israel would be saved (Rom 11:25-27).\u00a0 This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Hosea, after Yahweh had declared Israel to be ‘not my people’ that Israel would be restored when a people which did not yet exist would be called his people while at the same time those who had been rejected were declared to be his people once again (Hos 1:10; 2:23; Rom 9:25-26).<\/p>\n

While Pascha and Pentecost have created the renewed, restored, resurrected Israel, this people in its fullness is still being gathered through the mission of the church in the world.\u00a0 St. Paul calls this body which will come to fill Israel ‘the fullness of the Gentiles’ (Rom 11:25).\u00a0 Christ himself referred to the time between the constitution of the people of Israel and their arrival in the promised land and the kingdom as ‘the time of the Gentiles’ (Luke 21:24).\u00a0 It is for this purpose that Christ sent his apostles, the twelve and the seventy, after beholding him risen on the mountain, to make disciples from all nations (Matt 28:19).\u00a0 Next week’s post will discuss the new covenant issued to the reconstituted Israel of God on the day of Pentecost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the previous post, the brief history of Israel as God’s people in the Old Testament was outlined, from its creation to its ultimate dissolution.\u00a0 Despite that dissolution, the prophets promised that God would one day restore and redeem not only the remnant of Judea, but the entirety of Israel.\u00a0 This had been made seemingly impossible by the fact that the ten northern tribes had been ‘lost’.\u00a0 They had not been lost to history.\u00a0 There is clear historical record of the cities and regions in Assyria to which the Israelites had been deported.\u00a0 Rather, over generations of intermarriage and assimilation, the people of the northern tribes became indistinguishable as a particular people.\u00a0 Their identity as a people had been dissolved\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"Renewed Israel - The Whole Counsel Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Renewed Israel - The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the previous post, the brief history of Israel as God’s people in the Old Testament was outlined, from its creation to its ultimate dissolution.\u00a0 Despite that dissolution, the prophets promised that God would one day restore and redeem not only the remnant of Judea, but the entirety of Israel.\u00a0 This had been made seemingly impossible by the fact that the ten northern tribes had been ‘lost’.\u00a0 They had not been lost to history.\u00a0 There is clear historical record of the cities and regions in Assyria to which the Israelites had been deported.\u00a0 Rather, over generations of intermarriage and assimilation, the people of the northern tribes became indistinguishable as a particular people.\u00a0 Their identity as a people had been dissolved\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-02-04T02:01:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2019\/01\/hqdefault.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/\",\"name\":\"Renewed Israel - The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2019\/01\/hqdefault.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-02-04T02:01:01+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-02-04T02:01:01+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2019\/01\/hqdefault.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2019\/01\/hqdefault.jpg\",\"width\":480,\"height\":360},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2019\/02\/03\/renewed-israel\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Renewed Israel\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\",\"name\":\"The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"description\":\"The Scriptures in the Orthodox Church\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\",\"name\":\"Fr. 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