Nothing seems to launch Christians into a full‑blown, fiery debate faster than the question on whether Israel has a theological right to the small piece of land in the Middle East that bares its name. Many Christians of the North American persuasion make this land acknowledgement as a foundational point of their theology especially when declaring their eschatological convictions. These disputes stem on questions such as whether the physical descendants of Abraham still have a biblical and covenantal claim today to possess the land of Israel? Is this claim to the land simply something that will be active during the future millennium? Why is there so little said about the land in the New Testament? Not only are these questions the gusts of theological debate but these sensitive queries are the foundation behind the current wars and conflicts in the state of Israel.
I’m quite certain what I’m about to write here will not settle that contentious question or bring peace in the Middle East but I want to address this, nonetheless. My purpose is simply to demonstrate that the land promise found within the Abrahamic Covenant and elsewhere was related closely to the cluster of promises made to Israel. Part of what makes Israel, Israel, is the promise to the Land of Canaan. My approach will be similar to that of our previous two lessons in that I will attempt to relate this feature to the People of God especially in light of what is revealed to us in the New Testament texts. My approach will remain that the promises made to Israel under the Old Covenant are fulfilled in Christ and belong to Him. They are then expanded.
THE LAND
References to the land and the promise of its blessing are entrenched in our Old Testament Scriptures. It is the most prominent promise in the Abrahamic Covenant and was at the centre of the expectation of the OT saints. While the land was promised to the descendants of Abraham, it was also promised to the nation during their time in Egypt, in the proclamation that God would bring them to the promised land (Exodus 3:17). Once God conquered the Egyptians, freed the slaves and they, in return, plundered their goods (Exodus 3:20-22), the Lord wasn’t about to leave them in Egypt, but bring them into the promised land of their patriarchs. This was so that they would have their own society where they might be free from the idolaters and sinners of the surrounding nations. God would give them a law to govern the nation for this very purpose, and they would build a temple for the worship of Yahweh.
The Land Needed to be Taken
The Land of Canaan wasn’t a vacant piece of real estate that was ready to be developed with overpriced condominiums. There were others living in this area who were mighty men (Numbers 14) and the expectation was that the Israelites, with the help of their God, would conquer and plunder the land. Because they feared the inhabitants, the generation that left Egypt lost their chance to enter the land. God would still be true to His word and lead them to this region with another generation receiving the land of promise (Numbers 14:30).
Joshua Enters the Land
God would lead in conquest of Canaan through His mediator Joshua to take possession of it from its occupants. They were commanded to drive out the current inhabitants, not by their own strength or skills, but because God was with them and would guarantee the success of this mission.
This land, however, was a gift. Just as faith and the obedience that flows from faith were necessary to enter the land, so faith and obedience are necessary to maintain the land. It remains covenanted land, God’s gift to Israel in the fulfillment of covenant promises. It never loses its character as a gift, and Israel must never forget the “giftedness” of the land[1].
There was a condition attached to the ownership of the land. They needed to remain faithful to the Lord. They were to practice righteousness and justice as laid out in the law, and worship Yahweh their God only. God promised that if they were unfaithful, they would perish from the land, be driven out and made to worship idols and predicted this outcome:
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you will surely perish quickly from the land where you are going over the Jordan to possess it. You shall not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed. The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the Lord drives you. There you will serve gods, the work of man’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. (Deuteronomy 4:26-28).
As we previously mentioned, we believe that the land promises were fulfilled to physical Israel prior to the writing of the New Testament (Joshua 21:43-45; Nehemiah 9:7-8). The physical descendants of Abraham eventually came to lose the possession of the land due to their unfaithfulness to God.
Do not rejoice, O Israel, with exultation like the nations! For you have played the harlot, forsaking your God. You have loved harlots’ earnings on every threshing floor. Threshing floor and wine press will not feed them, And the new wine will fail them. They will not remain in the Lord’s land, But Ephraim will return to Egypt, And in Assyria they will eat unclean food. (Hosea 9:1-3; Also see Zechariah 7:8-14).
Israel’s Restoration to the Land
Even after the demise of their land due to their unfaithfulness was fulfilled in the destruction of their temple, God continued to promise, through the prophets, that He would demonstrate His covenant faithfulness to them by restoring them to the land if they repent (Jeremiah 33:14-26). One of the key attributes of this promise was that God Himself will intervene and accomplish a renewal to faithfulness through the Lord’s own work (Jeremiah 31:31-37; Ezekiel 36:25-28). They needed to be granted new hearts and a New Spirit to have the ability to undertake the faithfulness required please God. But when does this restoration happen to the People of God?
Isaiah’s Vision of The Promise of the Post-Exilic Land
We don’t have to wait till the New Testament to discover how the fulfillment of the land inheritance will take place. The prophet Isaiah reveals an even vaster fulfillment than previously anticipated by the other prophets. When the people of Israel prepared to go into exile, a restoration was promised by the prophets which seems to hint at a return to the land upon the renewal we previously saw in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. It was closely associated with the restoration of Jerusalem (Isaiah 40:1-3; 51:11; 52:1-15; 62:10-12).
As the prophecy of Isaiah unfolds from the new horizon of the promised return from exile to the far horizon of the New Heavens and New Earth, the scope and glory of Jerusalem expand to embrace the entire earth. The city’s children will be more numerous than those of Jerusalem before the exile, and she will need to enlarge her “habitations” to contain them because her descendants will “possess the nations”[2].
When the exiles returned, they repossessed the land, rebuilt the city and its temple but the land did not experience what Isaiah described. There wasn’t a peace or rest upon the city, but continued oppression and war. We are told that they failed to meet their responsibilities in the renewal of the covenant (Nehemiah 9:36) which is likely why this restoration never occurred. The Jerusalem that had been described in Isaiah as filled with the glory of God and a blessing to the nations, and who would enjoy the wealth of the nations (Isaiah 61:6), had not come. The failing of the nation was brought about because the promise was not received through holiness!
The New Testament & The Land
As we turn to the New Testament, one of the glaring realizations is that there is very little mentioned about the land. A theme that was so dominant in the Old Testament is now almost silent in the New. What exactly happened to the central proclamation of the land promises? There are a number of responses to this inquiry:
(1) Some have argued that the land in Paul’s writing is absent due to his view of the fulfillment of the law in Christ. There is no need for the obedience of the law and since the land is part of the old covenant, there is no reason to bring it into the new covenant promises. They see the fulfillment of these land promises in a spiritual sense and that they have no territorial significance.
(2) Others argue that the land promises are for Israel alone and hence there will be a fulfillment in the distant future during the millennium.
I believe that both these interpretations are wanting. There seems to be a different mindset placed upon the promises in the Old Testament related to the Land of Canaan. In Ephesians 6:2, Paul instructs the Ephesians to obey the command to honour their parents with the promise that you may live long on the earth. The quotation and application of this command from Exodus 20:12 shows that these are not heavenly, non-physical promises. They are very historical and lived in this age. For those who restrict it to Israel, they must deal with the fact that Paul was writing to Gentiles in Ephesus who would be the recipients of this promise. So, the application of Exodus 20 is to be lived out physically and its promise would be given to a Gentile Church in the 1st century.
Christ Receives the Land?
We’ve argued elsewhere that Christ is the recipient of the Abrahamic covenant promises, which, includes all the promises sworn to the descendants of Abraham which includes the land. Much like the other features of the promises, they are fulfilled in Christ, and in a sense, expanded upon. In what sense does Christ and the Church inherit the land?
The book of Romans seems to imply that “the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the law, but through the righteousness of faith” (Romans 4:13). In this passage in Romans, Paul uses the term “kosmos” for world expanding the promise of the land of Canaan to encompass something far vaster in the whole earth.
Through Jesus, the believer in Christ, those who are of the faith of Abraham, are granted to possess all things, which includes “the world”:
So then let no one boast in men. For all things belong to you, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come; all things belong to you,and you belong to Christ; and Christ belongs to God. (1 Corinthians 3:21-23).
This is largely what Isaiah was communicating in that the expansion of Israel and its land would encompass the nations and the world. Whereas Judaism tended to place a national and restricted territorial stamp on the promises to Abraham, Paul perceives in Christ their universal scope[3].
Matthew 5:5 – The Meek shall inherit the earth
The inversion of religious values focused upon in the beatitudes finds a segment focusing upon those that are meek. This is a quotation from Psalm 37:11, where the Psalmist contrasts the evildoers (Psalm 37:9) and the wicked man (v.10) with those who wait on the Lord (v.9) and the humble (v.11). In these verses, those who wait on the Lord and are humble inherit “the land”. The meek or humble are those who are gentle in the face of repression and cruelty.
When Jesus states that those gentle souls would inherit the land, what did He mean? Was He referring to the land of Israel or to the Earth? Burge makes a valid point in stating that while the land itself had a concrete application for most in Judaism, Jesus and his followers reinterpreted the promises that came to those in his kingdom. Their kingdom is in heaven (Matt 5.3, 10). Israel as land was associated with the Kingdom of God which, now, has been received through the Messiah and would be taken to the outer regions of the earth.
Paul & Inheritance
While Paul mentions very little about the land, he does mention much about inheritance. He is quite consistent to argue that the “inheritance” is the kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 15:50; Galatians 5:21). As we just mentioned, the kingdom under the Old Testament was always associated with the borders of Israel. Much like the expansion of the Abrahamic blessings to include the believing of all nations, the land promises have extended to the world. This extension is accomplished through the forward march of the kingdom and its people. As it permeates the nations with the message of the good news, the kingdom grows in citizens. The gospels are not focused upon land titles but a more universal expansion that comprises of the earth. The inherited Kingdom of God will expand further than the borders of Israel.
Jerusalem
As we already mentioned, the prophets, especially Isaiah, when thinking in terms of the land, seemed to focus primarily on Jerusalem as the center of that land. It symbolized the Kingdom and its people. Jerusalem was the capital city of Israel,
- The city where God dwelt (Psalm 132:13)
- The city that God established forever (Psalm 48:1; 132:14).
- The eternal dwelling place (Ezekiel 43:7).
- The city of the King (Jeremiah 3:17).
- This was the city of salvation! (Isaiah 4:2-4).
But even with all its glories mentioned by the prophets, Jerusalem in the 1st century is painted as a place that was condemned. It was known as:
- The city that killed the prophets (Matthew 23:37),
- One that would suffer the judgment of God (Matthew 21:33-44; Matthew 23:37)
- The city that would be left to them desolate (Luke 19:41-44).
Two Cities
In an interesting development, the apostle Paul, in Galatians 4:21-31, writes about a new and very different Jerusalem than he had experienced in his lifetime. After having proclaimed that the inheritance from the covenant of Abraham was received by faith and not by Old Covenant stipulations or the ceremonies of the Mosaic law, he then proceeds to disassociate the two covenants represented by two women by highlighting their differences:
- Hagar represented a covenant of the flesh, proceeding from Mount Sinai and in return bearing children that are slaves. Mount Sinai is mentioned as a reference to the “present Jerusalem”. This representation demonstrates that the children of Hagar, who reside in that current Jerusalem, were slaves. The symbol of the law and slavery was Jerusalem in Paul’s day.
- The free woman would bear sons through the promise. There is a second Jerusalem spoken of which is not under law or bondage, but that is free. It is a Jerusalem from above, from the heavens!
For those believers in Galatia, Paul associated their residency with this woman, the free Jerusalem. These Gentile believers were like Isaac, children of promise and heirs of Abraham. He associates this new Jerusalem with the fulfillment of the restored Jerusalem of Isaiah and elsewhere. They were to “cast out” the current physical Jerusalem, its laws and its covenant, and cling to the free woman or the heavenly city. In the text in Galatians 4, Paul quotes Isaiah 54:1 to demonstrate the blessing that was promised to this blessed woman which represented the New Jerusalem. The post-exilic Jerusalem would have more children than the old Jerusalem. The Old Jerusalem was now a symbol of slavery, while the New Jerusalem was the symbol of freedom and salvation.
The New Jerusalem in Hebrews
The theme of the New City is carried into the book of Hebrews where we are told that Abraham left his homeland and was looking forward to a city that has foundations and would be built by God (Hebrews 11:10). Unlike his movable tent, this city would have foundations where he could establish himself much like the city that the writer of the Hebrews was looking to:
For here we do not have a lasting city, but we are seeking the city which is to come (Hebrews 13: 14).
Unlike that current city of Jerusalem, it would be an enduring metropolis in a heavenly country (Hebrews 11:16).
Hebrews 12
An important portion in the Book of Hebrews to consider is Hebrews 12:18-24:
For you have not come to a mountain that can be touched and to a blazing fire, and to darkness and gloom and whirlwind, and to the blast of a trumpet and the sound of words which sound was such that those who heard begged that no further word be spoken to them. For they could not bear the command, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it will be stoned.” And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, “I am full of fear and trembling.” But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel.
Believers are commanded to pursue peace and holiness (Hebrews 12:14) and, in return, guard against apostates (vs. 15-17). They were not like their ancestors and should conduct themselves differently. To substantiate this argument, the author points to the fact that the recipients of his letter had not come to Mount Sinai. The author describes the mountain with vivid details, as a place of fear (vs.18-19, 21) and exclusion (v.20). This was certainly not the place where they had experienced their God! In contrast, they met God at a mountain called Mount Zion. It was a different mountain than their ancestors had entered into a covenant with Yahweh. It was a more spectacular city, where a New Covenant would be entered into. That city was none other than the New Jerusalem.
Zion was:
- The dwelling place of God (Isaiah 8:18),
- The place where the redeemer would come (Isaiah 59:20)
- Where Israel would be preserved (Isaiah 4:5; 60:14; Jeremiah 3:14; Joel 2:34; 3:17, Zechariah 1:17)
Believers in God’s Son, Jesus Christ, have (present tense) come to Mount Zion, the place of redemption and preservation! It is the city of the Living God, where myriads of angels’ dwell, and ultimately the place where God promised the restoration of Israel and the giving of the land. This was not the assembly at Sinai, but the assembly of the true firstborn, where God’s people were brought into His presence through Jesus, the mediator of the New Covenant!
Summation
In summary, the promises for God’s people regarding the land of Canaan had a stipulation attached to it mainly that they were to obey God’s statutes and commandments and do so from the heart. Isaiah was already revealing something far greater and more expansive in his day. The restoration that the prophet saw included holiness and a renewal of Jerusalem. The New Testament says very little about the land of Canaan and seems to be focused upon the whole earth but at times it even uses the terms land and earth interchangeably. The promises surrounding the city of Jerusalem are now attached to a different Jerusalem, a city with heavenly essence which consists of a heavenly population. Believers with the faith of Abraham, who’s names are written in the book of life (Philippians 4:3) are the citizens of these new Jerusalem (Philippians 3:20). Israel, Jerusalem, Mount Zion, according to the New Testament, are no longer simply places in the middle east, but they have been expanded to include the whole earth, a people who dwell amongst the nations, to bring the Spirit of God to the world.
[1] Jesus & Israel: One Covenant or Two?, David E. Holwerda, WM B. Eerdmans Publishing, Page 90-91
[2] Jesus & Israel: One Covenant or Two?, David E. Holwerda, WM B. Eerdmans Publishing, Page 97
[3] Jesus & Israel: One Covenant or Two?, David E. Holwerda, WM B. Eerdmans Publishing, Page 103