Have You Changed Your Israel Theology?

Since October 7, 2023, I have watched something strange happen in the Church. People who once stood firmly for Israel—who had a robust theology of God’s covenant faithfulness to the Jewish people—began to quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, abandon that theology. The reason was not a new exegetical discovery. No one found a scroll. No seminary published a landmark paper. The reason was circumstances: disturbing images, viral videos, heated social media debates, abundant conspiracy theories, and a drumbeat of accusations against Israel that many believers found difficult to process.

So I want to ask a simple question: Does Israel still matter to God?

Not Israel as a geopolitical concept. Not the Israeli government, which I can criticize along with the best of them. As a voting Israeli, I have no problem being critical of our government—something you cannot do in Syria, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, by the way. I am speaking of the Jewish people—the physical, ethnic descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and the land promises God made to them thousands of years ago. Do those promises still stand?

I believe the answer is unequivocally, irrefutably yes. And I don’t base that on my feelings about the Middle East. I base it on a passage of Scripture that should stop every replacement theologian cold. In the same way that God cannot change, his promises cannot. His word is his essence. He is not a politician speaking one message to one group and another to a different group. He is faithful. Full stop.

The Passage That Demands an Answer

“This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—the Lord Almighty is his name: ‘Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,’ declares the Lord, ‘will Israel ever cease being 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,’ declares the Lord.” — Jeremiah 31:35–37

Notice carefully what God says here. He doesn’t say, “I will never reject Israel as long as they obey me.” He says he will reject Israel only under conditions that are cosmically impossible:

• When the sun stops shining by day

• When the moon and stars stop their nightly vigil

• When the sea grows still and its waves go quiet

• When human beings can measure the expanse of the heavens

• When archaeologists can dig to the foundations of the earth itself

The sun is still shining. The moon and stars still light the night. The waves still roar. The heavens are still immeasurable, and no one has drilled to the bottom of the earth. Therefore, by God’s own oath, he has not rejected Israel.

This is not a theological side note tucked away in some obscure corner of the prophets. This is God Almighty swearing by the created order itself.

Can These Promises Be About the Church?

I want to be clear: the suggestion that this passage speaks to the Church rather than to ethnic Israel is not a minor hermeneutical difference—it is a catastrophic misreading of the text.

Think about what that interpretation requires. It requires us to believe that when Jeremiah wrote these words, God was secretly speaking about an entity that would not exist for another six hundred years—an entity that, as far as Jeremiah’s audience was concerned, did not yet have a name, a land, or a history. In a passage dripping with covenantal specificity—the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea, the descendants of Israel—we are asked to believe that God was actually talking about a community of mostly Gentile believers who would one day call themselves the Church.

What do I mean by “covenantal specificity”? God invokes the laws of nature because he governs creation as part of his covenant faithfulness—a relationship rooted all the way back in Genesis 1–3. These are not decorative metaphors. They are God staking his cosmic governance on a commitment to a particular people.

Imagine your father has been arrested for crimes he genuinely committed. You visit him in prison and make a solemn promise: “Dad, I love you. You are still my father. I will visit you every week. I will be standing at the gate when you walk out.” Now imagine that over the next decade, you never visit your father at all. Instead, you faithfully visit a stranger in the next cell—bringing him meals, writing him letters, and meeting him at the prison gates on release day. When your father finally asks, “Where have you been? You made me a promise,” you say: “I fulfilled that promise—I just fulfilled it to someone else.”

That is not covenant faithfulness. That is not fulfilling a promise.

That is covenant abandonment with a semantic smokescreen. God does not fulfill his promises to Israel by redirecting them to the Church. He never says anywhere, “By the way, when I said ‘Israel,’ I meant a new community I haven’t told you about yet.”

Consider also how deeply incoherent this reading is. The punishment that the prophets declared upon Israel happened to Israel in real time—historically, literally, devastatingly. But we are then asked to believe that when those same prophets, in those same passages, speak of restoration, they were actually describing another people entirely. The judgment was for Israel; the restoration was for the Church? That is not exegesis. That is sleight of hand.

The new covenant passage just before this one in Jeremiah 31:31–34 is itself addressed to “the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” As theologian R. Kendall Soulen has pointed out, the new covenant is made between the same two parties as the old one—the same God and the same Israel—and is best understood as “the renewal and expansion of an old relationship, not a divorce and a remarriage.”

God’s Promise Does Not Mean Immunity from Judgment

We have to look at this passage with honesty, not theological gymnastics.

Read the full context of Jeremiah 31. The entire section is saturated with the language of judgment, exile, weeping, and devastation. These promises of permanence were not written in seasons of national triumph. They were written precisely because judgment was coming. God was telling his people through Jeremiah: I am about to send you into exile. The Babylonians are coming. And even then—even in the midst of everything I am about to allow—my covenant with you will not break.

The promise is not that Israel is immune from wrongdoing or its consequences. The entire Hebrew prophetic tradition, from Moses to Malachi, is built on this covenant structure: blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience. God takes Israel’s sin seriously. He always has. He judged Babylon, he judged Egypt, and he judged Israel, too. He still does.

But—and this is the irreducible heart of the passage—judgment is never the final word for Israel. Restoration is. Read the prophets: Isaiah 2, Zechariah 14, the middle chapters of Jeremiah, Ezekiel 36. One Hebrew prophet after another foresees a millennial age, a Messianic era, with Jerusalem at its center, the nations streaming to Zion, Israel restored and renewed, and Yeshua—the Messiah of Israel—reigning. These promises are not poetry about spiritual abstractions. They are geography, ethnicity, history, and hope.

The very fact that God’s harshest judgments and his most breathtaking restoration promises appear side by side in the same prophetic texts is itself the point. He does not excuse Israel’s sin. But he will not abandon Israel either.

I do not have the liberty to strip these promises of their meaning because of what I am watching on the news.

Why Did You Change Your Theology After October 7?

This is the question I keep returning to. If you had a serious, scripture-grounded Israel theology before October 7, what exactly happened in the months after that required you to revise it? What new verse did you find? What exegetical argument changed?

For most people, the honest answer is: nothing in the text changed. The circumstances changed.

And that is exactly why we need to be careful. You do not build your theology—your understanding of God’s character and faithfulness—on current events. You bring your theology to current events as the lens through which you interpret them. If you change your theology every time history delivers a difficult chapter, you do not have a theology. You have a mood.

I hear the phrase constantly: “Israel today is not the Israel of the Bible.” Meaning what, exactly? If the modern State of Israel is not the fulfillment of God’s prophetic promises to restore the Jewish people to their land, then who is? The prophets are explicit that in the End Times there will be a literal entity called Israel, in a literal land, under enormous geopolitical pressure, brought to national repentance, and ultimately saved (Zechariah 12–14; Romans 11:26). If that is not the Jewish people living today in the land promised to Abraham, who is it?

Consider how improbable Israel’s very existence is. Name one ancient nation that survived. There are no Hittites, Jebusites, or Philistines carrying passports today. Ancient peoples simply do not endure millennia of exile, dispersion, and persecution to reconstitute themselves as a nation in their ancestral homeland. And yet here we are. If Israel is not a fulfillment of prophecy, then it is the most amazing coincidence in history. 

You say, “but only a remnant is saved.” And Paul speaks of God using this remnant to somehow bring a measure of sanctification for the whole (Romans 11:16).

And let’s not dignify the claim that Jews today have no genetic connection to the Jews of antiquity. Modern DNA research has demolished that argument. Multiple studies—including landmark research published in journals like Nature—have confirmed that Jewish communities across the world share common ancestral DNA tracing directly back to the ancient Middle East. The genetic evidence is not ambiguous.

My Faith Is Not in Israel

Let me be equally clear about something else.

My faith is not in Israel. My faith is not in the IDF, or in the Israeli government, or in the righteousness of any particular military decision. I have my own concerns and criticisms, as any honest person living in this country does. Israel is a nation of human beings, and human beings do both right and wrong things. Every nation at war makes mistakes. Every government has blind spots. I hold Israel to the same moral standard I hold every other nation. The very judgment promises that include the promise of restoration prove that God does not excuse Israel’s sin. They also prove his commitment to restore her.

My faith is in the God of Israel—the One who made these staggering, cosmically-backed promises and who has never once needed to retract them. I am not asking you to trust Israel. I am asking you not to let your frustration with Israel cause you to distrust God.

And have you seen our neighbors?

• Lebanon hosts the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah.

• Syria is governed by a former Al Qaeda leader.

• Hamas is not a liberation movement but an Islamic terrorist organization.

• Iran has brutally suppressed its own people for decades, executing more citizens per capita than almost any nation on earth. Just recently, tens of thousands of Iranians were murdered by the IRCG for simply using what Americans call their First Amendment rights.

Can Reality Inform Theology? Yes—But Carefully

Here is a concession I want to make, because I think it is important to be honest.

I do believe that real-world events can shape and sharpen our theological understanding. We are not Gnostics; we do not pretend that history is irrelevant to faith. For example: when Jewish people began returning to the Land of Israel from over one hundred nations in the twentieth century—in waves that have no parallel in human history—that reality did not create my theology of Israel’s restoration. But it confirmed it. When I read Ezekiel 36:24—“For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land”—and then I watch Ethiopian Jews arrive at Ben Gurion airport, and Russian Jews, and Argentine Jews, I am not forcing a prophecy onto a coincidence. I am watching Scripture come alive.

Conversely, I learned in my graduate studies that when a new archeological discovery seems to contradict the biblical record, the proper response is not to immediately revise the Bible—it is to keep digging. More often than not, subsequent discoveries resolve the apparent tension. The incomplete data was the problem, not the Scripture. Faith operates the same way. When something I see in the world appears to contradict what I believe about God’s faithfulness to Israel, the proper response is not to abandon my theology. It is to hold on, keep seeking, and trust that the fuller picture will vindicate the promise.

What Paul Says to the Rest of Us

The Apostle Paul understood that the question of Israel’s future was not peripheral to the gospel—it was central to it. In Romans 11, he confronts Gentile believers directly:

“Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious.” (v. 11)

“As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.” (vv. 28–29)

That word irrevocable deserves to sit with us for a moment. Paul does not say God’s gifts and calling are conditional. He does not say they are contingent on Israel’s behavior. He says they are irrevocable. You cannot vote them out. You cannot blog them away. You cannot cancel them with a theological framework hatched six centuries after Jeremiah wrote his book. God’s promise will outlast every wave of antisemitism the world can generate.

And in Romans 15, Paul goes further—pointing out the debt Gentile believers owe to the Jewish people: “For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings.” (v. 27) The gospel you believe came to you through Jewish apostles, on the foundation of a Jewish Scripture, centered on a Jewish Messiah. Paul’s point is that this is not a one-way relationship, and it never was.

Conclusion: What the Scholars Have Said

I am not alone in this. Serious theologians across the theological spectrum—people with no tribal axe to grind—have wrestled with these texts and reached similar conclusions.

Karl Barth, the twentieth century’s most towering systematic theologian, wrote in his Church Dogmatics (II/2) that regarding the Jewish people, “it is incontestable that this people as such is the holy people of God: the people with whom God has dealt in his grace and in his wrath; in the midst of whom he has blessed and judged, enlightened and hardened, accepted and rejected; whose cause either way he has made his own, and has not ceased to make his own, and will not cease to make his own.”

R. Kendall Soulen, professor of systematic theology and president of the Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology, has devoted his scholarly career to demonstrating that mainstream Christian theology has systematically erased Israel from the narrative in ways that are not only exegetically unjustifiable but historically catastrophic. He observes that supersessionism—the belief that the Church has replaced Israel in God’s redemptive purposes—is “like a submerged resentment toward our nearest kin that infects all our social relationships.” In his analysis of Jeremiah 31, he notes that the new covenant is addressed to “the house of Israel”—the same people, the same covenant partner—and is best read as renewal, not replacement. He concludes that theologians who heed Paul’s warning in Romans 11 “that Israel remains God’s beloved” are far more likely to arrive at a theology that is both faithful and coherent. (The Christian Century, June 2013)

These are not fringe voices. These are some of the weightiest theological minds of our era—not Zionists, not Israeli lobbyists—simply scholars willing to let the text say what it says.

The sun still shines. The moon still rises every night. The sea still roars on the shores of Ashkelon, and I can hear it if I open my window. By God’s own oath—sworn by the very rhythms of creation—he has not rejected Israel.

I will not change that conviction because the news cycle is hard. My faith is not in the Israeli government. My faith is in the One who swore by his own creation that he would not let go.

“He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” — Psalm 121:4