By Dustin Ellington

It can be stressful and confusing to live in Lebanon with the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. The situation is full of complex realities which I will not pretend to address here. Instead, I want to deal responsibly with one issue that lies underneath a lot of what’s happening in Lebanon and the region: how Christians read the Bible with respect to the promised land.

First, a little background: The promise and gift of the land are central in the Old Testament. It was not simply territory but the place where Israel would live as God’s covenant people in his presence. God brought Israel out of slavery and into the land so that they might live under his rule, worship him, and bear witness to him among the nations.

But how do we interpret the promise after Jesus’ death and resurrection, once the church expands to include the gentiles, and the New Testament is written?

Let me grant that such questions of interpretation are complicated, and at the risk of oversimplification, let me describe the issue in terms of two main options: Should we read Old Testament promises regarding the land as they are, receiving them in a literal, plain-sense way, as many believers do who move directly from the Old Testament to modern territorial claims? Or should we take cues from the writers of the New Testament and interpret these promises christologically, as fulfilled in Christ, which leads in a different direction?

To be clear, these options are not about taking Jesus Christ seriously or not; believers with very different perspectives on this issue are serious followers of Jesus. I’m asking: Do we take the Old Testament’s promises about the land at face value, or do we handle them in the way that the New Testament tends to approach them? This blog explores the second option.

Let’s begin by recognizing that almost all Christians today are not Jewish and therefore would not be naturally reading the Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures) apart from our Christian faith. We receive what we call the Old Testament as God’s word to us because of our faith in Jesus Christ. He is our connection to the Hebrew scriptures. For those who wrote the New Testament to teach early Christians, the reality that gentile believers’ connection with the Old Testament is only through Jesus Christ has profound effects when it comes to reading the Old Testament’s promises.

To keep this blog brief, instead of offering a survey of the New Testament as whole, I will focus on Paul the apostle. This will allow us to go deeper into the thought of a key New Testament writer than just quoting Bible verses as proof texts from here and there.

Paul claimed, “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ” (2 Cor. 1:20 NIV). This statement sums up Paul’s approach: he understood that God’s promises in the Old Testament are faithfully fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

What could Paul have meant by this statement in 2 Corinthians? He gives us clues. Though Jesus and his first disciples were Jews, Paul was mainly writing to gentile Christians living in ancient Corinth when he spoke those words. He also says “we” (gentile Christians like the Corinthians) now “have these promises” (2 Cor 7:1). Paul is identifying these believers in Jesus Christ as the (new) temple of God (2 Cor 6:16; see Zech 2:10-11 and Is 56:3-8 for Paul’s possible basis). But the claim is broader than that. He also calls the ancestors in the Old Testament “our fathers” (1 Cor 10:1); that is, Paul teaches gentile believers that, through Christ, they have become heirs of Israel’s scriptures and God’s promises.

Yet it’s not as though Paul concludes that the promised land belongs to Christians.

In fact, despite the presence of 13 letters in the New Testament bearing Paul’s name, we find him making no mention of the promise of the land. This silence is very loud.

Some say Paul doesn’t mention the promised land because he assumes the Old Testament already says what needs to be said. That’s highly unlikely, because Paul gives us clues that he re-interprets the plain-sense meaning of the Old Testament’s promise of the land.

Paul says in Romans 4:13 that God promised “Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world (kosmos)”.

The Old Testament teaches that God gave Abraham the land of Israel and that his descendants would inherit that land. But Paul’s insertion of “kosmos” where we would expect “land” signals why Paul demonstrates relatively little concern for the land of Israel. Paul’s belief about the promise has turned from a particular piece of land to the whole world, in line with the part of the promise saying that God would bless the nations (gentiles) through Abraham (Gen 12:3; 18:18; 22:18).

Thus, we find evidence in Paul’s letters that he’s trying to make his way to Rome, the center of the known world at that time, for the sake of spreading the gospel from there. Paul’s letters, and the New Testament as a whole, tend to decenter ancient Jerusalem and the land of Israel, even while affirming that the Christian faith is rooted in ancient Israel and the Old Testament.

And in Romans 15:5-12, Paul grounds his call to take the gospel to the gentiles in a wide variety of Israel’s scriptures – Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah. The universal mission to the gentiles arises from the Old Testament. So we see Paul’s reading of Israel’s scriptures through Christ is layered; he takes some elements rather straightforwardly, such as prophetic vision for the gentiles, while other aspects he interprets in a more spiritual or figurative way.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians affirms God’s promise to Abraham but features Paul re-interpreting the promise to Abraham’s “offspring” as singular, identifying the one offspring as Christ (Gal 3:16). Paul makes no mention of the land, but instead “the promise of the Spirit” (3:14, NIV). We who put faith in Jesus receive the Holy Spirit and “sonship”; we become God’s children and heirs (3:26). So, Paul uses inheritance language for his gentile Christian readers, telling them they are children of Abraham, children and heirs of the promise through faith in Jesus Christ (3:29).

Paul affirms something similar in Romans 8 when he states that believers are joint heirs with Christ (verse 17). And instead of mentioning the land, he maintains that all of creation will be liberated (8:19-23). Again, we see Paul’s move from the Old Testament’s promise of a particular piece of land to a vision for the whole world (see Is 65:17 for Paul’s possible basis).

Yet Paul also displays deep concern for his fellow Jews. Romans 9 to 11 is a famously complex text where Paul affirms God’s faithfulness to the Jews. Paul even says God’s calling and gifts to them are irrevocable (11:29), which is probably the saying which Christian Zionist interpreters rely on the most in Paul’s letters, though the land itself is notably absent from Romans 9 to 11. This long passage helps us realize that it is not that Paul believes the increasingly gentile church has displaced the people of Israel. It is not that God’s promises to Israel have failed or been voided.

The reality is not displacement but continuity and exponential enlargement into one people, Jew and gentile worshiping God together as one Israel throughout the world (Rom 10:18), like one great olive tree into which new branches (gentile believers) have been grafted (11:12, 15; 11:17-23). Paul also leaves us with a mystery because he says, “all Israel will be saved” (11:26). There’s debate about whether this verse means the whole community of Jews and Gentiles together who believe, or solely ethnic Israel as an entity. Paul does not provide details for how or when this salvation will happen, but he recognizes this event as part of God’s faithfulness to the Jews, even as he maintains in the larger context that it is all who call upon the Lord Jesus who will be saved (10:9, 13; 11:23).

If we wanted to explain Paul’s position on the promised land further, we could explore the church as the body of Christ and the locus of God’s presence on earth, apparently in place of the temple and the land (Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 3:16; 12:27; Eph 3:6; 4:12). Paul identifies the bodies of believers (mostly gentile in the context to which Paul writes) as the new place of God’s dwelling through the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:15, 19). It is a similar way of thinking that leads Jesus to say to a Samaritan woman, “The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father” (John 4:21). Why is that? Because the coming of Jesus and his death and resurrection relativize and dramatically decrease the importance of Jerusalem and Israel’s land. For Paul, these physical spaces are no longer the location of God’s presence.

The New Testament, while rooting its teaching in the Old Testament, gives little (or no) priority to a particular piece of land for God’s people. Instead, the New Testament sets believers’ sights on the whole world. The promised land is not denied; it is expanded to include the rest of the world, to which the gospel message and Christ’s presence must go (Rom 15:19-23; 2 Cor 5:19; Gal 3:8).

My goal here is not to pretend to address all that might shape Christians’ differing views of supporting the modern state of Israel. And many other issues are relevant when interpreting the promised land, such as: What does accountability mean in relation to the land? What are the biblical boundaries of the land? Who is Israel? How does the rest of the New Testament, beyond Paul’s letters, handle the promise of the land?

I’ve only tried to raise questions and plant seeds so that believers will pause and realize that evidence from Paul points toward a different understanding of the promise than that promoted by those who take the approach of a literal fulfilment of the Old Testament’s promise of the land. The writers of the New Testament read the Old Testament’s promise about the land through their experience of the risen Christ, which leads them toward a different way of receiving the Old Testament’s promises.

I invite fellow believers to consider guidance from Paul and other writers of the New Testament as we interpret the promises about the land found in the Old Testament. In the least, perhaps this blog can help Christians who take the promises of the land literally to understand one important reason why many fellow Christians don’t hold the same view or have the same priority. A responsible Christian approach to modern Israel needs to take into consideration how the New Testament interprets the promises about the land found in the Old Testament. Doing so may help us avoid transferring biblical promises automatically and uncritically into political claims about the modern state of Israel. Avoiding the latter can ultimately lead to policies and a region that’s more just, and may even make the gospel message more credible.

Dustin Ellington is Associate Professor of New Testament at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary. His articles on Paul’s letters have appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature and the Journal of New Testament Studies, among other publications.
Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).