Hosts dissect Romans 11, rejecting John Hagee's dispensationalism and replacement theology in favor of a post-millennial, partial preterist stance. They argue the Old Covenant ended at AD 70, citing DNA evidence that Palestinian Christians hold more ancient Israelite lineage than modern Jews. Interpreting Jesus' ministry as a judgment on Jewish rejection, they claim "grafting in" occurred via global evangelization over two millennia. While affirming universal salvation, they assert current Jewish hostility to Christ stems from Torah adherence, concluding Matthew 24's prophecy fulfilled within the generation of the crucifixion rather than awaiting future revival. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Land Promises and Spiritual Future00:15:26
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For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion.
That blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and so all Israel will be saved.
As it is written, the deliverer will come out of Zion, and he will turn away ungodliness from Jacob.
For this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.
Concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election, they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.
For the gifts, And the calling of God are irrevocable.
For as you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their disobedience, even so these also have been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you they also may obtain mercy.
For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all.
O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out.
For who has known the mind of God, or who has become his counselor, or who has first given to him, and it shall be repaid to him?
For of him, and through him, and to him are all things, to whom be glory forever.
Amen.
Throughout the history of the church, there have been a few ways to understand what Paul is saying here.
Some take it as Paul saying, somehow.
Israel will be saved apart from Christ.
This is obviously incorrect.
Others believe that it means Israel will be preserved timelessly in its apostate condition until all the other peoples of the world are evangelized.
This, of course, would imply, at least in some fashion, that the old covenant never really came to an end, despite Hebrews 8 13 telling us that it would pass away imminently.
The most coherent way to interpret Paul is to recognize.
That the Old Covenant was decisively ended first in the resurrection and interim period after Pentecost, and finally in 70 AD at the destruction of Jerusalem.
Paul wrote all this in the decade or so before Jerusalem was destroyed and the Old Covenant came to its complete end.
Jews and Gentiles still were categories that the Old Covenant world operated in as the New Covenant was breaking this world apart.
Paul's use of the phrase earlier in Romans 11.5 at the present time and 11.31 now are clues to his meaning.
So we've outlined right now in the cold open three main views.
You've got the insufferable Zionist John Hagee view.
That was kind of the first one.
So, it's, you know, the old covenant really hasn't ended at all.
And there's really kind of like two paths to salvation.
You know, you can go that extreme.
Yeah.
Right.
It can go that extreme.
That's not all dispensational.
Obviously, John MacArthur would reject that.
He is a dispensationalist or by his own, you know, admission, a leaky dispensationalist.
But there are some that go so far as to say, you know, people can be saved by faith in Jesus.
Or they can be Jewish.
You know, there's two different tracks of salvation.
So that would be an extreme form of dispensationalism.
But still, dispensationalism as a whole would reserve that the old covenant is still in great detail.
It's still in effect, not merely for this futuristic spiritual revival of salvation among a particular people, namely the Jews, but that there are still land promises and physical promises and all these things made to the Descendants of Abraham.
And so that would be physical descendants of Abraham.
And so that's still at play and still not merely in Paul's future at the time of his writing, but in our future, still 2,000 years removed.
So that's the first view.
The second, covenant theology, fulfillment theology, replacement theology is just a pejorative, a slur for it.
Right.
It's just a straw man, boogeyman, pejorative.
And a caricature of it as well.
Right.
Because it doesn't, and we'll get into that, but it's not replacement theology, it's fulfillment theology.
It's not that he changed his mind.
Behold, I am the Lord, I changeth not.
God is not a man that he should change his mind or lie.
God, from the very beginning, before the foundations of the world were laid, he had a plan.
And the plan was the church to redeem the people for himself.
And Israel was used in the old covenant to build the scaffolding, is kind of the way that I would word it in this project.
And then in the new covenant, the scaffolding gives way to the actual building.
But then everybody who was working, laboring on the scaffolding, is warmly invited into this building.
And yet, We know from Isaiah, we know from the gospel narratives that Christ came to his own and they received him not, at least initially during his earthly ministry.
And so many of the Jews, some were saved, some did receive him, but many of the Jews rejected Christ, rejected their Messiah.
And yet the second position would still hold that, you know, there's no more land promises, the covenant is done away with, but there's still a hangover.
There's still a little bit of the covenant that's lingering in the ether because there's still no land promises, no physical promises remaining, but there are spiritual promises.
There is not merely in Paul's future, but in our future, 2,000 years later, still on the table, a futuristic revival, spiritual revival.
And then the last position, the one that you and I hold, and you helped me come to this conviction, and I think it was good.
You, James B. Jordan, others.
Give all the credit to you.
Is that the covenant really is done, completely done.
Yeah.
And that there is no future land promises, no divine right to this little strip of land in the Middle East.
But there's also no future spiritual promises of a future revival.
And yet, at the same time, these people, whether or not they're the genetic descendants of Abraham, we might get into a little bit of that.
We probably will.
But regardless of that, what we know for sure is that they're human beings made in the image of God.
And as post millennial Christians, what do we believe for Israel?
Same as Brazil and China.
We believe they'll be saved eventually.
They will be saved and they need Christ.
They will be saved and they need Christ.
But in the meantime, There's no Bible verse that obligates us to billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
There's one takeaway is that.
Amen.
Speaker Mike Johnson, hardest hit.
So, those are the three big positions dispensationalism, obviously, different stripes and colors, that's a sliding spectrum.
There are different dispensationalist forms.
But in general, they would say the old covenant is still, if not completely, it's still mostly intact.
And there are physical and spiritual promises for Israel in our future.
And then the fulfillment theology as supersessionism, they would say, well, You know, there is still a spiritual revival in our future, but the physical promises are done.
And then maybe a hard supersessionism, the position that you and I would take, would say, no, the whole covenant really is done.
And yet these are people made in the image of God, and we pray for their salvation, and eventually they will be saved.
But in the meantime, there is no special third position of Christian adjacent.
There are Christians, the people of God, and then there are enemies of God.
And you and I were once enemies of God.
Yeah, so the Bible describes us.
Right.
But He saved us, but God.
Who is rich in mercy, Ephesians 2.
So he saved us and he can save them.
But in the meantime, it's helpful to know who they are.
They're not our greatest ally.
They're not Christian adjacent.
They don't have a whiff of Christ, but are actually, like all unbelievers, hostile towards God.
And perhaps because of the influence of the Talmud, even uniquely hostile towards the person of Jesus Christ.
And the influence of the Torah, too.
If you don't accept the law and what the law teaches you, it'll actually make you more hostile to God.
Right.
I mean, well, and we see that as a Clear pattern throughout all scripture, especially for those of the reformed tradition.
This is something we should know.
This is Romans, not just 11, but this is Romans 1.
That what happens to a person the more they're subjected to God's gracious revelation and yet choose willingly to lie and suppress the truth and deeds of unrighteousness, the heart doesn't get softer, it gets harder.
You actually are building, you're actually programming yourself to be predisposed with a greater hostility and callousness and rejection towards.
The goodness of Christ.
Yeah.
So that's kind of laying everything out.
Let's go to you.
Where do you want to start?
Oh, there's a lot there just from what you said already.
I mean, I think going into the different views, even in a little more detail of Romans 11, is important, especially this idea of yes, the old covenant has ended, it's over.
The promises, and I wouldn't even necessarily say that there are no promises.
Promises from the old covenant left.
In one sense, that's true, of course.
But also, you know, Genesis 12 or Genesis 17, right?
It's not as though God says, All right, Jesus came and I'm going to renege on these promises.
It's that they're fulfilled in Him.
Jesus is the fulfillment.
So you're right.
The promises continue for God's people.
It's just that's Christians.
Well, who are the people of God?
It's Christ and His people, both Jew and Gentile.
And And so you look, well, I make you an everlasting promise of this land, right?
The land of Canaan.
This will belong to you and to your seed.
Well, Paul says that the seed of Abraham is Christ.
Right.
And if you were Christ, you were Abraham's seed.
Right.
Right.
So it's those plural seeds, but singular.
Who does the like, if you want to talk about that particular land, all the land, right?
All the nations, right.
According to Psalm 2, China belong to Jesus.
Right.
That's his inheritance, including.
The land of Canaan or Israel or Palestine or Judea or whatever you want to call it, right?
That stretch of land, that real estate there, along with every other stretch of real estate on the planet, belongs to Jesus and his people.
So, right, who does that land belong to?
Because we are co heirs with Christ, it belongs to Christians.
Who does that land belong to?
To that particular stretch of land, well, it belongs to Christians, right?
It's their land, they're the one, but by this divine promise, that belongs to them, which is interesting.
Yeah, you brought up the DNA stuff and things like that.
We could definitely go there, like obviously, like we're not going to go there and say, Oh, definitively, 100%, we're not going to say that, but I do think there's some good holes to poke.
Yeah, it's interesting.
But the like you bring up the land promises, and we'll get back to Romans 11 in a second, hopefully.
But the land promises, right, to your seed, your sin, even if you take it that way, that.
In the new covenant, no, it's still the descendants of Abraham who get that land.
Well, right, Palestinian Christians have more ancient Israelite DNA than modern Jews do.
Explain that, flesh that out.
How do we know that?
Recently, in the last year or two, there were wide DNA studies of all of the different peoples in the area of Israel and the Levant, different populations were taken.
And they tested their blood against like archaeological sites and things like that where they have records of this was a Jewish person from the first century.
Right.
Right.
What DNA are they able to compile?
And then tested against these populations.
And the Palestinian Christians were near the top.
And all of the various Christian groups the beautiful divine irony in Lebanon, Iraq, all the different places they had the most.
Then other groups were much further down, including Israelis.
And so you think of that if you think, okay, it's based on these DNA, the blood descent.
Well, who has the greater claim, right?
If we're going to go down that road, who has the greater claim?
Well, the Palestinian Christians that didn't convert when Islam came in, right?
They remained Christian, right?
Well, these are people, you go back 2,000 years ago, these are the people that after the Romans came in and destroyed Jerusalem that survived.
And what did they do?
Converted to Christianity.
Right.
These are all Jews that converted to Christianity.
Exactly.
Because our position, we'll get into this with Romans 11, like you said, getting back to that.
The position is not that what Paul's writing in Romans 11 fell flat.
We're not saying that Paul wrote something inspired by the Holy Spirit that didn't come to pass.
Paul says that there is for a time, so temporary, and also partial, a partial hardening.
So even at Paul's time, maybe, you know, I don't know about you, but I would pin it at like maybe 8050, 8055, the writing of Romans.
Yeah.
Or even maybe a little bit.
Earlier?
Later.
Later, okay.
Possibly.
Yeah.
So at that time, you know, 10, 15, 20 years out from AD 70 and the destruction of Jerusalem, even at that time, it's still a partial hardening, which means that with the ministry of Paul, which at this point had shifted primarily to the Gentiles, but the ministry of the other apostles, Peter, James, John, the Jews were being saved.
Yeah.
But it was a trickle.
And yet there was a stream, a flood of Gentiles that were being saved and coming in.
So partial hardening, meaning that even in Paul's, at the time of his writing, there are still Jews being saved.
Yeah.
But it happens to be in the large scope, the minority report, by comparatively to the Gentiles.
But then Paul says that this is not only a partial hardening, but it's only a partial hardening for a temporary period of time.
But that the natural branches will eventually be grafted back in.
And so we're not saying that that didn't happen.
We're saying, but maybe what Paul's writing about isn't something that's going to happen 50,000 years from then or 2,000 years from then, 1950 years.
Partial Hardening of Israel00:16:47
But maybe that's something that actually happened in AD 70, and that it pairs so well with that partial preterist hermeneutic of just reading a lot of the New Testament, not all of it.
We're not hyper preterists.
There's a massive problem with that.
But we are partial preterists.
And so we're reading Romans 11 the same way that we would read Matthew 24 with the Olivet discourse that Jesus says, I tell you the truth, not one stone of the temple will stand on one another.
And he also says, You'll see the Son of Man coming on the clouds.
And that's not cherubim, you know, little baby angels playing harps on the clouds.
It's not pretty, but that's Joel 2.
It's clouds signify judgment language.
And the reality is that Christ did come.
He came, his parousia, his coming was a spiritual coming.
So he didn't come a second time in the flesh.
He will, a final return.
He did come.
Yeah.
That's right.
But he did come in AD 70 spiritually upon the clouds.
What are the clouds?
Well, it was smoke and desolation, destruction.
What are the clouds?
The clouds are the heavenly host, the angels, right?
The glory cloud is made up of all these angels and coming in destruction.
And Josephus even said that, like, he interviewed people, eyewitness accounts that said that in the desolation and all the clouds and smoke from all the destruction in Jerusalem, that they saw silhouettes.
Some of the people said they saw silhouettes of like chariots.
And like heavenly host going back and forth in the clouds.
Really interesting.
So, what we're saying is that Paul says, look, there's a partial hardening temporarily on the Jews.
Some are getting saved, a lot aren't.
But these natural branches will be grafted back in.
And we're not saying, uh uh, Paul's wrong.
No, we're saying, uh huh.
And I think it maybe happened like 10 or 15 years after he wrote it.
Yeah.
And not, we're still waiting 2,000 years now removed.
So, all that back to the Christians in Palestine, to what you were saying, these may be the descendants of.
Jews who converted to Christ in 8070, leading up to it.
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But yeah, you have that, and it isn't just the area of Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Israel in the first century where Jews were located in the empire.
There were millions of them all throughout the Roman Empire.
Maybe as much as a fifth of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish or Gentile God fears that are connected to the worship in the synagogue.
You're telling me this for the first time.
Yeah, massive numbers, right?
Massive numbers there.
So this is a very large minority population in the Roman Empire.
So it isn't just, we always, I think, mentally in our head, think like there's just a couple Jews here and there scattered all throughout.
There's a reason why when Paul went, To every city in Asia Minor and Greece and throughout the Roman Empire, he would go to the synagogue and there would be a synagogue there and be lots of people there, both Jews and Greeks worshiping there, and be able to preach and bring people out.
It's part of his strategy that he's ministering to his people.
And you see this in Romans 11 that he's talking about this point that why am I going to the Gentiles?
Why is God going to the Gentiles?
It's to provoke jealousy among them.
And the key word, you know, we mentioned it in the reading in the Cold Open.
Jealousy among who?
His people, the Jews.
The Jews are the ones who were supposed to be in B.
Yes.
Yeah.
And they were.
Like you read Acts, right?
What happens?
Everywhere he goes, right?
There are riots and fights.
He gets stoned or he gets imprisoned.
And who are the instigators?
It's Jews because they're angry that Paul goes and preaches, and in the synagogue, many people.
Believe him and hear the gospel and are saved.
The majority of the synagogue eventually drives him out.
But who comes along with him?
It's the Gentile God-fearers who are worshiping in the synagogue.
They come along with him, many of them do, and he begins preaching to the Gentiles, to the Jews first and to the Greeks.
And that was the ministry mode that he operated in.
And they resented that now, what is going on?
The Gentiles, they receive the Holy Spirit and they see Gentiles doing these great works of the Spirit, these sign gifts in the first century, and they become envious and jealous.
This is the point I make.
We'll talk about Matthew later, I think, in other episodes.
But the point that Jesus makes about the sign of Jonah, I think, is extremely important and relevant to this passage in Romans because Jesus is talking about the sign of Jonah.
And a lot of people maybe misunderstand it.
They think, okay, well, that's about Jesus being crucified and then being buried in the ground and being resurrected, right?
Three days and three nights.
And that's an aspect of it, of course.
That further fulfills the typological argument that Jesus is making.
But what is the sign of Jonah?
Like, if you understand the book of Jonah, right?
Jonah, if it's beyond just like the veggie tales understanding of Jonah, it's not, they don't hit people with fish.
That's not why he doesn't want to go there, right?
Jonah doesn't want to go to Nineveh.
For one reason, right?
He has read the book of Deuteronomy, right?
And in Deuteronomy, right, Moses tells them, You're going to get to this land.
You are going to reject your God.
You're going to start worshiping idols.
And you're going to face all of these curses, right?
You're going to be spat out of the land.
You are going to go into exile.
Foreign armies are going to come, occupy you, kill you.
I mean, all of these horrible things are going to happen.
And how are you going to know when this is going to occur?
I'm going to give you a sign.
The sign is I, God, am going to go to a people who I do not know, to a nation I do not know.
I'm going to go to the Gentiles.
And so here is Jonah.
God says, Jonah, get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, because my anger has risen against it.
And Jonah, it's amazing, is able to piece together God, if you want to destroy Nineveh, you don't need to send me to go tell them.
You sending me to tell them.
Is actually really gracious.
And I don't like that.
So he runs away.
Jonah explicitly tells us in chapter four, he says if there's any lingering question about whether or not, why Jonah is reluctant to go, that question is definitively answered in the beginning of chapter four, where Jonah says, This is why I chose to flee to Tarshish, make haste to Tarshish, because did I not say that I knew you were a gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love?
And he also adds this.
Relenting in sending disaster.
Most Christians think that Jonah was reluctant to go to Nineveh because he was afraid the Ninevites would reject his message and they would turn on him and kill him.
No, he was afraid that they would accept his message, knowing his own people and their hardness of heart that they had rejected God's message time and time again.
And he knows he's adding up the prophecies, piecing Deuteronomy and Isaiah.
Isaiah talked about how he knew that.
And here's the other thing Jonah, the first half of the tenure of If we could say that of his prophetic ministry, his prophetic vocation, God used him to prophesy blessing, the expansion of borders in Israel and these kinds of things.
So Jonah was actually probably well liked, which is pretty rare for a prophet.
So it's like he's got this really sweet gig.
He's a prophet who's actually liked.
He gets to prophesy good things for once.
Yeah, he's got the big mega church and the private jet and all that stuff.
Exactly.
But the whole time, He's a Kenneth Copeland prophet, but then the whole time he knows there's this ticking clock because he's read Isaiah.
And so then when he starts seeing the pre invasion attacks from the north, and that's where he was in Gath Hafer, in the northern tribe, in the northern kingdom, and what's north of them is Assyria.
And so as these pre invasion attacks start ramping up in Assyria, starting to affect and even perhaps capture or brutally kill people that Jonah knows.
His neighbors, his friends, maybe even family members, we don't know for certain.
But as he sees this, not only is he angry towards Assyria because of their pre invasion attacks and the damage they begin to do, but he's especially, exceedingly angry.
The whole thing, you just see him angry.
He's angry about plants and bugs and this.
He's angry about everything.
But he's angry because not only has Assyria inflicted a blow as a pre invasion, knowing that there's more damage to come with Israel, his people, but he also knows because of the teachings of Isaiah, he knows that this signifies that.
Assyria is just getting started, that it's not going to stop.
And so he knows.
And now, where is he sent?
A lot of Christians don't make this connection either, but Nineveh is one of the capital cities of Assyria.
And so he's called to go to this place that's already preparing for war against Israel.
And not just that, but preparing it for war against Israel that has been prophesied previously by Isaiah.
And Jonah knows they're going to win, they're going to be successful.
And then God says, go to them.
And Jonah, again, he's not like, I'm scared to go because they might hit me with a fish, or I'm scared to go because they actually might take my life.
You know, the adult version of Jonah.
But no, he's like, it's not, I'm scared to go.
It's, I hate them.
I hate these people and I don't want God to show his grace to them.
That's right.
And he hates them.
And he also knows that this means bad stuff for Israel.
Right.
It means bad stuff for his people.
God's kindness towards them is a sign of the judgment coming for his people.
Yeah.
So when Jesus invokes Jonah, he's not just talking about the story of a fish and being in the ground.
Right.
Right.
What he's doing there is amplifying the typological connection between him and Jonah.
But you see, and you see this all throughout the Gospels, all the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, especially, that wherever Jesus goes, everywhere he goes, when he does miracles for Jews, what does he do?
He says, Hey, don't tell anybody about this.
Just keep it to yourself.
Just stay quiet about this.
And they don't always sometimes like, Can you believe what Jesus did?
Right?
He's always telling them, charging them to keep quiet.
About everything.
But when he does miracles on a few occasions for Gentiles or Samaritans, he does not charge them to keep quiet at all.
He says, go, yeah, go tell everybody.
I don't care.
And you think, oh, why is that?
Well, you get into Matthew after his people are rejecting him, Jesus starts speaking in parables.
And we'll talk about this more when we get into the Gospels, but he starts speaking in parables, which are not like a cute little illustration.
To explain.
It's not a helpful way to make something easier to understand.
It's the opposite.
You can feel it.
Yeah.
When the Bible speaks of parables, we read helpful illustrations for kids.
Isn't this cute?
What we should read is parables are more likened to riddles than explanations.
It's like the riddles of the Sphinx, right?
He goes from speaking plainly and openly to just telling people riddles like he's the riddler out there.
And that is itself a judgment, right?
He quotes Isaiah.
This is a judgment on Israel.
They're rejecting me.
So I'm not going to judge them, but not speaking openly anymore.
The miracles I do, I'm going to bury those.
He does the opposite.
He tells, put your light on the stand.
Don't hide it under a bushel.
Well, he's doing that to Israel on purpose and for a reason.
And the reason is that they are hard of heart and rejecting him.
And what do his people do after Pentecost in the book of Acts?
They leave.
Judea, they leave Samaria, they leave the Galilee, the land of Israel, and they go to the Gentiles.
Right.
Right.
That's what there were, there were 12, really 13 apostles.
And which one do we see the entire time in the book of Acts?
Like God, the Holy Spirit could have had us, you know, see where James or Andrew or any of them went.
We're following Paul.
We're seeing his journey.
Why?
The book of Acts, about halfway through, it really is kind of the halfway mark.
Yeah.
The epicenter, it goes from the geographic epicenter of what God is doing, being Jerusalem and Peter.
Yeah.
And then it shifts about halfway through to Antioch and Paul.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that also is a sign that's communicating something.
It's saying that the work of God has shifted from the Jews to the Gentiles.
Yeah.
And you see, even from the beginning of Acts, right?
You'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea.
And then to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth.
And the plot of the book follows that same pattern.
You start out in Jerusalem, then to Judea, and then to Samaria and Galilee, and through to Antioch and the ends of the world.
And it ends in Rome.
And so that's deliberate.
It's not by accident.
And so, yeah.
Well, that's part of what this life from the dead, right?
So, the cutting off of the natural branches because of unbelief, what that meant was it provided in the mercy of God the opportunity for the branches of a wild olive shoot to be grafted in their place.
That's us, that's the Gentiles.
And we're so grateful for that.
And we should be.
That's the proper response.
You might call it the right response.
The wrong response would be to be haughty or to be arrogant.
If God did not spare the natural branches, then he will not spare you, right?
So he cut them off because of unbelief.
And so do not be arrogant that you have been grafted in their place.
But the root is strong.
Yeah.
And there's plenty of room on that vine for both the natural branches and the wild branches.
Avoiding Arrogant Hearts00:08:00
Yeah.
And so we see the Apostle Paul saying in Romans 11 that the natural branches will be added back on, and not at the expense of the wild branches that have all been at, but that they'll be added together.
And so the natural branches will not be cut off forever.
But then Paul goes one step further.
He says, if they're cutting off, if God's cutting off for a time, a partial hardening of the natural branches, that is Israel, according to the flesh, if God's cutting off of them meant your inclusion, which is a really good thing, then what will God adding them back on mean?
And you might think logically, well, them being removed was good for us, our inclusion.
Them coming back in might mean our exclusion.
But Paul says, he throws a curveball and surprises us and says, oh, no, no, no.
Their re inclusion when they come back will actually mean even better news.
So, them being cut off for a time was good news for you, Gentiles, inclusion.
Them coming back is even better news, life from the dead.
And what I wanted to say is this the more and more I study history, particularly church history, and I look at what God has done through Christendom for 1,500 years, from Constantine to Alfred to Great Britain and England and America and the covenanters, the pure.
Puritans, when I look at the history of Christendom, I don't know about you, but I see life from the dead.
I think that the reason that the Christian gospel, this mustard seed, has grown into as large of a tree as it already has.
I think there's a lot of Christians who are still kind of waiting for it.
It's like being a newbie racer, a terrible illustration.
You're going to make fun of me.
Last time you were here, I quoted the Avengers.
Now I'm going to quote Fast and Furious, even worse.
Oh, no, it's better.
Okay, it's better.
Okay.
But it's like, hey, you're a newbie racer.
It's like, Too soon on that NOS, right?
Too soon on that NOS.
And I think a lot of the post millennial guys who I love, brothers in Christ, they're still thinking like we need the NOS.
And the NOS is that, you know, this modern nation state of Israel, that these people are still somehow the descendants of Abraham and they're going to get saved and then we'll get life from the dead.
And I guess what I want to say is no, I think we've been getting life from the dead, global evangelization for.
For 2,000 years, particularly the last 1,500 years of Christendom with Western civilization, that was life from the dead.
Let's preserve that, cultivate that, see more of that.
And one of the things that's harming that is Christians' bad understanding of Israel.
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
I think you're right.
And the difficult thing is, I mean, going, you know, just thinking again about Romans 11 and the different views, right?
Ours is, A preterist view, a preterist interpretation of that passage.
And then you have multiple futurist views.
And some of them are better than others.
But looking at that, I mean, this point of where Paul says, at the present time, now, right?
Like he's giving time parameters in that passage that we should look at.
We usually just gloss right over that because we're, I mean, maybe understandably, right?
We're thinking about ourselves today.
Yes.
Right?
What does this mean for us today?
That's the first question we usually ask.
We don't ever ask, what does that mean then for Paul in that moment?
And he's calling us to that, saying at the present time and now, his time.
And all of this set within the context of the old covenant is still chugging along.
There's still a temple.
There's still a high priest.
There's still sacrifices.
They're all still keeping the Mosaic law and clean and unclean and everything else.
And that is about to come to a complete end forever.
Right.
Very soon.
Right.
That's the now.
That's the present time that Paul is talking about.
And so, and Hebrews has this language.
Oh, yeah.
Like in stark language.
Yeah.
Hebrews 10.
Hebrews 8 13 in particular says, right, what is growing old, right, or what is obsolete is growing old and will soon pass away.
Quickly.
Yeah.
And it's like, well, and then he also talks about soon mean 2,000 years later.
Right.
Exactly.
Which is crazy.
It's like the beginning, whether it's the first chapter of Revelation, you know, these things which are soon to come to pass.
And we think, oh, well, We're living in a parenthetical moment.
Yeah.
Where, you know, God has this, you know, He has this love affair with Israel.
And, you know, and the Gentiles, you know, through Christ are really just His stepchildren, you know?
Yeah.
But He really loves, you know, Israel.
And yeah, Israel's been a terrible, rebellious son, but He loves Israel a lot more than, you know, than the stepkids.
Than the redhead stepchild over there.
You know, but Israel's been so particularly rebellious that, you know, as much as God wanted to have this love affair and this story with Israel, He, you know, He had to put it on a 2000 parenthetical pause.
Click pause on that for two millennia.
Not even because he really likes the stepkids that much.
They have some inclusion, but really just because it's not that, hey, I'll pause the love affair with the biological son for 2,000 years because I fell in love with the stepkid.
No, it's because the biological son is so rebellious that I just have to wait.
Yeah, even longer.
Until maybe his heart softens.
It's just a bad way of reading the Bible.
Yeah, you see, like, yeah, Revelation soon.
I mean, the point I have to make, you come to.
Chapter 20 and talking about the millennium.
And that's where the people who, when they read soon in verse one of Revelation, that things that soon must take place, be like, ah, here's like 15 ways that doesn't literally mean soon, right?
You do all the gymnastics.
Same as Matthew 24, this generation.
Well, this kind of generation, rebellious people will always have those.
Right.
But then you get to chapter 20 and it's like, it 100% definitely must be a literal thousand years.
Right.
Anyone who doesn't believe that is a heretic.
Right.
And it's like, well, one of those two things, regardless of your view, you have to take figuratively.
Right.
Right.
Either soon or millennium.
Right.
Right.
One of those two, you're going to take a figurative view.
So you can't say, I'm a biblical literalist.
I just believe in it, it says it literally.
And so I'm going to believe it.
Well, and you can say that.
But as the cool kids would say, that's not the brag you think it is.
Exactly.
Yeah.
When you say, I'm a biblical literalist, I understand that.
Yeah.
Right.
Like when the Bible says no female pastors, We take that literally.
We are a literalist.
Absolutely.
We're not saying, but that would be a part of the problem here, a big part of the problem.
Where Jesus says, I'm the door.
We don't think that, like, he's a piece of the door.
He's a literal door.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So we are, that's a part of our hermeneutic.
But I think, you tell me what you think, but I think that a well rounded, good biblical hermeneutic is historical, grammatical, literal.
But then, lastly, this is the piece, because MacArthur would say that historical, grammatical, literal.
And then we would say it's not.
Something else as a substitute for those three things I've just listed, but a fourth thing in addition, which would be historical, grammatical, literal, and typological.
Yeah, um, that the Bible contains symbols, yeah, and types and symbols have to be understood as symbols, otherwise, you just come away with some really crazy takes.
And there's biblical license for this, right?
The end of Luke's gospel when Jesus is on the road to Emmaus, right?
Envy Between Jews and Gentiles00:03:56
He's talking to these two disciples on the road about the whole.
The whole Old Testament and how it pertains to Him.
Right.
And it's like, well, right.
Well, how does King Og having an iron bedstead that's however many cubits long pertain to Jesus?
14 teeth.
Right.
Well, there's some typological way that it does.
And Jesus was talking about it on the road to Emmaus, right?
I mean, maybe I'm sure he didn't literally cover all the whole Old Testament, but you see this and you see these types and figures and they're right there, right?
I mean, and Jesus makes it, I mean, even the Going back to Jonah, like he's making a typological argument about Jonah, about what he is doing, that the gospel is going to go to the Gentiles, that my grace is going to go to the Gentiles, and that will make you angry and envious, and that will be the thing that draws you back in.
And that anger and envy, here's the whole thing that we're getting at that anger and envy, not of the Gentiles towards the Jews, but the Jews towards the Gentiles as they see the blessing of God shift to the Gentiles because of the Jews' unbelief and hardness of heart and their rejection of the Messiah.
As the Jews sit and witness this, They witness miracles breaking out in Gentile cities and not their own.
They witness Gentile families and homes being put together and strengthened and the bond of love and churches planted and all these different economies beginning to improve and all the things that the gospel, the fruit of the gospel, eventually brings about by way of consequence.
As the Gentiles or the Jews rather are sitting and watching this, it's not the Gentiles that will envy the Jews, but the Jews will envy the Gentiles.
And the final point is that that envy.
It'll work.
It'll do exactly what God ordained it to do.
Namely, it will provoke the Jews, not just to a perpetual envy for the sake of envy, but that in this jealousy that's roused, that it would stir them up to say, That's it, I've had enough.
Like the older brother watching the party for the sun, the party for the sun.
That's it, I'm coming in.
Where's my party?
I want to have a party too.
I want to be a part of this.
That eventually it would work.
And our position is simply that.
It did, yeah, not that it eventually will in 2,000 years or 2,000 more years, but that it actually did work and it worked precisely when Jesus said it would work, right?
Matthew 24.
This generation, the same generation that said, Crucify him, yeah, that they would see their crucified Messiah coming in judgment for their unbelief and rejection, and that in that judgment, that there would be a sweet mercy of the Lord, that many of them would repent of their sins and believe in Jesus Christ, and they did, yeah.
And some of their descendants perhaps are Christians in Palestine now.
Yeah, no, I think that is exactly the case.
I mean, you look at the Christians that have been in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, in the area that is now Israel and Palestine.
These are, they converted, right?
Tens of thousands, millions of people converted that were Jews, became Christians.
And that was, you know, then they carried forward, right, the Christian faith there in that region until the Muslims came in and.
And forced most of them to, most of the people in poverty, at least that couldn't pay the jizya to convert to Islam.
And so it's, I don't know, it's just fascinating to me, right?
You see this, and even up until this point, right, up until 70 AD, right, you have continual ministry happening in Jerusalem and in Judea, right, up until about 66 AD, right, when James is thrown from.
The Temple Made Desolate00:00:40
The temple down and then beaten and killed.
And then that's the point.
And Eusebius records this after James was martyred, right?
All the Christians said, All right, that is like that.
Jesus talks about seeing the abomination that makes the temple desolate, right?
What is that?
Well, the high priesthood just murdered our leader.
It's time for us to head for the hills, just like Jesus told us to.
They did.
And then the Romans came.
And surrounded the place and either killed or enslaved everybody in there.
All right.
Well, thank you guys for tuning in, and we will see you in the next episode.