A People, A Promise, A Prophecy

Since the advent of Dispensationalism there has been a hope placed in a reconstitution of nation of Israel. The creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 caused Dispenationalists to proclaim that prophecy had been fulfilled. As a result a segment of Reformed Christianity today denies any special blessing to or for the physical descendants of Abraham. But it was not always this way.

Reformation theologians John Calvin and John Knox, and later theologians such as Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon maintained that the plain reading of Romans 11 meant that there would be a turning to Christ by the physical descendants of Abraham. As late as 1965 John Murray wrote that Romans 11 indicated that the hardening of the Jewish people was neither total (since Paul believed), nor permanent.

We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater in reaction to erroneous theology. What is in focus is not the reconstitution of a nation, but the conversion of a people.