The Reestablishment of National Israel Is Not Biblical

by Stuart DiNenno

Due to the usurpation of land in Palestine by Jewish anti-Christs and their establishment in 1948 of a nation which they fraudulently labeled Israel, and the judaization of the institutional churches which has caused almost all of them to either embrace the fraud or at least be silent about it for fear of being seen as ‘anti-semitic,’ the truth must be all the more emphatically published that a restoration of national Israel does not accord with the biblical plan for the expansion of the kingdom of God. God’s promise of the land of Canaan to the Israelites was fulfilled when they took possession of it under Joshua. There will be no further fulfillment of a land promise to the children of Israel in the sense of a particular ethnic group occupying a delineated parcel of land. 

This is not to say that there is no future aspect to the promise made by God to the Israelites and to their subsequent possession of the land. In fact, there is a future application to both because both are types (figurative representations) of the promise of God for a future inheritance of a paradisiacal world by His people, “a land flowing with milk and honey.” The conquest of Canaan by the Israelites under Joshua was a type of the world being conquered by God’s elect under Christ. In fact, the name Jesus is a Latin version of the name Joshua which means savior or salvation of God.

The promise of the land of Canaan was specifically made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The promise was not made to them only in the sense that their offspring would possess it but it was emphatically stated that they themselves would possess it, which they did not in their own lifetimes. God promised several times to the patriarchs that He would not only give the land to their seed but give it to themselves as well: “to thee will I give it, and to thy seed” was stated in all the following verses: Genesis 13:15; 17:8; 26:3; 28:13; 35:12. Speaking of Abraham, the apostle Stephen declared that the promise God made to him of possessing the land was yet to be fulfilled: “And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession…” (Acts 7:5)  In Hebrews 11:13 it is said of the faithful saints of the Old Testament: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off…”

The promised inheritance will be fulfilled at the resurrection in that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with all of God’s people, will possess not merely the land of Canaan, which was only a type, but all the earth. That there was to be a future resurrection from the dead was understood by the saints prior to New Testament times (Job 19:25-27, Psalm 16:9-10, Psalm 49:14-15, Isaiah 25:8, Isaiah 26:19, Hosea 13:14, Daniel 12:2, Acts 26:6-8). Abraham knew by experience that God was able to bring life from the dead after he had already seen Him bring a child from his body “now dead” and from “the deadness of Sara’s womb,” and after receiving his son Isaac “from the dead” “in a figure” (i.e., in a type).

“And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb.” (Romans 4:19)

“Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure.” (Hebrews 11:19)

Biblical types, though consisting of real persons and meaningful events in their own time, are, in their symbolic aspects, inferior representations of superior persons and events that are to come in the future. It is not consistent with biblical typology to expect to see mere repetitions of the original types or equivalent manifestations of them occurring at later dates. The reestablishment of national Israel in a limited geographical location is not what Christians should be looking for but rather an establishment of the reign of Christ’s elect, who are the true Israel of God, over the entire earth. This is the greater antitype (i.e., the fulfillment of what the type represented). Christians are to expect the fulfillment of the mandate to take dominion over the earth which was given to Adam and look forward in hope for the future establishment of a paradise that is similar to Eden but worldwide in its scope and immutable in its nature. To look for anything less is to look for the “weak and beggarly elements” of a former time that were merely “a shadow of good things to come.”