For years I preached from a Bible that I had cut in half without ever realizing it. I was taught, as most Christian pastors are taught, that the Old Covenant Scriptures were given to the Jews and the New Covenant Scriptures were given to the Church. Two books, two peoples, and only one of them still mattered.
That error has done more damage to the Church than almost anything else I can name. It trained generations of Christians to skip past the first three quarters of their own Bibles, and then to skip past the people to whom those Scriptures were given. Replacement theology, the belief that the Church has taken Israel’s place, depends entirely on this mistake.
I want to show you what I missed for all those years, and the best place to begin is with a single Hebrew word.
The Hebrew word for covenant is berith. In Scripture a covenant is not merely spoken or agreed to. It is cut, sealed through sacrifice, and meant to last. The first time the word appears in the Bible, God is speaking to Noah as the floodwaters are about to come: “I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall enter the ark” (Genesis 6:18). Noah and his family did not survive that flood because Noah was a skilled builder. They survived because God had made a covenant with him, and every covenant God makes carries within it the power to accomplish what He has promised.
That last point is the heart of everything I want to say, and it raises a question I could not answer honestly for a long time. If God’s covenants carry their own power to be fulfilled, and if He has never once failed to keep one, then what exactly did I mean when I stood in a pulpit and told my congregation that the first covenant was finished?
What God’s Promises Have Already Done
Abraham was one hundred years old and Sarah was ninety, far beyond the age of bearing children, when Isaac was born. That child did not come through human ability or human effort. He came because God had made a covenant promise to Abraham, and the promise itself carried the power to bring it about. The nation that came from that child is still here today.
God promised Moses that He would bring the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, and He kept that promise “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with signs and wonders” (Deuteronomy 7:19). A covenant promise emptied Egypt of its slaves, made them into a nation, and gave them a land of their own. That same promise is still at work today.
Naaman was the commander of the Syrian army, and he suffered from leprosy. Hearing that there was a prophet in Israel who could heal him, he traveled to the home of Elisha, expecting to be received with the honor due a general. Elisha never came out to meet him. He sent a servant to the door with a single instruction: go wash seven times in the Jordan River, and your skin will be restored. Naaman was insulted by the answer and nearly returned home with his disease. When he finally humbled himself and obeyed, his leprosy disappeared completely (2 Kings 5:1-14). It was not the water of the Jordan that healed him, but the covenant promise of God attached to it.
Then there was Jericho, the first walled city standing between Israel and the Promised Land. God gave the Israelites a promise with conditions attached to it. They were to march around the city once a day for six days, and on the seventh day march around it seven times, blow the trumpets, and give a great shout (Joshua 6:2-5). Nothing about marching and shouting brings down a city wall. The Israelites had no power of their own to destroy Jericho, and God never asked them to have it. He asked them only to obey the conditions of His promise, and when they obeyed, the walls of that great city collapsed.
Some covenant promises reach far beyond the lifetime of the man who received them. God told Abraham, “Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God” (Genesis 17:8). An everlasting possession is not a temporary arrangement that God later thought better of, and He has told us plainly that He does not revise His own words: “My covenant I will not break, nor alter the word that has gone out of My lips” (Psalm 89:34).
A New Covenant Christian?
“I am a New Covenant Christian.” I have heard many Christians say these exact words with real pride. What they mean is that the Old Covenant Scriptures no longer apply to them, and that the people to whom those Scriptures were given no longer matter. The distance between that statement and outright antisemitism is much shorter than most believers realize.
The verse they cite to support their belief that God has rejected Israel and formed a new covenant with the Church is Hebrews 8:10, which is itself a quotation from the prophet Jeremiah: “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their minds and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
Look carefully at who this covenant is actually made with. God does not say that He will make it with the Church. He says He will make it with the house of Israel. It takes a great deal of effort to read that verse and then conclude that the Jewish people have been excluded from the very promise God addressed to them.
Notice as well what this “new” covenant contains. It contains the law of God, the same law that was given at Mount Sinai. God is not throwing the law away, He is moving it, taking it off tablets of stone and writing it on the human heart. This is why the covenant is far better described as a renewed covenant than a new one. It does not cancel what came before it, but applies it at a deeper level. And God has not stopped being the God of Israel for a single moment, because in that same verse He says of the Israelites, “I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
How can anyone teach that the law has been done away with, when the covenant they claim in its place is defined by that very law being written on their hearts?
The apostle Paul understood this clearly. When he wrote that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), there was no New Testament in existence for him to point to. Everything Paul meant by “all Scripture” was the Hebrew Scriptures. He was telling the followers of his day that the very book many Christians now ignore is the book that teaches us righteousness.
Paul was just as clear about the Jewish people themselves. “Has God cast away His people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite. God has not cast away His people whom He foreknew” (Romans 11:1-2). He then settles the question completely: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). God’s calling of the Jewish people cannot be revoked, cancelled, or handed over to anyone else.
The Promise We Are Watching Come True
God made another promise through the prophet Ezekiel: “Surely I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, wherever they have gone, and will bring them into their own land, and I will make them one nation in the land” (Ezekiel 37:21-22).
For nearly two thousand years, that was a promise, a hope, and a matter of faith, but nothing more. The Jewish people were scattered across the world, and the land of Israel sat mostly empty. Then, in May of 1948, the State of Israel was declared and a nation that had not existed since ancient times was reborn. Jews have been returning home ever since, from Yemen and Ethiopia and Russia and America, and they are still coming home today.
People will argue endlessly about the politics of the modern State of Israel. What no one can argue is that millions of Jewish people have returned to the land God promised them, exactly as He said they would, in our own lifetime. We are watching the power of covenant at work in our day.
This is where every Christian reading these words has a decision to make. God’s promise to Abraham included a promise to everyone else as well: “I will bless those who bless you” (Genesis 12:3). The same covenant power that gave a hundred-year-old man a son, brought a nation out of Egypt, healed a Syrian general, and brought down the walls of Jericho is at work right now in the return of the Jewish people to their land. Christians who believe that promise and stand with Israel in this hour will themselves be blessed by God. That is not my opinion, it is what God said He would do, and He has never once failed to do what He said.
The prophet saw this very moment coming:
“You will arise and have mercy on Zion; for the time to favor her, yes, the set time, has come. For Your servants take pleasure in her stones, and show favor to her dust. So the nations shall fear the name of the Lord, and all the kings of the earth Your glory. For the Lord shall build up Zion; He shall appear in His glory.” (Psalm 102:13-16)
The set time has come. The only question left is whether the Church will recognize what God is doing while He is doing it, or read about it years from now in the very book it decided long ago to stop opening.
