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The Lord Jesus Christ is the
center of the counsels of God, and hence of prophecy, which treats of the
earth, and His government of it for His own glory. Hence the importance of
Israel, of whom, as according to the flesh, came Christ who is over all,
God blessed forever. They are His people by a choice and calling which
cannot fail in the end, though there may be and has been a fall and a long
continued disowning of them in God’s righteous judgment of their apostasy.
But mercy will restore them ere long, humbly, joyfully, welcoming the
Messiah they have long rejected.
This has been feebly seen, nay, generally
denied, throughout Christendom for ages. Scarcely any error is more patent
throughout the Fathers than the substitution of the Church for Israel in
all their system of thought. Every [ancient Chruch] Father, whose writings
have come down to us, is a witness of the same allegorizing
interpretations, not only the Alexandrian school of Clement and Origen,
but Justin Martyr, Iranaeus, and the Pseudo-Barnabas. The Latins followed
in the same wake, not Augustine and Ruffinus and Jerome only, but
Tertullian, Cyprian, and Lactantius.
Not one held the restoration of Israel to
their land, converted nationally; the millenarian portion expected that
the risen saints would reign with Christ in Jerusalem rebuilt, adorned,
and enlarged, not that the Jews should be restored and blessed in the
land. The medieval writers naturally adopted the same view. So did the
Reformers without exception, as far as I am aware. All fell into the error
of putting the Church into the place of Israel, and so of leaving no room
for His earthly people, besides His heavenly saints, and glorified Bride.
They neglected the warning of the Apostle
Paul, and assumed that the Jewish branches were broken off that the
Gentiles might be grafted in, and forever. They did not take heed to the
prophetic word, as Peter exhorts, but applied systematically the
predictions of Israel’s blessing in the last days to the Christian
Church. Still less did they appreciate the day dawning or the day star
rising in the heart. Catholics, Protestants, had no real light, no
spiritual intelligence, as to the hopes of Israel as distinct from those
of Christians.
Is it not as solemn as it is startling to
see thus beyond just question the immediate, universal, and lasting
departure of the Christian profession from prophetic truth? The divine
glory in Christ for all things in heaven and on earth being the blessed
and revealed purpose of God (Eph. 1:10), when this is forgotten, false
hopes spring up. Man, self, becomes the end, instead of the Lord Jesus;
the true light is lost, and darkness ensues in the just retribution of
God. The effort to make the Church all, instead of preserving the true
dignity of the Church as the heavenly spouse of the Lord Jesus, lowers her
to the position of earthly Israel, a people reigned over, not reigning
with Him, His inheritance, not heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ.
The future actings of God as revealed in
the prophetic Word are the expression of the principles on which He will
govern the world; and so His Word is the means by which alone we learn
these principles fully. If we fail to ascertain them thus, we form our own
thoughts of that which God gave us, prophecy whereby we know His mind. Our
business is to gather of what and whom God speaks; and no greater delusion
can befall us than to imagine that, because all Scripture is for our
profit, all must be about ourselves.
The purpose of God as to the Jews is in
its place as truly the object of faith as His counsels concerning the
Church. Thus, the apprehension of His various ways for glorifying His Son
is essential to real understanding of His Word. Here, as everywhere, a
single eye is essential. With the Lord Jesus before us, the whole body
will not fail to be full of light.
Is not this to take away Scripture from
the Christian? Quite the contrary! To understand it according to God is
the truest and richest gain; to misapply it to ourselves in Gentile
conceit is ruinous. Yet there is no instruction in the past or future
history of Israel as revealed in the Bible which is not for, though
not about, the Church. That such Scriptures concerning the Jew may
have been written so as to bear an analogous application to the Gentiles
is not denied; but the application calls for the utmost caution and a
right dividing of the Word of truth, because each economy or dispensation
has its own peculiarities, and in not a few things there are confessedly
decided and intended contrasts.
It is an error therefore to read the
Church in Judah and Israel, Zion and Jerusalem; and the effect of this
alchemy which the Fathers originated and handed down to both popery and Protestantism
alike, has been not only to rob Israel of their proper hope, but to lower
that of the Church incalculably.
Yet no maxim of interpretation can compare
with this most misleading identification for importance, antiquity, or
widespread reception. Since the apostles, perhaps beyond every other
tradition, has this been accepted always, everywhere, and by all. Fathers,
Romanists, Reformers, have alike applied it habitually in their comments,
as well as practice.
But these are points of detail, all of
which together are a trifle compared with the one grand principle which
effaces Israel from prophecy and instills the Church in their stead. What
can be thought of the judgment that could overlook an error so
transcendent, vitiating all sound exposition of both Old Testament and New
from Genesis to Revelation?
One can account for it by two
considerations: first, a quite superficial estimate of the evil involved
in this old and general error; secondly, a very exaggerated feeling
against those who looked for a personal Antichrist among the Jews and a
future revival of the Roman Empire before the age ends, lest it should
weaken Protestantism in the face of the popish re-awakening in our day.
There is no adequate sense of wrong which
has been already done the truth for nearly eighteen centuries, and the
darkening influence which Judaizing the Church has wrought far and wide in
Christendom, among the Orientals, Greeks, and Latins, as well as
Protestants more recently, throughout all its history save the first
century.
The feverish doubt caused by a few
fanciful essayists like Drs. Maitland, Todd, and Burgh, Messrs. Tyso,
Dodsworth, and the like, were slight indeed compared with the original
paralysis in the distinct perception of the Christian’s heavenly
privileges in union with the Lord Jesus Christ on high, or in the just
recognition of God’s fidelity to Israel. What an indignity religion puts
on every person of the Godhead alike, on the grace and truth which came by
Jesus Christ, when it drags souls back to the dread distance of Judaism. |
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