“Lord,” the disciples asked the risen Jesus, “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” His answer was: “It is not for you to know the times of periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” -Acts 1:6-7
The question was a reasonable one for disciples who had earlier heard Jesus
imply future glory for the city of Jerusalem when the times of Gentile
political domination were past (Luke 21:24). Here in Acts such standard hopes
of Jewish end-times theology (or “eschatology”) that included political
sovereignty were not denied but apparently deferred. For now the concern to
which the disciples were directed was worldwide evangelistic mission radiating
out from Jerusalem, instead of a focus on political rule in Jerusalem.
Fast forward to the late 19th century. When
nonreligious Jews sought to create a secular Jewish state, many Orthodox Jews
objected that the Zionists were jumping the gun. The Zionists were “flying in
the face of heaven,” they said, and they should wait until the messiah came to
take the people of Israel back to their ancestral land.
The Orthodox Jewish stance has a remarkable
affinity to Jesus’ answer to the disciples, because both depend on traditional
Jewish eschatology, which says it is the Messiah who will restore Israel to the
land where justice and peace may be enjoyed. In Acts 1, Jesus, as the Messiah,
is personally to restore the kingdom to Israel, and the timing is to be God’s.
The context suggests that when Jesus returns from heaven it will be his role
out this Messianic task: “This same Jesus, who has been taken up from you to
heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
Jewish eschatology looked for the establishment
of the house of David in Jerusalem over an independent state. In the Old
Testament, the concept of the land plays a prominent role. But the New
Testament mostly tells a different story. By persistent appeal to Psalm 110:1,
the New Testament claims that the rule of the risen, ascended Messiah is for
now established in heaven rather than on earth. This emphasis and a focus on
redeeming the Gentiles moved the early church away from a land-related agenda.
The New Testament tends to reinterpret the land as the whole earth or as
heaven.
The Plymouth Brethen, a group that began in
mid-19th-century England, proposed a novel understanding of the “rapture” in 1
Thessalonians 4:17. There Paul regards the Second Coming as a time when Jesus,
coming back to earth through the air, was to encounter Christians, both living
and resurrected, who would be caught up to meet him.
In the Brethren’s new understanding, the purpose of this meeting was to take
the church up to heaven, rather than seeing here the welcome given by a church
that escorted its lord back to earth, as in the wedding parable in Matthew
25:6. Only if Jesus returns to earth, the Brethren believed, can he reign in
Jerusalem, the very place where he was rejected.
MOST ZIONISTS CLAIM that God’s eternal covenant with Abraham and his
descendants (Genesis 12,15) means that Israel must have undivided political
sovereignty over all the land mentioned there, which stretches from the Nile in
Egypt to the Euphrates in what is now Iraq.
Their claim is biblically erroneous. God’s
covenant and promise of the land in Genesis is given to Abraham and his
descendents, not only to Israel. Abraham is “the father of many nations,” not
only one nation (Genesis 17:3-6); Abraham’s descendants are Jews, Arabs, and
Christians, The mother of Abraham’s son, Ishmael, was Hagar the Egyptian. Hagar
produced descendants with Abraham and received a covenant promise: “I will so
increase your descendents that they will be too numerous to count” (Genesis
15:1-15). Those descendents were Arabs, settling in Arab territory (Genesis
25:13-18). Furthermore, Paul writes that Abraham’s descendents include Gentile
and Jewish Christians: all who believe” – both Gentiles who “have not been
circumcised” and ‘the circumcised” (Romans 4:11-12).
The prophets of Israel announce again and again
that if Israel does not repent and do justice, it will be driven into exile.
True and effective support for Israel is to join the call of the prophets for
repentance, justice, and peacemaking. That is what will make life more secure
for the people of Israel and Palestine. As the prophet Jeremiah wrote, “If you
really change your ways and your actions and deal with each justly, if you do
not oppress the alien the fatherless, or the widow and do not shed innocent
blood in this place… then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave
your ancestors for ever and ever.”
Leslie C. Allen is professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Glen Stassen is professor of Christian ethics at Fuller and author with David
Gushee of Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Inter
Varsity, 2003)