Jesus in a Vacuum

I am astonished by R.C. Sproul’s answer to the question, “What does Scripture teach us about the future role of Israel?”

He starts off well, giving two major views:

Some Christians believe that the New Testament church replaces Old Testament Israel as the subject matter of Old Testament prophecies about Israel. That is to say that the church today is regarded as the new Israel. If this is so, then any prophecies in the Bible having to do with Israel now refer to the Christian church and have no specific reference to the nation of Israel.

Other Christians are convinced that the Scriptures have much to say about ethnic, national Israel and that God still has another chapter to write for the Jewish people as such. I am persuaded that God will write a new chapter for ethnic Israel, for the Jewish people who are alive in the world today. I’m persuaded of that principally because of Paul’s teaching in his epistle to the church at Rome; in this letter he makes a clear distinction between the Jewish people and the Christian church (Rom. 11). In that distinction he speaks about the fact that God still has work to do with the Jewish people.

He continues well, citing Jesus’s prophecy of the end times:

One of the most important sections of all of Scripture that teaches about future things is what we call the Olivet discourse, called such because it takes place on the Mount of Olives (Matt. 24). Here, Jesus and his disciples discuss future events. Jesus speaks about the last times and the signs of the times and those things that will transpire at the end of the age before he returns to this planet. For example, in Luke 21:5-28, Jesus predicts the imminent destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the temple. This took place in A.D. 70, when the Romans perpetrated a holocaust against the Jewish people by destroying Jerusalem, slaughtering about one million Jewish people, and tearing the temple down. The Jews, of course, then went into exile. But when Jesus made this prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem, he said that Jerusalem would be trodden underfoot until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. So even our Lord talked in his prophetic utterances about a period in which that exile of the Jewish nation would end and they would return to Jerusalem, which has taken place in our own very day.

But watch how he concludes:

Beyond that, I do not know and can’t speak specifically to Israel’s situation.

In other words, all that Dr. Sproul knows about the future of Israel is what is recorded in Romans 9-11 and the Olivet Discourse.

I see two failures here. The first and obvious one is that Dr. Sproul is unaware of all that the Old Testament teaches about the future of Israel. The second is what motivated this post. Dr. Sproul (and many others) do not realize that the source of Jesus’s prophetic knowledge was the Old Testament. What Jesus told his disciples in the Olivet Discourse was little more than a summary of the visions that Daniel had received. When one doesn’t know the Old Testament, then one doesn’t recognize when the New Testament is repeating or developing revelation from the Old Testament, and then one may conclude that “beyond” what Jesus says, we are in the dark. But Jesus expects his disciples to know and understand the Old Testament, and he said to those who did not, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Luke 24:25).

The future of Israel is not a minor issue found in an obscure verse or two, but it is instead the major theme of many prophets, including Daniel, Zechariah, Haggai, Obadiah, Micah, as well as of large portions of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. These books are not optional reading for Christians and their relevance did not end when Jesus came and the New Testament was written. The surest way to misinterpret the New Testament is by ignoring the Old.