Appendix: "Israel" and the Modern Political State. The Israel of God Defined

This study is an appendix to Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election.

This appendix stands apart from the main argument. Nothing in Parts I through X depends on it, and readers who hold a different view of Israel and prophecy may disagree here without prejudice to the principal case. It is included because the definition of Israel touches the 144,000 of Revelation 7, and because the question is pastorally live wherever prophecy teaching shapes the pulpit.

One more confusion must be cleared, and it is not a digression, for a specific reason: the 144,000 of Revelation 7, on whom the entire tiered-Zion doctrine is built, are sealed "of all the tribes of the children of Israel." No verdict on that doctrine is possible until the word Israel is defined, and the attainment system's dispensational eschatology (its rapture-tribulation-millennium timetable) borrows its definition from popular prophecy teaching, namely: the assumption that when Scripture says "Israel," God means the present-day political nation-state established in 1948, so that its wars, borders, and headlines are the prophetic clock of God. The sovereign grace believer, standing with the older Baptist and Reformed reading, denies this, not from any hostility to Jewish people, among whom God certainly has His elect as He does in every nation, but because the New Testament itself defines Israel, and its definition is not cartographic.

In this study