by Douglas Goodin
Dispensationalists commit a major interpretive error by failing to rightly grasp the terms of the Old Covenant which state clearly and unequivocally that if Israel failed to perform her required duties, her relationship with God would be dissolved. Her failure would provoke God to divorce her, as it were (which He did in Jer. 3:8). Dispensationalists believe that regardless of what is stipulated by God at the beginning of the covenant, He later promised to love Israel perpetually and therefore they will always and forever be His special people. It's like a father who promises his 14-year-old son that if he gets straight A's through high school, he will buy the boy a new car at graduation. And when the boy is 16, the father promises that the car will be a Corvette. And when the boy is 17, he is promised a new car every year for the rest of his life. But the boy flunks out of school. To argue that someday the boy will receive his promised new cars is to have forgotten the original terms of the agreement—he must finish his schooling with perfect scores.
Dispensationalists find many passages in the Old Testament where God vowed to Israel that she would occupy the promised land, that she would have dominion over her political enemies, and that she would have a King from the line of David who would sit on a throne in Jerusalem and rule over the nations. Obviously, God has not fulfilled these promises, so their occurrence must be yet future. What is absolutely undeniable, they say, is that God will fulfill them. Indeed, His integrity is on the line. If He does not keep these promises, then He is not trustworthy.
But they miss the basis of God’s promises to Israel which were stated upfront and unambiguously when He established the covenant with them. God’s oaths to her were contingent upon her keeping the covenant terms. She must cook perfect meals, keep a perfect house, and produce perfect kids; any deficiency would bring about swift retribution. Without question, He promised her a blissful existence, but only if she was a flawless wife forever.
If we jump ahead to the New Testament, we find that the boy can still graduate with outstanding grades and receive the promises of God, but only by receiving credit for the grades earned by God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. The way to do that is to believe the Gospel. However, the Gospel does not join someone to the covenant made with Israel, but to the New Covenant in Christ. The believer becomes a Christian, not a Jew. And he receives the promises made to God’s Son and His people which far surpass those made to a bunch of Hebrew migrants several thousand years ago.
Why does this matter? Because Dispensationalists have begun to argue that if God does not bring temporal, national blessing to the physical descendants of Jacob, then He is a promise-breaker. And if God does not keep His promises to Israel, then what assurance is there that He will keep His promises to the Church? If the Jews don’t occupy the earthly promised land, Christians have little hope of occupying the heavenly one. The biblical report, however, is that God is the unfailing promise-keeper. In fact, He has already kept His promises to Israel. He promised that if they broke the covenant, He would destroy them. They did. He did. He kept His promises to make them perish, to bring them to ruin, and to punish them several times over for their idolatry. Because they broke the covenant, God has no further obligation to them. As quoted already in another article, Jesus said as much when He declared to the Jews that, "the kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and be given to a nation producing the fruit of it" (Matt. 21:43). Those who simply assume that Israel is God's special people eternally run into trouble because their presuppositions won't let them accept what Jesus unambiguously asserted in this verse. They press on in their belief that Israel is God's own possession, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation, unaffected by these clear words of Christ.
As with Covenant Theology, we will not interact with all of the ramifications of this error, but some of the beliefs that follow from it are:
• Apostate Israel is still God’s chosen people.
• There will be a rapture of the church, followed by a seven-year period of unprecedented suffering for the Jews, followed by an earthly reign of Israel with Jesus as king headquartered in Jerusalem (see A 7-Year Jewish Tribulation: Is it Biblical?).
• The promises of God’s kingdom were, are, and always will be, for the Jews, regardless of what the New Testament teaches.
• The Old Testament has interpretive priority over the New Testament, over Jesus, and over His disciples.