In the world of geo-eco-politics, it is not often that promises are kept over time. But a promise God made to Abraham more than 4,000 years ago is still in force. It is shaping our world today and will shape it even further as we approach the end of the age. Godâs promises are forever.
OVERVIEW
Most Israeli Jews, and many Jews living outside Israel, know someone who has been a victim of Palestinian terrorism in the Jewish homeland. Living with the prospect of death or injury due to Palestinian terrorism is a daily reality for Jews in Israel.
âPalestiniansâ is a generic term used to refer to Arabs who occupied the land of Palestine prior to 1948 and who were displaced when Israel was made a nation. Palestinians resent that displacement; they want their land back, and they want Israel to be erased from the map. They want Jews either to be killed or to leave their land and live elsewhere in the world. Acts of terrorism are their ongoing effort to attack Israelâs right to exist.
Israel is a tiny, 9,000-square-mile island in a five-million-square-mile sea of Arab nations that surround her. Her status as a legally reformed nation has resulted in a constant state of vigilance against attacks. Thousands of Israelis have been killed by Palestinian (Islamic) terrorists, and thousands of Palestinians have died as a result of Israelâs response to terror attacks. It is an ongoing conflict.
In recent years, Palestinians have gained the sympathy of the world because Israel has built settlements on two percent of West Bank (Arab) land to create a buffer zone against Palestinian attacks and to create civil order in an otherwise chaotic region. But Israel has never been the aggressor in Arab-Israeli conflicts. Israel has been willing to find a two-state solution, making concessions to the Palestinians, but her offers are always rejected because they include Israelâs right to exist as a nation.
Israel is fighting for her very existence. The subtitle of an article by World magazine editor Marvin Olasky succinctly summarizes Israelâs dilemma: âSlammed If You Do, Dead If You Donât.â When Israel takes the tough but necessary measures to defend herself, she is slammed by world censure. If she fails to take those measures, she is attacked by hostile neighbors. In that article, Olasky filed this explanation of the impossible situation in which Israel finds herself today:
The Holocaustâs 6 million murders led to the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the willingness of Jews to fight for it against enormous odds. . . . The hardened men and women who founded the state of Israel and fought to defend it in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, became known for saying, âNever again.â Never again would they make it easy for mass killers. Never again would they go down without a fight.
For several decades, non-Jewish Americans and Europeans understood that resolve. But then a generation grew up that did not know Adolf [Hitler]. Those without visceral awareness of the background saw Israelis not as victims trying to survive but as overlords acting unjustly to poor Palestinians. Manipulators took the opportunity to re-package the old anti-Semitism as sympathy for an oppressed third-world population.1
Oppression and opposition to Jews is nothing new in world history. The descendants of Abraham were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years, then the ten northern tribes were captured by the Assyrians in 722 BC and the two southern tribes by the Babylonians in 586 BC. (Granted, these captivities were due to the Jewsâ sins.) Then Rome crushed the Jews in AD 70, dispersing them into the world where they lived for 1,878 years until the United Nations declared them a nation again in 1948. During the dispersionâthe diasporaâmore than six million Jews were exterminated by Hitler in the 1940s.
Only one factor can explain why the Jews still exist as a people and a nation: the promises of God. As God said through the prophet Ezekiel, He has preserved the Jews for His own nameâs sake: â âThe nations shall know that I am the LORD,â says the Lord God, âwhen I am hallowed in you before their eyesâ â (Ezekiel 36:23, emphasis added). And through Isaiah God reminded the Jews that many of her hardships were discipline for her sins (Isaiah 40:2).
But discipline looks to a more righteous future. Why does God have a future for the Jews? Because of promises made to them in times past. The Jews represent a conundrum illustrated by the saying, âHow odd of God, to choose the Jews.â
It does seem odd from a human perspective. But there are two reasons God has preserved Israel as a nation: (1) because of a promise made to Abraham and (2) because of Godâs faithfulness to His Word. As we will see, nothing can cause God to break His promises to His people.
The promise made to Abraham began in Genesis 12:1â3 and was reaffirmed several times to Abraham as well as his son Isaac and grandson Jacob. Their descendants would be the inheritors of the promise God made to Abraham. Genesis 12:1â3 is a cornerstone, a foundational block of Scripture on which a right understanding of the Bible rests. To disregard the promises God made to the father of the Jewish people is to be confused about biblical eschatology.
There are seven features of Godâs promise (Godâs covenant) in Genesis 12:1â3 that serve as mileposts in the journey from Genesis to Revelation.
An Unconditional Covenant
When God says âI willâ (five times in Genesis 12:1â3), that signifies an unconditional covenant. God is not asking Abraham to reciprocate; He is stating what He Himself will do for Abraham and his descendants. God confirmed the unconditional nature of this covenant in a unique ceremony in Genesis 15.
That ceremony was a common one in the ancient Near East. Sacrificial animals were cut in two and the parties to a covenant would walk between the pieces. They were saying, âMay what happened to these animals happen to me if I break this covenant.â But when God and Abraham conducted this ceremony, God alone walked between the pieces, taking full responsibility for the keeping of the covenant. This wasnât an agreement between equals; this was God promising to do something for Abraham and his descendants.
Paul Wilkinson notes that God alone signed and sealed the covenant, âsince only He passed through the animal pieces. The inference drawn from Ancient Near Eastern custom is that in so doing, God invoked a curse upon Himself, should He ever break His promise.â2
