THROUGH TRIBULATION
TO
EVERLASTING LIFE: HISTORICAL PREMILLENNIALISM
This too was what many of the earliest church leaders taught. It’s what Irenaeus of Lyons was getting at when he said that God’s material promises to Abraham would be fulfilled through Jesus and the church. Irenaeus even declared that “the church is the seed of Abraham.”176 Justin Martyr defined Christians as the new Israel.177 Does this mean that ethnic Jews no longer have any special place in God’s plan? Certainly not! The preservation of the Jewish people to this present time is a miraculous sign of God’s continuing presence in the world. There are, as novelist Walker Percy has pointed out, “no Hittites walking about on the streets of New York”—but there are millions of descendants of the ancient Israelites.178
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What, then, does the future hold for ethnic Jews? At some point before the return of Jesus, many historical premillennialists anticipate a widespread spiritual awakening among the Jewish people. Jews throughout the world will turn to Jesus as their Messiah, Savior, and God. That’s what Paul was predicting when he wrote “The current secular state of that Israel would remain resistant to the Israel is not the fulfillment of God’s gospel only “until the fullness of the promise to Abraham; Jesus is. Gentiles has come in” (Rom. 11:25). For Nonetheless, the state of Israel is historical premillennialists, the primary the guardian of post-Holocaust focus of God’s promises is not the physical world Judaism. This does not land of Israel but the divine person of Jesus. necessitate that we support every And so, what historical premillennialists political decision of the Israeli anticipate for the Jewish people is not the government. It does mean that we restoration of the modern nation of stand with Israel against every Israel to their land but a turning of form of anti-Semitic violence Jewish people to Jesus. Because of this because we know that these are expectation, there is every reason to the kinsmen according to the flesh 179 proclaim the good news about Jesus “to the of our Messiah.” Jew first” (Romans 1:16). Russell Moore 333