It Is A Mystery....And Right Now We Should Leave It At That

                  How does the nation-state of Israel fit into God's Word? That is a major controversy in the church today. Classical Dispensationalism....classical but really not that old...says that God is working through history with a number of different plans....and one would be that the Jews of the Old Testament were part of one plan....they forfeited that as they rejected their Messiah....but....that same plan for them will be reestablished at the end of time. Others say that....no....there were no alternate plans....but that the church today fulfilled the original plan....and that any Jewish nation that might come back into existence is no more and no less than any other nation state in the world.
                    These new Dispensationalists at the time....saw a number of passages in God's Word that determined their theology towards Israel....and indeed there are many passages about Israel that are difficult to interpret. The problem is that Paul in Romans called all of this a mystery....a mystery that he described....but did not explain. The Dispensationalists believe that they solved the mystery! They did not solve the mystery.
                     The other side of this is not without problems of their own. They know that they cannot solve the mystery....so they just ignore it. Consequently....all of those verses in God's Word that tell of a reestablished Jewish nation of Israel....and the eschatological importance of it....are of no help to them today. Worse than that....the possibility exists that they can wind up actually working against God's plan for these branches that were previously cut off of the vine!
                      Spurgeon saw through this. He let the mystery stand as a mystery....and saw that the Jews would one day return to the Holy Land....and Martyn Lloyd-Jones acknowledged the same thing. Is it any wonder then that these two men of great discernment were the greatest preachers that the church has had over the past 170 years?
                      So....over time....big words like....replacement theology....have come up....and only muddled the situation more. It is a mystery! There is only one gospel of salvation. This fairly new nation of Israel....May of 1948....is not the same nation of the Old Testament....but they are also not just another nation. It's a mystery....and we are about to find out more on how that mystery plays out in the world.