Signs of the times: The re-establishment of the State of Israel

An excerpt from a forthcoming article in the June issue of ‘The Christadelphian’:

In the mid-nineteenth century, the belief that the Jews would return to their land after many centuries of dispersion was one of the distinctive features of Brother John Thomas’s writings. Despite the apparent impossibility of this, this Bible-founded belief became a central component of the Christadelphian community’s preaching and witness.

The continued importance of the Jews in God’s purpose, and their eventual return to their promised land, had not for centuries been a ‘mainstream’ Christian teaching. The belief that the Jewish people retained a significant role in God’s purpose following their national overthrow and dispersion in AD 70 was quite quickly dismissed by expositors who allegorised passages of Scripture and established what may be broadly termed ‘replacement theology’.

From the sixteenth century onwards, however, it is possible to identify dissenting voices whose belief was that the Jews would one day return to their land. Over a period of some three hundred years, their writings demonstrated the continuity of a belief that the Bible predicted a return of the Jews to their homeland. If Jesus spoke of the time of the Jewish nation’s destruction, then he also spoke of a time when Gentile domination of the nation and its capital would end:

“they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Luke 21:24, KJV).

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Replacement theology or Supersessionism