The Irony Around Opposition To ‘Replacement Theology’

It is surprising how often we hear or read something from one theologian or another, whether they are Gentile Christians or Jewish believers in the Lord Jesus who say, at the drop of a hat, how wrong, erroneous, and false Replacement theology is.  In defense of themselves they offer reason after reason why the idea of the Church replacing national Israel is an hurtful “anti-Semitic” idea that has no basis in fact as far as the Bible is concerned.

When they read passages of the Olivet Discourse they unconsciously taylor the information around and away from the A.D.66–70 debacle which speaks of the downfall of the Second Temple and Jerusalem and turn it into a trope about the founding of the Israeli State 1948 (quite a interpretive feat!!).  All of this disordered and difficult to challenge in the excitement and fray of electrifying claims and expectations that draw and direct people’s attention to what they believe and feel is just over the horizon in terms of prophetic possibilities.  

Their idea of the “truth” is that natural Israel and natural Israel alone is the receptacle and recipient of all the promises of God–whether those promises are about the Jesus ‘coming soon,’ the supposedly oncoming ‘Great Tribulation,’ the land promised to Abraham, or about the ultimate expectations about the Revelation 20 millennium, or of the promised kingdom of God as an everlasting inheritance of the saints in light.

In their minds, as it were, Replacement Theology stands for the idea that the Church takes Israel’s place as the recipient of all God’s good (Tanakh/ Old Testament) promises and Israel (I mean fleshly Israel) is the receiver of all the bad things the Law foretold, the curses of the Law, desolation, deprivation, dispossession from the land, being led away captive into all nations and a winding wandering status as a people without a national homeland, epitomized in the expression, ‘the wandering Jew.’

But on May 14, 1948, all that changed, and suddenly the Jewish people had a homeland again and Jews and Christians were suddenly confronted with a situation that did not exist at least since the A.D.132–136 Bar Kokhba Rebellion: the specter of a stable Israeli State competing with the Church and Christian’s claims to be the ‘true Israel’ the fruit of fulfillment of the Messianic and Kingdom promises of the Tanakh.

And the State of Israel indeed is stable and armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.  In this  regard we have no quibble with whether or not such a state entity has a right to exist (with or without such armory), but the question today is: What does the State of Israel mean theologically, biblically, and eschatologically? 

This triangle of concerns is important for us to explore for the simple reason that due to Hal Lindsey’s ‘Late Great Planet Earth’ and its pervasive popularity of Lindsey’s reasonings (which in light of the claims of the New Testament appear to be categorically false) but also the actual and demonstrable complete failure of his main claims means that a mythos is in danger of really being wrongfully reified on a evident foundation of quicksand that will not support the all-too-familiar tale of a bright future where Jesus will suddenly show up in glory and power in the clouds of heaven, but will instead continue to dash and disappoint the expectations of millions and billions–just as has happened over the past 19 centuries of end-of-the-world apocalyptic heralds. 

The end of ancient Israel, therefore (as it is popularly believed to have happened in A.D.70, but in reality, its end was achieved in A.D.135/6) stands in the mind of Replacement theorists for the termination of Israel’s theological viability once and for all.  

Then what is the State of Israel for those who deny Replacement Theology but the promised restoration foretold by the prophets of old?  The brand new Jewish State was founded in the spring of 1948 can be nothing but a sure and certain harbinger of the end of the world so notoriously foretold in the New Testament, but again, is this actually true or a brazen temptation in the direction of yet another elusive fulfillment?

The Olivet Discourse’s Interpretation 

and Fulfillment is in Question and Dispute

At the very root of the question and dispute about whether or not the Church replaces physical Israel is the Olivet Discourse and its legitimate context, interpretation, and fulfillment.  In this, there are two competing claims going on at the same time.  On one hand, it is claimed that the Olivet Discourse is about the end of the Jewish world of antiquity with the historic destruction of the Second Temple in the A.D.66-70 Jewish civil war and imbroglio against Roman rulership in the Holy Land.  Those who see in the events the victory of Vespasian and Titus and the triumph of the Romans over the Zealots and the Sicarii hail this as the precise meaning of the texts.  Some go a step further and advance that this very event was indeed the Second Coming that was foretold to happen so frequently in the New Testament.

On the other hand, there are those who see in the Olivet Discourse a step-by-step map of what happened in 1948 when the Balfour Declaration of 1917 finally bore the fruit of a brand new Jewish homeland on 14 May that year.  From this political development many in the Church, particularly those kindly disposed to Premillennial leanings, interpreted these outcomes to favor their view that current events witness the undeniable truth of the Bible standing in the full light of day on the world’s stage.  But this is a biased and tendentious interpretation both of the Olivet Discourse and what has actually happened in the Land of Israel in the past seventy-four years.  

1981–1988: Test Years That Proved Decisive

According to the view that Israel’s founding in 1948 was a ‘fig tree budding’ according to a forced and awkward reading of Christ’s words in Matthew 24:32-33, and 34, 1988 would have been a deadline for events, but 1981 would have been the year of a ‘Rapture’ a so-called world-wide disappearance of Christians–but it predictably did not happen!  

And what is wrong with this interpretation is this: It turns what Jesus said in the entirety of Matthew 24 on its head and fashions out of it what it wants it to say: That Israel will bud someday and Jesus will come back in the clouds at a time more than nineteen centuries from the lifetime of Peter, James, John, and Andrew.  However, upon closer inspection, the chapter neither support such claims nor means any such thing!  There are ZERO details about any developments in Jerusalem, about a Roman abomination of the Second Temple, or a successful Jewish building of a Third Temple, or about anything at all happening in the twentieth century.  The absence of any information about or in the direction of 20^th century Israel is true of the Olivet Discourse in Matthew, Mark, or Luke.  

A verse-by-verse examination of the entire chapter shows that it is about a deteriorating situation around the SECOND TEMPLE.  This is the first fact that must be held firmly in view.  Verses 1, 2, and 15 hold the line for a trajectory of events that takes us from April A.D.33 to November A.D.66 and from November A.D.66 to April of A.D.70.  And it is seventy-two hours days before Passover in April of A.D.70 that the first stones from Roman catapults start crashing against the walls of Jerusalem (Revelation 16:21).

Matthew 24 read destruction of second not a construction of third, but there is no Temple now and the chapter needs a Temple in order for anything to happen at all.  

Solution?  Make the chapter about a Third Temple and Second Coming: Which is illegitimate and destined to fail, without question.

Mark 13:14 tells us about an abomination of desolation of the Second Temple not the sacrilege of a Third Temple, but now there is no Temple at all and the chapter needs a Temple in order for the abomination of desolation to happen at all.

Solution?  Make Mark 13 about a Third Temple 20^th century Israel which is illegitimate and destined to fail without any question at all!

Luke 21 reads about the city being surrounded and its desolation is nigh, making assumptions about this circumnavigation being the Romans but projecting the coming in the clouds to be at the end of time–or somewhere near the 20th century.  But this is doomed, too.  Each of these chapters foretells, describes, and depicts the end of the ancient Hebrew client state of Judæa coming to an end with anomalous events around the Second Temple, including sorcery utilized to entice hundreds of thousands to remain in Jerusalem in hopes of deliverance, disgusting activities inside the Second Temple, the appearance of our Lord in the clouds of heaven, the mourning of the twelve tribes of Israel and the resurrection of the dead before that present generation passed away.^{1  2  3  4  5  6}

If these things did not happen when our Lord said they would, no amount of reconfiguring the information to be about or around a 20^th-century political event can change any facts at all–and the period from 1981–1988 proved this already!  

What Has Been Terminated and 

What Has Been Replaced?

If we hope to make headway in this discussion and if we desire to speak frankly about what we mean we definitely need to talk about that national Israel that began on Mount Sinai and what happened against Bar Kokhba during the reign of Emperor Hadrian in the second century represents the end of the State of Israel and its legitimate replacement by the Church and Christians.  

• • 1 No High Priesthood and there is no longer any pontiff, theocracy, or Sanhedrin.
  • 2 No regular priesthood.
  • 3 No Holy of Holies (there have been 3 successful buildings and three failed efforts to build). (Herod’s Temple was the Second Temple, not a Third Temple because “I think there is a translation issue at hand here. A churva in chazzal means a building which is in a state of disuse and disrepair, not a building in a state of being dismantled for the purpose of rebuilding.  After each of the two churbanos, the temple was left unused in a given state of disrepair.  Afterwards it was rebuilt. When Herod dismantled the temple for the purpose of building a bigger better one, it was not considered a churban, so the new building was not a new temple.⁷ The “Churban Bayis Sheni” happened in A.D.70 after the Zealots had held the Second Temple in their exclusive tyrannical grip for exactly forty-two months.
  • 4 No “Korban” animal sacrifices.  Korban - Wikipedia
  • 5 No festivals Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot
  • 6 No Yom Kippur (day of Atonement).
  • 7 No Ark of the Covenant
  • 8 No scarlet thread
  • 9 No Dice, nor Urmin and Thummim
  • 10 No Menorah
  • 11 No Shewbread
  • 12 No twice-daily sacrifices
  • 13 No tithes and Offerings
  • 14 No Court of Israel, Court of Women, or Court of the Gentiles with the Middle Wall of Partition between them.

What was accomplished in A.D.70 and reconfirmed in A.D.136 historically vindicated what Jesus said would happen to the nation of Judæa and that should end all controversy about the meaning of the Olivet Discourse.  But, of course, there is the issue of the meaning of Revelation 20 and when was that realized in history?  First, let it be noted that the affair of the Destruction of Jerusalem takes us to Revelation 19:21 where that fulfillment of Luke 19:27 came to pass–but it was not against the Romans, but the rebel Judeans fighting in the name of Zealots and Sicarii.  That’s the first thing. 

The second thing is that Revelation 20 is adjacent and naturally follows as an episode to what happens next from A.D.70s out toward the future of the now dispossessed people.  That line of time takes us through Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian’s reigns before we encounter the next big events in the Holy Land.

Now, these events are for many people unknown and to others obscure, but this unfamiliarity with the subject or the events by no means diminishes their importance for the question of Replacement Theology and its legitimacy.  

But before we can approach the subject of the particulars of Revelation 20 it is needful to note any constraints we have to face in order to factor in to restrain or limit the scope and parameters of our proposed interpretation.  

According to John the Baptist God was perfecting willing and able to make children for Abraham out of rocks (Matthew 3:7-9).

Jesus notified the Roman Centurian that the universalization of salvation was near (Matthew 8:5-12).

The Second Coming in light of the social world of the Apostles (Matthew 10:1-23).

The meaning of the expression “This generation” is clearly expressed in Matthew 11:16-19--and it means the people who lived at the time of our Lord's earthly ministry in the Land of Israel.

The departure of Satan in the parameters of “this generation” would correspond with his return in the same period and not later (Matthew 12:43-45 cf. Revelation 20:7).

God’s harvest of souls after the great ministry of Jesus and the Apostles in the Land of Israel would be reaped at the end of the Jewish world, which at that time was looming on the horizon (Matthew 13:1-17ff cf. 1 Peter 4:7, 17).

Christ’s promise to build his church with the keys to the kingdom was fulfilled within five weeks from his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead (Matthew 16:18-19 cf. Acts 2:47)

Christ to appear in the glory of God the Father with his angels in their lifetime not ours (Matthew 16:24-28)

The Apostles sit on twelve thrones judging the Twelve Tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:27-30).

The kingdom of God is to be taken away from Judaea and given to another nation (Matthew 21:33-46).

Jerusalem to pay for killing all the prophets, apostles, and saints all the way back to Abel (Matthew 23:1-39).

Events culminate in the abomination of desolation of the SECOND TEMPLE (Matthew 24:1-51).

Christ separated the Sheep from the Goats at his judgment of the world (Matthew 25:31-46).

Caiaphas, the pontiff of the Jewish nation, and the Sanhedrin to see Christ coming in the clouds of heaven and sitting on the right hand of the glory of God (Matthew 26:63-65).

Revelation 20 represents a break before the last explosion, which was described by Ezekiel between the twenty-two years 593 and 571 B.C.  That prophecy of his foretold a war in the Land of Israel that would result in a decisive overthrow unto which the Bar Kokhba revolt of A.D.132-136 bears a striking and uncanny resemblance!

Bar Kokhba Was the Last King of 

Israel to Direct the Nation in Sukkot

In A.D.135, three years after Rabbi Joseph Akiva declared Bar Kokhba to be Israel’s true Messiah and King, the so-called  Messiah and King got angry and murdered the last high priest, Eleazar, by kicking him with his foot after falsely accusing him of collaborating with the Romans.⁸

Thereupon, a  Băth Kŏl issued forth against Bar Kokhba, his self-promotion, and his war against the Romans and declared to him that he would die. https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/bath-kol/

It is by this means that national Israel went through its process of rejection by God while at the very same time the Church and Christians were in the ascendancy, however, it is a distinct mistake to think that Christian ascendancy has to do with ‘robbing’ the Jews of their identity or usurping their role in salvation–nothing could be further from the truth!  As listed, 1 through 14 show THE JEWS DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING NOW THAT IS RELATED TO THE THEOCRACY THEY ONCE ENJOYED (EVEN THOUGH THEY DO HAVE A POLITICAL STATE).⁹ 

After all, these setbacks that have happened after all these years, the spiritual will and the wherewithal are NOT collectively there for Jewish people to desire or want to recover anything coming close to resembling what they had when the Second Jewish Commonwealth existed.  But at the very same time the Church represents ALL these things because of CHRIST and him being the end of the Law (Romans 10:4).  And, really, what does that mean, Christ is the end of the Law? 

It means Jesus is the goal of the Law, which must also mean that the Church is the result of the Law reaching its purpose in the fulness of the times; therefore Christianity itself is the fruit of the fulfillment of Biblical Judaism and the past, not the future, is the place to look to see where, when, and why and how this happened.  God bless.

Atavism is an unapologetic Supersessionist effort but has absolutely no anti-Semitic leanings against Jewish people or the Israeli State.  The point is that the framework of the Tenakh is obsolete and does not exist anywhere nor does anyone have the ability to revive it after all this time, so no parallel reality exists in competition with the Church which is now God’s vehicle for glory going forward, according to Ephesians 3:21. 

Those Christians who are against Replacement theology may as well be against the New Testament for it represents what John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Apostles advocated was happening on the eve of the end of the civilization of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and what John of Gischala and Simon Bar  Giora (in the first century) and Bar Kokhba (in the second century) did were the only serious efforts to challenge what God had already done through Christ and what the Holy Spirit had orchestrated for nearly 33 and 100 years before the new state of Israel disappeared in the terrible A.D.135/136 cataclysm. 

Endnotes

¹ Sorcery to deceive the people to stay in the doomed city -

² Abomination of desolation ensued after the Zealots routed the Romans out of Jerusalem for the very first time since Gnaeus Pompey the Great had conquered the city in 63 B.C.  For the next forty-two months, the Zealots killed tens of thousands of people both inside and outside of the Second Temple without a shred of shame, restraint, or regret! 

³ Exploding exponential iniquity all over the place as the Zealots extend their influence and pressure to try to galvanize public support for the war and for prosecuting the Aristocracy to “purify” Israel.

⁴ Anomalous events occurred to warn the people of the approaching end, but these signs were misinterpreted to mean the opposite of what they were intended to indicate.  In other words, when the armies of the Lord were seen in the skies above Israel the Jews could naturally associate this happening with what happened during the days of the Maccabees,

“About this time Antiochus the Fourth made a second attack against Egypt. ² For nearly forty days people all over Jerusalem saw visions of cavalry troops in gold armor charging across the sky. The riders were armed with spears and their swords were drawn. ³ They were lined up in battle against one another, attacking and counterattacking. Shields were clashing, there was a rain of spears, and arrows flew through the air. All the different kinds of armor and the gold bridles on the horses flashed in the sunlight. ⁴ Everyone in the city prayed that these visions might be a good sign.” (2 Maccabees 5:1-4).

It is understandable that any avid Zealot enthusiasts could see the heavenly troops flying through the clouds and refuse to admit it was Jesus giving the Christians a sign that he was on the point of giving them victory against all their foes and the odds against them.  And no sign that was seen near the end was interpreted to mean the war against Roman rule was in vain except for that incident in A.D.73 when the torch of flame changed from blowing north against the Roman siege works to blowing southward burning the Jews’ retaining wall at Masada (see, e.g., Wars of the Jews 7.8.5:316-319).

⁵ The mourning of the Twelve Tribes of Israel came about because the Second Coming was not a welcome event because it defied all Messianic ambitions concocted by the Jewish Nationalists.  They wanted to purify the Second Temple, but Jesus foretold it would be completely destroyed.  They thought they would have a Messianic kingdom, but Jesus told them they would be carried away captive into all nations.  They thought one of their Messianic claimants would rule from Jerusalem, but Jesus foretold that the city would be completely totaled along with the whole country and God would not grant a millennium wherein any Temple worship or animal sacrificial system would be reinstituted at all.

⁶ Connected with the destruction of Jerusalem also is the resurrection of the dead (which is in line with Daniel 12:1-4).  This can be seen in what our Lord says in Matthew 24:31 cf. Revelation 11:15-18).

⁷ https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/80954/why-is-herods-temple-not-considered-a-third-temple.

⁸  The person who was popularly declared to be the true Messiah of Israel (against the claims of the Apostles and the earliest Christians) was Simon Bar Kokhba.  Yet three years into his war against the Romans he ended up killing the very last high priest of Israel by kicking him!(link)  After that, the “first” arrangement (which is the theocratic framework supported by the Old Testament) forever slipped into history and the only vestige that remains is what God has incorporated into concepts that directly relate to the Church, the kingdom of God, and the new Jerusalem, but outside of this, nothing else remains but a political entity and sovereignty called Israel, which is neither necessarily good nor bad.

⁹ It is very important not to become confused by the terms “First Temple, Second Temple, and Temple of Bar Kokhba” all these edifices are part and parcel of the First arrangement and the Second arrangement is the Church, the kingdom of God, and the new Jerusalem.  In other words, if anyone opposes the replacement of the First with the Second (which is what God has already done - Galatians 4:21-31; Hebrews 8:13 and 10:9) - they are going against what God has accomplished through Christ and wish to return to the beggarly elements of the Law and the shadow which have already passed away long ago in antiquity.

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