Israel.
The church.
Are they two different entities altogether, or does scripture clearly teach one new man?
I wrote about this concept a dozen years ago, but it bears repeating. If you want to read it, click here.
The Greek word ekklesia appears 77 times in the Septuagint. This word is used in the New Testament 118 times, and is usually translated into the word church.
Septuagint? What's that, you ask? Several hundred years before the Messiah walked the earth, seventy Hebrew scholars - orthodox Jews - translated the Hebrew scriptures (aka Old Testament) into Greek. It is an excellent resource that helps to bridge understanding between the Hebrew and the Greek scriptures.
So back to my statement. The fact that ekklesia appears 77 times simply blows my mind. The church in the Hebrew scriptures? (Don't even get me started on the significance of the number 77).
Yes. Because the scriptures, in their entirety, tell a unified story that points to the Messiah and the redemption of the world.
There are a lot of last-days teachings these days. I have sat through quite a few of them. And rightfully so, because we truly are in the last days. But one thing that keeps coming up in these teachings is the idea that we are in the "church age."
The "church age" is much longer that the church thinks it is. It is not an entity that is separate from Israel, ready to be zapped away so that Israel can undergo horrible tribulation all by herself.
Biblically speaking, the ekklesia has always been God's people. God in His mercy has allowed Gentiles to be grafted into His kingdom, along with the Jews, as stated in Romans 11. Granted, most Jews do not yet believe in Yeshua the Messiah, but God keeps His promises, and that day of recognition is coming soon. They will be grafted back into the ekklesia, the community of God's people, through faith in the Messiah.
Without Israel, the nations were completely without hope of redemption. Look at Ephesians 2:12... Remember that you were at that time separated from Messiah, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
Many theologians teach that the "church" will be zapped away before God deals with Israel. There is no clear passage that teaches this... these teachers will admit that the idea is inferred. But it takes a lot of biblical gymnastics to get to that place.
Here is a quick example. Recently I heard a preacher say that Matthew 24:29-31 does not teach the "rapture," (I prefer to say the gathering of the saints) but the beginning of God's kingdom. Really? This is what it says:
Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the starts will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather the ELECT from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
Clearly, this scripture shows that there is a gathering of the saints at the return of the Messiah, at a loud trumpet call. What is the Greek word for "elect"? It is eklektos - a variation of the word ekklesia. For those theologians who say this passage is just for Israel, and then they insist that we are in a separate ekklesia age, how do they reconcile this? They can't.
There are several other places where the scriptures teach us about the gathering together of the saints. Check these out:
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. (1 Corinthians 15:51-52)
For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Messiah will rise first. (1 Thessalonians 4:16)
We are given another glimpse of the timing of this gathering in 2 Thessalonians 2: Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.
Did you catch that? Our gathering to Him (popularly called the "rapture") will not happen before the great rebellion (meaning apostosy, or falling away from the faith) and the revealing of the antichrist. Clearly we will still be around when the antichrist is revealed. So please, be ready. In this world you will have tribulation, according to Yeshua.
So what about that one new man that I referred to at the beginning of this post? After we are told in Ephesians 2 that the nations had been excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and without hope in the world, we see this:
But now in Messiah Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Messiah. For He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down the flesh the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through he cross, thereby killing the hostility.
Dispensationalism is a fancy word that means division between the church and Israel, and dispensationalists claim that the church has to be gone before God can deal with unbelieving Israel. There are actually some ultra-dispensationalists who teach that Christians will dwell in heaven with Jesus, and the Jews will in the kingdom on earth. Not only does this fly in the face of scripture's claim of one new man, but it is also thinly-veiled anti-semitism. As if we, the ekklesia, are to have nothing to do with those Jews.
Cringe.
I will leave you with the words of Yeshua in John 17, as He prayed for unity among His followers, both present and future:
I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.... I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
