(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)
““Therefore the Lord Yahweh says: ‘Now I will reverse the captivity of Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel. I will be jealous for my holy name. They will forget their shame and all their trespasses by which they have trespassed against me, when they dwell securely in their land. No one will make them afraid when I have brought them back from the peoples, gathered them out of their enemies’ lands, and am shown holy among them in the sight of many nations. They will know that I am Yahweh their God, in that I caused them to go into captivity among the nations, and have gathered them to their own land. Then I will leave none of them captive any more. I won’t hide my face from them any more, for I have poured out my Spirit on the house of Israel,’ says the Lord Yahweh.””
(Ezekiel 39:25-29)
““Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, so that there may come times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send Christ Jesus, who was ordained for you before, whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, which God spoke long ago by the mouth of his holy prophets. For Moses indeed said to the fathers, ‘The Lord God will raise up a prophet for you from among your brothers, like me. You shall listen to him in all things whatever he says to you. It will be that every soul that will not listen to that prophet will be utterly destroyed from among the people.’ Yes, and all the prophets from Samuel and those who followed after, as many as have spoken, also told of these days. You are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘All the families of the earth will be blessed through your offspring.’ God, having raised up his servant Jesus, sent him to you first to bless you, in turning away every one of you from your wickedness.””
(Acts 3:19-26)
God was promising the Messiah. God was promising a restored nation. God was promising that His people would be His people again. Whole. Restored. Complete. God was promising that the entire world would see it and know that He did it. Against all the odds. Against all the hatred. Against all the plans of the enemy. He WOULD do it. It WOULD happen. And we see a partial fulfillment of that today. Who would have thought that the people who had been stolen from their land would be returned to it? Allowed to form a nation? Yet what do we see? The Land being restored. Turned from swamps and a wasteland into productive land. We see the Jews returning home to their Land from all over the world. We also see the enemy waging war against them. Trying to kill them. To vilify them. To make them the enemy of the world. But God’s promises hold true. They will come to pass. Every single one of them.
Jesus is the vehicle through which those promises arrive. He sacrificed Himself for us. Paid the price for us. And if we repent and turn to God, our sins will be forgiven. Washed away. We’ll be given new hearts. Holy Spirit will come and live within us. We become His Temple. We become His dwelling. We enter into the renewed covenant that Jesus and the Father made. We can love Him as He loves us. We can love others as He loves us. Because of that love we will find ourselves obeying Him. Trusting Him. Relying on Him. Resting in Him. Anyone can do this. Jew and Gentile. Jesus opened the Way to us all. Jesus came to turn us away from our broken ways and to restore us to unbroken thinking. He did it for the Jews. He did it for us. We see that He is faithful. We see His promises coming to pass. They will NOT fail. They WILL arrive. We WILL see them fulfilled. Through Jesus, it will ALL come to pass.
Summary
The Church is everyone who believes in Jesus as the Son of God and our Saviour. Jew or Gentile. No one is replacing anyone else. God’s people are still God’s people. Gentiles have been grafted to the tree of His Life. We have not been planted on our own. We are part of God’s family. And we will see the promises to God’s family come to pass. The Gentile part, yes. But especially the Jewish part. Yes. They will get all their Land back. They will all turn to Him. They will all be active participants when Messiah comes again. None of God’s promises will fail. They will repent and turn to Him as a nation. The world will witness it. They world will see their restoration. And the world will know it was God who did it. They may not rejoice, but the Church will. Each and every one of us.
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