At one point the once-united nation of Israel got divided into the northern nation of Israel and the southern nation of Judah.
But God promised to restore them from captivity as a single, no longer divided, nation. And that happened.
So the terms Israel and the Jews became somewhat interchangeable.
But all the way through the Bible, there was tension between merely being ethnically Jewish, and being truly Jewish in the sense of living-up to what God really had planned for and through the Jews.
You see this in John the Baptist's warnings. And you see it in the way Jesus spoke to the Jewish leaders. Ethnicity alone wasn't going to cut it!
Actually even the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, scribes, lawyers, priests and the community at Qumran (Dead Sea) each felt that there was going to be some right requirement before a Jew could hope to be part of what God had planned.
There were righteous, and there were the damned, both - even in Israel, at the time of Jesus.
So a true 'Jew' - the true 'Israel' were, first of all, those Israelis who wholeheartedly embraced what God was saying and doing. And then many Gentiles came to participate in what God was doing and saying too.
In Old Covenant times, that meant Torah Observance; and it meant becoming Proselytes to Judaism. But once Jesus came, it meant believing in the One Whom God sent. First, the Jews - and also Gentiles. Believing in Jesus.
At that point Gentiles who turned to God no longer needed to embrace the old thing that God had done with Israel - rather, they embraced the new thing God had done with them - not Judaism, but Jesus.
So that's what we do today. We embrace JESUS. We love Him; love one another; renounce old pagan, fleshy behaviours - and since they didn't need to embrace the practices of Moses' Law even when it was still possible to do so, now that it isn't possible to we certainly don't need to embrace some modern form of Judaism.
Just Jesus and the gospel-life He intended for us. That's Israel's promises and prophecies in actualisation.
But God promised to restore them from captivity as a single, no longer divided, nation. And that happened.
So the terms Israel and the Jews became somewhat interchangeable.
But all the way through the Bible, there was tension between merely being ethnically Jewish, and being truly Jewish in the sense of living-up to what God really had planned for and through the Jews.
You see this in John the Baptist's warnings. And you see it in the way Jesus spoke to the Jewish leaders. Ethnicity alone wasn't going to cut it!
Actually even the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, scribes, lawyers, priests and the community at Qumran (Dead Sea) each felt that there was going to be some right requirement before a Jew could hope to be part of what God had planned.
There were righteous, and there were the damned, both - even in Israel, at the time of Jesus.
So a true 'Jew' - the true 'Israel' were, first of all, those Israelis who wholeheartedly embraced what God was saying and doing. And then many Gentiles came to participate in what God was doing and saying too.
In Old Covenant times, that meant Torah Observance; and it meant becoming Proselytes to Judaism. But once Jesus came, it meant believing in the One Whom God sent. First, the Jews - and also Gentiles. Believing in Jesus.
At that point Gentiles who turned to God no longer needed to embrace the old thing that God had done with Israel - rather, they embraced the new thing God had done with them - not Judaism, but Jesus.
So that's what we do today. We embrace JESUS. We love Him; love one another; renounce old pagan, fleshy behaviours - and since they didn't need to embrace the practices of Moses' Law even when it was still possible to do so, now that it isn't possible to we certainly don't need to embrace some modern form of Judaism.
Just Jesus and the gospel-life He intended for us. That's Israel's promises and prophecies in actualisation.
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