Only Israel Needs to be Saved?

Old heresies never die. They always return repackaged with a new name, a new face. And occasionally someone puts a new spin on one. "You must become a Jew to be saved" was the first error the church confronted. But what would you say to someone who tells you, "Only Jews needed to be saved"?

The internet made it so crazy ideas can spread around the world, and instead of just being something your buddy said after a few beers, now it can look like it has serious scholarly support. So there is no limit to what your friend or your child or that cousin you only see at the Memorial Day cookout can stumble upon.

Every kooky heresy has its die-hard supporters; these folks will be hard to dissuade. If your friend or child or cousin are simply curious, intrigued by this new idea they've come across, I think we can poke holes in these things more easily — take the shiny off and show them how silly it is.

The "Israel Only" folks return to the old idea that Jesus only came for the Jews. The new part is that only Israel needed to be saved:

IO shows from the scriptures that salvation and redemption were only meant for old covenant Israel, which means nobody today is saved and redeemed, nor has anyone needed salvation and redemption since the first century. IO essentially destroys the premises upon which the post-AD70 version of Christianity relies on. IO offers people the opportunity to understand why they were never sinners and why Jesus never needed to save them.¹

So it's not about adding a new (or rather, old) set of rules to Christianity. It's about doing away with Christianity altogether as a mistaken ideology that should have died out centuries ago. How do we answer that?

One of them self-published a book of arguments for this position, and he helpfully spelled out what it would take to disprove their view:

To overturn IO, one would need to demonstrate from Scripture that non-Israelite nations were ever under Israel's Law or its curse, that they were judged at the end of the age, that they are described as olive branches, sheep, elect, or covenant heirs, that Christ's New Covenant included them as such, or that the gospel was intended to continue beyond the end of the age.²

I appreciate him laying that out; most people don't tell you how to disprove their views. But I don't think that's what we need to do to "overturn" IO. Everything in that paragraph is based on their premises. We should respond to IO by pulling the rug out from under it. I think we can do that by showing two things:

People were judged apart from the Law of Moses
The idea that only those under the Law of Moses needed to be saved from their "covenant violations" should die in Genesis. Adam and Eve and all of their descendants were cursed apart from the Law of Moses. The humans of Noah's day were judged apart from the Law of Moses. Sodom and Gomorrah were judged without the Law of Moses. This continues throughout the Hebrew scriptures. Egypt, the Canaanites, Edom, and the Moabites were all judged without being part of a special covenant with God. When Jonah told Nineveh of the judgment that was coming upon them, it was not based on the Mosaic Covenant.

Instead, people were, are, and will be judged by a moral law we all know (eg, Rom 1:18-32) yet fail to live up to. The scriptures insist again and again "there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins" (Eccl 7:20) and "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23). Is this only for those who know the Law of Moses? No. "All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law" (Rom 2:12).

All means all. All are sinners and subject to judgment. If Christ only came for Israel, that's not good news but the worst news. Fortunately ...

Jesus came for the whole world
The idea that the Messiah was only for the children of Israel is also refuted as early as Genesis. When God called Abram, he promised "all peoples on earth will be blessed through you" (Gen 12:3). All still means all. And Paul, in Galatians 3, insists this promise refers to Christ. In Isaiah, God says of his Servant,

“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
   to restore the tribes of Jacob
   and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
   that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” (Isa 49:6)

When Jesus met a Gentile Roman centurion with great faith, he proclaimed, "many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8:11). This begins to be fulfilled when Peter meets another centurion in Acts 10. This becomes a full blown issue by Acts 15, where the issue is Gentiles who have no connection to the Law of Moses. But the church welcomes these people in, and James quotes:

"After this I will return
   and rebuild David’s fallen tent.
Its ruins I will rebuild,
   and I will restore it,
that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,
   even all the Gentiles who bear my name,
says the Lord, who does these things—
   things known from long ago." (Acts 15:16-18)

This culminates in Revelation. The IO crowd makes a big deal out of the fact that "144,000 from all the tribes of Israel" are sealed (Rev 7:4-8). But they ignore the next verse:

I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. (Rev 7:9)

Every means every. This is not just the lost tribes of Israel; it's every tribe, every nation. God's plan was never to save just the children of Israel but to do away with the distinction between Jew and Gentile.

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. (Eph 2:14-16)

The Lord's plan was to take salvation to the ends of the earth, and that's what he taught his apostles. That's why they and then their disciples spread the gospel to Ethiopia, India, France, and beyond.


1 copied from a social media post
2 Michael Bradley, Concealed In Covenant: The Case For Israel-Only

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