Quotes about Israel

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel's God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel's scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature.

Israel's hope has been fulfilled! The King has been enthroned! He was declaring that the crucified Jesus was Israel's long-awaited Messiah.

Who is the "me" here? The "I" and "me" of Romans 7 is a literary device through which Paul is telling the life story of Israel under the Torah.

He did not want to rescue humans from creation any more than he wanted to rescue Israel from the Gentiles. He wanted to rescue Israel in order that Israel might be a light to the Gentiles, and he wanted thereby to rescue humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation.

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

His analysis here is the subsequent reflection of one who has come to believe that the crucified Jesus is Israel's Messiah.

Thus, whether on the large scale — where Jesus as Messiah stands in for Israel, and hence (because of Israel's representative status in God's purposes) for the world — or on the small scale, with individual moments, the point is rammed home by all four gospels. It is not either 'victory' or 'substitution'. The victory is won by Jesus dying the death of the unrighteous.

What, in particular, might it mean to say that 'as Jesus was to Israel, so the Church should be for the world'?

The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel's Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven.

What God was doing through the Torah, in Israel, was to gather "Sin" together into one place, so that it could then be condemned.

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of "penal substitution," this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a "works contract," not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of "going to heaven," but of God's vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence: