“And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you.” (Genesis 17:7)
“And who is like Your people, like Israel, the one nation on the earth whom God went to redeem for Himself as a people, to make for Himself a name– and to do for Youself great and awesome deeds for Your land… For You have made Your people Israel Your very own people forever; and You, LORD, have become their God. (2 Sam 7:23-24 NKJ)
Four thousand years ago, the LORD God looked down from heaven and chose a man through whom He would bring a special people into the world. This people, in turn, would be the channel through which His light and blessing would be established for all mankind.
Because He is God, the LORD could have simply declared His intention to Abraham and that would have been that. In His infinite wisdom, however, because He knows the end of everything from the beginning, and because He knew who He was dealing with (His stiff-necked creation), God went “out of His way” to bind Himself to this decision by entering into a covenant with Abraham, with his descendants, and with Himself.
This covenant, affirmed to Isaac and then to Jacob (and not to Ishmael or Esau), made a special people out of the children of Israel, a people God called His special treasure, the apple of His eye.
Tragically, many, many Christians – arguably the majority – have been taught that God switched His favor from the nation of Israel to the gentile Church. They believe that, because of the Jews’ rejection as a nation of Jesus as Messiah, God in fact terminated or altered His covenant to exclude national Israel.
The Bible, of course, makes it clear that this covenant is unchangeable:
Thus says the LORD, who gives the sun for a light by day, the ordinances of the moon and the stars for a light by night, who disturbs the sea, and its waves roar (The LORD of hosts is His name): “If those ordinances depart from before Me, says the LORD, then the seed of Israel shall also cease from being a nation before Me forever.” (Jeremiah 31:35-36)
Israel was, is, and will remain God’s chosen, special people. Many do not like this, many refuse to accept it, some pooh-pooh the notion that any one group of people is or could be favoured above all others. Well, like it or not, this is the way things stand. For God has covenanted with the Jews and unlike the rest of us:
“God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good? (Numbers 23:19)
