Whose Land Is It Anyway?
Question
What are the Scriptures that tell of God’s Covenant with Israel concerning the “landâ€, that it will be theirs forever, when they entered it, when they were dispersed from it. Did they break covenant with God? Did He promise to bring them back to it thousands of years later? My greatest need is a chronology of the events, with scripture references.
Answer
God promised Abraham a people and a land (Genesis 12.1ff). He provided the beginning of the people promise with the birth of Isaac. It wasn’t until the book of Joshua that the land portion was fulfilled. The land was a place in which the covenant people were to be the light to the world concerning the creator God.
Israel failed and Jesus came to be for the world what Israel could not accomplish. He selected 12 disciples, the beginning of a new Israel. Paul speaks to the church in these terms (Gal. 6.15-16). The church has a new land. It is the whole world (John 3.16). It is the mission of the church to redeem the whole world and all that is in it. This is what Jesus came to accomplish in his death and resurrection.
The idea of specific land is the idle curiosity of a dispensational brand of theology (Dallas Seminary, Hal Lindsey, John MacArthur, The Left Behind series) to mention a few. This form of theology is rather new within the church coming into existence in the mid 1800s in England in a prophecy movement.
