The tension between Arabs and Jews endlessly boils into conflict as to who has the right to claim Palestine as theirs. Biblically speaking, Acts 17:26 says it’s God who decides where and when nations exist and whose land is whose. So who did he allocate Palestine to?
The Palestine of today covers much the same territory as the biblical “land of Canaan” which God allocated to Abram and his offspring roughly 3,500 years ago (Genesis 15:18, 12:6-7). Canaan was already inhabited by several tribes at the time (Genesis 15:19-21), but God told Abram to leave his homeland (in today’s Iraq) and take up residence in Canaan, because God was going to make his family into “a great nation” there, for the purpose of “blessing all peoples on earth” through him (12:3).
But of the two sons Abram had, the “great nation” God promised would develop through the younger son, Isaac. God promised his older brother, Ishmael, would also be “fruitful and multiply exceedingly” (17:20) – but not in the land of Canaan, which God made clear by having Abram send Ishmael and his mother away.
So the promise God made to Abram would focus on the line of Isaac, which led to the formation of the Israelite nation in the land of what is Palestine today. According to God’s plan, therefore, Israel was allocated the land of Palestine, as the means by which God would begin to redeem the world from the disaster in Eden, and put all to rights again.
The Israelites, however, failed miserably in that task, but through Moses and other prophets God predicted the arrival of a great champion from the descendants of Abram, who would fulfill perfectly and completely what Israel had failed to do.
So the promise to Abram still stood, but instead of blessing all peoples through a nation of his descendants, it would be through a single descendant of his, who would “bless all who call on him – both Jew and Gentile” (Romans 10:12) – for the simple belief that he, Jesus, was resurrected from the dead (verse 9), with the power to not only forgive the mess we humans have made, but put us all to rights as well.
In which case God’s promise through Abram’s descendants was no longer dependent on Israel being a nation in Palestine. Which means, biblically speaking, that it doesn’t matter whose land Palestine is now.
What does matter is people anywhere and everywhere doing what Abram did, and trusting God to be true to his promise. Which in our case is trusting that God did provide a descendant of Abram with the power to bless all peoples – in the person of the mighty Jesus, who right now is rescuing and restoring millions of people all over the world because they trust him too.
Ah but, next blog: “Will God restore Israel as a nation again?”
Buck To Basics 