Correct:
1 Peter 2:9-10 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a dedicated nation....claimed by God as His own......
Revelation 5:9-10 ,,,,by the blood of Jesus, bought for God, peoples from every tribe, race, nation and language.......and they shall reign on earth.
Tick.
Ethnic Israel has had the Kingdom taken from them;
Matthew 21:43 ....I will give the Kingdom to the peoples who bear the proper fruit.
Matthew 8:11-12 Many people will come from the East and the West, to sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.....but those who were born to the Kingdom will be thrown out into the dark. ......
Tick.
We Christian peoples are those who will occupy all of the Holy Land.
Cross. (Bzzzzzzt!)
We Christian peoples are those who
already occupy the Holy
Lands - because the gospel has gone out into the whole earth.
GRACE
Jesus so over-fulfils the OT law and sacrificial system so that we no longer need a high priest or temple - because Jesus replaces them. In the same way, the promises to Abraham that his children would be God’s people living God’s way in God’s land - and that this would bless the whole world, is fulfilled in Jesus living as the perfect Israelite, dying in our place, forgiving our sins, rising to new life to show that it worked, giving us hope of a new creation (as his body ran by the rules of the new reality as a guarantee of what was to come.)
KINGDOM
Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world. Jesus rebukes the disciples when they ask about an ethno-religious state in Israel and gets them to focus on the gospel going out to ALL people - even enemies - even the ends of the earth! Acts 1:8.
SUPER-TEMPLE
He told the woman at the well that because he is the living water, where we worship would soon be irrelevant - as long as it was in Spirit and truth. John 4. Jesus IS the perfect temple where God and mankind meet in perfect incarnation. He is Ezekiel’s “super-temple” - with the living water rushing out to make a new creation! Ezekiel’s super-temple cannot be literal - in the vision he stands on a mountain higher than Jerusalem to see the whole thing and this mountain does not exist.
Amillennial Interpretation of Ezekiel 40-48 | Monergism
Zechariah 14 also visualises a terrible earthquake coming from the Mount of Olives - and then living water spreading out to renew the world. But as we have seen, this is all fulfilled in Jesus. He said if they had faith, they could say to this mountain fall into the sea! It’s a reference to the fact that Jesus is the one who splits the mountains - who makes the temple irrelevant.
PRIESTHOOD
1 Peter 2 shows we are all the priesthood and holy nation. That fulfils the end of Zechariah 14 where everyday cooking items are like the most precious items in the temple - the sacred and secular are now both sanctified in Christian life. WE are now the temple of God. 1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19. We are the ‘one humanity’ made from both Jews and Gentiles. Ephesians 2
LAND
Hebrews 11 shows even Abraham himself and other patriarchs were not really aiming for ‘the land’ - but for heaven! “16
Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them."
Just as Zechariah reminds Israel that Jeremiah’s prophecies of a Messiah at the end of 70 years of exile can only be fulfilled if they remain obedient and keep the covenant, which reinterprets Jeremiah’s prophecies in the unfolding plan of God for Israel - so the gospel does for the Old Covenant but in much more dramatic and universal ways.
Hebrews 12 puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea of a special land. Just as Jesus told the woman at the well, we no longer worship from special places, but special hearts. Wherever we are, when we pray we are united as if we were all standing in Jerusalem itself! But the billion plus Christians alive today physically would not fit! (Forget any crowd crushes in the Muslim Haj - this would be apocalyptic!) But of course - this is the advantage of the New Testament reality of the ‘spiritualised’ gospel fulfilment of Old Testament concerns and promises. Everything is so much bigger!
Hebrews 12:22 “But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, 23 to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”
