May 27, 2026 Show with Jim Harrison on “The Controversy Over the Church Being the Fulfilment of Israel”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 27th day of May, 2026.

I'm absolutely thrilled, after a long absence, to have an old friend of mine return to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio as a guest. His name is Jim Harrison, and he is pastor of Red Mills Baptist Church of Mayapac Falls, New York.

And today, we're going to be addressing the controversy over the church being the fulfillment of Israel, and we'll also have Pastor Jim provide a response to Albert Moeller's defense of the modern state of Israel fulfilling biblical prophecy.

But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back, after a long absence, to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Jim Harrison.

Oh, thank you, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here. It has been too long.

Amen.

We go back a long way, back to WMCA days.

That's right.

It's great to be with you again.

And you reminded me that after management over there became confident in my discernment about the talk show—this is before I had my own talk show, this is when I had filled in as a guest host on Andy Anderson Live, previously known as Talk New York—they would ask me not only to fill in, but they would ask me for recommendations for fill-in hosts when Andy was on vacation, or if he was sick, and subsequent to his going home to the Lord.

And you were one of those men that I had recommended, and you filled in for him. In fact, you interviewed Al Moeller.

I did, I did. We were so young then. I don't know how anyone could have had confidence in us, Chris. They opened the door and we walked through. That was great.

Well, what was more amazing that they had confidence in me, knowing I was a five-point Calvinist and the only one at the station who was a five-point Calvinist. In fact, that was the very reason that my general manager told me, after Andy Anderson went home to be with the Lord, I filled in for Andy for two weeks until they found a permanent replacement.

My general manager, Joe Davis, said to me, Chris, you really do an excellent job as a talk show host, but I'll tell you, I can never appoint as a permanent in-house talk show host a five-point Calvinist.

He actually was right, because they expected of the in-house talk show hosts, as they did of Andy Anderson, to help bolster the programs and ad campaigns of people who have extremely questionable theological positions, to put it mildly.

They knew that I would never sit there smiling and affirming the statements of heretics and making them feel comfortable. They knew that I would interrogate them. So there was some wisdom behind not allowing me to have that job as a permanent.

You paid the price for the truth, so good for you.

But first of all, I want you to tell our listeners something about Red Mills Baptist Church of Mayapack Falls, New York.

Well, Red Mills Baptist Church of Mayapack Falls, New York, has been here since 1832, and for the last 33 years.

And you were the founding pastor, right?

It's starting to look more and more like that, but last 33 years, though. My predecessor was here for 35 years, so I've got a little ways to go yet. But God has been good to us. He brought about Reformation in the church after about seven years of my ministry here.

He kind of brought things to a head, and we have had unity and peace ever since. We are committed to the expository ministry of the Word, to evangelism, to sound doctrine. And as I say, God is gracious and has met all of our needs and continues to do that.

So praise unto him.

Amen. And if anybody wants more details about Red Mills Baptist Church of Mayapack Falls, New York, especially if you live in that area or you have family, friends, and loved ones in or near that area, or if you're going to be traveling through that area on vacation or on a business trip or any other reason the Lord's providence has you in that area, go to redmillsbaptist .org.

And I'll be repeating that website later on.

Well, you should probably know, Chris, that most people are not going to have any clue where Mayapack Falls is. And so just to give a general idea, if you start in New York City and you go north, you'll come up through the Bronx and through Westchester County, and we're just over the border into Putnam County from Westchester.

So it's in the Hudson Valley of New York State. I didn't know. When I first came to Mayapack Falls, I had never heard of it before when I came to candidate at the church. So I assume a lot of people are in that condition.

And I don't know if you remember, but when James White was a guest speaker at Red Mills Baptist, we both traveled up there from Long Island by train and we got separated at the Ronkonkoma train station.

And I went to get coffee and James, I think, did not hear me say, I'm going to grab coffee. So when I grabbed a cup of coffee, he turned around and I was gone. And he said he was waiting for me by a phone booth where there were some individuals looking like they were involved in criminal activity hanging around there.

And he was getting nervous. I was on the train. I just I was calling out his name, figured he got on the train. When it arrived, I jumped on one of the cars and I walked up to a complete stranger and snatched his cell phone out of his hand, called James and said, are you on the train?

No, sir. No, sir. So I had to get off the train at the next stop and meet James after he got on the train. And we eventually made our way up there to Mayapak Falls.

And he hasn't been back since.

That trauma really did it for him. But we are addressing the controversy over the church being the fulfillment of Israel. And as I said, eventually we will have you give a response to Albert Moeller's defense of the modern state of Israel fulfilling biblical prophecy, a position that surprised, I believe, a number of Reformed Baptists because Al Moeller is known as being soteriologically Reformed and a Baptist.

And most of those in most of us in that camp would not believe that the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. So it took a number of us for a surprise when we heard Dr. Moeller very sternly defending that position not long ago in an interview with my friend Todd Friel.

I hope that this interview today doesn't get Todd angry with me. And he promised he was going to come back on my show at some point in 2026. And this may bring that to an end, I don't know. But I don't hold it against him that he agrees with Dr. Moeller's position.

And in fact, that's probably a good way to start. Knowing of your ironic demeanor, I don't think that you would say that this is an issue that must divide members of the body of Christ. And we are not to view those in the body of Christ that believe that the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

We're not to view them as heretics or not as brethren. Would you agree with me on that?

Oh, absolutely. This is not an issue to divide over. People are going to have all kinds of different understandings and different views. Even as I listened to Dr. Moeller, it seemed to me that he's trying to walk a line there.

He's not on the dispensational side of things where he will come out and say that the modern nation state is the fulfillment of prophecy necessarily. But he was pretty clear that he believed that this is certainly something within God's plan for the nation of Israel.

And in regard to the sovereignty of God, obviously, everything's in God's plan. God is going to use all the things that he brings about for his own glory and for the building of the church and for the good of his people.

How one sees the modern state of Israel in connection with biblical prophecy is the question. And there are some who are quite vociferous in their contention that the modern nation state is the fulfillment.

In 1948, that was it. God fulfilled his land promise to Israel as a nation. And then there are others who will say, well, it's within the sovereign plan of God, obviously, but it's not the fulfillment of that land promise.

They see that in a completely different way.

And people have to be careful when they describe things that way, because God in his sovereignty had ordained my birth and he had ordained my rebirth and he ordained every day of my life before any of them came to be.

But I am not a fulfillment of any kind of direct biblical prophecy.

No, as far as I know, that is true, Chris. You are not, and neither am I. You know, on the other hand, in regard to the nation of Israel, you also have those who want to make a distinction between how we look at Israel theologically and how we look at Israel politically.

It is a geopolitical entity. And so we are certainly free to say, perhaps one might say, Israel is an ally of the United States and we ought to support it insofar as we are able. And one can do that. One can also criticize certain actions of the state of Israel.

And all of that can be done without saying this is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

And as much as you interpret Dr. Moeller's words as not definitively declaring the modern state as a direct fulfillment of prophecy, it appeared to me he was siding with people who do. He was directly responding to a couple of exchanges that have become global news, bringing this discussion into the eyes, ears and minds of the populace, whether they are Christian or not.

And I'm referring specifically to the exchange that Tucker Carlson had with Ted Cruz on his program and also the exchange that Tucker Carlson had with Mike Huckabee on his program. Both men are dispensationalists.

In fact, Ted Cruz said he entered into politics with Israel foremost in his heart and mind, the preservation of Israel. And for those of you who are listening and you'd like to hear a response to Tucker Carlson's exchange with Ted Cruz, I interviewed my dear friend, Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio.

And we had, I think, a fascinating conversation on that exchange between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz. You can hear that if you go to ironsharpensironradio .com and you type in Tucker Carlson into the search engine.

In fact, you could just type in Tucker and you will see at the very top of the list of programs, the interview I'm speaking of, which took place on June 20th of last year. I can't believe it's almost been a year.

That is amazing to me. We're approaching June next week. But not that I agree with every single thing that Tucker Carlson states and believes. I'm not sure if he is my brother in Christ or not. I know that he appears to be on a journey.

The Lord may be drawing him if he is not already saved. He has begun to read and study the Bible. But nonetheless, I still sided a lot more with Tucker Carlson than I did with Ted Cruz in that exchange.

But going back to the core issue here that we're going to be discussing, you have written an excellent paper. Now, I can't remember the reason for the paper, if these were notes for a sermon, but they should definitely be compiled and printed in a booklet of some kind.

Tell us your reasons for approaching this subject in the form which I just read recently.

Yeah, well, at our church, every month or so, we have a special afternoon service. We'll gather together for lunch following worship, and then we'll come together again to deal with something that is more issue oriented.

In our normal Lord's Day ministry, I'm working through a book of the Bible. It's an expository ministry, one passage after the other. And so, these special meetings are an opportunity to deal with something that wouldn't normally come up, perhaps, during the normal expository ministry.

So, that's what this was about. Because of what I had seen in regard to those interviews and because of what's going on in the world, obviously with Iran and Israel, I thought it would be helpful for our people to go over again what I believe the Scripture is teaching in regard to Israel, our relationship to it.

The relationship between Israel and the church. Because that's a huge, huge problem. I grew up in an environment, and I went to a Bible college in which I was taught pretty much what Ted Cruz was trying to explain.

I don't think he did it very well, and he got trapped a couple of times by Tucker.

And that actually surprised me because he's the son of a pastor. It really took me aback.

Yes. So, I thought that would be helpful for our people, and we took that time to go through a series of questions in regard to the relationship between Israel and the church. And where we began is perhaps the most basic of questions.

Are there two peoples of God, or only one people of God? Many of us who have a background in dispensational theology will understand that. In dispensationalism, which is really in American evangelicalism, that's kind of the default position that we find.

The idea is that there are two peoples of God, and they are distinct. There is Israel, and there is the church, and those are two very different entities. And God was dealing with Israel, and when Christ came, the Messiah of Israel, he offered the kingdom to Israel, and they rejected it when they rejected him.

And so, this is the dispensational idea. God set aside the nation of Israel for a time and began to deal with the new covenant church. But at some point, God is going to take the church out of the world.

This is where you get the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture, of course. The only reason that a pre-tribulation rapture is necessary is if you're looking at things from a dispensational perspective. If God's going to deal with Israel again, the church has to be taken out of the world, and then you have the seven-year tribulation, and God's going to deal with Israel once again.

What I find in the Scripture, and historically what the church has found up until the middle of the 19th century, is not that. It is that there is one people of God, Jew and Gentile, and when Christ came and the new covenant was established, Gentiles were brought into an existing people of God.

This idea of two peoples of God that leads to things like a pre-tribulation rapture is all very recent, and there's only one eschatological system which holds to this understanding, and that is dispensational premillennialism, as opposed to historic premillennialism and amillennialism and postmillennialism.

If you look at this in terms of denominations, those who hold to two peoples of God would be some evangelicals, as I said, beginning in about the mid -1800s, but the early church, the Roman church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, everybody but dispensationalists would hold to one people of God, Jew and Gentile brought together.

And so that's a crucial distinction. As I was a young man growing up and being exposed to this, all I was exposed to was a dispensational understanding. If your listeners are of a certain age, they will recognize the name Charles Ryrie.

He was a big name at Dallas Seminary in the late 20th century, and he wrote a book called Dispensationalism Today, and he said in that book that the defining factor of dispensationalism, the element without which you don't have the system, is this Israel church distinction.

And everything that makes dispensationalism what it is flows out of that distinction. So how do we understand, the question would be, how do we understand the Old Testament promises? And the dispensationalist would understand them in terms of national covenant, while I'll just speak for myself here, taking a traditional historic view, I would want to go to the New Testament and to look at how the New Testament documents make sense of these promises and how they look at these promises.

So I would come to Romans and Galatians and Ephesians and say, well, this tells me that I'm a child of Abraham by faith. This tells me now I am part of the commonwealth of Israel. This tells me that God is going to fulfill those covenant promises in all of his people, Jew and Gentile, that I have been grafted into the root, and there is one root, one tree comprised of both Jew and Gentile.

So there's the issue. And of course, the land promise and all of those other eschatological issues come into play when you're talking about whether or not there is one people of God or whether there are always an ongoing distinction between Israel and the church.

Yes, and this idea that you were describing that is uniquely dispensationalist, it has not appeared in church history until the 19th century, am I right?

Yeah, there are a couple of early church documents that some dispensationalists will point to, but it's not talking about the same thing. In the early church, there were premillennialists, but they would be described now as historic premillennialists, and there would be virtually no difference between historic premillennialists and amillennialists, except for their understanding of the nature of the millennial kingdom.

Historic premillennialists would see a literal thousand-year kingdom yet to come. But in terms of this issue of Israel, there would be no distinction between amillennialists and historic premillennialists.

Dispensational understandings that are unique to dispensationalism didn't come about until the mid -1800s. This idea that Israel and the church are forever distinct, that there are different ways in which God deals with his people, so there are different dispensations throughout history—the dispensation of innocence in the garden, and then the dispensation of government, and the dispensation of the law, and dispensation of grace, and all of these things working themselves out as different ways in which God would test his people—that's usually the language that's used.

Early on, if you go back to a man named Lewis Sperry Chafer, who founded Dallas Theological Seminary, and then C .I. Schofield, the editor of the Schofield Reference Bible, which really is the instrument which spread dispensationalism throughout the country, originally they would say things like, under the old covenant, people were saved by keeping the law, and under the new covenant, now we're saved by grace.

And, of course, as soon as people read that, they got a lot of pushback on that. Because if it was ever possible to.

Become saved by keeping the law, then it would be possible now.

That's right. That's right. And so, you know, they got a lot of criticism for that, and they walked it back. And this is one of the things that happens within dispensationalism as well. These kinds of things get pointed out, and it changes.

So, if you trace the history of this, you had a kind of an original form of paleo-dispensationalism with guys like Chafer and Schofield. And then you had what came to be called classic dispensationalism, men like John Wolverd and Charles Ryrie on the academic level, while on the popular level, you would have people like Hal Lindsey.

And then after that, come into the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s, there arose a progressive dispensationalism, which really didn't emphasize all of those distinctives anymore. But the whole dispensational project has been an effort to change and adapt and kind of make the system more palatable over time, to smooth out the problems that people notice all along the way.

So, it's an interesting journey that they've been on, but it is unique. And that's really the thing that we need to understand. This is unique in the.

History of the church, the last 175 years or so. And correct me if I'm wrong, but there is an irony involving modern-day dispensationalists who will very frequently accuse we who are amillennial and postmillennial as anti-Semitic.

And yet, some of their own movements' originators, did they not believe that the Jews would never inherit heaven as their eternal dwelling place and would remain on the restored earth? Is that something that some of the original dispensationalists.

Believe? Yeah. And when you say the original, that brings out another problem, because you talk to any particular dispensationalist, and there will be things that he will tell you that are kind of unique, that other people would deny.

So, that was certainly a part of it. Israel was spoken of as the earthly people of God, and the church was spoken of as the heavenly people of God. Even now, you've just got all kinds of very practical problems that arise out of this.

There's a very enthusiastic effort to get Jews to go back to the land, and it's portrayed. And I'm sure within the heart of those who desire that, there is a love for the Jewish people. There's a lot of evangelism that takes place to the Jewish people.

But in the dispensational scheme, it gets problematic, because once the Jews are back in the land and the church is taken out and we enter into the tribulation, the idea is that two-thirds of the Jewish people are going to be wiped out.

So, it's hard to say, yes, I love the Jewish people and I can't wait to be raptured. And then right after the rapture, you're just going to have the.

Slaughter of the Jews. I remember, it was more prominent in the 80s and 90s, there was a ministry called, I believe, On Eagle's Wings, or Wings of Eagles, I can't remember which. But there was this passionate plea for donations so that Jews in the Soviet Union and in other parts of the world could be flown to Israel and be a part of the hastening of the return of Christ.

And I remember hearing this as a Reformed Christian and thinking to myself, this is almost like an ad to buy tickets for Jews on the train to Auschwitz. I mean, because you are gleefully and passionately trying to encourage this thing to happen, and according to their own eschatology, as you just said, two-thirds of them are going to be annihilated in the Great Tribulation.

It makes no sense, does it, to be that gleeful about this?

Yeah, it certainly doesn't to me. Now, we do need to say, most rank-and-file dispensationalists don't make these connections. As we said, they love the Jewish people, and they pray for them, and they evangelize them, and they don't really think, well, okay, if we can encourage the Jews to go back to the land, then that's going to lead to this future slaughter.

They don't make that connection. But there are all kinds of other issues. You have somebody like John Hagee, for instance, who he kind of backtracked, and then he said it again, and he had this idea. I don't know where he stands on it right now, but he had this idea that you don't have to evangelize the Jews because they have their own particular covenant with God.

And I think you should make it clear that this was.

Not just some recent stumbling of words where he misspoke. He has been teaching this religiously.

For decades. Again, I want to be careful here because not everybody is John Hagee. There are more responsible dispensationalist teachers. There are dispensational scholars who would listen to what Hagee is saying and say, no, that's absolutely wrong.

That's not the case at all. There are people like our late brother John MacArthur who would say, the only thing that I am holding on to in regard to my dispensationalism is this distinction between Israel and the church.

Now, when I was being taught, it was a lot more than that. You've got to have all of these different dispensations, and you've got to see how God is working in each time period down through history, and there's all kinds of things.

I can't remember the last time that I've heard anyone teach or preach on the dispensations. That's just not a part of the system that anybody pays attention to anymore. It's really gotten confined to this distinction.

Between Israel and the church. We have to go to our first commercial break. If anybody would like to join the conversation with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Whether or not you agree or disagree with my guest, Jim Harrison, I welcome all questions. And if you prefer to remain anonymous, please only do so if you're asking a personal and private question. Let's say you are in a dispensationalist church, you're starting to feel uncomfortable with the direction of what is being taught there, and you have a question about this, and you don't want to identify yourself publicly.

I completely understand something like that would compel you to remain anonymous. But if you're just asking a general question, please give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence, and your country of residence.

Please don't go away. We're going to be right.

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And thanks be to God, your prayers have been answered, because, God willing, Dr. Morecraft will be returning home tomorrow. He's being discharged from the physical rehab facility and returning home. Please pray for his continued recovery and that he receives newness and strength and health and vitality, that he returns to his pulpit soon, and that he returns as a guest on Iron Trumpet and Zion Radio soon.

So, thank you all for joining me in prayer regularly for Dr. Joseph C. Morecraft III. And we do have a listener for you, Pastor Jim, from Gregory in Middle Island St. Kitts in the West Indies. According to Romans 11, which Israel is the true Christian is grafted into?

I'm not really sure about the grammar there. Sorry, Gregory. Is it the natural, physical, carnal, earthly Israel that is filled with homosexuals, atheists, false religions, non-Christians, and so on, or is it the invisible, godly,.

True Christian church? Great question. And Romans 11 is one of those really key passages in understanding this, and we're back to that question again. Are there two peoples of God, or is there only one people of God?

And throughout Romans, Paul is making the case that under the new covenant, there is one people of God comprised of both Jew and Gentile. When we come to this passage that Gregory is referring to in Romans 11, Paul gives us a picture of a tree with branches, and there's something that happens to these branches that are in this tree, in this root.

Some of them are broken off, he says. What's going on here? This, I think, is a picture of the transition between old covenant and new covenant. So if you'll remember, under the old covenant, the old covenant was a national covenant.

It was made with the nation of Israel, and that covenant was comprised of both believers and unbelievers. And most of them were unbelievers. There was always a remnant, of course, but God would take his people and send them off into exile.

God would bring judgment upon his people. His people would go off and worship other gods. And under that old covenant, that was the situation, because it was a national covenant. If you were circumcised, then you were in the covenant, regardless of where your heart was, whether or not you loved God or were a regenerate person.

But in Jeremiah chapter 31, of course, God says through his prophet Jeremiah that he's going to do something else. There is going to be a new covenant that will be established. And so in Jeremiah 31, beginning with verse 31, we read this, Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them, declares the Lord.

But this is the covenant I will make with them, with the house of Israel after those days. I will put my law within them, and on their heart I will write it, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.