178. The Case For A Preterist Supersessionism Part 2 (The Historical Case)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 178, part two of A Preterist's Supercessionism.

Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to the podcast.

My name is Kendall, and as always, I'm so deeply grateful for your support, for liking, for sharing, for commenting, for subscribing to the show, and as well as those who are financially partnering with this work, you make all of this possible for me to produce long -form biblical content in a world that has become allergic to truth and in an era of the church where we've forgotten how to think

Christianly. So I am super thankful for this community. I'm thankful for your help in this work.

I'm thankful for all of it. To quote Paul, I am thankful for your partnership in the advancement of the gospel.

And with that, I wanna give you a little bit of a recap on last week. Last week, we stepped into a doctrine that many people in the modern church treat like a live grenade, that is, they avoid it, which is the doctrine of supercessionism.

And before we go further into that doctrine today, we need to define our terms. We need to say the quiet part out loud like we did last week, but it's always good for a recap.

Here's what supercessionism is. Supercessionism says that there is no special covenant status for the modern -day

Jews. There is gonna be no future temple coming for the modern -day Jews, at least not one that has any biblical significance.

There's no end -time ethnic Jewish revival that God has put on a prophetic timeline or a schedule.

Their only hope, and that's for both Jew and Gentile, is to turn from your sins and turn to Jesus.

That means for the Jews, the only hope that they have is to turn from the dead demonic religion of modern -day

Judaism and to bow the knee to Jesus Christ. Anything other than that is a fantasy and a fiction that leads to eternal damnation.

And it's outright rebellion against what the Bible actually teaches.

Now, that is what supercessionism means kind of in a nutshell. It means that the

Jews have no unique covenant status any longer and that they have no future apart from repenting and turning to Jesus Christ.

That's not a highfalutin academic concept like the name itself would suggest where only scholars can understand it.

It is simply what the New Testament teaches. It's what we ought to understand if we're going to understand what the

New Testament is saying and it's what we ought not be ashamed of because it is just what the

Bible says. And once you see it, man, the biblical story really comes alive and the mission of God and the kingdom of God and how it's going to expand to the ends of the earth really explodes with newfound clarity, which is why we're talking about it because it's so confusing right now when it comes to Israel.

Are they the chosen people of God, as Ted Cruz says, or are they not? What is it?

Well, this doctrine, supercessionism, is going to help us. Now, last week we built the covenant scaffolding, if you will, for this view.

We demonstrated that from the covenants, Christ is the true Israel. He's the fulfillment of every one of the old covenants and he is the cornerstone of a new creation and global people who are made up of every tribe, tongue, and nation and who are made in union with him because he is the olive tree by which everyone is grafted in.

He's the tree, the true tree, by which the old covenant Israel and the new creation world are going to be grafted into him.

And we looked at all of that last week and if you haven't seen that episode, pause this episode, go check that one out.

I really do think that that first episode sets the tone for this entire little mini series.

Now, if you watched it, if you're with me, or if you've now come back from being on pause, this week we're gonna continue ripping the

Jewish bandaid off of the situation so that we can see clearly and also so that we can offer the

Jews the only hope that exists in the world and that is Jesus. The last thing that we ought to do for the

Jews is treat them as though they're in special covenant status with God. The last thing we ought to do is treat them as though, don't worry, you can spit in the face of Jesus.

You can say that he's roasting alive in his own feces in hell, which is what they say in their Talmud. We can say, don't worry about that.

God still loves you. You're still in covenant with God. That's hateful. That's telling them that they don't need to repent and they don't need to turn to the only way, only truth and only life, the only way to God, which is

Jesus. So we need to learn this so that we can have fervor in our evangelism for both the

Jew and the Greek, both the slave and the free, the male and the female for all people are gonna come in through Christ and Christ alone.

There is no hope in any other name. Now, because the modern idea that an unbelieving

Jew can and still does have covenant status, which is like a dispensational view, a

Zionist view, a view that many people, especially politicians hold.

Bibi Netanyahu has used this to weaponize American foreign policy to his benefit.

Let me say it bluntly. If you believe that the unbelieving Jews who curse

Jesus's name, who blaspheme him in their descriptions of him, if you believe that those who still have disdain for his one true bride are still

God's chosen people in any sense of what that term means, then you are saying that the cross of Jesus doesn't matter.

You're saying that Calvary at the very best was a side quest for Jesus where he accepted a bastard people while he waits on the people he really loves to be provoked to jealousy because of us so that they will come back to him.

It makes Jesus a kind of teenage boy dating Rebecca to get back at Rachel.

And the consequences of that kind of theology are scandalous. Let me say it even more plain than that.

If you believe that modern day Jews who hate our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ still by consequence of their unprovable genetic bloodline have a covenant with God apart from faith in Jesus Christ, then you are denying the very gospel and you are denying the

New Testament. If you believe that Israel will be restored without repentance, which would require leaving their demonic religion and fleeing into the arms of Jesus, which by the way would make them a

Christian, then if you believe that they don't need to repent, they don't need to return to Christ, then you're contradicting the plan of salvation that Jesus offered them, that Paul earnestly presented to them, that Peter prayed for them, that the book of Hebrews bid that they enter into, you're making up a fantasy religion and calling it

Christian for some other reason than fidelity to the scriptures. So with that today, we're gonna show how the

Jews have been cut out of the covenant. Last week we made a covenantal argument, this week we're gonna make a historical argument and we're gonna show how they were cut out of the covenant, how the old

Mosaic covenant has been so thoroughly ended and now the only way for the

Jew to be saved is to believe in Jesus, which means that the

Jews as Jews have no covenant status. The only hope they have is

Christ and we're gonna make that argument from a historical lens and we're gonna begin that historical treatment by going to part one, the covenant was taken from the

Jews. Now when Jesus crested the ridge of the Mount of Olives and he looked out over Jerusalem in the final week of his earthly ministry, he was not entering into a neutral city.

He was entering into a city that was compared to the vineyard of God, the one place on earth,

Old Testament speaking, that was obligated by covenant faithfulness to bear fruit for Yahweh.

It was a city that was meant to bear fruit and yet for almost a millennium at that point, the

Lord had dug around this vineyard, he had pruned it, he had watered it, he had warned it, he had disciplined it, he had sent prophet after prophet to cultivate it, but now the final moment of their disaster had come.

The vineyard owner himself was riding into the city on a donkey, riding as a king to inspect his realm and when he arrived, he found the same thing that he had always found, he found no fruit.

The city that was meant to bear fruit for God gave him leaves only on that Palm Sunday when he rode in.

Leaves without fruit, ritual without righteousness, religion without repentance, the city that was supposed to be a tree laden with figs only offered

Jesus leaves, demonstrating to everyone that they were all show and no substance.

Its temple was a magnificent corpse, its priests were whitewashed tombs, its leaders were polished chalices full of deadly poison.

Everything about Jerusalem in those days looked alive from the outside, from the distance with a shimmering kind of glory about it, but up close, once you got past the veneer, it was barren, brittle and utterly hollow.

And this is why Jesus, after he enters into the city the next day in the morning, this is why he curses the fig tree.

It wasn't a lesson in horticulture and it wasn't Jesus just being hangry and saying, you know what,

I'm hungry, I'm not got any food, this tree sucks, I'm gonna make it wither. That's not what Jesus is doing.

What Jesus is doing is he's rendering a lived out parable for covenant disaster.

In the Old Testament, the fig tree was a metaphor for Judah. So now we already have a connection there. And this fruitless fig tree is especially representative of the fruitless state that the first century

Jews had become. They had all the greenery and all of the leaves, but underneath all of that, they had no life -giving fruit, which is why he condemned it.

He condemned this fig tree as a symbol of what was about to happen to that generation.

Just like he withered the fig tree, he was about to wither them. When he cursed that pitiful little tree, the curse was echoing far beyond the bark of this tree to the city that was looming over the hill in the distance.

He was pronouncing through the judgment of the fig tree, judgment on the entire city of Jerusalem and all of its old covenant trappings.

When he said, no one shall ever eat fruit from you again, he was not only denouncing that small little tree, but he was showing his disciples that soon, very soon, no one was ever gonna travel to Jerusalem to know

God again because you would know God through Jesus and through his spirit alone.

When Jesus said this, he was not just denouncing a tree, he was denouncing Jerusalem and its old covenant because fruit was gonna be given by the spirit of God to the people of God all over the earth from that point forward.

Those words pronounced that morning were aimed far past that little tree. They were aimed at the temple mount itself, the center of the rot.

This is why when he turned to his disciples and he pointed directly at Jerusalem, and he said, see, if you say to this mountain, if you say to this mountain, be lifted up and it'll be thrown into the sea.

If you have faith, you can do it. He says, if you say to this mountain, this mountain, which is a near demonstrative pronoun, which doesn't mean far away, it means the thing that's right in front of you, this mountain, not that one, not those over there, this one and the mountain that Jesus was looking at that morning as he was walking to Jerusalem was the mountain that the city sat on.

This mountain leaves no doubt that Jesus was not talking to you about your mountain.

Like for me, a nearby mountain is Mount Washington in New Hampshire in the White Mountains.

I can't just go to Mount Washington and have some faith and move it and throw it into the sea. That's not what Jesus is getting at.

Whatever mountain is close to you doesn't apply either. He's saying the mountain in front of him was the one that if he had faith, he could have it removed from its place and thrown into the sea.

And that is exactly what happened because at the behest of the Romans, they came in, they leveled the city, they threw its wealth onto their boats and they cast the mountain that housed the city of Jerusalem and the house of God, they ripped it apart stone by stone, tore it down to its foundations and they put it in their boats and they threw it into the sea.

That is exactly what Jesus said would happen. If you say to this mountain, be ripped up and thrown into the sea, it will happen.

That happened in the destruction of Jerusalem. The mountain of Jerusalem was ripped up, literally stone by stone.

The wealth of it was put into the Roman boats and it was sent back to Rome, cast into the sea.

Jesus made this incredibly clear, if we have eyes just to see it, but he goes even deeper than that.

I think he becomes even more clear than that because right after he curses the fig tree, he marches into Jerusalem, this mountain, and then he starts telling parable after parable, three of them, in fact, that are talking about the cursing of the city of Jerusalem.

You see, he left the fig tree, cursed it, and then he marched right into the cursed city. He went right into downtown and he got immediately into an exchange with the cursed

Jewish aristocracy, the power brokers of his day, telling them three parables of their sudden and urgent and imminent doom.

And that is the only way that you can understand these parables in Matthew 21 through 22. It's the only way that they make sense that Jesus left the fig tree that he cursed, representative of Jerusalem, and then went to the city and told them three parables of how they're cursed and how they're soon gonna be ripped up, just like he said to the fig tree.

For instance, one of the three parables, the very first one, he looks right into the eyes of the Pharisees and he tells them about two sons in Matthew 21, which is a parable that exposes their hypocrisy.

See, according to the logic of this parable, they are the ones who've been saying with their lips for almost a millennium, centuries at this point, we are the ones who obey

God. And yet for the same amount of centuries, they were not the ones who were obeying God with their bodies.

Their lips were saying one thing, their bodies were doing another thing, which is Jesus's way of telling them, you are that child in that parable, which is why at the end of that parable,

Jesus tells them that the tax collectors and sinners are gonna get into the kingdom ahead of them.

I want you to think about that. The Jews hated the tax collectors and the sinners. They despised the

Samaritans and the prostitutes. They looked down their noses at them and called them hamartanoi, which is you sinner.

And yet Jesus told them that this new covenant kingdom was gonna bypass all of them.

The one that they were waiting on, the one that they had been spending centuries of their lives waiting on was gonna pass them by.

And everyone they considered to be dirty, rotten scoundrels were gonna get into that kingdom ahead of them.

Now, this clearly points to the fact that the first century Jews were particularly wicked, of course, but it also proves that the covenant that the

Jews were responsible for stewarding as the world awaited for the coming Messiah was ending.

That covenant was ending because a new covenant had come, one where sinners and tax collectors were gonna get in ahead of them.

The beneficiary of this new covenant kingdom would not be the stewards of old.

And if you like the Lord of the Rings, you'll understand this reference. They were like Denethor. They had been stewarding a kingdom that didn't belong to them.

And when the true king came, they hated him, they rejected him, and they went barreling off the cliff's edge on fire.

It's a great metaphor from Tolkien about perhaps what he saw as the destruction of Jerusalem.

Now, in the second parable, Jesus told the Jews a version of the same parable.

It was different characters, but same meaning. And he ratchets up the intensity in the second parable, which is what

Jesus often does. The third one's gonna be the most intense. And he tells them a parable of the vineyard at the end of Matthew chapter 21.

And he tells them this entire story of Israel's rebellion in a single story.

He tells them, quoting Isaiah 5, one through seven, that God had planted his people as a vineyard.

And ironically, according to the parable, the Jewish aristocracy were not a part of the people of God.

They were not the vineyard. They were the hired hands that were hired by the vineyard owner, who is

God, to care for his people until the harvest came. And yet, in an even greater twist of irony, it was these hired hands who were the ones who killed the prophets, who were the ones who killed the ones that God sent, and they're the ones that killed

Jesus Christ. And they're also the ones who were gonna receive the punishment for their century -long disobedience to God.

And this is why Jesus pronounced it, saying, the kingdom will be taken from you and given to a people who bear its fruit,

Matthew 21, 43. Not only will the tax collectors and the prostitutes get into the kingdom ahead of the

Jews, now Jesus intensifies the message to say that most of them are not even gonna get in at all, because the kingdom that they were stewarding is gonna be ripped away from them, from this godless sect of leaders, and it was going to be given to the

Gentiles. It was gonna be given to the tax collectors and the prostitutes. These Jews, they were biologically

Jews. They had the Hebrew bloodline. They would've had the right score on their ancestry .com

DNA test, and yet, even though they were biologically children of Abraham, they were going to miss out on the kingdom.

They were gonna be cut out of relationship with Yahweh, because they cared more about their bloodlines and their heritage than the

God who came to visit them in the flesh, and here's something we need to realize about this parable.

Jesus is not promising a temporary fulfillment. He's not saying that, you know, the kingdom's gonna be taken away from them for a while, maybe even a millennia or two.

He's saying that the kingdom's gonna be taken away from them forever, because the stewards no longer are in charge because the king has come.

The kingdom, he said, is gonna be taken with no qualification given, with no promise of it being returned to the

Jews. It's not gonna be shelved for a future millennium where the Jews get their temple back and the

Jews get this and the Jews get that. No, it's taken from them and given to Christ who will not surrender it back to them.

That's what the second parable is about. The third parable is the most intense.

It's the parable of the wedding feast, and it's a parable about how

God is this great king, and he throws a wedding feast for his son who's gonna get married to his covenant bride.

Now, we know that the king is God, we know that the son is Jesus, and the wedding guest, well, that's where things get interesting, because they were invited, but they did not come.

And the king sent more messengers to invite them, but yet they said no. And again and again, he sent his messengers, the prophets, and they refused to come.

And then the king, in his anger, after centuries of kindness, reaches the limits of his mercy and grace, and he sends his armies to destroy the city and to burn it down to ash because they would not come to the wedding of his son.

This is not a metaphor. This is not dramatic hyperbole.

This is Jesus telling the Jews in the city of Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin, the scribes, and the

Pharisees, this is him looking them right in the eye and saying that because you're rejecting me,

God is gonna set your city on fire. He's gonna burn you out of the covenant because you refuse to come to my wedding with my bride.

That's what Jesus is saying. And this undoubtedly happened when

God sent his armies, the Romans, in AD 68 through AD 70, and he sent them to set fire on the city and to turn it into smoldering ash.

The parable came true with a frightening clarity, and they were removed from the covenant.

Even after this, the famous question that the Pharisees try to trick Jesus was where they say, hey, look at this coin, whose likeness is on it?

Tell us, should we pay taxes to Caesar or not? Well, when Jesus held up that Roman denarius and he asked them the question, whose image is this?

And they said, it's Caesar's. What Jesus was exposing in that parable or in that little moment in the city, right after he just told those three parables, right after he just cursed the fig tree, right after he inspected the city and the temple and the city were leaves with no fruit, all of these things are leading up to this point where he looks at them and he says, render unto

Caesar the things that are Caesar's and render unto God the things that are

God's. What is Jesus talking about there? Is he talking about taxes? Well, yeah, there's a underlying or there's a surface level meaning where they try to trap him and they can't.

But I have to believe that Jesus is also indicting them. He's telling them that they are the people who are supposed to bear the imprint of the image of God and yet they look a whole lot like Caesar.

They've got his likeness on him. They're the ones who will later say that we have no king but Caesar.

And the terrifying implication of this was that God was going to render them over to their

Lord and master and savior, but it wasn't Jesus, it was Caesar. When Jesus said, render unto

Caesar the things that are Caesar's, he was almost surely meaning you belong to him.

And because you belong to him, I'm going to render you over to him. And in 40 years, they were.

Then Jesus, right immediately after this, without a break, the narrative doesn't stop, goes right into chapter 23, where he unleashes seven covenantal woes upon them, which are verbal declaration of covenant curses that were enlisted in the

Old Testament. And he does this again in Matthew 23, where he stands up in the middle of the city and he shouts his indictments against them.

And his voice cuts through the temple like the rumbles and pelts of thunder.

And sadly, very few commentators actually understand today what

Jesus is doing when he does this. He's not standing up in the city and complaining about them because they just won't turn to him.

He's not just sitting up and talking about, or standing up and talking about how concerned he is because of their lack of belief.

He's doing something covenantal here. He's condemning them. He was announcing a covenant curse motif, a formula that God had already detailed in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, which spells out exactly what's going to happen when the old covenant is brought to a calamitous ruin.

See, the old covenant was signed by the Jews and by the Israelites. They said, yes, we will obey. Yes, we will do this.

Yes, we will follow the stipulations of the covenant. Yes, and if we do so, we'll be blessed. But God also put a provision in there that if they don't obey the covenant, they will be cursed.

And a part of the curse is that they will be removed and cut out and severed from God, which is what

Deuteronomy chapter 28 is talking about. It's what Leviticus 26 is talking about. And when

Jesus stands up in the middle of the city in Matthew 23, he is evoking the covenant curse motif of the

Old Testament. He's saying this generation is gonna be cut out of the covenant. This generation is gonna have the terrifying curses poured out on their heads so that their dead bodies are gonna stain the

Judean landscape. And they were going to be given as food for the circling vultures.

He tells them that they, not just they, but they along with their house and their temple and their city and their nation and even their old covenant system were gonna be left desolate because they had filled up the measure of their father's guilt and judgment was coming on them.

And this is why Jesus begins Matthew chapter 24 saying that the temple is gonna be torn apart brick by brick.

This is why he tells them that false messiahs are gonna rise up and they're gonna fill the nation full of a filthy false hope.

This is why he describes wars and rumors of wars and wars are gonna shake the Roman Empire out of its

Pax Romana in peace. This is why he spoke of nation rising against nation, earthquakes tearing through the

Roman Empire, famines, starving people. This is why he warned his disciples that they were gonna be arrested in synagogues.

There were gonna be floggings and there were gonna be people betraying one another. There was gonna be a hatred of Christians by all the ethnic peoples, especially the

Jews. He warned them of a rising Jewish apostasy of Hebrew lawlessness.

He told them that the Hebrews, the Jewish people, their love is gonna run cold and they're gonna become lawless.

False Jewish prophets were gonna multiply like the plague of flies in Egypt and the situation in Judea where truth itself was supposed to be a feature of that nation was going to collapse in on itself as they believed every lie and every falsehood.

He said that the gospel was gonna be preached all throughout the Roman world before the end of that old covenant system came and all of it happened just like he said.

Matthew 23, he said all these things are gonna come on this generation. Matthew 24 is where he lists the signs that are gonna lead up to this coming judgment happening and every single one of them came true.

He warned that an abomination of desolation of Jerusalem was gonna happen, where Jerusalem was gonna be encircled by armies and where its desolation was gonna become unmistakable and where nursing mothers were gonna be killing their babies during the siege because of their hunger and their famine.

People were gonna be running for their lives and not even have time to grab their cloak or their coat.

He warned them of tribulations that were so violent that nothing in all of Israel's history could compare with it.

All of this happened in the downfall of Jerusalem, just like he predicted.

And as we proved in our Matthew 24 series, which by the way, I recommend to you, if you wanna go check that out, it is way more detailed than what we just described here.

It goes through Matthew 21 through 24 and it details all of it in 20, more than an hour long episodes each, so I commend that to you.

But for right now, suffice it to say, his prophecy came true. Matthew 24, 34 says, all these things are gonna happen to this generation and it did.

The vultures did circle the city. The city was rotten. The son of Israel's covenant world went dark.

The temple went up like tender. The sword of God, the terrifying day of the

Lord that was gonna come with blistering fury fell on that people. Blood filled the streets as high as the calves of the

Roman horses until as Josephus said, that it ran down the steps of the temple, painting it with their boiling blood.

Children were slaughtered and roasted over the flames. Families starved to death in the open.

Men were crucified until there were no more trees to make new crosses.

And then the very few survivors that remained were either dragged off and thrown into the

Egyptian salt mines where they would be beaten and whipped and suffered till the rest of their days, or they were paraded through the city of Rome to show the world how

Rome will put down its enemies. And if you wanna see a Roman depiction of this great parade, then look no further than the

Ark of Titus. It's an Ark in the city of Rome that actually demonstrates them carrying off the treasures from the temple in their grand destruction of the city of Jerusalem.

It's proof once again, that this city was trampled by the Gentiles, that this nation that was once called

God's firstborn son was scattered to the four winds of the earth. They were removed from their covenant status because everything

Jesus said was going to happen before that generation passed away happened with horrifying precision.

And my point in mentioning all of this is to just simply remind us that Matthew chapter 21 through 24 and then

Mark 13, Luke 21, these chapters are not speaking about a future event.

They're talking about a covenant judgment and consequences for disobedience that would remove the

Jewish people from their standing with God. And if you do even the smallest amount of research on this topic, you will see it playing out in the first century in real time.

The apostles knew exactly what was occurring around them. Paul warned Israel, begging with them, pleading with them to flee from the wrath that was being stored up against Israel.

He even says that he would give up his own salvation so that they would be saved because their hardened hearts were being hardened by God and even says that they're blind because they can't see the judgment that's coming against them.

Their blindness and their stumbling were divinely initiated. That's why Jesus said in the gospels that seeing they will not see and hearing they will not hear and God has brought them into a spiritual stupor.

That's why he tells the Jews, you can't come with me, you can't follow me. Where I go, you cannot come because he brought them into condemnation.

Their branches were broken off by the vine dresser due to their unbelief.

And Peter said that the end of all things in his lifetime was at hand, which of course does not mean the end of the world because if that's the case,

Peter got it wrong. Peter's not saying the end of the world is at hand in my lifetime.

It's 2000 years after Peter died. It's not what Peter's saying. Peter's saying that the end of all things related to the old covenant were coming to an end.

James says that the judge was standing at the door ready to make the Jews weep and howl in their misery.

That's James chapter five. Hebrews says that the old covenant was not merely fading but it was vanishing like smoke ready to disappear.

That's why he says that in chapter one of the book of Hebrews that in these last days

God has chosen to speak to us through his son, why? Because the old days, the former days, the old covenant days are passing away because God was bringing fulfillment in the coming of Christ.

He was ending the old covenant types and shadows and he was taking the mantle as new covenant

Lord. That's why John in his epistle said that it was the last hour. Not the end of the world but the last hour of the

Jewish covenant. That's why Jude says that judgment was coming on the wicked and the ungodly and it was imminent.

That's why the book of Revelation over and over and over announces that judgment is coming on that great city,

Jerusalem. And how do we know it's Jerusalem? Because he says that great judgment's coming on the city that crucified our

Lord and then he goes on to call that city Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah. They were gonna drink the cup of God's covenant fury forever.

Every book in the New Testament, virtually every book in the New Testament rings with the same urgent refrain that the old covenant age was collapsing and those who were clinging to that dead system were going to sink to the bottom of the ocean like Jack holding a piece of Titanic driftwood.

And that is exactly what happened in the downfall of Jerusalem. When Jerusalem was burned and the temple fell,

God was permanently ending every type and shadow that pointed to Jesus so that no one would ever conclude that those things are how you get to God.

No one would ever be mistaken again. You can't get to God through a Jewish temple. You can't get to God through a

Jewish sacrificial system. They were types, they were shadows that pointed to him and they will never come back because he's the true temple, the true sacrifice, the true king.

He is the way to God, not the types and shadows. Those things were cut off.

That covenant where those types and shadows belonged was terminated. Its institutions were dissolved and their priesthood was erased forever.

Their sacrificial system ended forever. Their temple destroyed forever. Their city judged, their nation disinherited, their bloodline and their lineage rendered useless so that now the only way and the only truth and the only life you can ever find will not be from Judaism, but it will be from Jesus Christ.

God will not send us back into the darkness of the shadows when the perfect light has come.

He will not. So that what we're saying here in the simplest terms that I can possibly give is that the message of the

New Testament is this. God made a covenant with Old Testament Israel and they broke it and they broke it and they repeatedly broke it and they rejected him.

And because of their rejection of God's son, God closed out their old covenant completely.

Its temple burned, its priesthood abrogated, its sacrifices eliminated, its nation disinherited and its special covenant status revoked so that it no longer matters what your bloodline is.

It only matters if you're washed in the blood of the lamb. That is why Paul goes on to say, don't let anybody judge you based off new moon and Sabbath.

Don't let anybody judge you based off of your bloodline. Don't let anybody judge you whether you keep a festival or you do this or you do that.

Don't let anybody judge you based on your circumcision. Why? Because Israel has all of that Old Testament Israel type and shadow is gone.

And now the only way to be saved is Jesus and Jesus will never be replaced.

Not by you, not by me, not by the Jews. And that leads us to part two, the end time revival already occurred.

Now in the midst of all of the language about judgment and fire and disaster and the covenant end of the

Jews that the New Testament clearly is pointing to, there's also a small glimmer of hope that some of them, indeed a remnant of them were gonna be saved.

Now, this is not as many commentators have argued an end of human history, full scale revival of the entire

Jewish people. This is not what Paul is arguing for in Romans 11, which we will look at in greater detail next week.

But for now, I want you to suffice it to say, when Paul says that at the present time, there is a remnant according to God's gracious choice, he's pointing out that not all of the first century

Jews are gonna undergo the disaster. The ones who clung to their Jewish identity and their

Jewish religion and their Jewish bloodlines, they were gonna boil in the cauldron of God's fury.

But for those who would leave their old covenant religion and bow their knee to Jesus Christ, they would be saved.

Although sadly, it was only a remnant. And here's the point that we need to remember.

When Paul mentions this remnant in Romans 11, again, we'll talk more about it next week, he's mentioning a remnant that he saw with his own eyes.

He's mentioning a group of people that were developing and growing all throughout the Roman world.

He's not talking about an end of human history revival of the Jews. He's telling us that he was noticing and seeing a large number of Jewish people who were repenting and turning to Jesus, which is absolutely astounding if you think about it.

Remember, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of Jews who grew up in a temple -centric world and a sacrificial system where that was their way to God.

Paul's letting us know that those people were in fact coming to Jesus Christ.

And Paul's letting us know that this is a monumentally consequential event in the history of Israel.

In fact, its presence in the first century not only fulfills Romans 11, but it virtually guarantees that no future

Jewish revival is coming. So for a moment, I wanna sketch out for you just how deep and how wide this

Jewish remnant was fulfilling Romans 11 five, how many people were actually turning to Christ from the

Jewish religion in the first century, how many of them were falling on their knees to worship

Jesus. And I want us to see how this reality confirms the doctrine of supersessionism.

That is our task in this section. And that is what we're gonna look at all throughout the Old Testament. So for instance, let's begin at the beginning.

Before the book of Acts ever opens, before the Spirit descends, before the Pentecost sets the world on fire, the first spark of the

Jewish revival, the first spark of the Jewish remnant that was forming, formed all the way in the very beginning.

What do I mean? Well, long before Acts and Calvary and long before any of that, there were believing

Israelites who were beginning to cluster around Jesus. And the first place that they began clustering is at his cradle 70 years before their own national destruction.

Here are a couple of examples of this. Zechariah and Elizabeth came to faith in him as two of the first members of the

Jesus remnant. Mary, a Jewish daughter of Israel, received the word of God with the signs of faith like Abraham.

And she sings a psalm of covenant fulfillment. She's a member of the remnant of the

Jews that believed in Jesus. Joseph, a son of David, obeyed God's dream without hesitation, which means that Joseph became a

Christian. He believed in Jesus. He believed the promises of God. We're gonna see Joseph in heaven. Simeon, an elderly man who saw the baby

Jesus in the temple, carries the consolation of Israel in his arms and prophesies the dawn of the new age that's coming.

Anna, the elderly prophetess from the tribe of Asher, she hurries into the temple to announce to everyone that Jerusalem's redemption had come in the birth of Christ.

These people are a picture of the backbone of Israel, the quiet faithful who were keeping the old lamp of the old covenant burning during that long period of time between the book of Malachi and Matthew.

And they are rejoicing to see that their long -awaited hope has come.

Now, fast forward a little, and there you'll find John the Baptist, who appears like the Elijah figure on the banks of the

Jordan River, summoning Israel to repentance. And the crowds, they were coming to repent.

And remember, they did not come as Gentiles. They came as Jews. They came as Jews confessing their sin, wading into the waters of that historic river, turning their backs on their own hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of the

Jerusalem priests so that they could prepare themselves for the Lamb of God, who was gonna take them into a new promised land, who was gonna forgive their sins, and who was gonna take away the sins of the world.

This ministry of John the Baptist, one of the first public dividing lines inside of Israel that aligned between the hard and covenant -breaking leadership who was gonna kill and crucify the

Messiah, and between the humble, repentant Israel who was gonna follow Christ. John is carving out even the first boundary lines of the remnant that was soon gonna receive

Jesus as their Savior, even as early. The preparations were being made as early as John's Jordanian ministry.

I mean, then you fast forward a little bit further. By the time that Jesus begins his ministry, the remnant is no longer just a spark, but now it's kind of a campfire.

You've got 12 Jews who are named apostles. They were Jewish men through and through. They leave their old covenant faith in a sense, even though they don't know fully what they're doing yet, and they're chosen as the foundation stones of a new covenant people.

Around them gathers a wider band of Jewish disciples, 70 and then even more than that, of men from Galilee and Judea and the surrounding regions that are beginning to garner faith in Christ, and they're beginning to actually become quite a large crowd, so much so that the

Pharisees are nervous about them. Now, we know that all of them were not elect because many of them actually did leave

Jesus, circa John chapter six, but what we do know that is actually significant that was happening is that a remnant within Israel was forming around Jesus, which is exactly what

Paul was correctly noting in Romans 11, that a first century remnant was forming within Judaism, and that remnant was surrounding

Jesus Christ, and that little flock of burgeoning followers, Jesus is the one who reminds them that God the

Father is gladly gonna give them the kingdom. What kingdom? The old covenant kingdom that's gonna be taken away from the

Jews and given to them in him. How do we know this? Well, John's gospel confirms that many among the crowds believed in Jesus during the feast, in the temple courts, in the alleyways of Jerusalem, John 2, 23,

John 7, 31. Nicodemus, for instance, Israel's teacher begins with questioning

Jesus in John three, then he comes by night to visit Jesus, and then finally, at the end of the gospel of John, he's the one who's boldly standing at the tomb with the costly spices in John 19, anointing

Jesus. Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy council member, a Jew among Jews, believes and gives his life to Jesus even as he gives his own tomb to Jesus.

John 19, Matthew 27, 57. After, or just before this, Lazarus, a

Jew, rises from the dead. Many Jews, because of this event, abandoned the establishment of Judaism to follow

Jesus, much to the Pharisees' chagrin, John 11, 45 through 48. The remnant was forming within Israel's own walls long before the

Gentiles ever entered the picture so that by the time you get to the book of Acts, the spark had become a small wildfire.

Pentecost erupts, and the men gathered in Jerusalem are explicitly called

Jews. They're devout Jews, covenant Jews, diaspora Jews from every nation, but they're

Jews. And now, 3 ,000 or more of them believe in a single day.

I mean, that's a Jewish revival. And then day after day, Luke tells us that more

Jews are streaming into the church. For instance, 5 ,000 Jewish men, that's just Jewish men, come into the church after Peter's sermon on Solomon's portico, which means that they were leaving their faith in the

Pharisaical religion that was being taught to them by the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees and the scribes, and they were believing squarely in a crucified and resurrected

Nazarene. That's not an insignificant or inconsequential event in the history of the people of the

Jews. They're leaving their Judaism to believe in Jesus. They're saying that this

Galilean messianic figure is God. No small thing.

By the early chapters of the book of Acts, you see a fully Jewish church that is formed in worshiping

Jesus, worshiping Jesus, still with their old Jewish covenant religious rhythms.

They're still going to the temple. They're still going to the synagogue. They're still participating in the Jewish feast at this point. They're still participating in a mostly

Jewish covenantal communal life. They're still participating or still providing for their

Jewish widows. They're still being led by Jewish apostles. They're still filling heaven full of Jewish prayers at this point, but with a growing number of Jewish disciples filling the streets of Jerusalem, you're having a

Jewish revival. I mean, does this not qualify as Paul's remnant? Thousands of Jews coming to Jesus in the city that murdered him?

Would that not be a consequential event in the history of the people of the Jews? And then notice the very first conflict that happens in the early church.

It's not a conflict between Jew and Gentile. It's a conflict between Jew and Jew, the Hellenistic Jews and the

Hebrew speaking Jews over which widows were going to be the ones who were cared for.

What this tells us that this controversy broke out is that the church was overwhelmingly

Jewish in the beginning. It began entirely as a Jewish church filled with believing

Jews who now were bowing down to Jesus, who were now realizing like Peter that what God has made clean, they can't call unclean, who was realizing like Peter again that you can't discriminate against the

Gentiles because there's no difference because there's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. They're all in one in Christ.

So you don't have this problem that's happening between the Hellenistic Jewish Christians and the

Hebrew Jewish Christians unless thousands of believing people are Jews wrestling with the reality of how do we now live for this

Jesus Christ. Then comes one of the most breathtaking statements in all of the New Testament. Luke tells us that a great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith.

That's Acts chapter 6, 7, which means that the priests, the men whose entire identity was tied to the temple, the sacrificial system, the feast and the shadows, they were now beginning to defect from their old covenant

Judaism and their norms and they were fleeing unto Christ. I mean, is that not a substantial remnant?

Wouldn't that constitute as a tremendous revival among the hard -hearted Jews? As the gospel goes outward from Judea to Samaria to the uttermost parts of the

Roman Empire, you've got Paul using a missionary strategy that goes from one synagogue to the next revealing how widespread the

Jewish remnant truly was. I mean, he walks into the synagogues all across the Roman Empire like Sidion and Antioch and Iconium and Thessalonica and Berea and Corinth and Ephesus.

In every single city, there was a real flesh and blood Jew who was turning to Jesus and believing.

Luke says many of them in these synagogues believed, which means that there were directly

Jewish converts in all of these different cities. For instance, Crispus, the synagogue ruler in the city of Corinth believed in Jesus along with his entire household and became some of the first believers in the church of Corinth, a

Jew. Apollos, who's an Alexandrian Jew who was mighty in the scriptures, he becomes converted and he becomes a towering preacher in the early

Christian movement, even discipled by Aquila and Priscilla who were also

Jews, tent makers, who brought him along to the way of Christ more fully. They joined

Paul's missionary team. I mean, by the time Paul returns from Jerusalem near the end of the book of Acts, James looks him in the eye and says, you see, my brother, how many tens of thousands there are among the

Jews who have believed, Acts 21 20. Tens of thousands, James says, myriads upon myriads,

James says, a number so large that Luke has to use the language normally reserved for an army regiment in order to describe them.

Is that not a substantial remnant that would fulfill what Paul is saying in Romans 11 five?

Is that not an inner Jewish revival? I think so. And that's not it as well.

Paul's letters confirms this at every term. He identifies himself as an Israelite, a

Benjamite, a Hebrew among Hebrews, yet he is one who has abandoned the old covenant righteousness for the righteousness of Christ, Jewish convert, a very prominent one at that.

He speaks of we who are Jews by nature, writing as a Jew who knows that justification comes only through faith in Jesus.

He greets Jewish co -leaders who were in Christ before him.

He refers to the church as the Israel of God, which is a term that would have been utterly meaningless if the majority of the early church were not

Jews. All of this is pointing to the fact that there was a massive

Jewish revival that was happening in the first century, which, oh, by the way, fulfills what Paul says in Romans 11 five.

Not an end time Jewish revival, a first century Jewish revival that were there evidence everywhere.

I mean, Paul's entire theology of the one new man in Ephesus presupposes

Jewish believers standing alongside Gentile believers in equal covenant status before God.

Isn't that the entire point of Romans one, two, and three, where Romans one is about the unbelieving

Gentiles, Romans two is about the unbelieving Jews, and Romans three is that they're all equal at the foot of the cross because they've all sinned and all fallen short of the glory of God.

I mean, think about the general epistles and how they assume the exact same thing. James writes to the 12 tribes scattered among the nations, tribes who are now confessing

Jesus as Lord. The point of James's authorship and the audience to which he writes is believing

Jews, which means that they were Christians. Peter addresses the diaspora

Jews using the ancient tagline that they are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation.

He's not talking to Jews who worship at the temple. He's saying there's a new kind of Jew who's a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and that's those kinds of Jews that now worship

Jesus, the ones who put away the types and shadows and the ones who now bow the knee to Christ.

Hebrews warns Jewish believers not to turn back to the old temple shadows, not to go back to the covenant of Moses because it's passing away, proving that a substantial number of Jews converted and left

Moses for Jesus, so much so that the writer of Hebrews had to warn them not to go back.

I mean, the fact that the book of Hebrews was even written suggests that there was such a large number of Jews they needed a book called

Hebrews to show them what Jesus actually means for them. Revelation goes even as far as to tell us that 144 ,000

Israelites from the 12 tribes were sealed in Jesus, letting us know that a faithful Jewish remnant was preserved by God even in the midst of the cataclysmic events that fell upon the nation that rejected its king.

So when Paul says in Romans 11 that there is a present remnant and he's using the present active indicative verb, he's telling us that this is happening in front of him.

He's not speaking in Yiddish riddles about an uncertain future revival. He's pointing out that faithful Jews around, faithful Jews were turning to Jesus at his birth, they were repenting under the ministry of John, they were believing during Jesus' ministry, they were following Christ, thousands upon thousands of Jewish converts who were following him, multitudes upon multitudes who were coming under the power of the spirit of God in the book of Acts, Jewish apostles who were leading

Jewish co -laborers, who were leading Jewish congregations, who were receiving the apostolic benefit and the letters from Jewish writers, all of this culminating in Revelation where we see 144 ,000 of them sealed and set apart so that the judgment that fell on Jerusalem wouldn't fall on them.

Does this not qualify as a fulfillment of Romans 11 five? And listen, here's why all of this matters.

A remnant only exists when a larger body of people are coming under judgment.

That's what remnant means. There's a group set apart for destruction and there's a remnant who will be saved.

That's the story of remnant theology throughout the Old Testament. There's those who refuse to enter into the promised land and there's the remnant,

Joshua, Caleb, and a few others who get to enter in. There's the remnant of the 7 ,000 who were spared during the days of Elijah while the rest of the nation fell headlong into apostasy.

There's the remnant that survived the exile, even though there was many of them who were destroyed by the Babylonians.

In each of these cases, the majority of the nation was taken under judgment and death and only a few of them were set apart for salvation, a remnant.

This is precisely what is happening when Jesus comes. Most of the

Jews of the first century faced the ultimate and the final consequence, the covenant curse for rejecting their

Lord and Savior when he came. Just like Malachi says, they were set on fire because they rejected the

God who showed up at their temple. But yet some of them, by the grace of God, were spared and they were brought into his everlasting kingdom.

And by the grace of God, the first century church started as an entirely

Jewish movement until the Jews became so persnickety that Paul even says, fine,

I'm gonna go to the Gentiles because they refused to believe. All of this points to the fact that God was gathering in the year 40, or sorry, in the year 30 through the year 70, 40 years,

God was gathering a collection of Jews who would be saved out of the wrath that was coming to the rest of the

Jews. God was crafting a new Jerusalem whereas the old one was falling.

That is the unavoidable truth that Paul is actually mentioning in Romans 11, that a remnant was gonna be saved.

And that matters so profoundly because it's a living, breathing proof that God has already transferred the old covenant to Jesus in the new covenant.

And that to those who belong to him, they now are the covenant people of God. The Jews who left

Judaism and the Gentiles who left paganism, they now are the Israel of God, according to Paul.

All of this is proof that the old order passed away.

And it's proof that like Noah and his family, only a few were spared before the destruction event.

And it's proof that there is no parallel Jewish covenant that is currently running alongside of the new covenant that is just waiting for one day for a bunch of Jews to turn to Jesus.

I do pray that the whole nation of Israel, the modern day nation state of Israel turns to Jesus.

But if they do, it won't be because they have a special covenant status. And it won't be because that they have some kind of eschatological promise.

They'll turn to Christ because they're elect of God. That's the only people who ever turned to Jesus are the ones who were elect before the foundations of the world.

It has nothing to do with their bloodline, nothing to do with their history, nothing to do with their special status.

We're all dead. We are all broken. We are all falling short of the glory of God. And the only ones who turn both

Old Testament and new are those who are elect of God. That's it. There's a remnant of first century

Jews that are saved from destruction because the old covenant was ending and they were brought into and grafted into the new covenant of God.

And the only way that they were going to be saved is if they jump off the temple life raft and cling to Jesus.

That's the only way that anyone is saved. And that's certainly proof that the only future hope for the

Jews is the same hope offered to the Gentiles, the crucified and risen Lord. That's it.

And that brings us to our final point in today's episode, which is part three.

The mission is under one name. Now, when the dust of that great collapse of the

Jews had settled, when the remnant had been saved and the rest of them had been destroyed, when the smoke of the old covenant world had drifted away like the breath of a dying man, only one thing remained standing in the rubble, and that was

Christ and his church. That's why Hebrews calls it the unshakable kingdom because the

Jewish Old Testament kingdom was shaken and it was shown to be wanting.

But Jesus and his church are the unshakable kingdom that will never end. That means all of the scaffolding of the ethnic privilege, all of the structure of the genetic superiority that the

Hebrews believed made them better than the Gentiles and the Samaritans, all of their legacy that they thought was the reason that they were saved was gone.

The temple was turned to ash. The priesthood was left in a pool of blood. The sacrificial system, gone.

The genealogies drown in the blood and the fire of AD 70. The only thing, the only thing that he honored, the only thing that God counted towards anyone's salvation was whether or not they were in union with his son.

And the people who belong to him would become the people of God from both testaments, old and new, which is why the mission of God is narrowed down into a single solitary point of exclusivity.

Every man, every woman, every child, every Jew, every Gentile, every slave, every free from that moment forward would come in and be saved by Jesus.

They would walk through the narrow gate or they would not come in at all. Not then, not now, and never again in our future, which is why

I say the Jews have no status. They have no gate. You can't enter through the

Jewish system and find God because it's been eliminated. Everyone comes in through the narrow gate of Christ.

That's it. And that's why supersessionism is such an important doctrine because it is the only way to make sense of the frantic urgency that explodes off the pages of the

New Testament. It's the only way to understand why the apostles preach like men shouting from the rooftops, not little lullabies, but they're shouting for the

Jews to repent. They're praying that the Jews would repent. It's the only view that makes sense of this revival that we see happening.

It's the only view that makes sense of why the first century Christians were telling their neighbors like firefighters pounding down the door of a burning house because the house was getting ready to be set on fire and burned.

The first century Christians told all Israel that judgment was coming, that the covenant that they trusted was collapsing, that the only doorway left that would save them is the crucified one whose wounds still plead for mercy.

They offered Christ because there was nothing else to offer them. The temple wouldn't save them.

The sacrifices wouldn't save them. And that also applies to any future people of Israel.

They can't trust in their genetics because it's only about Christ. They offer

Christ alone because he alone can save. And that's it.

That's why Paul bleeds over Romans nine, begging his kinsmen to be saved, even saying that he would be willing to be accursed.

He'd be willing to be cut off. He'd be willing to be cut out of the covenant of God just so that his ancestors and forebears could come in.

There's centuries of advantages, their adoption, their temple, their law, their promises, their patriarchs, all lie around them shattered like the relics of a shipwreck.

And they're unable to save unless Christ brings life and regenerates them. This is why

Romans 10 blasts like Mount Sinai torn open. This is why it points out that Israel possesses zeal, but not a kind of righteousness.

That's why that Paul accuses them of clinging to Moses, but Moses was trying to take them to the hand and lead them directly to the

Nazarene Lord. The only righteousness left in the world is the righteousness that comes by faith in Jesus Christ.

And Paul levels the entire globe beneath that one single command, repent and believe in the name of Jesus, because there's only one

Lord over all, one salvation offered to all, one pathway opened up to all, and no

Jewish elevator will ever make it to heaven because there's no ethnic bypass around the cross.

If a Jew is saved, he is saved exactly in the same way as a

Gentile by confessing Jesus Christ as Lord, and that is the only way.

That is why Romans 11 refuses to flatter unbelieving modern day Israel with sentimental

Zionistic niceties, because Paul does not tell them that their unbelief will save them.

He says that they are branches that have been hacked off, they're lying in the dirt, and unless they repent and turn to Christ, they will remain in their death forever.

And if they ever come back, it will not be through their Judaism because Judaism is satanic.

Judaism is a religion that takes you straight to hell.

The only salvation for the Jews is Jesus. They must become

Christians. Paul leaves no room for an ethnic covenant for a future

Jewish as Jewish revival. God restores them and all people through Christ and Christ alone.

That is what the New Testament is pointing to, and that leads us to our conclusion.

When you strip away all of the Zionistic sentimentalism and the political flattery of modern

Israel and the theological stupidity of men like Theodore Cruz, the

New Testament hands you a single truth. Christ did not come to affirm the blessings of the old covenant people.

He came not to offer her as a mistress so that the church could flirt with her and play footsie with her and act like she was the one that we're supposed to be enraptured by.

No, he pulverizingly destroyed her for her whoring so that he could be the entrance into Israel.

He is the temple, he is the priest, he is the sacrifice, he is the king, he is the nation, he is the prophet, he is the, he's everything.

So that if you wanna be a part of the Israel of God, you have to be in him. There's only one people of God, one covenant of God, and one name under heaven by which a people must be saved, and that is

Jesus. And supersessionism in that way isn't a mean -spirited doctrine and it's not antisemitic.

But it is the apostolic worldview. It is the grammar of redemption. It is the

New Testament story. And here's the question you gotta ask yourself, brothers and sisters, who would you rather offend?

Would you rather offend the Jews or would you rather offend God? And if that's antisemitic, then I guess

I'm antisemitic because I am not going to placate any group of people who worship any false religion, and I'm not gonna tell them that it's okay,

God's gonna give you a pass. No, to hell with that. The Jews need to repent and turn to Jesus.

The Buddhists need to repent and turn to Jesus. The Islamics need to repent and turn to Jesus. There is only one way.

That is the point. That is where we will end our time today. And I'll see you again next time as we go directly into Romans 11, into the cesspool of where all the arguments go and end, and by the end of it next week, actually, we're taking next week off for Thanksgiving, but you know what

I mean. By the end of our next episode, I think the point will be completely proven.

But until then, God richly bless you. See you again next time on the podcast. Now, get out of here.