Is Israel Still God's Chosen Nation? What You Need to Know

Steve Wohlberg says the Bible describes two different Israels, not one, and that most Christians have never separated them. Paul called one group "Israel after the flesh" and the other "the Israel of God," a group made up of Jews and Gentiles who believe in Jesus. Wohlberg, who grew up Jewish in the Hollywood Hills with no spiritual life at all, traces how a nineteenth century doctrine called dispensationalism convinced millions of Christians that ethnic Israel, not Christ, sits at the center of Bible prophecy.

Steve Wohlberg joins the show to unpack what the New Testament actually says about Israel, starting with his own story growing up a cultural Jew with no Bible, no prayer, and no synagogue. He walks through Paul's conversion from Saul the persecutor to Paul the apostle, and shows from 1 Corinthians 10:18, Galatians 6:16, and Romans 9:6-8 that Scripture itself divides Israel into two groups, one of the flesh and one of the Spirit.

He explains Peter's vision of the sheet and the unclean animals in Acts 10, and how it opened the door for Gentiles to be grafted into the Israel of God alongside believing Jews. He applies that same split to current events, arguing that neither blanket support for nor blanket condemnation of the modern state of Israel fits what Jesus taught, and that every action, Jewish or Arab, has to be judged by justice, mercy, and humility from Micah 6:8.

The conversation turns to where the popular end-times picture of a rebuilt temple, a rapture, and a Middle East Armageddon actually came from. Wohlberg traces dispensationalism to John Nelson Darby in the 1830s and 40s, through the Scofield Reference Bible, into Dallas Theological Seminary, and out to Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels, and contrasts it with the historicist reading held by the Reformers and the early Adventist movement under William Miller.

He closes by warning that the same self-exalting impulse that led the rabbis to reject Jesus as a conquering national Messiah can tempt any group, Jewish or Christian, to put itself at the center of prophecy instead of Christ, and makes the case that Jesus, not any nation or state, is the true center of the end times.