(This is an edited version of chapter 6 of Mauro’s ‘The Hope of Israel’.)
We have already seen that, by the covenant of Sinai, God offered Israel the highest of all blessings, but upon the express condition of obedience; the terms being, ‘If you will obey My voice indeed, and keep My Covenant’ (Ex. 19:5-6). To this they all agreed, saying, ‘All that the Lord hath spoken, we will do” (v.8). And this pledge of obedience was twice repeated after the ten commandments had been spoken to them (Ex. 24:3 and 7). Nevertheless, that covenant was broken by them within forty days through the idolatry of the golden calf (‘which My covenant they broke,’ Jer. 31:32).
Nevertheless, in response to Moses’ intercession, God had mercy on the people, and consented to go with them into the land that had been promised by Him to their fathers. But the covenant of Sinai was annulled, and a substitute covenant was made with them at the end of their wilderness journey, when they were about to enter and occupy the land of Canaan. For we have seen that in the last chapters of Deuteronomy is the record of another covenant, which, like the first, was accompanied by the giving of the Law.
The additional (or substituted) covenant was made with the next succeeding generation following that which had broken the covenant of Horeb. It is very different in its terms, particularly in that those great promises – ‘you shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me, …and you shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” – are omitted.
The covenant made at the end of the wilderness journey is limited to a recital of the terms and conditions upon which the children of Israel would be permitted to occupy the land of Canaan, which God had promised their fathers that He would give to their children; and as has been already stated, the children of Israel failed completely to keep the conditions of this covenant, even as they had failed to keep those of the other. Moreover, though the Lord God of their fathers sent to them repeatedly His messengers, the prophets, to warn them, and to recall them to Himself, ‘because He had compassion upon His people, and on His dwelling place,’ yet ‘they mocked the messengers of God, and despised His words, and misused His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against His people, till there was no remedy, (2 Chron. 36:15-16).
It is recorded that both Israel and Judah ‘kept not the commandments of the Lord their God’; wherefore ‘the Lord rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted them, and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until He had cast them out of His sight’ (2 Kings 17:18-20).
Nor was this national rebellion and apostasy ever repented of. For Christ declared concerning the generation of His day that they would fill up the measure of their fathers, and would bring upon themselves the wrath of God to the uttermost (Mat. 23:29-36). And this verdict was again stated by Paul a short time before the final storm of judgment burst upon them (1 Th. 2:14-16).
Close attention should be given to the last prophecy of Moses (Deut. 28-32) because of the clear light it throws upon the subject of our present inquiry. It foretells the history of the children of Israel, down to the very end, showing that it would be a history of continued apostasy and rebellion, and of stubborn refusal to hear the voice of Jehovah by His servants the prophets; and it declares with marvellous exactitude and fullness of detail what the end of that nation was to be (Deut. 28:49-68). This has always been counted, by all who have given attention to it, as one of the greatest wonders of prophecy. For example, Keith on the Prophecies contains an instructive comment on this passage, from which I quote the following:
‘The commonwealth of Israel from its establishment to its dissolution subsisted for more than fifteen hundred years. In delivering their Law, Moses assumed more (much more) than the authority of a human legislator; for he asserted that he was invested with a divine commission; and he who founded their government foretold, notwithstanding the intervening of so many centuries, the precise manner of its overthrow.
‘While they were yet wanderers in the wilderness, without a city and without a home, Moses threatened them with the destruction of their cities and the desolation of their country. Even while they were viewing for the first time the land of Palestine, and victorious and triumphant, they were about to possess it, he represented the scene of desolation that it would present to their vanquished and enslaved posterity, on their final departure from it. Ere they themselves had entered it as enemies, he describes those enemies by whom their descendants were to be subjugated and dispossessed; though they were to arise from a very distant region, and though they did not appear till after a millenary and a half of years: “The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor show favour to the young’ etc. [quoting Deut. 28:49-52].
‘Each particular of this prophecy has met its full completion. The remote situation of the Romans, the rapidity of their march, the very emblem of their arms, their unknown language and warlike appearance, the indiscriminate cruelty they manifested toward old and young, could not have been represented in more descriptive terms. The Roman Generals, Vespasian, Adrian and Julius Severus, removed with parts of their armies from Britain to Palestine, the extreme points of the Roman world.’
And this writer proceeds to show, as many other commentators have done, how, point by point, in the minutest detail, the judgments executed by the Romans in the years 66-70 of our era, were prescribed by Moses.
Now the matter of chief interest for our present purposes is that, from this national destruction by the Romans there was to be no recovery. And in this, the prophecy of Moses is in full accord with that of Jesus Christ, recorded in Matthew 24 and Luke 21. For Moses said: ‘God will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and you shall be plucked from off the land wither thou goest to possess it. And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth even to the other’ (Deut. 28:63,64). This, according to this prophecy, was to be the end of their history as a nation under that covenant.
Nor is there any promise of God, by any later prophet, of recovery for the earthly nation from this final destruction and dispersion at the hands of the Romans. For an attentive reading of the prophecies concerning ‘Israel,’ ‘Zion,’ and ‘Jerusalem,’ leads to the conclusions that such of these as are yet to be fulfilled relate to the heavenly people, country, and city, to which respectively those names properly belong; and that all prophecies of recovery intended for ‘Israel after the flesh’ (1 Cor. 10:18) were completely fulfilled in and after the return from the Babylonian captivity.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A RIGHT UNDERSTANDING OF THESE PROPHECIES
Some may think it a matter a small consequence whether the prophecies of future blessing and dominion for ‘Israel’ apply to the earthly or to the heavenly people. But not so; for the matter affects the whole subject of salvation and the hope of the gospel. It needs to be settled, and settled according to the Scriptures, in order that the gospel itself may be understood and its work properly accomplished. For so long as another hope, that is to say ‘another gospel’ (upon which, be it noted, the only anathema of the New Testament is laid, Gal. 1:8-9) is presented for a section of the human race (i.e. the scattered descendants of Jacob) and that a hope of earthly character, just so long, and to that extent, will the work of the gospel itself be obscured. It was so at the beginning, when the fixed notion of a restoration of the earthly greatness of Israel made the Jewish people the implacable enemies of the gospel, and of the Christ of the gospel, who is also the Christ of prophecy.
Therefore I am impelled to insist in the strongest way, and to call upon all friends of the gospel to do the same, that there is but one hope, one gospel, one salvation, even as there is but one Saviour for all men. Israel after the flesh was a nation under the Law. Under the Law, promises were given them, all those promises being expressly conditioned upon their obedience to the Law. Judgments were denounced upon them as penalties for disobedience, which judgments mounted up to the end of their nation, if their disobedience should be persistent – as it was.
And now the Law has been superseded by the gospel, with its ‘better hope.’ The economy of the Law, with all its shadows – people, land, city, temple, priesthood, sacrifices – has been set aside, and forever. Therefore, it is needful, and is due to the glory of the gospel, and of Him who died and rose again in order that all men might have the blessings of the gospel, that it should be clearly established and ceaselessly proclaimed that there is one hope, and only one hope, for all mankind. For there is no room in the purposes of God for another hope for any, along with ‘the hope of the Gospel’. Whatever promises were attached to the Law were all conditional; and all have now been forfeited and annulled. Its curses were what the nation earned for itself; and hence there is, in this dispensation of grace, but one way of escape from the curse of the Law, and that is by accepting the mercy which God freely offers to all men through ‘Jesus Christ of the seed of David raised from the dead’ (2 Tim. 2:7).
THE KINGDOM FORETOLD BY MOSES
It is a remarkable fact that Moses foretold, in this last prophecy, that the children of Israel would set a king over them; and he also foretold what would be the consequences (Deut. 28:36). That wicked act on their part was to be the culmination of apostasy; for it meant the repudiation of the sovereignty of Jehovah. We have His own word for this; for He said to Samuel, when commanding that prophet to give them their desire: ‘They have not rejected thee; but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them’ (1 Sam. 8:7). That kingdom therefore was not ‘the kingdom of God,’ preached by John and Christ. So far from its being the kingdom of God, the truth is that its establishment involved the setting aside of the kingdom of God. And it was not ‘the kingdom of heaven,’ for what the people demanded was a kingdom of earthly character, ‘like all the nations’. It is strange indeed, therefore, that any Christian expositor should regard the proclamation of Christ and His forerunner as the announcement of the restoration of that kingdom, born of apostasy and rebellion; and the more so after God had plainly spoken concerning it, saying, ‘I gave thee a king in Mine anger, and took him away in My wrath’ (Hos. 13:11).
Moreover, this ending of that odious kingdom in precisely what Moses had foretold long before it came into existence. For his words were, ‘The Lord shall bring you, and you king which you shall set over you, unto a nation which neither you nor you fathers have known’ (v. 36). That, of course, was the Babylonian captivity. The kingdom ended then, but not the nation. And in agreement with this historical fact, the prophecy of Moses goes on to speak of the subsequent experience of the nation, as an experience of continued servitude to, and oppression by, other nations. It shows too that the post-captivity period was to be an era in which they should have, not peace and plenty in their land, but dearth, distress, and various other miseries and afflictions (vv. 37-48). The fact that Moses speaks of the continued existence of the nation after the Babylonian captivity supports the belief that his prophecy gives the history of the nation down to its very end. From this alone we have warrant for the conclusion that from the national destruction wrought by the Romans there was to be no recovery.
That, of course, was not the view of the Jewish teachers, who, ‘because they knew not the voices of the prophets’ (Acts 13:27), and because their thoughts and desires were carnal, interpreted the promises as pertaining to a kingdom of the very same sort as their forefathers had demanded of Samuel – one ‘like all the nations.’