The Irrevocable Calling
Why Israel still matters—and the Church must care.
“Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are continually before me.”
— Isaiah 49:16
Every Christian has an answer to the question of Israel—even if they’ve never thought about it.
Silence is an answer.
Indifference is an answer.
The erasure, absorption, or recategorization of Israel are all answers.
And history shows us that the Church’s answers, regardless of how begign or “Christian” they appear, have never been neutral.
The question of Israel is not a political problem or a modern distraction that will fade away. I believe it will be the issue that decides the future of the American Church. Israel is a test case—the proof of God’s faithfulness. As the physician to Frederick the Great of Prussia once observed, “the proof that God exists is that the Jews exist.” What we believe about Israel reveals what we truly believe about God: whether he keeps his word when it costs him something—or whether he pivots on a whim, reallocating his promises and rewriting his definition of fidelity.
Zion is the central conflict of a story that runs from Abraham’s tent to David’s throne to the day the Son of Man rides the clouds. If we lose this thread, we do not merely misread a few passages. We mislocate the gospel itself.
The year 2026 will prove pivotal for the Church and the world. I write this piece with both trembling and hope: to call us back to the root that supports us, to the promises God swore by himself, to the humility apostles demanded of the nations, and to the awe that rises when we finally understand: the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29).
What is the Controversy of Zion?
The controversy of Zion is Gentile strife over—and divine jealousy for—the land and people of Israel, and the city of Jerusalem.
Isaiah names it bluntly:
“The LORD has a day of vengeance, a year of recompense for the controversy of Zion” (Isa. 34:8).
Jeremiah says Jerusalem will be “a cup that makes all the nations stagger,” a heavy stone that injures those who try to lift it (Jer. 25; Zech. 12).
Why such disproportionate fury over such a small strip of earth? Because God attached his name there.
From the beginning, the nations have resisted this divine attachment. Scripture records a long history of rulers and empires who sought, by force or by strategy, to pry God’s promises from this people and this land: Pharaoh, the Canaanite kings, Assyria and Babylon, Antiochus in the days remembered at Hanukkah, Caesar and Herod under Rome.
History has not outgrown this pattern. The names change; the aim does not.
Whatever the language—empire, security, progress, resistance—the goal of the hostility is always the same: to erase the Jewish people or to evacuate Jerusalem and the land itself of any future promised by God.
Many of us inherited a theology that prizes people while sidelining land, but Scripture does not make that move. In the Bible, land is not neutral backdrop—it is holy space. God set apart a specific strip of earth and a specific city as the stage on which he would reveal his character, enact his covenant purposes, and ultimately display his victory over the powers of evil.
That land is Zion, and that city is Jerusalem.
Scripture is not sentimental about this conflict. It does not predict a painless path to peace, nor does it imagine that diplomacy alone can resolve a hatred rooted deeper than politics. Instead, it promises something better—and far more unsettling: a divine-human king who will settle the controversy himself.
Election: The Offense and the Glory
The controversy over Zion is not a random accident of modern geopolitics that we simply happen to be alive to witness. It exists precisely because God’s choice of Israel still stands. He elected a people and a place through which he would reveal himself to the world.
The rage of the nations is the evidence of that choice.
We often stumble at the word election because we personalize it before letting Scripture define it. Biblically, election is not God playing favorites with isolated souls—it is God choosing one out of the many for the sake of the many. He chose Abraham’s family to bless all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1–3). He attached land, Torah, worship, and promises to Israel so that his mercy and blessing could spill into the nations. And he raised up Israel’s Messiah—Jesus of Nazareth—to embody, represent, and secure those promises.
Paul feels the strain of this mystery in his bones:
“I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish… I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Messiah for the sake of my brothers… They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises… and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Messiah” (Rom. 9:2–5).
Tradition has often treated Romans 9–11 as a prelude to erasing Israel—or, more commonly in dispensational theology, temporarily setting her aside. Paul says nothing of the sort. These are the words of a man gripped by the conviction that God has not abandoned—nor postponed—what he swore.
Paul’s thunderclap about Israel comes in Romans 11:
“As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake; but as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (vv. 28–29).
Irrevocable—not canceled, not fulfilled in Christ, transferred to another, and certainly not spiritualized away. Paul believes Israel’s present hardness is partial and temporary for the sake of God’s mercy toward the Gentiles, and that their future mercy is guaranteed by God’s fidelity (Rom. 11:25–26). If God can discard Israel, none of us are safe. But he cannot—and he will not.
Paul trusts that mercy that grafted Gentiles in will graft God’s people in again. Grace joins our story with the Israels’; it doesn’t erase her.
This is why Paul’s “no distinction” texts level the ground of access to salvation (Rom. 10:12; Gal. 3:28). The nations are to find life in Israel’s story while retaining the ethnic distinctions God has creatively ordained. Gentiles enter the covenant family by faith in its mediator, the Messiah, just as Jews trust the promises he upholds. But God’s mercy does not erase the distinct identities he has woven into his human creations. Male and female remain. Jew and Gentile remain. The ecclesia of the nations does not become “the new Israel.”
We have Jesus, we tell ourselves—we do not need Israel. We have heaven—we do not need the land. We have grace—we do not need the Torah. These errors, by whatever names they travel under, have haunted the Church for centuries. Their fruit is bitter: arrogance toward all things Jewish, contempt for God’s firstborn, disregard for the land, city, and people he set apart for himself, and fertile soil in which antisemitism has repeatedly taken root—even in the Christian West.
Paul’s warning could not be sharper: “Do not be arrogant toward the branches… remember: it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you” (Rom. 11:18).
Sadly, Paul’s fears about Gentile pride have come true. Even among loving Christians, the belief that Israel still matters—that the land and people are chosen, and the fulfillment of God’s promises through them central to our hope in Jesus—receives almost no attention. And so, whether by our outright rejection or silent complacency, we join the controversy of Zion ourselves.
The Timeline of Mercy—and the Cost
Scripture names a season when the controversy of Zion crests like a black wave: “the time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jer. 30:7).
The texts are not evasive. The Jewish people are the “you” in Jesus’s Mount of Olives discourse; Jerusalem is the epicenter; the nations rage with wrath against her, and God, like a mighty warrior, arises.
I do not write this lightly. After the centuries of European violence and the horrors of our own day, the claim that more trouble lies ahead is an unbearable one to admit. I struggle with the ethics of such a message. But faithfulness to Scripture need not end in despair. It produces watchfulness and compassion.
The same passages that speak of Jacob’s trouble also promise ultimate deliverance:
“At that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book” (Dan. 12:1).
And Jesus anchors his warnings of this time with great hope:
“When these things begin to take place, straighten up and lift your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:28).
As believers in God’s promises, we should not be surprised if we come under fire for this confession. God will redeem the land of Israel and the Jewish people, vindicate his covenant, and reign from Zion through his Messiah. Persecution will not come to Christians because we love Jesus abstractly—no one is killed for being nice to their neighbor. It will come because of our identification with Israel, our belief in her vindication, and our allegiance to her Messiah.
Revelation 12 portrays this conflict with unsettling clarity. When the dragon cannot destroy the Messiah, he turns his fury on the woman—a clear allusion to Israel—and then on “the rest of her offspring,” those “who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 12:17). These are the Jewish people, set apart by Torah and covenant, and also are those who bear witness to the gospel Jesus proclaimed—the reign of God’s kingdom and the restoration of his land and people.
To confess that gospel publicly puts our lives where our theology is. Faithfulness means loving what God loves and standing with the people and land at the heart of his Messiah’s mission.
It’s easy to believe in God’s irrevocable calling of Israel when your heart is anchored in his Word. But standing by that same calling when you have a lukewarm knowledge of the Bible and have kneeled to the spirit of the age is impossible.
When we know what Scripture says about Israel and the covenant Jesus sealed with his own blood, we can love both the Jewish people and their enemies rightly. With our prayers, our resources, and actions, we can live as though God meant what he said—and endure without surprise when that love costs us something.
Why Israel Still Matters—And Why the Church Must Care
Israel still matters because God’s choice of them is irrevocable. The survival of the Jewish people is a living testimony to God’s ongoing covenant fidelity. Paul dares to say that Israel’s reconciliation will mean “life from the dead” (Rom. 11:15). The resurrection that began in one Jewish body will blossom into a resurrection that fills the earth. The land of Israel and the Jewish people remain the undeniable linchpin of God’s redemptive plan—a plan that graciously, includes us all.
If the Church is to stand in the days ahead, she must recalibrate to this message.
We must recover our roots—not as a sentimental return, but as an act of obedience. Left in our current apathy, we are easily discipled by the age, carried along by every persuasive current of respectable-sounding doctrine we’ve never actually held against the standard of God’s irrecovable promises. We become Cain—resentful of God’s favor toward our brother, offended by the Father’s feast for the son who returns. Or we become Jacob, scheming and grasping for a blessing we were never excluded from.
God’s choice of Israel not about us; it is for us. It is about the God who keeps his word—to Abraham and his descendants, to Israel and the nations, to Zion and the ends of the earth—through Jesus the Messiah, the crucified and risen Son who will rule from Zion with a rod of iron (Ps. 2; 110).
I believe a great sifting is upon us. It will not be decided by theological debates or peace treaties in the Middle East, but by the question of Zion. Will we in the Church yawn with the nations—“It’s just Zion; no one cares” (Jer. 30:17)—or will we become watchmen who do not keep silent until he establishes Jerusalem and makes her a praise in the earth (Isa. 62:6–7)?
Jesus’s words in Revelation are a sharp warning to his followers in a generation on the brink of the redemption:
To Ephesus: return to first love—and remember from where you have come.
To Smyrna: be faithful unto death.
To Pergamum and Thyatira: refuse the seductive speech that normalizes covenant infidelity and takes what belongs to someone else for greedy gain.
To Sardis: wake up; strengthen what remains while it’s still there.
To Philadelphia: hold fast to the messianic confession.
To Laodicea: repent of indifference—choose who Jesus is. Know him, or he will not know you.
Our Master does not call his followers to activism but to faithful allegiance to the God he represents—the God of Abraham. Our posture toward Israel must end not in Christian pride or political zeal, but in praise to God. The kind of worship that steadies our hands to pray, to stand, to suffer if necessary, and to hope without shame.
Israel still matters because God is faithful.
He has engraved them on his hands; he will not forsake them. Until then, we love our neighbor and hold to the testimony of Jesus—the Jewish Messiah, the Cloud-Rider and king whose scepter goes out from Zion.
And we whisper the oldest Christian prayer, which is also Israel’s greatest longing:
Come, Lord Jesus.
Who Do You Say I Am?
What did Jesus mean when He asked, “Who do you say that I am?”
This article examines how personal versions of Jesus can distort the gospel and why understanding the Messiah through the Old Testament is essential for a grounded faith.
Who Do You Say That I Am?
In the Gospels, Jesus presses his disciples with a question that still echoes today: “Who do you say that I am?”
It wasn’t a question for strangers. It was for those who had walked with him, eaten with him, witnessed miracles, and heard him teach. They had plenty of material to work with. And yet, his question cuts deeper than facts. It searched for loyalty, recognition, and faith.
It asks whether the Jesus they thought they knew was the Messiah he claimed to be.
I have a friend who lives in that question every day. He searches for Jesus everywhere, unsure what to believe about him. His beliefs are a murky mixture. There’s some liturgy from childhood that feels empty now, some fragments from passionate sermons, some cultural clichés about Jesus as nothing more than a moral example. He weighs them all against each other, confused and unsatisfied, groping for something real. He wants a straight answer.
Well-meaning Christians tell him to just believe. Jesus loves you. He died for you. He wants to be Lord of your life. But what “Lord of your life” means looks different for every person he meets. The standard is all over the place. Some assure him that everything good is from God, every bad thing from Satan, and that we all have little agency in between. Nature whispers a different story—beauty, goodness, pulsing life—but he wonders: is that God, or something else?
So he is left searching, repeating the question: Who do you say Jesus is?
He sees only the versions others offer—the Jesus they’ve pieced together from their own journeys. And since no two versions look the same, he’s left to build his own collage, with no trustworthy standard to measure it against.
Worse, it has left him under the impression that Jesus is whoever someone says he is.
The Jesus We Build
When we describe Jesus to others, our testimony often reflects how we first encountered him. And while that’s not unimportant, it’s crucial to recognize that it’s not necessarily the same as who he claims to be.
• To the beggar, he’s a provider.
• To the addict, a chain-breaker.
• To the brokenhearted, a miracle-worker.
• To the lonely, a friend.
• To the confused, an answer.
• To the desperate, a way-maker.
• To the abused, a savior.
And he is all these things. Our Lord is deeply relational, attentive to the smallest hair on our heads. Our personal testimonies matter deeply to the world. They are first-hand accounts of the goodness of God in our lives.
But if that is all we ever say—if these are the only stories we tell—we shrink Jesus into a reflection of our own needs. Our witness becomes a patchwork stitched from wounds and proof-texts: bits of comfort, snippets of rescue, fragments of help. None of them are wrong, but few present the full figure that Scripture gives.
Faith can’t rest on a Jesus defined only by our experiences mixed with some popular stories about him.
Our witness may begin with our own story, but it must grow into the story Jesus told about himself—or else we end up worshiping our own reflection in a pool of a million others.
And what does that say to those watching? When they peer in, they don’t see the Messiah of Scripture—they see a different Jesus for everyone.
The Messiah We Ignore
Most of us read the Gospels as if the story of Jesus begins in Matthew 1, climaxes in John 3:16, and resolves at the empty tomb. But the Gospels were never meant to stand alone. They were written as a radical claim—eyewitness proof that this man named Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah the Hebrew Scriptures had been promising all along.
Yet, how many of us could honestly say we could explain what Messiah even means? Could we outline a biblical job description of the Messiah’s tasks and responsibilities? Not a Jesus-colored mockup, but the real, robust portrait the Old Testament actually gives?
Jesus could.
He saw himself through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. He explained his mission through books most of us barely know and seldom read. Like every Jewish boy, he wasn’t born with the Scriptures preloaded into his mind. He learned them through sitting in synagogue, listening to his parents tell the stories, sing the psalms, and celebrate the holy days. Year after year, the words of Moses, Isaiah, David, and Jeremiah poured into his ears. He prayed the shema. He repeated the laws. He wrestled with the promises. He heard of Abraham’s covenant, David’s throne, God’s dwelling in the midst of his people.
Those words didn’t just instruct him. They shaped him. Jesus used the Hebrew Scriptures to understand who he was and why the world needed the Messiah these Scriptures outlined. So when he stood up on shabbat in Galilee and declared, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the captives and to declare the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18), he knew exactly what he was saying.
But do we? Who were the captives he had in mind? What “year of favor” was he referring to? Could we answer with the same clarity his first audience would have known, let alone the clarity Jesus himself had?
That day in the synagogue, Jesus wasn’t improvising. He was stepping into an office the Scriptures had described for centuries. That is the Messiah he claimed to be—not only our personal Savior, but the Anointed One with a mission that stretches beyond a sacrificial death.
A Thin Gospel
If we’re honest, the Old Testament Messiah does not neatly fit into the standard gospel message. A descendant of Abraham ruling on David’s throne from Jerusalem? How exactly do we present that as good news to our lost friends asking the hard questions? Truth be told, we are unprepared to. Which is why so often, we don’t.
Instead, we present the Jesus we think we know and leave the rest to pastors, churches, or theologians to fill in. We’re all sinners, and sinners need Jesus. That message feels solid enough. Messiah of the Old Testament? That can wait.
But the gospel stripped of its messianic foundation is frail. It may soothe for a moment, but it will not withstand the pressures of a darkening world.
Who Do You Say He Is?
And so question presses in again: Who do you say I am?
Have we leaned too long on a Jesus shaped only by our own journeys, pain points, and Christian imaginations? Do we actually live as though he is who he says he is?
The Messiah is not a neutral figure. His role comes with specific tasks, responsibilities, and expectations that will cut across our traditions and challenge our culture. The kingdom he proclaimed was never meant to be reduced to mere kindness or spiritual platitudes. It was the kingdom promised to Eve, to Abraham, to David, and declared by the Prophets. A kingdom already breaking in through Jesus’s spirit living in his followers, yet not fully here.
The world is not drifting towards peace. The days grow darker, more polarized, more hostile. And people who don’t know Jesus can sense it. My friend sees right through the thin claim that “Jesus saves.”
The prophets described the coming kingdom as labor pains—waves growing sharper, stronger, and closer together until God’s reign invades the land through the Messiah he anointed. This is the story Scripture actually anticipates, even if it’s a story we haven’t always had ears to hear.
To follow Jesus in such times requires growing in the knowledge of the Messiah he claimed to be. That means adopting a messianic stance toward Scripture—reading the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings the way he did. Most of us were never taught to do that. No wonder we avoid his question. It’s easier to stick with the Jesus we’ve inherited or experienced than to measure our version of him against the Messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures.
But this can change. Jesus invites us to make his story part of our own. And he is faithful to open our eyes and help us understand it.
At the Mountain’s Foot
Right now, our Lord stands at the right hand of the Father, enthroned on the heavenly mountain, veiled from our sight. Are we waiting in trust, filling our lamps with the oil of the Word, ready to recognize him when he comes? Do we know him well enough to describe his story to others—not only a “Savior who forgives sins,” but the Messiah who reigns, who rides the clouds, who will restore all broken things?
Today, believers stand at the mountain’s foot with two options. We can lift our eyes to the Messiah Scripture foretells. Or we can bow to an image of Jesus pieced together from gospel fragments, personal pain, and cultural tradition.
Who do you say that I am?
Your answer doesn’t change who he is. But it does shape the gospel you live, the Jesus you proclaim, and the hope you offer a world still searching for the truth.
Who do you say that he is?
This piece is the first of my Four Anchors series. Next, we’ll turn to God’s enduring promises to Abraham. Until then, may this anchor hold you steady in a world adrift.