The True Israel

People sat scattered across the sofas and armchairs in my living room, Bibles open. We were wrapping up two years of studying the Torah together. The room felt thick with both accomplishment and unfinished business, like like we had reached a summit only to realize there was another massive ridge beyond it.

Then someone finally asked the question that we had been circling for weeks—maybe months:

“Okay, I get that this is about ancient Israel. I get that the Torah is their story. But where are these people today? Who is the true Israel? Who are these people now?”

It was an important and heartfelt question, and one that has seen heated debate by popular commentators. I swallowed, and opened my Bible to Romans 9, trying my best to help a room full of Christians make sense of a letter we’ve so often treated like a theology textbook. But as I began to guide us through the passage, something unexpected happened.

I felt anguish.

Paul’s words “not all Israel is Israel,” have come to mean so many different things and unleashed devastating outcomes he never intended. While the question itself was good and asked by someone sincerely searching for an answer, the fact that we even have to ask it left me deeply bothered me.

I was grieved that I—a Gentile follower of Jesus, disconnected from any Jewish community—was the one trying to answer it. What right do I have?

It doesn’t matter who I say Israel is. It matters who God says Israel is—and who the Jewish people themselves say they are. I felt that absence of a Jewish voice so sharply. But since I had no better option, I read Romans 9:2 aloud, feeling every word of Paul in my bones.

“I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.”

— Romans 9:2

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The Tears Behind Romans

One of the most theological books in the New Testament contains a guttural lament.

Behind Paul’s careful reasoning stands a man with tears running down his face. A Jew born into Israel’s story, he now watched many of his own people reject the Messiah he believed was promised to them. The pain ran so deep that Paul said he would trade his own salvation if it could mean their redemption.

Romans, for all its theology, is still a letter—written to real people by a real person at a real moment in history. Like my small group, the believers in Rome were mostly Gentiles. Years earlier, Emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from the city (around AD 49), scattering the Jews and Jewish followers of Jesus. By the time Paul wrote, the Roman house churches were Gentile-majority communities. That shift shaped how they saw themselves in God’s plan. They wondered, was God done with the Jews who had been run out of town?

So when Paul confronts this and asks, “Has God’s word failed?” (Rom. 9:6), he’s not condemning Israel’s disobedience. He’s defending God’s faithfulness in the face of Israel’s unbelief.

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The Famous Line

“For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.” — Romans 9:6

Few lines in the New Testament have shaped Christian theology more—and perhaps few have been more misunderstood.

Over time, many interpretations have taken root:

• “Ethnic Israel isn’t the true Israel; the Church is.”

• “The modern state of Israel is different than the biblical nation of Israel. The true Israel is spiritual, believers in Christ.”

• “Israel is a symbol of God’s people—Christians.”

• “The true Israel is a lost group, scattered among the nations—not the Jewish people today.”

And on the sayings go. Together, these kinds ideas form what’s known as Replacement Theology—the belief that faith in Jesus replaces Israel’s covenantal election.

Toward the end of the first century, the Jew/Gentile house-churches in the Roman world became increasingly Gentile-majority. Over time, and for a variety of reasons, these Gentiles began to reinterpret Israel’s story as their own, recasting the Hebrew Scriptures through a distinctly Christian lens. Gradually, this led to a theology that redirected Israel’s promises to the Church—until “true Israel” came to mean believers in Jesus, and the Jewish people were seen as rejected, replaced, or set aside.

This shift left a deep interpretive scar that the Church has struggled to move past. Even today, most of us have inherited a story that strips of Israel of her biblical identity, and that has affected nearly every area of modern life and faith.

Our reasoning assumes Israel’s covenant identity depends on spiritual performance or political ideologies rather than divine promise. Yet Paul’s whole argument in Romans 9–11 rejects that idea.

Paul’s line, “Not all Israel is Israel,” doesn’t pit Israel against the Church. In his day, there was no “Church” to oppose Israel.

Instead, Paul was distinguishing between Israel—the unbelieving majority—and Israel—the faithful remnant within. Throughout Israel’s history, a faithful remnant preserved the covenant while others rebelled (see Elijah in 1 Kings 19, Isa. 10:22, Deut. 30:1–6).

The contrast Paul refers to is within Israel, not between Israel and the Church, or Israel and some other group. When Paul grieved over Israel, he wasn’t lamenting the faithful remnant but the unbelieving majority of his own people, the same covenant people still scattered among the nations and within the land today.

His hope was not in human persuasion or missionary effort, but in God’s faithfulness to redeem them. Israel’s story, in Paul’s view, is unfinished, but not forsaken.

That’s the part Christians so easily miss. It seems we have so easily allowed our doctrines and geopolitics to define Israel, rather than take God’s word for what he says about them.

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Who Israel Says She Is

That’s why I felt anguish that day in my living room. I have no right to answer the question.

For too long, Christians like me have done most of the talking about Israel. We interpret her Scriptures, stories, and prophecies. We define her identity, usually without hearing from the people to whom the story actually belongs. The Jewish people wrote and preserved the Scriptures we stake our lives on. Maybe we ought to listen to what they have to say about them, before forming our own conclusions.

If Paul’s words about the remnant are true, then that remnant still exists today.

So rather than simply explain what Paul meant in this article, I want to let someone who embodies Paul’s message do the talking.

My friend Matt Davis is a Jewish follower of Jesus and co-founder of The Jewish Road. He carries this tension in his own life. Matt feels the deep joy of knowing Messiah, a pastoral love for the Christian church, and the ache of longing for his people to know the Messiah too. Like Paul, Matt believes Israel’s story doesn’t end in rejection, but in redemption.

Here’s how Matt explains who the Jewish people are and what hope still burns for Israel’s future:

“The Jewish people, including those living in Israel today, are still part of that covenant family God chose through Abraham. But I understand why the question [of Jewish identity] comes up.

Some people assume that because most Jews today don’t believe in Jesus (about 98%), they must have forfeited their status as God’s chosen people. Others have heard conspiracy theories, that the modern State of Israel is just a political project, even a plot funded by wealthy families like the Rothschilds. Still others look at the return of Jewish people from all over the world and say, “How can these scattered, mixed-heritage people possibly be the same as the Israelites in the Bible? Too much time has passed. The diaspora has blurred it all.”

From there, it’s an easy leap for some to say, “Well, if the question of Jewish identity is that muddled, maybe the only real answer is that all the promises God made to the Jewish people now belong to a ‘new Israel’ - the church.”

But before you accept that conclusion, you have to ask: If the Jews living in Israel today are not the ‘real’ Jews…then who is?

History itself seems to have no confusion on this point. From the early church’s persecution to the Crusades, from the pogroms of Europe to the Holocaust, and even to the attacks of October 7, the Jewish people have carried a unique mark since the days of Abraham. If they are not the covenant people, why has the enemy - whether spiritual or human - been so consistent in identifying them as such? The Jewish people have been singled out again and again as those Jews, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

God’s covenant was never based on flawless genealogy or perfect faith. It was based on His own promise. Throughout history, Israel has been exiled, scattered, and regathered - just as the prophets said would happen (Isaiah 43:5–6; Ezekiel 36:24). That scattering didn’t dissolve the covenant, it fulfilled the very warnings God gave through Moses. And the regathering we see today isn’t a random political accident - it’s part of the long, slow return that God Himself said He would accomplish.

As for unbelief, Paul is clear: “As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake, but as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Romans 11:28). 

The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. Unbelief may break fellowship, but it cannot break the covenant.

So when you see Jewish people in the land of Israel today - whether they came from Ethiopia, Russia, America, or Yemen - you are looking at living evidence that God keeps His word. The covenant conversation is not about who holds the most pure DNA or whether the state of Israel’s politics are perfect. It’s about the faithfulness of the God who made an everlasting promise and has not gone back on it.[1]”

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Listening to the Voice of the Remnant

Matt’s words humble me, “Unbelief may break fellowship, but it cannot break the covenant.” I spent many years believing the deception because I was too naive and complacent in my own faith to go meditate in the Scriptures for myself. I believed because of my faith in Jesus I was “in,” and that was all I cared about. I tuned out in Romans. I did not heed the voice of the remnant God has so mercifully preserved. I read Paul, but I didn’t listen to Paul.

That was terribly wrong.

Now, I sit in repentance. God has been so merciful to bring me along. People like Matt have been so kind. They’ve helped me grow and welcomed me to the table to learn with them. But anguish still washes over me.

I grieve because I didn’t know God’s promises to Israel were still alive.

Paul grieved because he knew God’s promises to Israel were still alive.

Matt grieves, and also rejoices, because he knows those promises still reach into the present.

As Gentile believers, we must learn to carry that grief with the faithful remnant like Matt—not by speaking over Israel’s story, but by learning to honor the root that supports us.

Romans 9–11 is not an academic puzzle. It is a window into God’s heart.
A heart that refuses to abandon his people.
A heart that gathers the nations without discarding the firstborn son.
A heart that binds Jew and Gentile into one olive tree rooted in Abraham’s covenant.

We must find the humility to hear story of Israel as told by the faithful remnant today. To believe in who God says Israel is.

The Messiah of Israel will complete what he began—here, in the world he made, among the people he chose, for the sake of every nation he longs to bless.

This is the hope we stake our lives on. This is the gospel of the kingdom going out to the nations.

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Up Next: Matt’s words, and the questions that emerged in our small group, moved me so deeply that I knew the conversation couldn’t end there. I asked him to write a letter sharing what was on his heart for the non-Jewish American church. His words are honest, powerful, and carry a message we can’t afford to ignore. I’ll be publishing his letter here next week. Stay tuned and subscribe to stay up-to-date.

Notes

[1] The Jewish Road, Are the Jews in Israel Today Still the People of Promise?, accessed December 10, 2025, https://thejewishroad.com/blog/are-the-jews-in-israel-today-still-the-people-of-promise.