The Irrevocable Calling
“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: