When we read the stories about Abraham (stretching as they do from Gen 12 to 25), we can have no doubt that he and his descendants are shown as specially blessed by God. "In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed," (Gen 12:3), "your descendants shall be as numerous as the stars," (Gen 15:5), "I will be God to you and to your offspring after you" (Gen 17:7), "by your offspring, all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves" (Gen 22:18). Abraham was "right with God" (Gen 15:6).
We Christians know that we are heirs to these promises. Paul goes to great lengths to explain that the word "heirs" is not to be taken literally. Abraham's heirs are not his physical descendants, but all those who share his faith (Rom 4:13-14). "If you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise." (Gal 3:29). It is faith that has put us "right with God" (Rom 3:26).
The New Testament was written at a time when Christians were very aware of their Jewish roots. God's promises were made first to the Jews, and then, by extension, to all nations. Both Jews and non-Jews, if they had faith, could share in the promises. So what should we, as Christians, make of God's other promise to Abraham, in Gen 17:8, "I will give to you all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding"?
The theme of a Promised Land is one which recurs both in the Old Testament and the New. (The phrase as such, surprisingly, never occurs in Scripture.) In the Old Testament, the promise remains just that - something in the future. The narratives in Genesis keep pointing out that Abraham and Isaac lived in Canaan as aliens, and Jacob (we sometimes forget that his other name was Israel) went and settled in Egypt, where for a time the milk was creamier and the honey sweeter.
Life in Egypt, we learn, became bitter, and God promises Moses to bring "my people...to a good and broad land, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites." But Moses never reaches this land, and when the Israelites under Joshua moved into Canaan, in spite of all the horrifying tales of ethnic cleansing which we can read in the books of Joshua and Judges, it seems that all through the time of the Kings, the many groups and tribes there lived peacefully together - too peacefully, at times, for we read of frequent cases of intermarriage and of idolatry.
The account in II Kings 23:26-27 portrays God as angered by the heathenism of King Manasseh (who ruled in the seventh century before Christ). Despite the repentance and reform under Manasseh's successor, Josiah, God's promise is withdrawn. "I will remove Judah from my sight..., and I will reject this city that I have chosen."
But God's promises remain. There are those who see this in the rebuilding of the Temple under Ezra and the religious revolt against Greek paganism under the Maccabees. For some of them, the founding of the World Zionist Organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, its unsuccessful attempts to set up a Jewish homeland in the Argentine and Uganda, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after 1918 and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine under the United Nations are a sign - but the Zionist movement was inspired by the Tsarist pogroms against the Jews, and the partition of Palestine by the death camps of Auschwitz, and how could anyone dare to say that they were part of God's plan?
The Christian view is different. God is indeed faithful, but Jesus was clear that the Temple would go. "True worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth," (John 4:23). And the Letter to the Hebrews makes clear that the promise - to us all, Jews and Christians alike - is of a heavenly homeland (Heb 11:13-16), not an earthly one. The new Jerusalem will indeed be a city of peace. But while the earthly one still remains, home to Jews, Christians, Muslims and those who do not believe, let us pray too for its peace.
HD