THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

234 The Hope of Israel: What Is It?
people" (Tit. 2:14, I Pet. 2:9) just as David's line is
maintained and perpetuated in Jesus Christ the Son
of David risen from the dead (see also Mat. 21:43,
where our Lord speaks of the new "nation")
. But it is
simply an impossibility that the prophecy that the seed
of Israel should never "cease from being a nation"
should apply to the natural seed of Jacob; for they
have ceased from being a nation since the destruction
of Jerusalem in A. D. 70.
Further the verses quoted from Jeremiah promised
that God would not "cast off all the seed of Israel, for
And God has not "cast off all
all that they have done."
the seed of Israel" a fact which Paul is most careful
to point out in Romans 11 :l-5. For there we read that
God "has not cast away His people which He foreknew,"
but has accepted "the remnant according to the
election of grace." And the apostle goes on to show
in the same chapter, that these, with believing Gentiles
"graffed in," constitute the "good olive tree," the
true Israel of God.
In view of all this, which it needs no special gift
of spiritual intelligence to discern, any one who cites
Jeremiah 31 as a prophecy of the future restoration
of the natural Israel as a nation is bound to show clearly
where that prediction is to be found in it. But the
article I am reviewing contains not a word of explanation
to that effect. The writer thereof merely quotes
along with it Jeremiah 33:25, 26 (where the prophet
foretells, as he does in various other passages, the return
of the Jews from the then approaching Babylonian
captivity), and then makes the following comment:
"Thanks, Jeremiah, we know that you have much more to
say that was given you from the Lord; but this is to the point
and quite sufficient."