Episode 481: Why Our End Times Theology Matters, Part Four--Modern and Ancient Israel

Sometimes church folk envision complicated timelines of events they believe must happen in world history in order for Jesus to come back (we explored this kind of thinking in our first episode of this series), and often those timelines involve assumptions about events pertaining to the modern nation-state of Israel. And sometimes, religious voices will take verses from the Scriptures originally about the ancient descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and interpret them to mean that anything the modern state of Israel does must be God's will--even though the prophets often critiqued the actions of ancient Israel's kings and society. So what are we to make of this? Is the modern nation-state of Israel identical with the ancient people of God? What about the large Jewish population all over the whole world who do not reside in Israel? And how can Christians avoid a theology that just reduces other people groups to being props or chess pieces in their schemes for end-times scenarios? These are some of the questions we'll explore on this week's episode of Crazy Faith Talk!