Why Israel Is Unique
As far as the nations of this world are concerned, Israel stands apart. Scripture teaches that the nations were “made [not created] from one blood” and so may be, and quite often are, only here temporarily, depending on how they conform to God’s conditions. He has “determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings” (Acts 17:26).
Some nations, like some animals, no longer exist, such as the Hittites, Sumerians, Scythians, and others. New nations have been made, such as the United States; and there will actually be nations in the new earth (Rev. 21:24). Possibly those nations will have earned God’s blessing as nations because of their kindness towards God’s special nation, Israel. (See Genesis 12:2–3; Zechariah 14:16.)
Of all the nations God has formed throughout history, assigning them bounds and times, Israel (with its capital of Jerusalem) is the only nation on Earth said to have been created and therefore certain to last forever. Things that are made may disintegrate and die, but what God creates endures forever. (See “A Special Kind of Miracle,”)
For the Lᴏʀᴅ shall build up Zion; He shall appear in His glory. That a people yet to be created may praise the Lᴏʀᴅ (Ps. 102:16, 18).
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem as a rejoicing, and her people a joy (Isa. 65:18).
These wonderful promises refer not to the present people of Israel and the present Jerusalem, of course—for they and it are still dominated (like most of the other nations) by secular humanism and an evolutionary worldview. But the day is coming when “all Israel will be saved….‘The Deliverer will come out of Zion, and He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob’” (Rom. 11:26).
God, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, long ago promised Israel,
“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; For as the new heavens and the new earth which I will make shall remain before Me,” says the Lᴏʀᴅ, “so shall your descendants and your name remain” (Isa. 65:17; 66:22).
Like the first heaven and earth, God will both create and make the new heavens and earth, and “the holy city, New Jerusalem” (Rev. 21:2, cf. 10) will be its eternal capital city. The gates of the city will be inscribed with the names of Israel’s 12 tribes and its foundations with the names of Christ’s 12 apostles.
Israel has a glorious future. But there will also be other nations in the new earth (Rev. 21:24). In view of the fact that America, up to the present, at least, has been Israel’s best friend as a nation, we can hope that one of these will be our own beloved country.
