God's Chosen People

QUESTION: Why are the Israelites God's chosen people?

ANSWER:

God does not play favorites among His people, however, the Bible does tell us that God's chosen people are the Jewish race because they were the ONLY ones to obey Him in lieu of other gods.

Deuteronomy 7:6 says, "For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession." This does not mean they are automatically "saved" and will go to Heaven. In order to assurance of eternal life in heaven, one must believe in God's Son, Jesus. Because of God's Promise to redeem the Jews in the end times, Israel will turn to her Messiah and be saved. So, in the meantime, any believers in Jesus are "grafted in" and may partake of the Tree of Life.

What are the factors that were involved in God's selection of Israel?

• His instructions to mankind, as a whole, had been challenged by a united rebellion of the people against Him at Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), and He then forcibly confounded their languages and divided them into distinct nations.
  
  
• His promise of a coming Redeemer to reconcile a lost world to Himself required that God should become man some day and He would thus have to be born into a particular nation and people.
  
  Such a nation would have to be prepared, both by divine revelation and national experience, to be the nation through which the Savior would come.
  
  
• All of the nations formed as a result of the judgment at Babel were already in rebellion against God and unsuitable for this purpose.
  
  
• God, therefore, chose one man, Abraham, to establish a new nation through which "all families of the earth would be blessed."

Not only are the people of Israel special and God's chosen people, but the land is also special. In Deuteronomy 11:12, we read, "It is a land the LORD your God cares for; the eyes of the LORD your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end." God is working out Israel's salvation from the time of the Old Testament. He desired the Messiah to appear there, and that the church would be formed there.

He has a sound plan for His people and His land. In the next few years, most of the Jewish people in the world will actually live in the land of Israel, and today, we have seen much of that happening. Over a million new immigrants have returned home, and they have come from the north (former USSR) and south (Ethiopia) just as Isaiah from the Bible said they would. God is bringing about a profound spiritual change to the people, so God's eternal plan will then be worked out for Israel, for the Church, and for the world. It will be worked out in the physical land of Israel and with the people who have returned from all the nations of the earth. The end results will be an eternal age of peace and blessing for all mankind.