The True Israel of God: What Scripture Teaches About God’s Covenant People

If you came to the faith through a dispensational church that drew a sharp line between Israel and the Church, you were likely told that belief was a non-negotiable. I understand. Many of us sat under gifted preachers, men like John MacArthur, who taught us to love the Bible and take it seriously. My debt to him is real, and nothing in this article is written to dishonor him.

In my earlier post, Reformed and Amillennial: Five Reasons to Embrace Amillennialism, I laid out the biblical and confessional case for amillennialism. That piece generated questions, good ones, especially around the charge of “replacement theology” and what Reformed theology actually says about Israel. This post is the sequel.

What if the Bible itself refuses to draw the line where we were taught to draw it? What if the whole of Scripture, read on its own terms, reveals that the true Israel of God has never been defined by ethnic descent but by covenant union with Christ (Gal. 6:16)?

That’s my thesis, and it’s the historic confession of the Reformed church. This isn’t a position that requires reading anything into Scripture. It requires only that we let the Bible speak.

Christ as the True Israel

The New Testament makes an astonishing claim that changes everything: Jesus doesn’t merely fulfill Israel’s role; He is the true Israel. He’s the faithful Son where the nation of Israel was faithless, the obedient Servant where the people rebelled (Heb. 3:1–6).

When Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I called my son,” he applies a text about the nation of Israel directly to Jesus (Matt. 2:15).

This isn’t allegory. It’s typological fulfillment: Jesus recapitulates Israel’s history in His own person. He passes through the waters (Matt. 3:13–17), endures the wilderness (Matt. 4:1–11), and keeps every commandment the nation broke (Matt. 5:17).

Paul drives the point home: Abraham’s “offspring” (singular) is Christ (Gal. 3:16). The promises made to Abraham find their “Yes” not in a nation but in a Person (2 Cor. 1:20).

Every covenant blessing (land, seed, blessing to the nations) finds its fulfillment in Christ. If you’re looking for the fulfillment of these promises anywhere other than Christ, you’re missing the whole point of Scripture.

The Church as Abraham’s True Offspring

If Christ is the true Israel, then all who are united to Him by faith share in that identity. This is exactly what the apostles taught (Eph. 2:11–22), not as a plan B, but as the fulfillment of what God always intended.

Paul writes: “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:29).

Belonging to Abraham’s family has never been a matter of a person’s DNA. “Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” (Rom. 9:6). True circumcision is “a matter of the heart, by the Spirit” (Rom. 2:29), and Paul tells the Philippian believers (many of them Gentiles), “We are the circumcision” (Phil. 3:3). Calvin saw this unity stretching across the entire canon:

The covenant made with all the fathers is so far from differing from ours in reality and substance, that it is altogether one and the same: still the administration differs.¹

One covenant of grace, one covenant people, administered differently across the two testaments. That’s the heartbeat of covenant theology, and this truth changed how I read the entire Bible. Suddenly the whole canon read as one continuous story. Bavinck pressed the same point:

There is a difference between the Israel according to the flesh and the Spirit. The church of Christ is now the true seed of Abraham, the people and the Israel of God. Those among the Jews who reject the Christ are not the true Jews.²

And Berkhof drew the line as plainly as anyone:

Israel was the Church of the Old Testament and in its spiritual essence constitutes a unity with the Church of the New Testament.³

This isn’t a case of the Gentiles replacing the Jews and stealing their covenant promises. The true covenant people have always been defined by faith, not flesh (Rom. 4:11–16). The scope of the ingathering widens in the New Testament; the definition of the covenant people does not. But it goes even deeper than that. Bavinck observed that the Mosaic covenant itself was grounded in the earlier promise:

This covenant with the ancestors continues, even when later at Sinai it assumes another form. It is the foundation and core also of the Sinaitic covenant (Exod. 2:24; Deut. 7:8). The promise was not nullified by the law that came later (Gal. 3:17). The covenant with Israel was essentially no other than that with Abraham.⁴

One covenant of grace runs from Abraham through Moses to Christ (Heb. 13:20); the people of God were never redefined but always the covenant community, awaiting the Seed in whom the promise would be fulfilled.

Answering the Supersessionism Charge

At this point, someone will object: “Isn’t this replacement theology?” The label is emotionally and politically charged, and it deserves a careful answer. It’s one of the questions I heard the most after my amillennialism article, and I want to address it head-on.

Reformed theology does not teach that the Church ethnically replaces Israel. It teaches that Christ fulfills Israel’s covenant purpose, and that all who are in Him, Jew and Gentile alike, inherit every promise.

The category of “replacement” is itself foreign to covenant theology, because it assumes Israel was the final destination rather than Christ Himself. Kim Riddlebarger put it well: the New Testament writers spoke of the church in terms that the Old Testament could only apply to national Israel.⁵

Peter calls the church “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God” (1 Pet. 2:9); language drawn straight from Exodus 19:5–6. That’s not identity theft, it’s fulfillment. Bavinck drives it further:

Whatever the political future of Israel as a nation, the real ekklēsia, the people of God, transcends ethnic boundaries. The kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus is not a political reality but a religious-ethical dominion born of water and the Spirit.⁶

Paul’s olive tree metaphor in Romans 11 sealed the argument for me. There’s one tree, one root, one people. Gentile believers are grafted in to an already-existing tree; unbelieving branches are broken off. The tree itself, the covenant community stretching back to Abraham, is not uprooted, replaced, or restarted.

God never maintained two peoples on different salvation plans. He’s always had one covenant of grace, running through every dispensation of redemptive history (Rom. 11:17–24). Christ only has one bride, not two (Eph. 5:25–27).

A dispensationalist might reply that the bride is the Church, not Israel, but that only deepens the problem. It means God has one people who are His bride and another people who are…what, exactly?

The question has never been whether God keeps His promises to Israel. The question is how, and Scripture’s answer is: in Christ.

Answering MacArthur Directly

The late John MacArthur stated his position with admirable clarity:

The whole of my dispensationalism can be stated in one sentence: it is a distinction between the Church and Israel period.⁷

Of course Israel means Israel. The real question is which Israel: the one defined by DNA, or the one defined by covenant? That’s what the text demands we work out.

MacArthur characterized the Reformed position this way: “Israel forfeited its kingdom in the execution of the Messiah. The Church is the new Israel…everything is spiritual.” And that we “go back into the Old Testament…and reinterpret all of the Old Testament promises as spiritual promises to the Church and eliminate Israel.”⁸

With respect, that’s not what Reformed theology or the Bible teaches. We’re insisting that Christ is the fulfillment of Israel’s covenant purpose and that all who are in Him are heirs of every promise (Gal. 3:29; Rom. 8:17).

MacArthur’s own words press toward this conclusion. He acknowledged that the old covenant’s “temporal, external things…were set aside when Israel failed and the new covenant came in,” and that “now there’s a new people of God” no longer “marked out by social identity…[or] occupying the same land.”⁹

If that’s true, if there’s a new people of God no longer defined by land, ethnicity, or social identity, then what defines them? The answer is union with Christ. Paul said it himself: “There is neither Jew nor Greek…for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). The dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been torn down (Eph. 2:14).

The Antisemitism Charge

MacArthur also suggested that amillennialism has roots in antisemitism, tracing it to “a kind of antisemitism that was around, even in Luther’s day.”¹⁰ This is a serious charge and it deserves a serious response.

First, Luther’s antisemitism is universally condemned, including by Reformed and amillennial theologians. It was condemned in his own day: Bullinger criticized Luther’s writings regarding the Jews, comparing them to the tactics of the Roman Inquisition.

Calvin’s approach was markedly different; scholars have argued that his theology was the least anti-Semitic “of the major classical theological systems,” and that he “exhibits a real break with a long-standing tradition of Christian anti-Jewish exegesis of the Old Testament.”¹¹

But here’s the critical point: the rejection of a literal earthly millennium didn’t originate with Luther or anywhere near him. The early church debated chiliasm (premillennialism) for centuries, and by the time Augustine wrote The City of God in the early fifth century, he was synthesizing a non-chiliastic reading of Revelation 20 that had been building across earlier generations of the church.

Augustine didn’t invent amillennialism; he pulled it together. And he did so more than a thousand years before Luther’s horrifying later writings on the Jews. To trace amillennialism’s roots to Reformation-era hostility is historically indefensible.

Second, the confessional backbone of Reformed amillennialism (the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards) contains no antisemitic content whatsoever. If the position were rooted in ethnic hostility, we’d expect to find it embedded in its confessional documents. It isn’t there.

Third, MacArthur himself affirmed that he was “unwaveringly committed to the sovereign election of a future generation of Jews to salvation, and the full inheritance of all the promises and covenants of God.”¹²

The overwhelming majority of confessional amillennialists affirm the same. Romans 11 teaches a future ingathering of Jewish believers into the one olive tree, the one covenant people (Rom. 11:23–26).

And consider: if “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26) means literally every ethnic Jew who ever lived, that would have to include the Pharisees, the very men Jesus told, “You are not my sheep” (John 10:26). A strictly ethnic reading creates problems the text itself doesn’t support.

The antisemitism charge is not only unfounded, but it also gets history backwards. Amillennialism doesn’t diminish God’s love for the Jewish people; it magnifies it by insisting they’re saved the same way every sinner is: by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Every faithful Christian I know loves their Jewish neighbors and family members and longs to see them have eternal life.

One People, One Savior

This comes down to a question about the gospel: Who belongs to God, and on what basis? Scripture’s answer has never changed. All who are in Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, are the true Israel of God, heirs of Abraham, partakers of every covenant promise.

The covenant of grace, as Bavinck wrote, “is everywhere and at all times one in essence, but always manifests itself in new forms and goes through differing dispensations.”¹³ It’s one olive tree, with one root, gathering one people in one Savior.

If you’re wrestling with this, if you came from a dispensational background that taught otherwise and the cost of rethinking feels steep, know that you’re not alone. I’ve walked this same road.

The destination isn’t a diminished Israel but a magnified Christ, in whom every promise finds its Yes and Amen (2 Cor. 1:20). To see Christ as the true Israel is not to lose anything but to gain everything.

Endnotes