Commentary Compass

Few questions run through the New Testament more persistently than the identity of the people of God.

The question appears in different forms.

Who are Abraham’s children? What happens to Israel when the Messiah comes? How can Gentiles become heirs of promises made through Israel? What does it mean for the church to be Christ’s body, God’s temple or a holy nation? How should Jewish unbelief and the Gentile mission be understood together? Who finally inhabits the New Jerusalem?

Commentaries often treat these questions book by book because each New Testament writer approaches them differently.

Reading the strongest work across those books, however, reveals an important pattern.

The New Testament neither simply abandons Israel nor leaves the identity of God’s people unchanged. It presents a story of continuity, fulfilment, incorporation, transformation and expansion centred on Jesus the Messiah.

That combination is more interesting than either a simple continuity or a simple replacement model.

Matthew Begins With Israel but Ends With the Nations

Matthew opens his Gospel with Abraham and David.

That is already a theological statement.

Jesus enters a story with a history. He is Israel’s Messiah, David’s royal heir and the one in whom scriptural expectations converge.

Matthew consequently cannot be understood if Israel becomes merely a negative foil for Christianity.

Jesus’ ministry is initially directed toward “the lost sheep of Israel.” His teaching is saturated with Israel’s Scriptures. His disputes with Jewish leaders are disputes occurring within Israel over the identity of Israel’s Messiah and the nature of faithfulness to Israel’s God.

Yet Matthew simultaneously builds toward something larger.

Gentiles repeatedly appear at significant moments. The Magi come at the beginning. A Roman centurion displays remarkable faith. Jesus envisages people arriving from east and west to share the messianic banquet with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Finally the risen Jesus commands his followers to make disciples of all nations.

The movement is therefore not simply Israel followed by a different people.

The nations are being drawn into the fulfilment of Israel’s own messianic hope.

The key is Christ.

Acts Shows the Expansion as a Work of God

Luke continues the story in Acts.

The geographical movement is familiar: Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and outward toward the ends of the earth.

But the important question is what drives that movement.

Again and again Acts portrays Gentile inclusion not primarily as a human strategy but as something God forces the early Jewish-Christian movement to recognise.

Philip is directed toward the Ethiopian official.

Peter receives a vision before entering Cornelius’s house.

The Holy Spirit falls upon Gentiles.

The Jerusalem church must interpret what God has done.

Paul’s mission repeatedly crosses boundaries that seemed initially to define the people of God.

This makes the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 especially important. The question is not merely whether Gentiles can join a Jewish religious movement. It is whether they must first become Jews in order to belong fully to the messianic people.

The answer is no.

But the reasoning matters.

Gentile inclusion is understood through the work of God in Christ, the gift of the Spirit and the fulfilment of Scripture.

The nations do not enter by bypassing Israel’s story.

They enter because Israel’s Messiah has come.

Galatians Reopens the Question of Abraham’s Family

Few letters make the issue sharper than Galatians.

Paul is not engaged in an abstract debate over whether religious people should try to earn salvation.

Circumcision raises a concrete covenantal question.

Who belongs to Abraham’s family?

Paul’s answer is radical because it places Christ at the centre of Abraham’s promise.

Those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to promise.

This does not make Abraham irrelevant. Quite the opposite.

Paul reaches further back into Israel’s story in order to explain why Gentiles can now be included without adopting circumcision and becoming ethnic Jews.

The promise always anticipated a larger family.

Faith in Christ therefore does not abolish the Abrahamic story. It reveals its destination.

This is one reason the Old Testament arguments of Galatians are so important. Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, Sinai, promise, inheritance and Jerusalem are not illustrations attached to an otherwise self-contained doctrine of justification.

They help Paul answer the question:

Who constitutes the family promised by God?

Romans Refuses a Simple Answer About Israel

If Galatians states Gentile inclusion forcefully, Romans prevents that inclusion from becoming Gentile triumphalism.

Romans 9–11 is therefore indispensable.

Paul must explain how the gospel can be the fulfilment of Israel’s Scriptures when so many Israelites have not embraced Israel’s Messiah.

His answer is complex because the problem is complex.

Election remains real.

A remnant exists.

Gentiles have been incorporated.

Unbelieving branches have been broken off.

But Gentile believers are explicitly warned against arrogance.

They do not support the root; the root supports them.

The olive-tree image is especially important because it resists two simplistic conclusions at once.

The first is that nothing has changed. Something clearly has: branches can be broken off and wild branches grafted in.

The second is that Israel has simply been discarded and replaced by an unrelated Gentile entity. Paul warns against precisely that kind of boasting.

His argument then moves toward the mysterious expectation that “all Israel will be saved,” one of the most disputed phrases in Romans.

Commentators divide over whether this refers to the totality of the elect people of God, to the cumulative salvation of Jewish people through history, or to a substantial future turning of ethnic Israel to Christ.

The last interpretation has considerable strength because Paul appears to maintain a distinction between Israel and the Gentiles throughout the argument.

Whatever conclusion is reached on that particular question, the larger point is difficult to miss.

Gentile inclusion must produce gratitude, not superiority.

Ephesians Moves From Incorporation to a New Humanity

Ephesians develops the result from another angle.

The dividing line between Jew and Gentile is one of the most important human distinctions in the first-century world of the letter.

Gentiles were once outside Israel’s commonwealth and strangers to the covenants of promise.

But Christ changes the situation.

Those who were far away have been brought near.

The imagery then accelerates.

The two become one.

Hostility is killed.

A new humanity is created.

Both have access to the Father in one Spirit.

Gentiles become fellow citizens, members of God’s household and stones within a temple in which God dwells by his Spirit.

This is much more than toleration between two religious groups.

The gospel creates a new corporate reality.

Yet notice again how the argument works.

Gentiles are not told that Israel’s history never mattered.

They are told that they were once strangers to its promises and have now been brought near.

Continuity and transformation occur simultaneously.

First Peter Gives Israel’s Identity Language to Gentile Christians

First Peter makes one of the most striking moves in the New Testament.

Its readers appear predominantly Gentile in background. They had formerly lived in ways associated with pagan society.

Yet Peter addresses them with language drawn directly from Israel’s covenant identity.

They are a chosen people.

A royal priesthood.

A holy nation.

God’s special possession.

Once they were not a people; now they are God’s people.

This language has sometimes been taken as straightforward evidence that the church has replaced Israel.

But the movement is better described more carefully.

Peter does not appear interested in announcing the disappearance of ethnic Israel. His pastoral purpose is to explain the astonishing new identity possessed by people whose surrounding society may regard them as marginal, suspicious or dishonourable.

Their fundamental identity no longer comes from ethnicity, social approval or civic status.

It comes from God’s call in Christ.

The privileges once described in relation to Israel can therefore describe these believers because they have been incorporated into the people created around Israel’s Messiah.

And that identity immediately produces vocation.

They are chosen so that they may declare the praises of the one who called them from darkness into light.

Election leads to witness.

Hebrews Reimagines the People of God as Pilgrims Approaching Their Homeland

Hebrews approaches the subject differently again.

Its great categories are priesthood, sacrifice, covenant, promise, rest, sanctuary and pilgrimage.

The people of God are people on the way.

Israel’s wilderness generation becomes both predecessor and warning.

They experienced extraordinary privileges but failed to enter because of unbelief.

The audience of Hebrews therefore occupies an already-and-not-yet position. Through Christ they possess astonishing access to God, yet they must continue toward the promised rest.

Hebrews 11 expands the horizon further.

Abraham himself lives as a pilgrim.

The faithful desire a better country.

Moses accepts disgrace rather than Egypt’s treasures.

The story culminates not merely in an earthly location but in the heavenly Jerusalem.

By Hebrews 12, believers are described as having come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem and the festal assembly surrounding Jesus, mediator of the new covenant.

The people of God are therefore defined by promise, perseverance and access to God through the Son.

Their deepest homeland is eschatological.

Revelation Brings Israel, the Nations and the Church Into One Symbolic Vision

Revelation gathers many of these strands and intensifies them symbolically.

Israel’s imagery is everywhere.

There are twelve tribes.

Twelve apostles.

A sealed multitude numbered as 144,000.

A woman clothed with cosmic splendour.

Exodus plagues.

A new Jerusalem.

A temple that finally becomes unnecessary because God and the Lamb are themselves its temple.

Alongside this deeply Israel-shaped imagery stands an emphatically international people.

The Lamb has purchased people from every tribe, language, people and nation.

An innumerable multitude from all nations stands before the throne.

The final city contains the names of Israel’s twelve tribes on its gates and the names of the twelve apostles on its foundations.

The symbolism is too deliberate to miss.

The consummated people of God cannot be understood without Israel.

Neither can they be restricted to Israel.

They constitute an international people centred upon the Lamb and gathered into the fulfilment of the scriptural story.

The Bible ends not with humanity escaping creation but with God dwelling with his people in renewed creation.

The covenant formula reaches its destination:

God with humanity.

So Has the Church Replaced Israel?

The language of “replacement” can obscure more than it clarifies.

There certainly is profound transformation in the New Testament.

Membership in the people of God cannot finally be secured by ethnicity. Gentiles are fully incorporated without circumcision. Christ fulfils institutions and expectations embedded in Israel’s Scriptures. Covenant identity is now inseparable from allegiance to Israel’s Messiah.

But the story does not begin again from zero.

The church does not receive a different God, different Scriptures or an unrelated salvation.

Gentile believers are grafted into an existing olive tree.

They become heirs of Abraham.

They are brought near to covenants from which they had once been strangers.

Their Messiah is Israel’s Messiah.

Their Scriptures are Israel’s Scriptures.

Their final city bears the names of Israel’s tribes.

“Fulfilment” and “incorporation” therefore often describe the New Testament pattern more adequately than simple replacement.

At the same time, fulfilment is not merely repetition. Something genuinely new has occurred in Christ.

The People of God Are Defined by Both Gift and Calling

One further pattern emerges when these books are placed alongside one another.

Identity is never merely privilege.

Matthew’s disciples are commissioned.

Acts’s Spirit-filled community bears witness.

Galatians’s heirs walk by the Spirit.

Romans’s recipients become living sacrifices and learn to welcome one another.

Ephesians’s new humanity must live out unity worthy of its calling.

First Peter’s holy nation declares God’s praises and embodies holiness among outsiders.

Hebrews’s pilgrims must persevere.

Revelation’s saints conquer through faithful witness to the Lamb.

Election therefore produces vocation.

To belong to the people of God is to receive grace and to be summoned into a way of life.

The Final Answer Is the Presence of God

The New Testament’s answer to the question “Who are the people of God?” finally leads beyond arguments about labels.

The goal is communion.

Matthew begins with Jesus as Immanuel—God with us.

John describes the Word dwelling among humanity and anticipates the Father and Son making their dwelling with believers.

Paul speaks of the Spirit dwelling in individuals and communities.

Ephesians imagines the church becoming a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

Hebrews brings believers into the heavenly sanctuary through Christ.

And Revelation closes with the declaration that God’s dwelling is with humanity.

The whole movement of the New Testament therefore tends toward something greater than the question of who belongs to which group.

God is creating a people from Israel and the nations, through the Messiah, in whom he will dwell.

The identity of that people matters profoundly.

But the greatest thing about the people of God is ultimately not the people.

It is God dwelling among them.