One Citizenship, Not Two (2 of 2)

The question left is how it shares. One answer is that the church participates by application: the covenant's blessings, the forgiveness and the law written on the heart, are applied to believers now, while the covenant itself, made "with the house of Israel," waits to be fulfilled with Israel.¹¹⁰ The pressure on that answer is in what Hebrews says. Jesus "mediates" this covenant, and it "is enacted on better promises" (8:6), and in chapter 10 the Holy Spirit "witnesses to us" with Jeremiah's words and concludes from them about forgiveness already in hand (10:15–18). Those are present-tense statements about a covenant in force, not a borrowing from one still waiting. Progressive dispensationalists, who read the covenant as inaugurated, take those verbs at face value, and the argument here lands differently on them, as Section 4 records for the larger quarrel. The text also shows a shift worth noticing: Hebrews 8:8 and 8:10 keep Jeremiah's "house of Israel," and 10:16 reads "with them." The change is in the text. What it means is disputed, and it is evidence, not proof, for either side.

What Romans 11 adds. Paul draws on the same promise. After "all Israel will be saved," he writes, "The Deliverer will come out of Zion; he will remove ungodliness from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins" (Romans 11:26–27). The covenant sentence echoes Jeremiah 31 and its forgiveness of sins, and Paul places it after the Gentiles' coming in and speaks of "them," Israel.¹¹¹ That is the strongest text for a later turning of ethnic Israel into the covenant, and nothing in Hebrews 8–10 contradicts it. In its own context Hebrews 10:18 answers continued sacrifice ("every priest stands day after day serving and offering the same sacrifices again and again," 10:11), the subject of Section 1's temple paragraphs. It does not say whether Israel as a people will someday receive the forgiveness it describes. So Romans 11 and Hebrews 10 lean on one promise: Hebrews says its forgiveness has been secured by one sacrifice, and Romans says a people still outside will be brought in. One covenant in force now, with a later turning of Israel into it, fits the two commitments this essay already holds. The covenant of Hebrews 8–10 is in force, and Romans 11 leaves a national future open.

It is not the only reading, and each has a price. Taking "all Israel" as the elect of every age closes the later turning that Section 1 leaves open. Taking it as national restoration with the land meets the fact that Hebrews 8–10 never mentions land. A staged reading, in which Jeremiah 31:34 is partly fulfilled now and partly later, has to square that with Hebrews 10:15–18, which treats the forgiveness as given. And a reading in which the promises find their fulfillment in Christ and the land is typological has to answer Jeremiah 31:36 and Romans 11:29.

The land is the column that stays open. Jeremiah ties Israel's standing as a nation to the order of the sky: "The descendants of Israel will not cease forever to be a nation in my sight. That could only happen if the fixed ordering of the heavenly lights were to cease to operate before me" (Jeremiah 31:36). Amos ends with a promise of land, quoted above (9:15). Hebrews 8–10 says nothing about land, and James stops before it. Silence is not denial. A reading that takes the land as typological has to carry the weight of Jeremiah 31:36 and Romans 11:29, and Section 2 already counts that as a cost of this essay's reading. A reading that takes the land literally has to say how that sits with a covenant whose present form Hebrews describes without it. This section still tests only whether the church and Israel are two programs. It does not settle the land.¹¹²