Now there are people, and good Christians, but they misinterpret much of the Old Testament. It is just this area they get wrong, and they say – ‘Oh, the Jews are coming back. God in the end of time will bless the Jewish race and nation as an ethnic unit and they will rebuild their temple, and Jewish worship will be re-established and will continue in a more glorious form. God is going to come back and bless the Jews again.’ Well yes, God will come back, Christ will return, and he will certainly return to this earth. It will be the end of the age and the Day of Judgement and the people of God will be raptured with those already living and reigning with Christ in paradise, and we shall receive resurrection bodies in the last day and glorious things will happen. ‘But no,’ they say, ‘Christ will come back and he will set up a literal thousand-year kingdom on earth and the temple will be rebuilt and the Jews will be supreme, because the promises made to the Jews must be kept.’ It sounds convincing until you read here that ‘the Gentiles should be fellowheirs… of his promise in Christ by the gospel.’ So it cannot be that the temple is going to be rebuilt; it cannot be that the old worship is going to be brought back in grander form; it cannot be that the Jews are going to be the number one citizens of heaven, and the Gentiles number two. It cannot be because we are equal partners, heirs in all those promises.
Now there is an illustration given by W J Grier (who wrote the book ‘The Momentous Event’). It features a farmer who was quite wealthy and had a son. When the son became a teenager the farmer said to him, ‘When you become 21, if you never smoke I am going to give you a horse and buggy of your own.’ The son remembered the promise and on his 21st birthday, he got out of bed and pushed aside the curtains and looked out of the window, and to his astonishment there on the gravel drive in front of the old farmhouse was a Nash Sedan, a very beautiful car. What the son did not do was this: he did not run downstairs and buttonhole his father and say, ‘Dad you cannot do this to me. You promised me a horse and buggy. What is this?’ Of course the son was delighted that it was not a horse and buggy; it was a Nash Sedan car which would be his pride and joy gleaming there. The promise was made in one age, when the great thing would be a horse and buggy. It was fulfilled in another age, when the great thing would be a gleaming Nash Sedan car.
And so it is with the promises of the Bible. When God gives promises to the Jews, he uses Jewish language, the language of the time: that the land will prosper, that there will be magnificent blessings, that the farms will prosper and there will be plenty. But the promises are fulfilled in the New Testament when Christ has come, and what counts is Jews and Gentiles together being spiritually blessed with spiritual treasures and spiritual riches. You have to understand that the spiritual sense of Old Testament prophecy is what God meant, not the literal sense. When God says that in the last day the final battle for the earth will be won with lances and bows and arrows, he does not literally mean that they will come back. You see, you cannot interpret the Old Testament prophecies in a rigid literal manner. They have a full spiritual meaning.