A Chosen People - God’s Eternal Relationship With Israel

We jokingly say that the Jewish people are just like everyone else in the world, only more so. Having said that, I do believe that the Jewish people are unique among all the people of the world. It is not that we are better than anyone else, or smarter, or more numerous.

In fact, our “chosenness” is something that most Jews would like to understand better. I certainly had no clue what being chosen meant. It didn’t always seem like a great deal to be chosen. After all, being Jewish has exacted a price in our history from the crusades to the pogroms. And even today, in 21st - Century America, we live with the constant awareness of the Holocaust, even though we may not have gone through it ourselves. Nevertheless, many of us lost family members and may even know survivors. That one event of history, perhaps because it is so proximate to us in time, has left its mark on the Jewish soul and shaped our lives and identities. 

So, when we ask, “What does it mean to be chosen?” We don’t really know the answer if we are not connected to God’s Word in the Scriptures where that answer is found. Nevertheless, the idea of being chosen has remained elusive and far away. In a way, being chosen raises conflicting feelings about what that means. A very typical Jewish characterization of the idea of “chosenness” is characterized best in Fiddler on the Roof at that moment when Tevye looks up to God and says, “I know, I know. We are your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t you choose somebody else?”

For many Jewish people, the whole idea of being chosen is a mystery. It seems that it has brought more pain and suffering than it has brought happiness and joy. That is because the moment God said to Abram, “I choose you,” Satan also said to Abram, “I choose you, too.” While conflict and persecution rages here on earth between Israel and the nations and even Israel and the “Church;” I think there is another instigator to all our troubles in the unseen realm.

In considering the idea of Israel’s chosenness, “someone” has been the source of strained relations, hostility, and misunderstanding amongst the Jewish people themselves, and even within historical Christianity, as it has concluded in many places that the Jewish people are no longer God’s chosen people. Because they rejected their Messiah, God is now through with them and the church is the new Israel. That belief has been the source of much Jewish persecution by many “Christians'' who thought that they were serving God by punishing the Jews for their treatment of Christ. As a result, Israel and the church have a very troubled past. Church history for most of the past 2,000 years has not been good.  And that past has hurt the efforts of Jewish ministry. Suffice it to say at this point, given our history with the church, it is practically impossible to understand the “Christianity” of today as a Jewish movement (it was a Jewish movement in the first century). To the Jewish people, it feels like accepting the Messiah means we must also embrace those who have been the persecutors of our people. This is where a lack of understanding of the chosenness of Israel exists among both the Jewish people and Christians alike.  

Let us look at the choosing of a man, Abram (Abraham), and the promise of God. 

Israel has a special purpose in the world by divine decree that started in Genesis 12:1-3. In these verses God establishes His relationship with the Jewish people (and the nations, meaning the rest of the world) through a covenant with Abraham. 

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

This covenant that God made with Abraham was unconditional. The first part of the promise was “the land which I will show you.” The second part of the promise was “I will make of you a great nation.” And the third part of the promise was that “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” 

When God spoke these words to Abraham, choosing him as the progenitor of the nation, He was doing far more than simply choosing the Jewish people. The choosing and forming of the Jewish people was actually a creative act on the part of God since Abram was 99 years old and his wife, Sarai was 90, beyond the years of childbearing. Yet, from her came Isaac. And Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, was also barren and Isaac prayed to the Lord and the Lord answered (Gen. 25:21) and Jacob was born. And Jacob’s wife, Rachel, was also barren until God remembered her and opened her womb (Gen. 30:22-24) and she gave birth to Joseph who, in the providence of God, happened to be the preserver of life for the tiny nation of Israel, 70 people, who went down into Egypt and grew into the nation that Moses would ultimately lead out of Egypt hundreds of years later. So God is the one who is doing the creating and the sustaining of His chosen people. The covenant is unique in that it is unconditional, and a witness to the world of God’s faithfulness. 

In Deuteronomy 7:6-9 God proclaims that He did not choose Israel because they were greater in number or ability. His choice was based on His love and faithfulness. The world would know what kind of God He is by how He would be faithful to His promises to His people Israel, even when they were unfaithful to Him. 

To answer Tevye’s question, God is not going to choose somebody else for a while. He is going to deal with His people Israel because He made a promise to them, a covenant with them that rests completely on God alone to fulfill His promise in His choosing of Israel. And He tells them that in the latter days He will act, not for their sake, but for the sake of His holy name (Ezekiel 36:22-24). And He will bring them back to the land He swore to Jacob, and He will be their God and they will be His people, and the nations will know that it is God who sanctifies Israel (Ezekiel 37:25-28).