The New Israel
Reflection: Today, in Psalm 79, the psalmist cries out for God to help the people of Israel for the glory of His name. He then starts to reason with God, “Why should the nations say, Where is there God?” Then, in the Isaiah passage, we see Isaiah reflecting on how even after the Babylonians had invaded and plundered the Southern Kingdom (Judah), that one day God would gather back all the exiles. God would rise up another super power, the Persians, led by King Cyrus, to re-establish the people of God and overthrow the Babylonians. At this point this was a prophetic utterance of Isaiah that would come true later. And then bringing it full circle Paul finishes his letter to the Galatians by calling them the “Israel of God” . Some dispensationalist theologians want to make a strict separation between “Israel” and the “Church”, yet it is hard to argue that case when just verses earlier Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor f...