The Relationship Between Israel and the Church

Of all I have read and the myriad of times that I've defended myself against the charge of "replacement" theology, these two paragraphs by Arthur Walkington Pink are succinct, scriptural and stunningly compelling:

In their crude and arbitrary attempts to rightly divide the word of truth, those calling themselves dispensationalists” have wrongly divided the family of God. The entire Election of Grace have God for their Father, Christ for their Saviour, the Holy Spirit for their Comforter. All who are saved, from the beginning to the end of earth’s history, are the objects of God’s everlasting love, share alike in the benefits of Christ’s atonement, and are begotten by the Spirit unto the same inheritance. God communicated to Abel the same kind of faith as He does to His children today. Abraham was justified in precisely the same manner as Christians are now (Rom. 4). Moses bore the “reproach of Christ,” and bad respect unto the identical “recompense of the reward” (Heb. 11:26) as is set before us. David was as truly a stranger and pilgrim on earth as we are (Ps. 119:9), and looked unto the same eternal pleasures at God’s right hand as we do (Ps. 16:11; 23:6).

The worst mistakes made by the “dispensationalists” grow out of their failures at the following points: first, to see the organic union between the Mosaic and Christian economies; second, to perceive that the “old covenant” and the “new covenant” were but two different administrations under which the blessings of the “everlasting covenant” are imparted; third, to distinguish between the spiritual remnant and the nation itself. The relation between the patriarchal and the Mosaic dispensations and this Christian era may be stated thus: they stood to each other, partly as the beginning does to the end, and partly as the shell does to the kernel. The former were preparatory, the latter is the full development—first the blade (in the patriarchal dispensation), then the ear (the Mosaic), and now the full corn in the ear, in this Christian era. In the former we have the type and shadow; in the latter, the antitype and substance. Christianity is but the full development of what existed in former ages, or a grander exemplification of the truths and principles which were then revealed. [1]


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1.  Pink, A. W. (2000). An Exposition of Hebrews (electronic ed., p. 888). Escondido, CA: Ephesians Four Group.