What is the status of today’s Israel via-a-vis the old Israel? The relationship between the Old and New Testaments is well known to Bible scholars as one continuous chain of events that find their fulfilment in the New Testament. As we already know, the Old Testament hides the New, while the New Testament is the exposition or, a fulfilment of the Old. One contentious issue that has been the source of confusion for many Christians is the answer to the question: who are the Chosen People of God? The very question has split Christendom into two camps. Those who believe that the present day Israel still qualifies to inherit God's promises to the nation of Israel of the Old Testament, and those who insist that present day Zionist Israel is not the nation or people to which the Old Testament promise was made. The pro today's Israel group are often oblivious of the New Testament fulfilment of the promise. They often don't even know that the New and Old Testaments compliment each other. On June 18th 2025, Turker Carlson, the former Fox News Presenter, and now a foremost Podcaster of the Turker Carlson Network (TCN), interviewed Senator Ted Cruz of the US Senate. One of the issues that came up was Christian Zionists unalloyed support for the State of Israel in the US. The Senator quoted Genesis 12:3 wrongly, and out of context too, to support his loyalty to the Zionists State. "Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed." He argued that this scripture commands Christians to support the nation of Israel. This is very far from the truth. First of all, that quote is not in the bible. God was actually speaking to Abraham and his “seed” or “offspring” that was to come, meaning, Jesus Christ, Notice he did not say seeds, or “offsprings”. The correct quote is; “I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” Soon after the interview, several bible scholars and other knowledgeable Christians came out to correct him, and set the records straight. For centuries, the dominant Christian answer to, “who are the people of God” has been that the Church, the body of believers in Jesus Christ has inherited the spiritual promises, and covenantal identity originally given to the nation of Israel. This is not a doctrine of replacement—as if God’s plan had failed and a backup was needed—but rather a doctrine of transformation and fulfilment. The Church is the New Israel. This presentation will argue that, based on a coherent reading of both the Old and New Testaments, the Christian Church has become the legitimate heir to the covenant promises made to Abraham. Furthermore, it will demonstrate that the reason for this covenantal transfer is the rejection of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, by the majority of the old Israel, an act that, according to the terms of their own prophetic tradition, constituted a final and fatal breach of their covenant with God. To understand why the Church becomes the New Israel, we must first define what Israel was meant to be. In the Old Testament, the nation of Israel was not merely an ethnic group; it was a theocratic covenant community chosen by God for a specific purpose. In Exodus 19:5-6, God makes His intention for them clear: "Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Israel was chosen not for privilege alone, but for service. They were to be a living parable of God’s holiness, a light to the Gentiles, and a priesthood mediating between God and the world. This election was conditional, grounded in obedience to the covenant law given at Sinai. The prophets from Isaiah to Malachi consistently warned that disobedience, particularly idolatry and injustice, would lead to covenant curses, including exile and a temporary loss of favoured status. The history of Israel is a long, tragic narrative of rebellion, judgment, and eventual dispersion. The Old Testament itself, therefore, plants the seeds of its own supersession. It describes a God who judges His people and who is never ultimately bound by ethnicity, but by faith and obedience. The final and decisive act of Israel’s disobedience, from a Christian perspective, is their collective rejection of Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah. This is not merely a failure to recognize a religious teacher; it is the culmination of all previous rebellions. Jesus Christ, in the Gospel accounts, presents Himself as the very embodiment of Israel’s purpose and destiny. He is the true Israelite who succeeds where the nation failed. He withstands the temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11) that ancient Israel succumbed to. He is the "Son" called out of Egypt (Matthew 2:15, quoting Hosea 11:1). When He chooses twelve apostles, He is symbolically reconstituting the twelve tribes of a new, spiritual Israel. In the Gospel of John, He declares, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser" (John 15:1). In this single metaphor, Jesus claims that He is not merely a branch of the old Israel but the very vine itself—the source of life and identity. To be connected to the true Israel, one must be connected to Him. The old, national vine, which had produced wild grapes (Isaiah 5:2), was now being supplanted. The rejection is most explicitly dramatized in the parable of the tenants, found in Matthew 21:33-46. A landowner (God) plants a vineyard (Israel), leases it to tenants (the religious leadership), and goes away. When He sends servants (the prophets) to collect His fruit, the tenants beat and kill them. Finally, He sends His son (Jesus). The tenants, seeing the son, say, "This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance." They take him, cast him out of the vineyard, and kill him. Jesus then asks his listeners what the landowner will do. They reply; "He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons" (Matthew 21:41). Jesus then delivers the devastating conclusion: "Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits" (Matthew 21:43). This is the clearest possible self-pronouncement of judgment. The "other tenants" are not a separate, new entity but the community of His followers, the Church, who would be the new stewards of God’s Kingdom. The rejection of the Son, results in the eviction of the old tenants. The New Testament authors, who are Jews themselves, particularly the Apostle Paul, were tasked with explaining the theological earthquake that had taken place: "the Messiah had come to His own, and His own had not received Him" (John 1:11). Their explanation was not that God’s Word had failed, but that a remnant had been faithful, and that the unfaithful majority had been, in a real theological sense, "cut off." In his great treatise on the subject, Romans 9-11, Paul uses the powerful metaphor of an olive tree. The cultivated olive tree represents the covenant people of God, the true Israel. He argues that some of the natural branches (ethnic Israel) have been "broken off because of their unbelief" (Romans 11:20). In their place, "you, a wild olive shoot, [the Gentiles] were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree" (Romans 11:17). This is not a new tree. It is the same tree of covenant promise. But the identity of the branches has changed. Unbelieving Israel is cut off; believing Gentiles are grafted in. The defining characteristic for belonging is no longer physical descent from Abraham, but faith in the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Paul makes this explicit earlier in Romans: "For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter" (Romans 2:28-29). The spiritual, not the physical, defines the true Israel. This redefinition of the people of God is the central engine of the New Testament’s ecclesiology. The Greek word for "church." When the Apostle Peter addresses the early Christian communities, he deliberately and breathtakingly appropriates the identity markers of old Israel and reapplies them to the Church. He writes: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellences of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light" (1 Peter 2:9). This language is lifted directly from Exodus 19:6, God’s original commission to national Israel. Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, declares that these titles no longer belong to a nation-state or an ethnic lineage. They now belong to the multinational, multi-ethnic community of believers in Jesus Christ—the New Israel. The same logic permeates the writings of Paul. In Galatians, he confronts the heresy that Gentile converts must first become Jews (be circumcised, follow the Law) to be saved. He refutes this by arguing that the true children of Abraham are not those of his physical bloodline, but those who share his faith. "Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham... so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles" (Galatians 3:7, 14). He then makes a statement that is the ultimate theological cornerstone of the New Israel doctrine: "And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise" (Galatians 3:29). To be "in Christ" is to be a direct, legal, and covenantal heir to every promise God ever made to Abraham. The old covenant, with its laws, ceremonies, and national boundaries, was a temporary guardian until Christ came (Galatians 3:24-25). Now that faith has come, the guardian is no longer needed. The new covenant, mediated by Christ’s blood (Luke 22:20), is the eternal, final, and universal covenant. Thus, the Church does not "replace" Israel; it is Israel—the faithful remnant expanded to include the entire believing world. The argument for God’s rejection of the old Israel on account of unbelief is not merely a Pauline invention; it is perfectly consistent with the prophetic history of Israel itself. The central theme of the Old Testament is that God’s favour is contingent upon faith and obedience. The entire Book of Deuteronomy is structured around blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, culminating in the threat of being "plucked from the land" and scattered among the peoples (Deuteronomy 28:63-64). The prophets Hosea and Amos thunder God’s rejection of a faithless Israel that maintains the outward forms of worship while their hearts are far from Him. God says through Hosea, "I will have no mercy on her children, for they are children of whoredom" (Hosea 2:4). The rejection of Christ is the ultimate act of "whoredom"—an embrace of a false, nationalistic, works-based righteousness instead of the righteousness that comes by grace through faith in the Son of God. When the Jewish leaders cried out at Jesus’s trial, "His blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 27:25), they were, in a tragic and ironic sense, invoking the very covenant curses they had brought upon themselves. Their rejection was not God’s arbitrary choice but the judicial culmination of their long history of rejecting His messengers, now reaching its zenith in the rejection of His Son. Therefore, the relationship between God and the ethnic, non-messianic Judaism after the coming of Christ must be understood in the light of this covenantal framework. They retain their ethnic identity and their historical connection to the promises, but they are, as Paul sorrowfully notes in Romans 9, "cut off" from the life-giving root of the covenant. They are like a son legally disinherited for repudiating the father. The promises of the land, the priesthood, and the kingship were all types and shadows that pointed to the greater realities found in Christ: the new heavens and new earth, the universal priesthood of all believers, and the kingship of Jesus. To cling to the shadow after the substance has arrived is not faithfulness but a form of unbelief. The continued existence of Judaism as a non-Christian religion is not proof of God’s ongoing covenantal favour with the old Israel; rather, it stands as a solemn historical witness to the consequences of rejecting Christ. As Paul argues in Romans 11, their hardening serves a purpose—to allow the Gospel to go to the Gentiles—but he emphatically does not describe them as remaining in a state of covenantal blessing. They are broken off, and only by faith in Christ can they be grafted back in (Romans 11:23). There is no other path. The historical and theological outworking of this is the Christian Church. The Church is not a parenthesis in God’s plan, a temporary institution waiting for God to resume His "real" work with ethnic Israel. On the contrary, the Church is the plan. The New Testament sees the Church as the eschatological fulfilment of all of God’s promises. In Ephesians, Paul describes the Church as a new humanity, a single body created from Jews and Gentiles, having destroyed the "dividing wall of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14). This new humanity is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone" (Ephesians 2:20). This is the household of God, the New Jerusalem, the true Israel. The old covenant was a preparatory school; the new covenant is the university. The old Israel was a seedling; the Church is the full-grown tree. The promises of a glorious kingdom, a purified people, and a universal reign of peace are not waiting for a future, national restoration of an Old Testament-style polity. They are being realized now, spiritually, in the Church, and will be consummated at the return of Christ, when all believers, from every tribe, tongue, and nation—the true Israel of God—will inherit the new creation. Opponents of this view argue for a "two-covenant" or "dual-covenant" theology, where God has a distinct plan for ethnic Israel (the land, the law, a future temple) and a separate plan for the Church. This position, often associated with dispensationalism, is theologically problematic for several key reasons. First, it divides God’s Word and His purposes, creating a schism in the biblical narrative that the New Testament authors simply do not acknowledge. Second, it ignores the clear teaching of Hebrews 8:13, which declares that in making the new covenant, God "has made the first one obsolete." A functioning covenant cannot be made obsolete while simultaneously remaining active for a specific group of people. Third, it fails to account for Jesus’s own explicit statements, such as, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners" (Mark 2:17). If ethnic Israel has a separate path to righteousness that bypasses the need for the Great Physician, then the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ were unnecessary for them. This directly contradicts Peter’s declaration that; "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). The idea that God permanently rejected His people is also a mischaracterization of this theology. The New Israel doctrine does not assert that God is unfaithful, but that His faithfulness now operates through the new covenant in Christ. The old covenant was a temporary administration that has been successfully concluded and replaced by a better one. The "remnant" of ethnic Israel that believed in Christ (the apostles, the early disciples) became the core of the New Israel. The rest were not rejected because God is unpredictable, but because they rejected the cornerstone. In conclusion, the testimony of Scripture is unified and coherent: God has always desired a people who worship Him in spirit and truth. He began this project with a typological, national people—Israel after the flesh—to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. When that Messiah, Jesus Christ arrived and was rejected by the nation’s established leadership and the majority of the people, that covenant administration reached its end. In the words of Jesus to the religious leaders, "Your house is left to you desolate" (Matthew 23:38). The kingdom was taken from them and given to a nation producing its fruits—the Church. The Church, composed of all who believe in Christ, both Jew and Gentile, is the New Israel. It possesses the identity markers of the old: chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation. It inherits the promises of the old: the blessing of Abraham, the land of the new creation, the indwelling presence of God. And it is founded not on physical descent, but on the spiritual reality of faith in the crucified and risen Son of God. The rejection of Christ by the old Israel was not an accident to be remedied by a later side-line plan, but a decisive act of rebellion that, according to the terms of their own covenant, justified God’s judgment. The olive tree of God’s covenant people remains, but its branches are now defined not by bloodlines, but by the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord. The New Israel is not a replacement in the sense of a hostile takeover; it is a completion, a fulfilment, and a glorious expansion. And to this New Israel belongs the promise, the presence, and the eternal future of God.