What About Israel? Faith, Proximity, and the Heart of God

There is a prayer that cuts through theological complexity, cultural noise, and the weight of unanswered questions. It is short, honest, and desperately needed: Lord, increase my faith. It is the prayer of someone who recognizes that what God is doing in the world is bigger than any single perspective can contain. And it is the prayer that must anchor us as we wrestle with one of the most profound and often avoided questions in the Christian faith: what is God doing with the people of Israel?

This is not a question reserved for scholars or political commentators. It is a question that lives at the heart of the book of Romans, and it demands something from every person who claims to follow Jesus.

Reading Scripture With New Eyes

For many Western Christians, the book of Romans has been read through a narrow lens, pulled apart into memorable verses and memorized passages, stripped of its original context and audience. But Romans was written to both Jews and Gentiles, and chapters 9, 10, and 11 deal specifically with a question that Paul could not stop wrestling with: why have so many of God's chosen people rejected the Messiah they were promised?

Paul makes his heart plain in Romans 10, where he expresses his deep longing that Israel would be saved. He acknowledges their zeal for God, while also recognizing that their pursuit of righteousness had become about works rather than faith. And here is the stunning thing Paul argues: it was always supposed to be about faith. Even the law, even the promises given to Moses, pointed toward a righteousness received not by human effort but by trust in God.

The righteousness that Paul describes in Romans 10 is breathtakingly simple. Declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. Believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. That is the path of salvation, and it is the same path for every human being, Jew or Gentile alike. There is no difference in how grace is received. The same Lord is Lord of all.

The Question of "They"

One of the most clarifying moments in reading Romans 10 carefully is noticing a single repeated word: they. How can they hear without someone telling them? How can they believe without hearing? How can anyone preach unless they are sent? And then, almost immediately, Paul pivots back to Israel specifically.

The answer to who "they" refers to is both general and specific. There is a universal truth about how the gospel spreads through proclamation, through sent messengers, through people willing to carry good news into unfamiliar places. But there is also a specific application: Israel has heard, and yet many have not believed. And still, God has not withdrawn his hand. The image Paul leaves us with is striking. All day long, God has held out his hands to a disobedient and obstinate people. Not past tense. Not a closed chapter. All day long.

The Weight of History

Before we can engage honestly with what God is doing among the Jewish people today, we have to reckon with what has been done in the name of Christianity throughout history. Forced conversions, expulsions, discrimination, violence, and centuries of theological frameworks that blamed the Jewish people for the death of Jesus. These are not distant abstractions. They are part of the reason that for many Jewish people, the word "Christian" carries the weight of oppression rather than love.

Paul's vision was never for the Gentile church to cut itself off from its roots. He was creating space for Gentiles to enter into the family of faith, not for Gentiles to replace that family or persecute it. The root system of the Christian faith is Jewish, and to sever ourselves from that root system is to misread the entire story of Scripture.

Proximity Changes Everything

Here is where the theology becomes intensely practical. It is easy to form opinions about people from a distance. It is easy to let headlines and social media shape your understanding of an entire nation, an entire people group, an entire history. But proximity has a way of dismantling the comfortable distance we keep between ourselves and the complexity of real human lives.

When you sit across from someone whose family has been taken hostage, whose neighborhood has been shelled, whose business has been destroyed, whose community has been emptied by war, something shifts inside you. Not because every political question gets answered, but because a face appears where there was once only a headline. A story replaces a statistic. And love, the kind that God extends all day long with open hands, becomes not just a theological concept but a lived reality.

Loving Israel does not mean agreeing with every decision made by every government official. Loving your own country does not require that either. What it does require is the willingness to enter into proximity, to ask questions without demanding simple answers, to hold tension without collapsing it prematurely.

The Renewal That Follows

It is not accidental that Romans 12 begins with a call to renew the mind immediately after three chapters about Israel. Paul urges his readers not to conform to the patterns of the world, but to be transformed, so that they can discern what God's will actually is. That renewal of the mind is not just a personal spiritual discipline. It is the necessary preparation for seeing the world the way God sees it, including seeing his people the way he sees them.

God's steadfast love never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. Those words from Lamentations 3 were written first to and about the Jewish people. And they remain true. God has not taken back his outstretched hands.

The question is not whether God is done with Israel. The question is whether we are willing to join him in what he is still doing. That begins with a prayer, and it begins with open hands of our own.

Lord, increase our faith.