The Distinction Between the Church and Israel

From Lesson 212 of the biblical framework Series

Charlie Clough

Last time I kind of reviewed the difference between the Church and Israel, and this is a fundamental distinction. To that we can add a third distinction, Israel and the Gentile, the Gentile nations. So we actually have three groups in the Scripture and the problem in Biblical interpretation is to understand God’s purposes with each of those three groups. God has a purpose for Israel; God has a purpose for Gentile nations and God has a purpose for the Church.

In the Church Age God says I’m not going to work with the nation any more, now I’m going to work with individuals, but here’s the difference, and this is a difference you’ve got to grasp if we are to interpret correctly these prophetic passages. You have got to understand the difference in the definition between Israel and the Church. During this period of time, in the Old Testament, God worked with the nation Israel; the prophecies concern the nation.

Now when we come to the Church we come to an utterly different thing. What have we done as we reviewed, for example, the book of Acts. When we think back to how the Church started, what was the Church? The Church was a subset, was it not, of Israel at first? Wasn’t it all made up of Jews? Of course it was. But what characterized that Jewish nucleus that first formed the Church? How would you characterize those Jews in the book of Acts who believed in Jesus Christ over against the rest of the nation Israel? They’re the remnant; they are the subset of the nation that did believe in the Messiah and did not reject Him. So from the very first the Church was minus, it was not an organization, it didn’t have any organization at first, it was just a group of people who responded to the Lord Jesus Christ. So the Church, as such, is not to be identified with an organization. It is not to be identified with a nation. What happened on the day of Pentecost? Were multiple national people groups represented? What’s the lesson from the very day of Pentecost? They spoke in many different languages, from many different people groups.

What’s that a signal for, you know, God sends signals, He says hey guys, wake up, we’ve got a new thing here. What’s the new thing? The Church is going to be something that was never revealed in the Old Testament. It is going to be one body made up of believers only from multiple people groups. So you have this definition of the Church. It is not an organization; it is not a nation. It is not a race, it is not one language, it is people from all of those who are in this union together because they bow their knee to the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior. They can be black, they can be white, they can be red and they can be yellow, it doesn’t make any difference, because all those people, ultimately, came from the same boat, Noah’s family.

So the Church, then, is defined as those people who have received Christ. Down through history the Church has taken on different identities. We want to be careful about this. That’s where dispensational theology clarifies the issue.

Israel is a nation and the Church isn’t a nation, it isn’t a community, it is a subset of individuals who have received Christ, as we could have seen in Acts 2 when they were not part of the Jewish community. The Christians began to break away from the community on the basis of their personal decision to trust in Jesus Christ.

My point being that this all comes down to defining and clarifying what the Church is and that has been clarified very clearly inside dispensational theology, because in dispensational theology the Church is defined clearly from the very start as made up of all believers and no unbelievers. If you have a congregation, and we always will have a congregation that is mixed. The congregation ultimately is not the Church; therefore people have devised two words, two vocabulary words to describe this problem. If you have 100 people in a local church, regular attendees in a local church, can we be sure that all 100 of those people have personally trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ? No. What do you do? You keep preaching the gospel and teaching the Word of God. So that one or the other thing happens, either they trust Him or they get so irritated hearing the Word of God that they get up and go home. It either softens hearts or it hardens hearts, or puts them to sleep so they aren’t hardened or softened. So you have the Church invisible, and that’s a term sometimes you’ll see, the visible and the invisible Church. Those are just terms that theologians have come up to try and distinguish this problem, in a congregation of 100 people there might be, say 91 believers and 9 unbelievers, so the visible church has 100 people in it, but the invisible Church only has 91 people in it. That was the terminology that was devised to describe that.