Christian Zionism - New Life Tabernacle of Chattanooga

hands.’ Although Brickner forcefully repudiates dispensationalists who have
dispensed with evangelism, there is a sense in which even he and other
messianic dispensationalists nevertheless do still affirm another way to God
for Jewish people. According to Brickner, there remains hope for those
unbelievers who miss the Rapture but survive Armageddon and are alive
when Jesus returns. After the Rapture of the Church, during the millennium all
nations, he claims, will come to worship God in Jerusalem. 810
2.3 Israel has a Superior Status to the Church
By regarding the Church as a digression from God’s continuing purposes for
Israel, it is hard for dispensationalists not to elevate Israel to a superior status
above the Church. Brickner, for example, following Darby’s own
dispensational terminology, regards the last two thousand year history of the
Church as merely ‘a parenthesis’ 811 to God’s future plans for the Jews. He
recognises that to regard Israel as ‘God’s chosen people, the apple of his eye
- his special one’, appears ethnocentric and even arrogant. Nevertheless, his
biblical absolutism leads him to insist God is the ‘God of Israel’ and has his
own reasons for using ‘a small and seemingly insignificant people to be his
light of the world.’ 812
Ironically, while dispensationalists like Brickner follow Darby’s
differentiation between Israel and the Church, and elevate contemporary
Israel to a superior status above the Church, Darby himself had no desire to
do so, believing that, while in this dispensation the Church had failed, Israel
as a political entity had no significance either, at least until after the Rapture.
Content with heaven he wrote dismissively, ‘If I want an earthly religion, I
ought to be a Jew.’ 813 Nevertheless, for dispensationalists, and indeed for
many covenant premillennialists, the promises originally made to Abraham
were, they believe, unconditional, eternal and exclusively for the physical
descendants of Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. Therefore, Israel today is truly
blessed. Christian Friends of Israel, for example, insist, ‘The Bible teaches
810 Brickner, Future, op.cit., p94.
811 Ibid., pp18, 130; J. N. Darby, ‘The Character of Office in The Present Dispensation’
Collected, op.cit., Eccl. I, I, p94.
812 Brickner, Future, op.cit., p96.
813 Darby, ‘Hopes’, op.cit., p379.
175