What if the fixation on the physical nation of Israel is not a mark of biblical maturity but a symptom of something the Holy Ghost is supposed to cure? The Bible professes pretty clearly - if you read it carefully - that a fixation on the nation-state of Israel is a symptom of spiritual lostness or spiritual immaturity. There are two cases in particular, from what the Bible says and what it doesn’t say, that demonstrate this is true. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You simply won’t find a spiritually mature, spirit-filled Christian caring about the body-politic of Israel in the Sacred Text.
On January 17, 2026, the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem issued a joint statement describing Christian Zionism as a “harmful and damaging ideology” that “misleads the public, sows confusion, and harms the unity of our flock.” These are not progressive mainline American Protestants with rainbow flags and preferred pronouns. These are the ancient apostolic churches of the actual Holy Land, the people whose grandparents walked the same streets Jesus walked, who have been burying their dead in Jerusalem for two thousand years. They looked at the theology that American evangelicals have been exporting into their backyard and called it what it is: damaging.
Mike Huckabee, the United States Ambassador to Israel and a man who has visited the country more than a hundred times, has laid bricks in Israeli settlements in occupied territory that are banned by U.S. policy, and once told Bloomberg that a two-state solution is dead “in our lifetime,” responded with the kind of genial pastoral condescension that only a Baptist preacher turned politician can fully achieve. He said he didn’t understand how anyone who uses the moniker “Christian” could not be a Zionist. He said it with the warm, confident smile of a man who has never once considered that the question might have an answer he wouldn’t like.
This article is that answer. I’ll explain it.
It comes in three parts, drawn entirely from the book of Acts, which is the inspired record of what happened when the Holy Ghost showed up and started running things. The pattern is consistent, the evidence is embarrassing, and the conclusion is one that Huckabee, if he is the Bible student he claims to be, is going to need to sit in the corner and think about for a while.
The thesis is simple: the fixation on the physical nation of Israel as the organizing center of God’s redemptive program is not a mark of mature, Spirit-filled Christianity. It is, if the New Testament is any guide at all, precisely the kind of thinking that the Holy Ghost tends to cure.
THE CONCERN THAT THE HOLY GHOST MADE DISAPPEAR
In Acts 1, the disciples have just spent forty days with the resurrected Christ, receiving instruction about the kingdom of God. Forty days (at least, periodically, in a 40-day period), with the risen Lord himself. He gave them personal tutoring from the Son of God on the subject of his own kingdom, and after all of that, here is the burning question they bring to the table in verse six: “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?”
Keep in mind, Jesus taught them everything He wanted them to know. Right before Christ is beamed up, they interject a question they likely hoped He would get to, but he had not. They’re bound and determined to ask it before He goes.
Take a moment to appreciate what is happening here. These are not pagans off the street. These are the men who walked with Jesus for three years, who witnessed the transfiguration, who heard the Sermon on the Mount, who watched him raise Lazarus from the dead. And after forty additional days of post-resurrection instruction about the kingdom of God, which He taught a lot about, their theological preoccupation is still the political restoration of a geographic nation-state. It’s the same as their fixation before the crucifixion. Now, after the crucifixion, they’re still thinking about it.
They want to know when God is going to put Israel back on top of the geopolitical map. They are, in the most generous possible reading, asking a Dispensationalist question. What is happening politically? Where are the boundaries? When are they getting a king? Where is the army? Where is the nation-state that they’ve lacked for centuries? Because if you think the Jews of Theodore Herzl's day were longing for a kingdom, keep in mind that the Jews of Jesus’ day were longing for a kingdom, too. At this point, Israel was barely a puppet state. It hadn’t been an autonomous, sovereign nation for a long time (722 BC for the Northern Kingdom, 586 BC for the Southern Kingdom).
Jesus does not answer their question. He redirects them. “You will receive power,” he says, “when the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and you will be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem and in all Judaea and in Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”
The answer to their question about the nation is the church age. He is not deferring the national restoration question to a later date. He is telling them that what they think they are asking about is not actually what they think it is.
Then Pentecost happens.
Now, this is the exercise. Read through the rest of Acts and find me the passage where the disciples, now filled with the Holy Ghost, circle back to the national restoration question. I’ll wait here. Take your time. Search carefully. Go all the way through chapter twenty-eight if you need to.
You will not find it, because it is not there. The question that consumed them before the Spirit came never comes up again after the Spirit comes. Not once. The men who could not stop thinking about when God was going to restore the kingdom to Israel, once filled with the Holy Ghost, apparently stopped thinking about it entirely. They moved on to other concerns, specifically the proclamation of the gospel to every creature under heaven, which turns out to be what the kingdom of God actually looks like when it is not filtered through the lens of ethnic nationalism.
Now look at what Peter does on Pentecost. He does not stand up and announce the timeline for national restoration. He does not give the crowd a prophecy chart. He quotes Joel, and the Joel passage he quotes is the one about the Spirit being poured out on all flesh: sons and daughters, old men, young men, servants, male and female. What you’ve got to understand is that the Book of Joel is about the Kingdom of Israel being restored (i.e., the motif of the locusts, and the Lord restoring what the locusts have eaten).
The kingdom has arrived, Peter says, and it looks like this outpouring. The throne of David that Peter references is occupied right now, at the Father’s right hand, by the ascended Christ. Peter is not describing a future political arrangement in the Middle East. He is describing what is happening in front of their faces, which is the fulfillment of everything the prophets had pointed toward, arriving not as a military campaign but as fire on the heads of one hundred and twenty people in an upper room.
This is not an accident. Luke is a meticulous writer. He does not include things randomly and he does not omit things randomly. The disappearance of the national restoration question from the post-Pentecost narrative is as deliberate as anything else in the book. The Holy Ghost arrived and, among other things, appears to have cured the disciples of their preoccupation with Israel as a geopolitical category.
The epistles are saturated with kingdom language. Paul alone uses it dozens of times. But when you look at every single instance, the kingdom is consistently described as present spiritual reality, a present possession of believers, something inherited through new birth and transformation, something already entered, or something connected to Christ’s reign, and not a geographic territory.
What you will not find anywhere in the epistles is a single apostle writing to any church anywhere saying that the kingdom of God will be established when Israel is reconstituted as a nation-state, that believers should be watching for or supporting the political restoration of ethnic Israel, that the promises to Abraham await fulfillment through a future geopolitical program, or that Jerusalem needs to be under Jewish political control for prophecy to be fulfilled.
Not in Romans. Not in Galatians, where Paul goes out of his way to redefine the seed of Abraham as those who are in Christ. Not in Ephesians, where the mystery of the gospel is that Jew and Gentile are made one new man. Not in Hebrews, which treats the entire old covenant apparatus as finished. Not in Peter. Not in John’s letters. Not anywhere.
The silence is total, and it is theological. These men wrote tens of thousands of words between them about the Christian life, the church, eschatology, ethics, and the purposes of God. If the political restoration of a nation-state was central to God’s redemptive program, they had exactly the opportunity to say so and not one of them took it.
You would think that a theology which claims to be Spirit-filled would account for this. You would think that, and you would be wrong, because accounting for it would require Dispensationalism to reckon with the possibility that its central question is a pre-Pentecost question, which is a very polite way of saying that it is an unconverted man’s question. John Nelson Darby did not invent his system until the 1830s. He apparently missed the memo that the question had already been asked and answered eighteen centuries earlier, at which point the people who had been burning with it stopped asking it and went to evangelize the known world instead.
Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. Paul said that, and he knew something about the subject, having been personally knocked off his horse by the answer.
THE NATION NO ONE WANTED TO DEFEND
In 70 AD, the Roman general Titus put Jerusalem under siege, broke through the walls, and destroyed the temple so thoroughly that Jesus had predicted it with precision: not one stone left upon another. The event was catastrophic by any earthly measure. The city burned. The population was massacred or enslaved. The center of Jewish religious life, the dwelling place of the presence of God in the Israelite imagination, was reduced to rubble that is still being excavated today.
Here is what the Christian community did when the siege began: they left. They fled to Pella across the Jordan and did not return to fight. This was not cowardice. This was theology. They had been told by Jesus himself, in the Olivet Discourse, that when they saw Jerusalem surrounded by armies, they should flee to the mountains. They took him seriously, and they went. And the Jewish community, which had expected them to stay and defend the holy city, never fully forgave them for it. The flight to Pella is one of the historical roots of the formal split between Judaism and Christianity, because the Jews read it as the ultimate betrayal: you abandoned Jerusalem, you abandoned the temple, you abandoned your people when it mattered most.
What the Jewish community did not understand, and what American evangelical Zionists do not appear to understand either, is that the Christians were not abandoning Jerusalem because they did not care about God’s purposes. They were abandoning Jerusalem because they understood them.
They knew what the temple was. They had read the book of Hebrews (probably, scholars believe), which treats the entire Levitical system as a shadow that has given way to the substance, which describes the old covenant as “ready to vanish away,” which argues at length that the priesthood, the sacrifices, the tabernacle, and everything associated with them were never the point. They were types. They pointed beyond themselves to Christ, who is the High Priest, the sacrifice, the temple, and the meeting place between God and man all at once.
When the type meets the antitype, you do not mourn the scaffold after the building is finished. You do not weep over the mold after the bronze has been poured. The temple’s destruction was not a tragedy for Spirit-filled Christians in the first century because they understood, in a way that Dispensationalism has spent two centuries trying to unteach, that God had never been interested in the building. He was interested in the Builder. He was never interested in a physical nation-state, but in a people group. And that people group is the church, and never required an actual physical nation.
And then there is the small matter of Revelation, which was written to people who knew the temple was gone or going. Revelation ends not with a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem but with a New Jerusalem descending from heaven in which, John tells us explicitly, there is no temple at all. “For the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.” The book that Dispensationalists love most as a proof text for their national restoration program ends with a city that has no national borders, no ethnic gatekeepers, no temple, and no priesthood, because those categories have been absorbed entirely into Christ. The last chapter of the Bible renders the whole program obsolete.
Nobody in the New Testament lights a candle for the demolished temple. Nobody drafts a fundraising letter to rebuild it. Nobody writes a lament for the lost sacrificial system. This is because the people who wrote the New Testament were Spirit-filled, and Spirit-filled people understood that the demolition of the temple was not an interruption of God’s program. It was the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence God had been writing for fifteen hundred years.
Imagine that. The thing that the unconverted Jews wanted so badly during the days of Herzl - and the thing that Dispensationalists today are focused on and can’t stop thinking about (the nation of Israel) - the First Century Christians saw demolished right in front of them, and they didn’t shed a single tear. They didn’t give a single sniffle. Nobody complained. Nobody wept. Nobody mourned when they saw the nation of Israel crumble in front of them. The Christians were indifferent to it. It didn’t matter.
WHAT THE SPIRIT ACTUALLY DOES
Back to Mike Huckabee not understanding how a Christian could fail to be a Zionist, the Christians who lived in Jerusalem for the first two thousand years of church history, the ones the Patriarchs spoke for in January, cannot understand how a Christian could embrace it. One of these groups has to be wrong, and it is not the group that has been baptizing people in the Jordan River since the first century.
The New Testament does not present Spirit-filling as something that increases your devotion to the ethnic nation. It presents it as something that completely blows apart ethnic categories. The disciples who asked about restoring the kingdom to Israel, once filled with the Spirit, never asked again. The apostle whose Hebrew name marked his connection to the covenant nation lost that name in Luke’s narrative the moment his Gentile mission was fully launched under the Spirit’s direction. The Christians who understood the temple most deeply were the ones who walked away from it without looking back, because the Spirit had shown them what it was all along: a very good picture of something infinitely better.
These two data points are not cherry-picked anomalies. They are the consistent testimony of the book that records what the Holy Ghost actually does when he shows up and takes over. He does not produce a people consumed with the geopolitical fortunes of a Middle Eastern nation-state. He produces a people consumed with Christ accomplishing his will through the church, across every ethnic boundary, in every nation under heaven. The kingdom that the disciples thought they were asking about in Acts one turns out to be bigger, stranger, and more glorious than anything they had imagined, and the Holy Ghost spent the rest of the first century showing them just how much bigger it was.
The fixation on the physical nation of Israel as the center of God’s redemptive purposes is not a sign of deep biblical literacy. It is a sign of pre-Pentecost thinking preserved in theological amber by a nineteenth-century Irish lawyer named John Nelson Darby and distributed to the American church through a Bible with study notes written by a man whose personal life was such a catastrophe that you are going to want to read the Century of Scofield when it comes out this spring.
That system, Dispensationalism, has convinced millions of American Christians that the question the disciples stopped asking after Pentecost is the most important question in eschatology, that the building whose destruction the New Testament treats as theological punctuation needs to be rebuilt, and that the scaffold must be re-erected around a building that was finished two thousand years ago.
The Holy Ghost has been freeing Christians of caring for the nation-state of Israel since Acts chapter one. The patient, unfortunately, has proven remarkably resistant to treatment. But then, that has always been the interesting thing about bad theology: it tends to survive longest among people who are most confident they do not have any.
DISPENSATIONALISM IS JUST JUDAISM WITH A JESUS STICKER ON IT
There is a question that nobody in the Dispensationalist camp wants to answer directly, and it is this: in what meaningful way does your interpretation of Old Testament prophecy differ from the interpretation held by rabbinic Judaism?
Take any major Dispensationalist claim about the prophetic program and lay it next to the standard rabbinic reading. The land promises to Abraham are literal and await physical fulfillment in a specific geographic territory. Check. The restoration of Israel means the political reconstitution of the Jewish nation in that territory. Check. The temple must be rebuilt in Jerusalem. Check. The Davidic kingdom will be established as an earthly political reality centered in the city of David. Check. The nations will ultimately be subordinate to a restored Israel operating from Jerusalem as the capital of the world. Check. The promises made to ethnic Israel belong to ethnic Israel and cannot be transferred, spiritualized, or reassigned to another people.
Dispensationalists and rabbinic Jews read the same prophecies and arrive at substantially the same conclusions about what they mean. The only difference is that Dispensationalists have inserted Jesus into the story at a particular point and assigned him the role of returning to fulfill the political program that Judaism has been expecting all along. In the dispensationalist framework, the Jews were not wrong about what the kingdom would look like. They were only wrong about the timing and the identity of the king. The program itself, the land, the temple, the throne, the nation, the political supremacy, that part they had exactly right.
This is an extraordinary concession that most Dispensationalists make without realizing they have made it. They have essentially agreed with the Pharisees about the nature of the kingdom and disagreed only about whether Jesus qualifies to run it. They have taken the reading of Scripture that caused Israel to reject its own Messiah, the reading that expected a political deliverer and a national restoration rather than a crucified servant and a spiritual kingdom, and canonized it as the correct hermeneutic. They have built a theological system on the interpretive foundation of the people who handed Jesus to Pilate.
The early church understood this problem with a clarity that centuries of dispensationalist influence have largely erased. When Peter stood up on Pentecost and said, “This is that,” he was not saying that Joel’s prophecy was being partially fulfilled with the main event still pending. He was saying that the outpouring of the Spirit was the thing the prophets were pointing at all along, and that the people who were looking for a political program had been looking at the finger instead of the moon.
When Stephen gave his sermon in Acts 7, the sermon that got him killed, his argument was precisely that the ethnic and geographic reading of the covenant was a fundamental misunderstanding of what God had been doing from the beginning. Abraham was called outside the land. Joseph was used by God in Egypt. Moses encountered God in Midian. The tabernacle, not a fixed temple, was the dwelling place God ordained in the wilderness. Stephen’s point was that God had never been as attached to the real estate as his audience assumed, and the audience understood the implication well enough to pick up rocks.
Paul makes the same argument in Galatians with surgical precision. The seed of Abraham, the one to whom the promises were made, is Christ, and those who are in Christ are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise. This is not a reassignment of the promises. Paul is arguing that it was always what the promises meant, and that the ethnic nationalist reading was a misreading from the beginning.
In Romans 9 through 11 he works through the anguish of his own people’s rejection with the conclusion that the true Israel, the Israel of God, has always been defined by faith and not by bloodline. Not all who are of Israel are Israel. The children of the promise are counted for the seed, not the children of the flesh.
Spirit-filled people read the Bible the way the apostles read it, which is to say they read it through Christ and from the end backward. They understand that the Old Testament is not a flatly literal program awaiting execution but a complex of types, shadows, promises, and patterns that find their yes and amen in Jesus. The land is a type of the inheritance of the saints in Christ. The temple is a type of the body of Christ and the indwelt believer. The Davidic throne is fulfilled in the ascended Christ reigning at the Father’s right hand right now. The restoration of Israel is the ingathering of the nations into the one new man through the gospel. These are not creative reinterpretations invented by clever theologians to avoid the plain meaning of the text. They are the readings the apostles themselves gave, in the very documents that constitute the New Testament, under the inspiration of the same Spirit who inspired the prophecies in the first place.
The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God because they are spiritually discerned. The disciples asked the natural man’s question in Acts 1 and the Spirit cured them of it at Pentecost. Dispensationalism has spent two centuries trying to put the question back in the mouth of the church, and it has done so by teaching Christians to read the Bible the way the Pharisees read it, which is to say, the way people read it before the Spirit shows up and reorients everything.
The rabbinic scholar and the dispensationalist prophecy conference speaker are looking at the same map. They are expecting the same destination. The only one who told both of them they had the wrong map is the Holy Ghost, and on this particular subject, a very large portion of the American church has decided not to listen to him.
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