Nov
15
Praying for the peace of Jerusalem
Filed Under The Church
I’ve had a number of people ask me recently what it means to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” The answer to this isn’t as simple as you might think. The common prevailing notion is that Psalm 122:6 commands believers to pray for a 123 sq km piece of land in the Middle East and the government that currently occupies it. This is a somewhat strange view considering that Christians feel very free with equating Jerusalem in other areas of the Old Testament to the Old Testament equivalent of the New Testament church. For example, Psalm 147:2 says, “Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion!”. I doubt many Christians would exegete this passage as calling on praise from the current residents of geographic Jerusalem. Rather, correctly interpreted, they would say the passage calls on the people of God to give praise to their God.
What we are articulating is the shift that occurred between the Old Testament and New Testament in how the people of God were designated and to whom the gospel was preached. In the Old Testament, the people of God (what we now affectionately refer to as “believers”) were very closely related to ethnic, political Israel. This does not mean that all Jews were converted believers simply based on their nationality. Paul tells us otherwise, “That not Israel [ethnic] was Israel [spiritual].” But the ties were so close and our Lord’s pleasure to deal with that nation so strong that Israel and what we now know as the Church were synonymous.
The common and ubiquitous testimony of the New Testament is that civil, ceremonial Israel served as a type of the Christ who was to come. With the coming of Jesus Christ we see a shift in the orientation of the church from ethnic to spiritual and from inwardly focused to outwardly evangelical. These two shifts are most notably seen in the inculcation of and global invitation to Gentiles to repent and believe in the Messiah of the Jews. The dividing wall had been torn down and Christ had united Jew and Gentile in His body. This is the testimony of Christianity.
Take for example Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4. The conversation quickly turns to the location of worship. The Samaritans were a sect of Judaism much like Mormonism would be to Christianity today. The Samaritans and the Jews differed as to where the appropriate location of worship was to be. The Samaritan woman brings this question up to Jesus. He replies that the day was coming when worship would not take place in a geographic location but would take place, “in spirit and in truth.” He then summarizes this change in his self-declaration of himself as the Messiah. In this passage Jesus was declaring the coming shift in how the Church would be defined. Worship would be wherever God’s people were gathered. The new temple would be believers individually and the church corporately as the temple of the Holy Spirit. No more Levitical priests but rather Jesus after the manner of Melchizedek. What was Jerusalem, Israel, Jacob, Zion, and so forth in the Old Testament would now be subsumed under the title “church” in the New Testament.
So how should we obey Psalm 122:6? We should pray for the church of Jesus Christ. We should pray for her peace. We should lift holy hands for Christian congregation everywhere We should pray for the prosperity and successfulness of the gospel as it goes out into the world. We should do this longing for heaven, in which we will experience another transition, when we will all be gathered together into the new Jerusalem (Rev 3:12 and 21:2).
So what should our attitude to Israel be? We can save that for another post and simply quote Paul in Romans 11:28, “As regards the gospel, they [Jews] are enemies of God for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers.” Judaism is an enemy of the gospel because it does not acknowledge Jesus as the Savior of sinners and Messiah of the Old Testament. We do however look forward to the day when the humbling of Israel is over and God sees fit in His infinite mercy to again bring revival to ethnic Jews.
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