Israel and the church

The mention of Jews and Israel in Revelation is genuinely controversial. Why does the book speak of them the way it does, and how can the tension be resolved?

The tension with the Jews

In the time of the early church, the Jewish religion was respected by the Roman Empire because of its long history, and Jews were free to practice their faith as long as they stayed loyal to the emperor.

Christians, however, refused to pay the emperor the worship he expected — and worse, from Rome’s point of view, they were going around persuading people to follow a Jew named Jesus instead.

Because the emperor initially saw Christianity as simply a Jewish sect, the Jewish community found itself under pressure by association. That is part of why some Jews took to accusing Christians before the Romans: it was a way of making sure the emperor understood that they, at least, were not on the Christians’ side.

Jews in Revelation

The book of Revelation is about one thing: Jesus, and everything that gets decided in light of him. That is true of how it treats the Jews as well.

We already saw the tension between Christians and Jews playing out concretely in Smyrna and Philadelphia, where local Jews attack the church for witnessing to Jesus — which is why John calls them a synagogue of Satan. When those same Jews in Philadelphia are later said to bow down before the church, the point is not that they submit to the church as an institution, but that they come to accept Jesus.

The same dynamic surfaces in chapter 11. The place where the two witnesses are killed is spiritually described as Sodom (a place of sin) and Egypt (a place of slavery) — a description of Jerusalem, since that is where their Lord, Jesus, was killed. Tellingly, even the name “Jerusalem” is avoided here.

And yet, for all that tension, Revelation never turns its argument against ethnic Israel as such (how much weight that carries depends on how you read the 144,000 in chapter 7). What the book actually addresses throughout is people’s relationship to Jesus, not their ethnicity.

That is because the church is part of Israel, not a replacement for it. Revelation makes this unity explicit in several places: the 24 elders in chapter 4 represent the 12 tribes and the 12 apostles together, and the names of the 12 tribes and the 12 apostles are engraved side by side in the New Jerusalem. Heaven itself, notably, is not pictured as some neutral, placeless realm but as the New Jerusalem — which makes it unsurprising if Jesus were to appear in the physical Jerusalem at his second coming. This is the key to why Revelation’s language about the Jews can sound so sharp: precisely because the church is part of Israel, it cannot cut off its own roots, even when some Jews openly attack it.

Conclusion

The challenge for the church, then, is to hold both truths at once — being part of Israel while also, at times, being attacked by Israel.

There is a lot we can learn from this book about how to navigate that same kind of tension today, whether between different church denominations or in our relationship with Jewish people.