Lord, Lord, Did We Not?

by Kendra Mallock (April 2026)

“Lord, Lord, did we not…?”

The most disturbing part of Jesus’s warning in the Sermon on the Mount is that it is aimed at people who are certain they understand what God has said. They are believers—convinced they are serving Him, confident enough to point to their works and say, “Did we not do these things in your name?”

That possibility should trouble every serious Christian. Because it means sincere believers can be profoundly mistaken about what God has promised.

Christians disagree about many things. Most of those disagreements are manageable—interpretive questions that can be debated without troubling anyone’s conscience too deeply. But occasionally a theological dispute raises a harder question: what if the consequences of being wrong are not the same on both sides?

The question of Israel is one of those cases. If the Bible’s covenant promises to Israel were meant exactly as they were spoken, then dismissing them is not merely a technical mistake in interpretation—it becomes a claim about the reliability of God’s own word.

For more than a century Christians have debated how to read the Bible’s covenant promises to Israel. Dispensationalists argue that the promises made to Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures remain in force and will ultimately be fulfilled in the Jewish people and their national restoration. Other approaches—including supersessionism and various preterist readings—argue in different ways that those promises have either been fulfilled, redirected, or otherwise no longer apply in the same way to the Jewish people as a distinct nation.

Both sides appeal to Scripture. Dispensationalists emphasize the plain meaning of the covenant promises in the Hebrew prophets, while supersessionists emphasize how the New Testament speaks about the people of God in Christ. The real dispute is not whether Scripture matters but whether later interpretation authorizes believers to declare that promises made in the strongest possible language were permanently redirected to someone else. In practice, these approaches often differ less in their sources than in what they permit themselves to do with the plain force of the promises.

But something is usually left out of the comparison: the consequences of being wrong are not symmetrical.

Conscience comes first. This isn’t about gaming theology to avoid punishment. But when people compare these systems of interpretation, they rarely acknowledge that the risks are not identical.

If those who expect a future fulfillment are mistaken, the error amounts to expecting too much from the biblical promises to Israel—taking language about land, nationhood, and restoration more literally than history may ultimately justify.

If those who argue that the promises have been fulfilled, redirected, or otherwise completed are mistaken, the error is heavier. It means declaring that commitments expressed in the strongest possible terms no longer stand as they were given. In that case the mistake is not merely interpretive; it means opposing something God Himself established, and it puts the person making that claim in spiritual danger.

The Bible itself warns believers to tread carefully when speaking with certainty in God’s name. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives a warning that has unsettled Christians for centuries:

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven…
On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name…?’
And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

The people described in that passage are not unbelievers. They are people convinced they are acting in God’s name. Their problem is not insincerity. It is certainty—they believed they were defending God’s will while misunderstanding what God had actually said. That warning should weigh heavily in any discussion about covenant promises, because when God speaks about Israel in the Hebrew prophets, the language is not casual. Consider the words recorded in the Book of Jeremiah. In chapter 31, God gives one of the strongest covenant statements in the Hebrew Bible:

Thus says the LORD,
who gives the sun for light by day
and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night…
If this fixed order departs from before me, declares the LORD,
then the offspring of Israel shall cease from being a nation before me forever.
If the heavens above can be measured
and the foundations of the earth below can be explored,
then I will cast off all the offspring of Israel.

The logic is unmistakable. Only if the cosmic order collapses—if the heavens can be measured and the foundations of the earth fully searched—will God reject Israel as a nation.

Language like that suggests a covenant not merely recorded in Scripture but woven into the order of the world itself.

The prophet returns to the same point again in Jeremiah 33, where God rebukes those who claim He has rejected “the two families” He once chose—the houses of Judah and Israel. Once again the promise is tied to the fixed order of day and night. Unless the covenant with creation itself can be broken, God says, He will not abandon the descendants of Jacob.

Other prophets speak with similar clarity. In Amos, the promise is expressed in simpler but equally striking language: Israel will be restored to its land, its cities rebuilt, and its people “planted upon their land never again to be uprooted.”

These passages do not read like metaphors for a purely spiritual community. They describe cities, land, nations, and permanence. Supersessionist theology therefore faces a difficult interpretive task: explaining how promises expressed in such concrete national language came to mean something entirely different.

The New Testament itself contains language that echoes the same instinct. Writing in the Epistle to the Romans, Paul reminds his readers that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” The statement appears in the middle of his discussion of Israel’s place in God’s purposes. Whatever one concludes about how prophecy unfolds, the underlying principle is clear: divine commitments are not withdrawn. The tension runs throughout Scripture: even in periods of disobedience, Israel is still spoken of as a people bound to God by covenant, not as a category that has simply dissolved.

For centuries, however, many Christian theologians believed these promises had already been absorbed into the Church.

Covenantal and replacement theology developed in a world where the Jewish people were scattered, stateless, and politically powerless. For centuries, the idea that Israel might again exist as a nation would have seemed historically impossible. To theologians writing in medieval and early modern Europe, the biblical nation of Israel appeared to belong entirely to the past.

That assumption is harder to maintain today.

In the twentieth century something occurred that earlier Christian theologians never witnessed: the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the same region described in the biblical narrative. A people dispersed for nearly two thousand years returned to the land associated with their ancient covenant texts and established a national home there.

Whatever one thinks about prophecy, that development alone complicates the confident assumption that Israel’s role in the biblical story quietly ended.

There is also a historical fact that deserves more attention than it usually receives.

Most ancient peoples disappeared. The Philistines vanished. The Moabites vanished. The Edomites vanished. The Assyrians and Babylonians who once dominated the ancient Near East eventually dissolved into the larger currents of history. Yet the Jewish people remained identifiable as a people across two millennia of exile, persecution, and dispersion—and eventually re-established a national state in the same region described in their ancient texts.

Whatever explanation one prefers, that survival alone is historically unusual. Peoples conquered and dispersed in antiquity almost always vanished into the surrounding populations within a few generations. The Jewish people did not.

There is also a broader historical reality that modern readers cannot easily ignore. Much of the Middle East that once hosted Christian or Zoroastrian civilizations eventually came under Islamic rule, and many of those earlier cultures were absorbed or displaced. Yet the land at the center of the biblical narrative remains tied to the story of the people from whom that narrative came.

This is the land where Abraham journeyed, where David ruled from Jerusalem, where Solomon built the Temple and the prophets spoke, and where Jesus himself taught in Galilee before being crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Is it really plausible that the people whose story produced those events are now merely incidental to the place where they occurred?

None of this proves dispensationalism. Theology cannot be settled by historical observation alone. But it does raise a question earlier theologians did not face in quite the same way: what should Christians make of the continued existence of the Jewish people, and the reappearance of Israel as a nation, in the very land that Scripture associates with their covenant story?

Even if one ultimately rejects dispensational interpretations of prophecy, the existence of Israel today makes it harder to speak casually about the permanent disappearance of the people to whom those promises were originally addressed.

And then there is something else that keeps appearing in these conversations, something that has little to do with careful biblical interpretation.

The hostility toward Jews and toward Israel that surfaces in many of these debates is difficult to miss. Again and again the discussion moves easily from theology to open contempt—mockery, slurs, sneering about “the Jews,” and the endless coded references (am I the only one who sees several references to “the Austrian painter” every day?). Whatever someone’s theology, that posture sits badly beside the command to love one’s neighbor. And when that hostility appears in arguments made by people who describe themselves as supersessionists, the contradiction becomes difficult to ignore.

The New Testament repeatedly warns that religious certainty can become a form of blindness. Scripture speaks of a final deception persuasive enough that many will follow it believing they are serving righteousness. That possibility alone should make believers cautious about assuming they already know what fidelity to God will look like in history.

Because Scripture itself warns that it is possible to say “Lord, Lord” with great conviction while still misunderstanding the will of God.

Promises framed that way do not sound temporary.

They sound like something woven into the order of the world.

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