Christ, Our Promised Land
By John Gavazzoni

Let's see: Adam and Eve, while being a real, actual, historical couple, were, as such, a type, a fore-shadowing of Christ and His bride, the church; the garden in which God placed them, an actual garden, I believe, somewhere in the Middle East, while real and actual, typified God's people as His garden ("Ye are God's husbandry/tillage, ye are God's building," wrote Paul....the garden in Genesis destined to become the garden-city, the New Jerusalem). Abraham, the father of many nations, typified our Heavenly Father, and Abraham and Sarah's son, Isaac, was a foreshadow of Christ, the Son of God. We could extrapolate that Jacob pre-figured the Holy Spirit as he (Jacob) is a model of the transforming power of God.

Moses was a type of Christ as our Deliverer; Joshua pre-figured our Conquering Lord who leads us into the promised land, the "land" of Himself; the tabernacle in the wilderness, and later, the temple, were clearly, each, a type of, first, Jesus, who came and "tabernacled among us," in Whom dwelt fully the whole of God's grace and truth, but also all humanity in union with Him, we are that temple not made with hands, the temple made of living stones to be the habitation of God through the Spirit.

We might be so bold as to posit that Jesus Christ is the Substance of all the things of the created dimension. Though real, they are, in comparison with Him, only the shadows of which He is the Substance. We work to produce good things, typifying God's workmanship in Christ Jesus. Yet, as Paul put it in Eph. 2:10, "The fact is, we are the effect of what HE did (or: His creation; the thing He has constructed; the result of His work; His achievement; His opus; the effect of His Deed): people being founded from a state of disorder and wildness (being framed, built, settled and created; being changed from chaos to order), within and in union with Christ Jesus; [founded and built] upon good works (virtuous actions; excellent deeds) which God made ready (prepared) beforehand, to the end that we may, could, should and would walk about (= live our lives) centered within and in union with them."

We live in material houses, and while doing so, we are typifying dwelling in Christ. I could go on and on, but let me get to my point: why, pray tell, with all of the above foreshadowing God's relationship with man in Christ, has the notion so overtaken evangelicalism, especially in the U. S., that a literal, physical land in the Middle East is the promised land of God's chosen people?

Dear reader, if you have been in any measure captivated by that theological nonsense, being suckered into believing that to understand prophecy, you must keep your eyes focused on what's going on in the modern State of Israel, wise up! Christ, is the promised land of His people. We are to be rooted and grounded and built up in Him, finding Him to be our land of milk and honey, our land of God's provision for His people. Though I ended up having significant disagreement with him re: the direction of the movement he headed, Witness Lee, the co-worker of Watchman Nee, summed it up so well in his teaching of the land of Canaan being "the all-inclusive type of Christ." That's where all biblical typology leads to and ends: Christ, as the "land" in Whom we are to live, draw from, find our nourishment, grow and prosper, and from "there," to manifest His goodness to all the earth.

There is only one "place" of eschatological promise, Christ, Himself. The idea that the modern State of Israel is at the center of what God is up to is an idea created in the seductively creative mind of a man named G. N. Darby, the architect of the theology of modern dispensationalism. Darby, to be fair, truly loved the Lord Jesus, but was led astray by the lust of his inquiring mind, obsessed with formulating a system that would finally satisfy his propensity for categorizing scripture, placing portions into neat cubby holes that led him to the conclusion that God has two different administrations, one for Israel, and one for the church, and they were not to be confused.

Most of those who sit in churches today listening to pastors who embrace Darby's theory, do not realize that, for Darby, the church of Jesus Christ was an after-thought of God's, ah, as it were, plan B, because ancient Israel, as the object of God's plan A failed to be faithful to their commission. From that, he reasoned that God had an earthly people, and a heavenly people.....the stars of the heavens and the sands of the sea, and that the kingdom of heaven on earth belongs to Israel, so Darby reasoned, that if the Bible is true, then God must recover Israel as a nation in the latter days.

If one is able to trace a thread of true Christian orthodoxy down through history since time of the apostles, Darbyism stands out as a strange insertion and intrusion into that thread. Such luminaries as C. H. Spurgeon, G. Campbell Morgan, the saintly George Mueller, and many others, came finally to denounce its radical presumptions. Mueller going so far as to say that the matter boiled down to either Darby or his (Mueller's) Bible. I received my early mentoring from elders who truly loved the Lord, but, as in the case of the first pastor of my experience...a gifted evangelist, many were strongly advised to attend Bible schools and seminaries devoted to that eschatological scheme. Having cut their teeth on the Scofield Bible, with its dispensational notes, it was presumed that they should get further training consistent with, and expanding on, those notes.

The present expectation of the "rapture of the church," which is integral to that teaching, has led many saints of God to a defiled hope. It has led so many gullible Christians to seeing the final end of the Christian life as an escape from tribulation, rather than being the light of the world in the midst of tribulation. Of course, it fits quite well within the scenario of a gospel that is about escaping hell and gaining heaven. Folks, it's going to get bad, real bad, in the days to come. There's all the signs of a societal collapse all around us, and the union of the prosperity gospel, along with the rapture theory, is going to leave many ill-prepared for what's coming, wondering why God doesn't yank them out of the mess.