If the forefathers of the faith accepted by faith that the promise of a promised land was something greater than the acreage between Dan and Beersheba, then why shouldn't we? If the faith of the forefathers of the faith look forward to the perfection of the promises in Christ, then why don't we look back at the covenants as having been perfected in Christ?Worth looking at is Two Level Fulfillment, an excerpt of Meredith Kline's Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview dealing specifically with dispensationalism.But the author of Hebrews is probably just wrongly spiritualizing the covenants, right?
By virtue then of both the filling of the land of Canaan and its characterization as a sabbath-land, this first level, Canaanite fulfillment of the land promise is seen to be an anticipatory portrayal of the consummated kingdom-land, the Metapolis kingdom-city of the new heavens and earth which the Creator covenanted to man from the beginning. Canaan represented this in a figure; it was only a limited land, not the cosmic goal of the creation kingdom. Also, as Hebrews 4 teaches, Canaan was not the true Sabbath experience. Even believers under the new covenant still await that. The Canaanite, first level fulfillment of the land promise served the pedagogical purpose of pointing beyond itself to the second level fulfillment, intimated by the “everlasting” nature of the promised possession.....Biblical teaching concerning a cataclysmic overhauling to be undergone by the earth and the emergence of a new heaven and earth at the Consummation presents a problem to any interpretation of the promise of an everlasting land inheritance understood in its specifically Palestinian delineation. The particular configuration of Canaanite territory specified to Abraham will not exist forever. Even apart from the assumption of radical cosmic restructuring at the final judgment, one would have to recognize that the current continental configurations of the earth reflected in the Abrahamic land promise would be altered beyond recognition in future ages by the natural geologic dynamics of the planet.
Moreover, and more decisively, in the New Testament there are clear indications of a positive kind of the shift to the second level of meaning of the land promise. Indeed, with surprising abruptness the New Testament disregards the first level meaning and simply takes for granted that the second level, cosmic fulfillment is the true intention of the promise. In keeping with Old Testament prophecies that Messiah, the royal seed of Abraham, would receive and reign over a universal kingdom (e.g., Pss 2:8; 72:8; Zech 9:10), Paul identifies Abraham’s promised inheritance as the world (kosmos, Rom 4:13). What is more, the New Testament attributes to Abraham himself as a subjective expectation an eschatological hope based on a second level understanding of the land promise. According to Hebrews 11:10,16 the object of Abraham’s faith-longing was not any earthly turf of this evil world-age but a better, heavenly country, the city of the new age, the creation of God.
I could quote it at great length, but I doubt it would do much good for the contingent here with it's fingers in it's ears humming real loud "Israel is Israel".
don’t you think it’s only natural for humans to predict, explain and wait for some god-awful event in the human history of mankind to wipe the slate clean? or better yet,
to wait for a savior, a messiah, the “one”, etc... to
deliver man from his own evils? I think it’s perfectly natural but not plausible
don’t you think it’s only natural for humans to predict, explain and wait for some god-awful event in the human history of mankind to wipe the slate clean? or better yet,
to wait for a savior, a messiah, the “one”, etc... to
deliver man from his own evils? I think it’s perfectly natural but not plausible. I think better to place trust in
g-d completely.