The core problem with Christian Zionism is simple. All of God’s promises are yes and Amen in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20). There are no promises to anyone outside of Christ. Jews outside of Christ have no divine promises to claim, including no land promise. Obviously the people living in the land right now have a right to defend it, the same way any nation has a right to defend itself, but there is no divine right to the land granted to Jewish people just because they are Jewish. Even in the old covenant, Jews were exiled from the land for their sins. A divine right to possess the land even in the old covenant was conditional.
Further, in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul says to all believers, Jew and Gentile, “all things are yours” — the world, life, death, the present, the future — “all things are yours, for you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.” Jewish Christians do not get any promises Gentile Christians do not also get. There are no “extra” promises for Jewish believers. To say Jewish believers are promised something Gentile believers are not promised is to re-erect a division between Jew and Gentile that Christ demolished.
To put this another way, if the “holy land” belongs to anyone, it belongs to Christians – not Arabs, Muslims, or Jews, but Christians. But even that doesn’t go far enough. The “promised land” was never anything more than a down payment on a much larger inheritance God promised his people. In Romans 4:13, Paul says Abraham (and thus Abraham’s children, Christians) “would be heir of the world.” The whole world has become the “promised land.” This is why Paul could take a land promise attached to the 5th commandment and apply it to Gentile Christian children living in Ephesus in Ephesians 6.
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