Rethinking America Through the Eyes of Israel

It is nearly impossible here in the United States to read the national prophesies of Israel and not think of our own nation. The parallels appear striking: moral collapse, idolatry, unfaithfulness, and the lingering memory of better days. But we must remember something quite important: the USA is not Israel. We are not a chosen people. We have no special covering, no election, no divine favor as a nation. That anything in our history has been blessed by the hand of the Lord over our 250 years has nothing whatsoever to do with the nation itself, and everything to do with the church within her.

So let us rethink our supposed “special place” in God’s eyes as a country. Israel was not just a nation—it was a nation-church. A people called, covenanted, wed to the LORD in an unrepeatable way. We are just another nation, beloved in our own eyes, but which happens to contain a church, a body of the elect, gathered by grace from every tongue and tribe. Whatever warnings we will come across in the Old Testament, directed at Israel, speaks to us as a church, both comprehensive and local… but not as a country.

Hosea’s Audience Was Not a Secular State

This distinction is critical in the age of swelling Christian nationalism. The temptation to blur the boundaries between church and nation, between God’s covenant people and political identity, is, at best, theologically confused.

Old Testament prophets did not cry out to a republic or a democracy. But to a people whose entire national structure was bound up in covenant. They had Sinai behind them. We do not. They had the Ark and the Tabernacle. We do not. They had prophets speaking by divine revelation. We have the completed Word. Their identity was shaped by redemptive history; ours is shaped by geography and constitution.

To read OT prophesies through the lens of American exceptionalism is to flatten the very meaning of covenant and twist the gospel’s trajectory.

America Has No Sinai

The United States of America, for all her providential mercies, has no burning bush, no Shekinah, no Davidic throne. Her Constitution is not the Law of God. Her shores were not crossed under divine mandate. God has preserved and restrained evil within her borders, but she is no more the “city on a hill” than Nineveh or Babylon once were. The Church is.

Whatever we may say about American history, it must be said in humility, not pride. God's patience with nations is never a mark of covenant, only of mercy.

But There Is a Remnant

Yet within this nation, God has placed a remnant. A church bought with blood. A people gathered by grace across many denominations and churches. They are not defined by flag, but by faith. Not by soil, but by Spirit.

The church, not the state, is the object of God's redemptive focus. The true heirs of Abraham are those united to Christ, not those who pledge allegiance to any earthly banner. And so, it is within the church, not the country, where Old Testament nation's prophesies find their present address.

Let It Strike Where It Should

Let the Old Testament prophesies speak. Let them cut. Let them expose every false trust and every idolatry of heart. But let them do so to the right people. Not in the halls of Congress, but in the sanctuary. Not to America writ large, but to the Church within her.

Let us not hold this prophecy like a cudgel over unbelieving culture. Let us receive it first as a scalpel for the Bride of Christ. The church must read, let's say, Hosea with trembling, not with a flag in hand, but with sackcloth.

The Gospel Is Bound to a Cross, Not a Flag

We should abandon the delusion that America is in any way a modern Israel. The gospel does not march behind or in front of the stars and stripes. It marches alongside a crucified and risen Christ.

Our hope is not in reclaiming a nation. It is in reviving a people, His people. The church.

The church alone is the covenant community. And the church alone will remain when the nations of this present age are long forgotten.