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Welcome to the Cross References podcast on the Book of Ezekiel. In this study, you learn how every small piece of the Bible tells one big story- and most importantly, how they all connect to the cross and Christ.
Whether you’re a newbie Christian or a veteran Bible reader, my goal is that God’s Word will make more sense to you after every episode.
Host: Luke Taylor
The Myths of Replacement Theology and the 10 Lost Tribes
Ezekiel 37:15-28
Ezekiel series, Part 70
Introduction
I’m going to give you a great Bible Study tip, because some people have a really hard time figuring out what the Bible is saying. So here’s a little tip that always helps me: when the Bible tells you what it’s saying, then you don’t have to try to figure out what it’s saying. You can just go with what the Bible tells you it’s saying.
Sound good? Great. Now you can throw out half your commentaries on the book of Ezekiel. Or, at least, you can come throw out half of mine, because it’s astounding how many Bible teachers- literal scholars- will totally miss the point of Ezekiel 37.
We talked about it last time, and it’s going to come up in this lesson, too. Now, I don’t want to sound arrogant, or like I’m smarter than all these guys. Why do I say they get it wrong? Well, because they bring all these preconceptions to the table when the crack open their Bibles, and whatever they read in the Bible must always fit the preconceptions they had before they opened it.
And these preconceptions are things like covenant theology or replacement theology. And if you want to make Ezekiel 37 fit replacement theology, you have to ignore what the Bible says when it tells you exactly what it says it means and make words mean things that the Bible never said.
The Book of Ezekiel creates some major headaches for people who want to make the Bible fit their preconceptions rather than letting the Bible mean what it clearly says.
So today, we’re going to leave our preconceptions right here in the intro, and we’ll let Ezekiel 37 tell us exactly what it’s telling us. And you’ll learn what that is today on the Cross References podcast.
[theme music]
V15-16, a Tale of Two Sticks
Welcome to the book of Ezekiel: a Cross References Bible study where we learn how every small piece of the Bible tells one big story- and how they all connect to the cross and Christ.
My name is Luke Taylor, and I’m a member of the church. Being a member of the church does not make me an Israelite. I may have some lessons I can learn from the Israelites as I read my Bible, and I Corinthians 10 tells us that this is one of the reasons the Bible was written.
But that does not make me one of them. Ephesians 2 also makes it clear that to become part of the church makes me a different classification than the Jewish people. So I am not an Israelite, a Jew, or an Israeli just because I became a Christian.
Now, it might sound silly that I need to say that, but there are many theology books who teach that the church has replaced Israel in the plan of God. This is a doctrine called supersessionism, or replacement theology. It’s not a heresy; people who believe it are not wicked or immoral. It’s a secondary issue. The primary issues are the things of God and salvation and the Gospel, and good christians can disagree on secondary issues.
But it’s still a significant issue, because in order to make replacement theology work, you have to allegorize a lot of very clear Old Testament passages that speak of a future plan for the nation of Israel. And that’s what I observe happening a lot with the verses we’re going to cover today.
Today is another vision from Ezekiel about his people. Last week, we covered the first half of Ezekiel 37 with the vision of the valley of the dry bones coming back to life. Today’s verses are not quite as famous, but they come just after those verses.
Ezekiel’s ministry has been characterized by a series of sign-acts. Lying on his side for a year in the town square and cooking his bread over poop. Digging a hole in the side of his hut and crawling through it. The sign-acts have been a memorable part of what makes Ezekiel Ezekiel, and (it’s with some sadness that I say) this is his last sign-act of the book.
Ezekiel 37:15-16
15 The word of the Lord came to me: 16 “Son of man, take a stick and write on it, ‘For Judah, and the people of Israel associated with him’; then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph (the stick of Ephraim) and all the house of Israel associated with him.’
Ezekiel is told to take two sticks, and each stick represents one of the two kingdoms of Israel.
So, as you are probably aware, Israel had split into two different kingdoms right after Solomon’s rule. Let’s have a quick history lesson.
Solomon died in approximately 931 BC. After he died, the land of Israel was divided into two portions, a northern portion consisting of 10 tribes, and the southern portion consisting of just two tribes. Right after Solomon died, God orchestrated circumstances to give 10 tribes to a man named Jeroboam, telling him
In I Kings 11:31-33
‘Behold, I am going to tear the kingdom away from the hand of Solomon and give you ten tribes 32 (but he shall have one tribe, for the sake of My servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel), 33 because they have abandoned Me, and have worshiped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of Moab, and Milcom the god of the sons of Ammon; and they have not walked in My ways, doing what is right in My sight and keeping My statutes and My ordinances, as his father David did.
Despite this, Jeroboam ends up leading Israel into even MORE idolatry once he gets put in charge. This kicks off a pattern in the books of I and II Kings of learning about the kings of the northern kingdom and the kings of the southern kingdom. The southern kingdom was often called Judah. The Northern Kingdom with 10 tribes was often simply called Israel, because it was the majority of Israel- but it would also be known at times as Samaria, the house of Joseph, and Ephraim.
The NICOT commentary by Daniel Block on Ezekiel says, “From Jeroboam I to the fall of the northern kingdom, the state was ruled by Ephraimite kings from Ephraimite capitals.” A footnote also says that Ephraim is used very often for the northern kingdom in books like Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms and Chronicles.
The northern kingdom of Israel or Ephraim always had evil kings, all the way through. I and II Kings would often use the phrase that so-and-so did evil in the Lord’s sight, and all of the northern kings were evil like that. In the southern kingdom, it was a little better; they had 6 or 8 good kings in the mix, but most of theirs were bad, too.
This is important when you study the major and minor prophets, because they typically open by saying which of the two kingdoms of Israel they’re preaching to, which tells you something about the location and setting; and they typically say which kings they prophesied under, which tells you something about the chronology.
For the northern kingdom, it ended up being conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BC. But it wasn’t because they were simply weaker than the Assyrians; God allowed them to be conquered as an act of judgment, because they had been evil for so long. God gave them hundreds of years to repent and sent them numerous prophets, such as Elijah and Hosea, but they just wouldn’t relent of their idolatry.
Like I said, the southern kingdom ended up being a bit better because they actually had a few good kings and some spiritual revivals over the years, but they eventually became so wicked that God destroyed them, too, and that’s what Ezekiel spent the first half of his book warning them about. They ended up falling to the Babylonians in 586 BC.
And now that they’ve been conquered and are learning their lesson, we find ourselves nearing the end of Ezekiel’s book, and now he’s actually giving them some hopeful messages about the future. We saw that last week with the valley of the dry bones, as Ezekiel told them that this represented the nation of Israel rising again someday.
That is pretty similarly related to what Ezekiel is telling them in this sign-act, except this one will include an important detail: that God is not just resurrecting the southern kingdom, but that the tribes of the northern kingdom will be restored as well.
Now, this might have sounded like an impossible promise. The northern Jews were scattered more than a hundred years ago. By the time of Jesus’ day, they’ve so intermingled with the Assyrians that they are now known as a completely different race: the Samaritans. So it seems literally impossible that God could actually restore the northern tribes because they’re just too far gone. Many Christians today don’t even accept the idea that the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom could ever make a return, that they’re the 10 lost tribes, lost to history.
And as we wrap up today, I’ll prove why that is not the case. That God was still preserving members of those 10 tribes through Ezekiel’s day, through Jesus’ day, and why I believe they’re still out there in the world today, even if they themselves don’t always know their own heritage.
V17-21, the power of one
So in this sign act, Ezekiel was told to take two sticks. One stick said “Judah,” representing the southern kingdom, and the other one said, “Joseph” which represented Ephraim AKA the Northern Kingdom, because Ephraim was a son of Joseph.
Ezekiel 37:17-20
17 And join them one to another into one stick, that they may become one in your hand. 18 And when your people say to you, ‘Will you not tell us what you mean by these?’ 19 say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I am about to take the stick of Joseph (that is in the hand of Ephraim) and the tribes of Israel associated with him. And I will join with it the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, that they may be one in my hand.
This time, the Word of the Day is “one.” It shows up 10 times in this section of scripture, and you heard it several times just now. God’s desire for the children of Israel is that they all be reunited into one tribe. That they all get brought back in together.
He symbolizes this with two sticks. The word for sticks here is a very vague Hebrew word, “es.” It basically means a piece of wood. It can mean a staff, a scepter, but probably just means a couple of sticks. You could probably imagine two staffs here.
Verse 21
then say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all around, and bring them to their own land.
The vocabulary here is so precise. The phrase “people of Israel” means the descendants. The word “people” is “ben,” which means “house” or “children.” It means the family of Israel. It’s a very warm and gracious word. God still views the Israelites as His children, despite everything that has happened. And it also communicates to the Israelites that their ethnic identity will be preserved.
These promises may have seemed too far-fetched to the Israelites, but again, notice that phrase “I will.” God says He’ll do it. You don’t have to worry about how. God is putting His own name on the duties here.
Finally, God also says in this verse that not only will He restore their national and ethnic identity, but that He’ll bring them back into “their” own land. Their land. It’s still their land.
The covenant God made with Abraham was not annulled just because they broke the covenant with Moses. We discussed this on a couple of recent episodes, as we studied Ezekiel 36, and in my interview with Craig of Awaiting Christ ministries. And we’ll talk about it some more today, because some Christians think that there’s only one covenant, and that the church has replaced Israel in all of God’s promises to Abraham, and that there is no longer a land agreement. But we see right here in Ezekiel 37:21 that the land of Israel is still the land that belongs to the Israelites. That covenant with Abraham was not broken. And as 1948 showed, it’s still in effect to today.
Let me side-track for a minute, because some of you may have the question as I go through this lesson: what does this have to do with my life? Why should I bother to learn history? What does Israel back in the land have to do with me? I have been challenged before while teaching through texts like this on how to make it relevant and practical to our lives. Because that’s always the pressure on bible teachers and pastors: make it practical. Get to the personal application ASAP, because we’ve heard it a million times, that if you aren’t making the Bible practical, you’re failing as a Bible teacher.
And I certainly understand that mindset, but I wonder sometimes if perhaps when emphasize personal application so much in Bible study that we subtly teach ourselves that the Bible is always about us. Not everything in the Bible is about us.
I’ve been a Sunday school teacher before to a group of teenagers. I remember working through the book of Zechariah with them one time, and we got to a point toward the end where there were a couple of chapters just about Israel, and I remember seeing the kids’ eyes glaze over, and they’re wondering why we’re spending so much time talking about this tiny little country on the other side of the world.
And they weren’t doubting that the Bible was true, or that the prophecies about Israel would happen someday. But they just didn’t seem relevant; the question was, why should we care?
And I can’t answer for every Christian out there, but prophecies about Israel are important to me for one reason: because they’re important to God. Israel has no relevance to my life Monday through Sunday, to be honest. I mean, I guess I can kinda watch Israel and get a sense of how close we are to the end times. But if I didn’t know anything about Israel, my life probably wouldn’t be all that different. I only care about Israel and what happens to it because it’s important to God. And I want what’s important to God to be important to me.
And in Ezekiel 37, God is saying that it’s really important to Him that Israel be rejoined into one nation. So after that side-track, let’s keep reading what’s important to God.
V22-28, Who is David?
Ezekiel 37:22-23
22 And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. And one king shall be king over them all, and they shall be no longer two nations, and no longer divided into two kingdoms. 23 They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. But I will save them from all the backslidings in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
This must be a millennial promise, because this hasn’t come true yet.
So, I am premillennial in my theology. That means I believe there will be a 7-year end-of-the-world period, commonly called the Tribulation. Then Jesus will return and that will be the second coming of Christ. And then a one-thousand-year period of peace known as the Millennial Reign of Christ will take place.
There are a lot of different views on what the Millennium entails. That’s why I will be doing a deep-dive on the Millennium as we cover Ezekiel 40 through 48, which are all chapters about the Millennial Reign of Christ. But for today, I’ll just point out that these verses about Israel being ruled by one king is probably in reference to Jesus, as well discuss in just a few verses.
I’d like to say they’re being ruled as one by Netanyahu, but I can’t apply that to him, as it also says they’ll cease their detestable things and transgressions, and Israel is still capable of quite a bit of immorality in these modern times. And also, as great of a guy as he is, Netanyahu can also be a bit of a yahoo. Great man, but morally he’s a little loose. For example, his wife never lets him travel anywhere alone, and there’s a reason for that.
So I believe that you could make an argument that Israel is all united now, as this chapter has been saying; but starting with verse 22, it becomes clearly stuff that will not be true until they accept Jesus and go into the Millennium.
Ezekiel 37:24-28
24 “My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes. 25 They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children's children shall dwell there forever, and David my servant shall be their prince forever. 26 I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will set them in their land and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore. 27 My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 28 Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.”
To start with is this phrase “my servant David.” David is going to come up as the leader over future Israel in chapter 34, right here in chapter 37, and also in the final section of the book later when it talks about the Millennial Temple.
Most commentators take this to be a reference to Jesus Christ, and I am about 75 or 80% sure they’re right. That’s is almost certainly what it is, and if you assume that, too, then you’re probably safe. I do think there’s a possible argument to be made that this is literally King David, and that in the future Kingdom of Jesus, that David actually has a role to fill. We’ll discuss that possibility when we get into those final chapters of Ezekiel sometime early next year.
But I’ll just say this here: if this is Jesus right here and not actually King David himself, then David would be the only thing in this paragraph of promises that isn’t literal. Because every other word of this section is about something that will literally happen someday just as it says.
So, the ancient hearers of this message about a future King coming and restoring the land to the people and ruling as their leader and dwelling with them as God would have been rightfully understood as messianic by these original hearers. And that’s why I am so sympathetic to the Jewish people who got Jesus so wrong when He came the first time.
That is not to say that they were right to mistreat Jesus and hate Him and kill Him. I am not so sympathetic to that. But I can totally understand why so many people misunderstood His purpose for being on this earth the first time He came around. Even the disciples didn’t always get Him right. His own disciples said in
Acts 1:6
“Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
That was after the resurrection. After! And they still didn’t get it. They still wondered when Jesus would take over as king of the world. They got Him so wrong the first time. But as I talked about in last week’s study, they’ll get Him right when He comes the second time.
Debunking Replacement Theology
Now, I want to shift gears and dispel a couple myths as we wrap up this chapter. A lot of commentaries I read on this passage made it all about Christian unity, and how Jesus prayed that WE, we Christians, would be ONE. Because like I said, “ONE” is a key word in this passage, and Jesus also prayed that His followers would be ONE.
And frankly, these commentaries are wrong. They try to make this passage about Christianity and the church because they believe in something called Replacement Theology, that ever since Jesus came and died, that the church He instituted has replaced Israel in the plan of God. And so all the Old Testament prophecies about Israel are transmogrified to apply to Christians.
Conveniently, all the warnings about judgment and destruction on the Israelites in the Old Testament? Yeah, they still apply to Israel. We just get the good stuff. It’s pretty ridiculous sometimes.
A lot of commentaries and scholars and pastors will have to twist Ezekiel 37 to make it apply to Christians instead of who it’s actually about: the nation of Israel. It’s wrong. It’s frankly abusing the word of God. It has to make words mean something other than what words simply mean.
So I am not a fan of Replacement Theology because of what it does to passages like this. It takes all these things that are clearly about a physical and literal people group and spiritualizes them to be about us. And when you start allegorizing the Word of God, you can make anything mean whatever you want it to. It’s like Sigmund Freud interpreting dreams; you can make anything mean anything.
Now, God’s Word does include some allegories, but Ezekiel is going out of his way here to make it obvious that he’s talking about the literal children of Israel. He says in
Verses 16 and 17
“Son of man, take a stick and write on it, ‘For Judah, and the people of Israel associated with him’; then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph (the stick of Ephraim) and all the house of Israel associated with him.’ 17 And join them one to another into one stick, that they may become one in your hand.
Now, that obviously refers to the nation of Israel itself. I’m not even quite sure how you could make it about the church. The church was not split into two kingdoms. You couldn’t make the argument that there are two churches. You could make the argument that there are a hundred churches, or a thousand churches, with all the denominations of christianity that are out there, good and bad. But it’s kinda hard to make it just two. Not when there was literally already a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom of Israel.
Verse 21 said
Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all around, and bring them to their own land.
If that’s the church, then what is our own land? Because the book of Hebrews tells me, as a Christian, that I am part of a kingdom that is non-physical. A kingdom that can’t be touched. A kingdom that can’t be shaken. So if this is about the church, then where’s our land? It doesn’t correlate to anything in our new covenant.
Verse 22
And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel.
What’s our nation? Where are our mountains? So Replacement Theologians have a lot of things to replace in this section of scripture, and that’s what gets under my skin about it; because they’re forced to just make stuff up about what Ezekiel 37 means if it’s actually a promise about the church. When in my opinion, God is going out of His way in this chapter to make it as clear as He possibly can that this is about a literal nation.
Remember a basic rule of Bible Interpretation I’ve used many times on this podcast: when the plain sense makes sense, seek no other sense.
Remember the Taylor Rule of Interpreting Scripture: if it isn’t already plain enough for you to accept it as literal, then what WOULD God have needed it to say to make it more literal?
So when it comes to this section we’re reading and it talks about a Northern Kingdom called Ephraim and a Southern Kingdom called Judah and uniting them together and bringing them back into their land and making them a nation…I just have to ask, it seems pretty obvious to me who that is talking about. Israel. It’s not about me. And unless you’re a Jew, it’s not about you.
And we have to be OK with that, because not everything in the Bible has to be about us.
[music]
Housekeeping/Mailbag
Before we get into chapter 38 with Gog and Magog, I’m going to have to take an extra week to study it. In fact, I have already planned out what I want to do with Gog and Magog, so here’s where we’re going next as of now.
I’m going to take next week off. I will perhaps run a bonus episode on my podcast feeds from my other podcast, Weird Stuff in the Bible. But in two weeks- on October 21- I’ll begin our study of Gog and Magog with study of who IS Gog and Magog. Let’s dig into his identity, most say it’s Russia, they’re probably right, but some say it’s other nations; let’s investigate it for ourselves and be absolutely certain we understand who the pieces on the board are.
Then on October 28, we’ll study the identities of some of the other players in that chapter: Persia, Cush, Put and more.
On November 4, I’ll have an episode called Why Gog Invades Israel. What are they after?
November 11 will be studying the timing of Gog and Magog. Some place it before the tribulation, some during. Some at the end of the tribulation. Some at the end of the tribulation. It may come down to this phrase “a land of unwalled villages.” So we’ll talk about that.
Then on November 18, we’ll do an episode about the battle or war of Gog and Magog and what happens when they attack Israel.
And then on November 25, I’ll do an episode called Cleaning Up after Gog and Magog, which will wrap up Ezekiel 39, and if all goes to plan, we’ll have these two chapters wrapped up by Thanksgiving.
That will probably be my last episode of the year. I plan to take December off from this podcast as I prepare my final project of Ezekiel, a look at the Millennial Reign of Christ. Like I said, this all depends on things going as planned, but I’d like to come back in January and work our way through those last 9 chapters of Ezekiel, which I think will go a lot quicker than my usual pace through this book because those chapters include a lot of technical information.
So, I hope you’re subscribed so you can get all those episodes! If you need to get in touch with me, send me an email to crossreferencespodcast@gmail.com. Thank you for all the positive feedback on my episode with Craig of Awaiting Christ, that was one of my most popular episodes. Probably my most popular when it comes to Day One downloads.
October 7 Anniversary
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this: today, October 7, is the one-year anniversary of the attack on Israel in 2023. I’d just like to make a comment on what has transpired since then.
Right after that attack happened in which more than a thousand Israelis were killed and many were taken hostage, I did an episode called “Why Satan Hates Israel.” In that episode, I talked about how Jesus has tied both of His comings to the Jewish people. That in His first coming, God had said that the Messiah would come through the Jews, and so that is why Satan was always trying to wipe out the Jews in the Old Testament.
In the New Testament, Jesus tied His Second Coming to the Israeli people, saying that He will not be back until they say “blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord.” And as we discussed last week and several times on this podcast, that won’t happen until toward the end of the Great Tribulation. Everything else right now is just setting the stage for that.
Which means that if Satan wants to prevent the Second Coming of Christ, all he has to do is kill the Jews. And that’s why to this day, he hasn’t given up, and he won’t until he’s thrown into the Lake of Fire. That’s Satan’s master plan, his only way to stop Jesus. You could say that Israel is God’s greatest weakness.
Zechariah said in chapter 2 of his book to Israel
he who touches you touches the apple of his eye
The apple of your eye is your pupil, the most sensitive spot of the human body. You can take Rocky Balboa in his prime and nobody on this earth can stop him- except Apollo Creed sometimes, it depends on the movie- but if take the Italian Stallion and you poke him in the pupil of his eye, guess what? He’s going down to the ground. Because the apple of your eye is the most sensitive part, your greatest weakness.
And God has set Israel up as the apple of His eye. If God had a weakness, this would be it, and that’s why Satan goes so hard after it.
So last year when all this blew up, I said we should pray that when Israel finally goes into Gaza, that it takes back this land that it has never truly settled. Even going back to the days of Joshua and the Judges, this is territory that they could never quite conquer, and so their enemies always camped out right in those spots, like the Gaza Strip, which is where they were attacked from on October 7.
It appears that Israel has finally- after thousands of years- finished the job. We’re still in kind of that fog of war, but whether it was through our prayers or if this was God’s plan all along, it appears that Israel has finally settled and truly claimed the Gaza Strip.
Then they started getting attacked by Satan’s forces up in the north, the terrorist group known as Hezbollah. So Israel decided, you know what, we’re on a roll here, let’s keep killing terrorists. SO they started wiping out some of their longstanding enemies in the north. As I was recording last week’s episode, news broke that they had killed a major terrorist leader named Nasrallah.
This angered Iran so much that in the past week, they sent couple hundred missiles- not just rockets, but ballistic missiles- into Israel and bombarded it. They overloaded the Iron Dome protection program in Israel and these missiles actually struck down on Israeli territory. Amazingly, the only death I’ve heard of so far out of this was a Palestinian citizen. So if Israel actually got hit with a bunch of missiles and not a single Israeli died, that would have to be hand-of-God type of protection. Prayer works, guys, and please keep praying for Israel.
I have no idea what comes next between Iran and Israel, but I do know what comes eventually: Gog and Magog. Eventually, Iran is going to team up with some other nations in a major attack on Israel, but what we’re going to study next in Ezekiel will give us the details.
Or, Gog and Magog might just happen this November, in which case we’ll be studying Ezekiel 38 and 39 as history, and I’d be OK with doing that, too.
But it’s amazing to me how the October 7 massacre has led to this moment we’re in right now where tensions are very high between Iran and Israel, and lots of people are questioning whether we’re on the verge of WW3. Guys, if this is WW3, we don’t have much to worry about because God’s going to fight it for us.
So keep praying for Israel. Because if we’re actually this close to Ezekiel 38 and 39, God’s gonna give us quite a show, and it’ll all be so that then all may know that the God of Israel is the Lord.
No 10 lost tribes
My closing thoughts today are on the 10 lost tribes. The so-called 10 lost tribes.
This idea is that after the northern kingdom of Ephraim was wiped out by the Assyrians in 722 BC, that those 10 tribes were basically lost forever. That there are no more Issacharites and Gadites and so on, because they got so intermarried and intermingled with the other peoples.
This idea can come from a replacement theology mindset, because they have a tendency to believe that Israel’s story is over, that God can have no reason to preserve those old tribes. Or maybe they just think that because it’s what they’ve been taught. Or the idea can come from a logical assumption; that if the 10 Tribes of the North were conquered and scattered, that yes, those Jews would be lost. So it’s not necessarily a malicious assumption, but it would be an incorrect assumption. The 10 Tribes that constituted the Northern Kingdom were never totally lost, and we can show this through Scripture.
So let’s travel back to the days of Jeroboam. There is a reason I went through all that history at the beginning of today’s lesson, so I hope you were paying attention. Jeroboam divided off the 10 tribes of the north to form their own nation, but the two southern tribes- Judah and Benjamin- had Jerusalem, and so this created a problem for Jeroboam. Jerusalem was the spiritual center of Israel, the city of the Temple of God.
So Jeroboam built his own worship center in the city of Samaria, made that the northern capital, and made his own idols for the Israelites up there to worship. Thankfully, not all the Northern Israelites went along with that plan. And II Chronicles, a parallel account to I and II Kings, tells us that Jewish people of the North who wanted to follow God migrated down into the Southern Kingdom.
II Chronicles 11:13-17
13 And the priests and the Levites who were in all Israel presented themselves to him from all places where they lived. 14 For the Levites left their common lands and their holdings and came to Judah and Jerusalem, because Jeroboam and his sons cast them out from serving as priests of the Lord, 15 and he appointed his own priests for the high places and for the goat idols and for the calves that he had made.
(Verse 16 is the key here)
16 And those who had set their hearts to seek the Lord God of Israel came after them from all the tribes of Israel to Jerusalem to sacrifice to the Lord, the God of their fathers. 17 They strengthened the kingdom of Judah, and for three years they made Rehoboam the son of Solomon secure, for they walked for three years in the way of David and Solomon.
So verse 16 tells us that all of those from the Northern tribes who wanted to follow the true God still followed the true God. And I think it would be a safe assumption that any from the Southern Kingdom who didn’t want to follow God would have migrated up north.
And this goes to show that those who had a heritage from the Northern Tribes did not necessarily get conquered by the Assyrians and lost to history. They may have become Southerners. Just like I’ll do if Texas ever secedes from America. I’ll be like, honey, we are becoming Southerners.
For the sake of time, I won’t go through every last verse about this, but you can also look up II Chronicles 15:9, II Chronicles 30:5-21, and II Chronicles 34:9, as well as Ezra 2:70 and Nehemiah 12:47.
Then when we get to the New Testament, we see members of the 10 northern tribes cropping up.
Luke 2:36
And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.
Acts 5:36-37
Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas (which means son of encouragement), a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles' feet.
Acts 26:6-7
And now I stand here on trial because of my hope in the promise made by God to our fathers, to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship night and day.
And James 1:1
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion:
So we see that the idea of the 10 Lost Tribes was a myth. They remained and were preserved, Jewish people from each tribe. Again, not everybody who believes in the 10 lost tribes myth has malicious reasons. Like I said, it’s probably just what they were taught. But it was an idea that was probably invented for malicious reasons, because it’s meant to perpetuate the idea that God is done with the Jews and scattering them to history. It’s simply not true.
So if you were a member of one of the 10 North Tribes and you just had evil king after evil king after evil king, that was a problem, but that didn’t have to be your problem. You could move back down to southern Israel where they had good kings once in a while, and you could always worship the God of Israel, and you always had a choice.
One last note about what this shows is that your demographic is not your destiny. Statistics and trends might be true in a general sense; they might say what is typically true. But you as an individual have a choice. No matter what is true about your demographic, your place in life. You have a choice in whether or not to follow God.
These in the North and the South had a choice whether to follow God. They couldn’t say, “Well I’m a Israelite of a Northern Tribe, it’s my peoples’ way to worship the calf idols in Samaria.” No, you don’t get an excuse. Your behavior is still your own responsibility. Your outcome and destiny in life is still your own choice. Whether you want to take the easy path and go along with the flow of society, or whether you want to take the harder path and swim against the current.
I’ve been reading JD Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy. This man had a rough early life. Drug-addicted mom, a life in poverty, unstable home. Most people in his position in life would just repeat the lifestyle of their parents, the same mistakes, drug and alcohol addiction, kids out of wedlock, no college, work in a factory until you die. JD Vance made different choices to make a better life for himself, and now he’s running for Vice President of the United States. Which should be an inspiration to every one of us and shows that you can’t say, “Well I was raised by a single parent and grew up poor and I never had a chance to have a different life.”
Your demographics are not your destiny. If you turn your life over to God, he can do something better than repeating the mistake of your past, no matter what home you were born into, what state, what tribe, what your family history is. Anything is possible with God.
And when God has a plan for His 10 tribes of Israel or when God has a plan for you, God can do it. It doesn’t matter how impossible it sounds for man. God didn’t tell man to do it. God said He would do it. You don’t have to stress about the details. God told Ezekiel to put two sticks together, and He would take care of the rest.
Nothing is too hard for God. After all, our salvation was accomplished by two sticks being put together and God took care of the rest.
Thanks for listening to this Cross References Bible Study on the Book of Ezekiel. This has been Luke Taylor, and I hope the Bible makes more sense to you after this episode.