Another claim by “Replacement-ites” is that the Jews people have lost their covenant, and have been replaced by other people this comes from the abuse of Matt. 21:43.   “Therefore I am saying to you, “The kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a  nation bringing forth the fruits of it.”:

The context again shows the fact that Jesus was talking to the priests and Pharisees and not to the Jewish people as a whole.  All the Jewish people around him did not take offense, because they understood.  It was the Pharisees that saw immediately that it was they who were being insulted.  This reference does not address the Jewish people or the nation of Israel and it does not cancel the Jewish covenant. 

And what is this Kingdom of God they will lose?  The Kingdom is not the Church.  The Church is the bride of Christ. The Church is the whole of all who love Yeshua, who have died and been born again.  It is those who have accepted Yeshua’s gift and serve him with the love of a bride.  The Kingdom is the place wherein the bride lives and works - a physical/spiritual place.  To the Jews listening it represented the physical state of a new Israel, but that was one of the key reasons Yeshua came, to correct expectations and introduce a rarely understood concept of a physical-non-physical kingdom.  Let me explain by introducing this definition of “The Kingdom of God”. 

The Kingdom of God is the physical/spiritual place where two worlds of God meet.  Two worlds but one reality.  The place where the spiritual reality functions totally within the realm of God and the physical co-exist at the same time and place.  In this Kingdom God rules, God provides, God protects, and God leads. It is a place where we live for Him - and where we will continue to live forever.  A world without chance.  The physical world is one in which our physical bodies must live, work and die.  However, living in the Kingdom of God means living in a world that is affected, miraculously bent, and adjusted to allow for the needs of the Kingdom just as God promised and just as he sees fit to alter.  By living, worshiping, studying, planning, serving, giving, listening and relating to God as our personal savior He provides for all our needs in the physical world while at the same time we grow in understanding the spiritual world.  For us to understand it and allow ourselves to be affected by it we must realign our sense of reality to allow for God to move and allow for God to control.  It is no longer my job, or my house, or my money, my rights, my honor, my pride, my feelings, my desires or my purposes…I give them over to Him.  We invite and allow Yeshua to mold us like clay, to make us over into a useful vessel. 

By allowing him to redefine what and who we are we are allowing Him to define us.  Yeshua knows better and he wants us to know better that is why he brought the Kingdom of God to us so that we could begin to understand…to understand how it works, and for us to understand the purposes for our real life.  The first thing we must understand is …this physical world based upon our physical senses is not real.  It is the real life that follows this training ground here on camp earth.  By understanding and living in accord within the Kingdom of God we show ourselves prepared for a life to come where the physical does not exist as we know it.  While the physical world to come is unknown to us the spiritual world is known.  If we can understand how the Kingdom works, then we are well on our way to being useful in the world to come.  In that world to come we will enter bringing nothing from the physical world but we will bring everything from our spiritual world.  That is why living in the Kingdom of God is essential to successful living…period.  This world is nothing more than a short prep time for the “real life” to come.

So, the Pharisees heard that they would not have a place in “the kingdom”, and since they jumped to their own physical world understanding of “kingdom” they missed the point. They missed the point because they did not understand that Yeshua came to redefine the expectations and understanding of the people concerning the Kingdom of God.  Since they did not understand the kingdom then they could not be a part of it.  Yeshua went on to redefine our position as priests.  We do not need a priest to come between us and God.  We go direct to God through our high priest Yeshua who is God.  The time of the Pharisees was coming to an end…physically and spiritually.  Now we are all priests who walk with God in the Kingdom of God. 

Another clarification is needed for the word, “nation”.  This scripture becomes much clearer for us if we use the word “people” in place of the word “nation”, because that is exactly what several other translations of Matthew do (International Standard Version-ISV, and the New American Bible -NAB).  By using the word nation it becomes easier to jump to another “nation” if we are abandoning one for another.  But if we are abandoning a group of people (Priests & Pharisees) for another group (Kingdom of God Christians) then it is more difficult for us to use this text to be-little God’s promises to His chosen people.   The word nation can be understood as the Church universal.  A nation defined as a group of people who know and love the Messiah Yeshua.

So who is this, “nation & bringing forth the fruits of it”?  It is the “people bringing forth the fruits of it”.   It is the Church, the bride, the people of God all around the world who are growing in the understanding of the Kingdom and who are being blessed in many wonderful ways. It is a group of wonderfully different people blessed with the understanding of Yeshua who are working together as one new man. It is a people group made up of rich & poor, slave & free, male & female, Jew & Gentile.  Each unique, each differently gifted, yet each united.  We can even say, the very existence of these Jewish people of today, still living around the world and growing in Israel proves our point.  If God had intended to abandon the Jewish covenant and replace the old covenant people with new covenant people, then there would have been no miracle of Israel’s return.  There would be no identifiable Jewish people, because they would all be dead or absorbed like every other exiled culture in history.   It proves that God has not abandoned his chosen people because after 2000 years…they still exist.