Can you be true Bible-believing Christian despite blatantly disbelieving what the Bible plainly teaches? On one issue at least many people are comfortable with this state of affairs. That issue is the contentious one of the fabled Lost Tribes of Israel. People who know and love the Bible; people who are well versed in both the Old and New Testaments; people who rely on the promises of the Bible concerning their personal salvation, and who claim to believe in the prophetical working out of God’s plan for mankind, including the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth; such people will studiously disregard large portions of scripture having to do with God’s dealings with his chosen people Israel. They may do this in conformity with the traditional downgrading of the role of God’s Old Testament people in Christian theology (anti-Semitism) or, conversely, they may believe that something is being taken away from the Jews by way of fanciful claims to Israelite ancestry made on behalf of many and varied ‘gentile’ nationalities. Worst of all the issue will be considered an irrelevant side issue, fruitless Old Testament speculation, a question secondary to the issue of one’s eternal salvation.

Yet in the prophecies we read that the return of the scattered exiles of the various Israelite captivities of the past is placed firmly at the time of the end, at the coming of the Messiah. In Jeremiah we find:

Ezekiel speaks of the same event:

How do God’s chosen people come to be in a condition of exile in the first place, and of what significance is their return? The dispersion of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah was God’s judgment on a sinful people. This is a demonstration of God’s will in action. God will punish and correct his people whether they are chosen under the Old or the New Covenant. Individual Christians, also, will experience the severe punishments for faithlessness that are woven into the history of Israel. This is the purpose for God having chosen a people and working with them in history in the first place. But God had no intention of casting the Israelites aside forever. The Old Testament prophecies of return testify to this. The essential point is that God will fulfil his purposes come what may. God is faithful even if we are not. He will bring about a great purpose despite all indications to the contrary in the profane world. The unwillingness of people to accept this suggests the limitations people will set on God’s power and his effectuality in the real world. We are simply not willing to see God perform great acts in history.

One of the most mystifying features of biblical teaching concerns God’s promises to the patriarch Abraham recorded in the book of Genesis. Here it is solemnly recorded:

This promise is repeated to Abraham’s grandson Jacob.

The promise finally settles on the grandsons of Jacob (through his son Joseph) in a little-known but highly significant incident recorded in Genesis 48, where Jacob passes on the patriarchal blessing originally given to Abraham. In this passage Jacob bestows the blessings specifically upon the ancestors of two, and two only, of the famous twelve tribes of Israel (Ephraim and Manasseh).

The tribes of Israel take separate historical paths following the Assyrian exile, as described in Chapter 2. A stunning symbol of this separation is provided by the prophet Jeremiah:

The core people of Israel by this analogy, the bony skeleton of Israel’s national identity, are the Jews. The Jewish people became permanently detached from the greater Israelite tribal confederation at this time, and the patriarchal promises intended to be fulfilled in the Israelites now become part of the historical destiny of people we do not identify as ‘Jewish’. The historian Josephus, writing in the 1st Century A.D., relates that the Ten Tribes "are beyond the Euphrates, and are uncountable for number". The northern tribes of Israel were always more numerous than the southern kingdom of Judah (1 Sam.24:9) - constituting as they did ten out the twelve tribes of Israel - and should therefore be large populous nations in today’s world.

The Jews have never been an abundantly blessed people according to the promises. They have never been a ‘company of nations’ and certainly not a world-straddling empire. This latter point seems implied in God’s promise that Abraham’s descendants would spread abroad (one would assume triumphantly).

The Israelite tribe of Joseph, for whom the greatest of Abraham’s blessings were reserved, did indeed seem to be especially singled out for blessing according to Genesis 48:22-26.

What nations then qualify on the grounds of national power, wealth, and a pivotal role in world affairs - an absolutely indisputable characteristic of God’s chosen people! Moreover, these Israelitish nations must exist as separate national entities in the relationship of ‘a nation’ and a ‘company of nations’. Do we look to the Chinese and the Japanese, the Spanish and the Portuguese? What other important ‘brother’ peoples do we have to choose from? Attention soon turns to the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Here are a people who have dominated world history for the last two centuries and more. In the nineteenth century the British Empire ruled the waves, dominating a quarter of the world’s surface, and giving rise to an extensive group of ethnically related nations - the British Commonwealth. Their blood relatives across the Atlantic, the Americans, take over the reigns of world leadership during the twentieth century (the so-called ‘American Century’). All nations in this Anglo-Saxon commonwealth possess wealth and abundance, tremendous agricultural output, seemingly limitless natural resources, fantastically high standards of living unheard of in other nations, and in other historical eras. Was all this an accident? The very name of the British people evokes the covenant God has made with his people, the berith or brit. The Sakasuna or Scythian people from whom they descend spoke a Hebraic language. Moreover, the British and American people between them have been almost solely responsible for spreading Bible-based Christianity to every corner of the globe.

The people known to be the chosen people are the Jews. These people are downtrodden, impoverished, despised, persecuted and the victims of holocaust. The world looks at these people and says 'where is your God? So this is what it means to be God's chosen people!' All the while another people exist whose identity is unknown - as their father Joseph had a secret identity as the ruler of Egypt. They are wealthy, powerful, have had every blessing from God but are not known as God's people. Do you have eyes to see what is going on here? These people have inherited the blessings of Abraham. They are the very picture of a people especially blessed, but God will not allow them to be known as his chosen people up to now. He rather wants to be identified with the downtrodden and despised, so as to test our hearts on these matters. The British people are acting out the blessings God intended to pour out on his people Israel if they had been obedient. The Anglo-Saxons are no more righteous than the Jews. They do not deserve any of these blessings. They are merely acting as a demonstration of God's will. They have inherited blessings which belong to Abraham, a reward to him for his righteousness, but they give us a glimpse of how God works, and how he will bless his servants - how he will bless you, if you are obedient to him!

If the Anglo-Saxon nations are not modern Israel, then what nations are? It does not particularly matter which nations we identify as the Ten Tribes. The main thing to realise is that the promises of the Bible about our personal salvation are only as good as the fulfilment of God’s promises made to his servant Abraham. If we are happy to disregard these promises and blessings, then we have no warrant for expecting God to fulfil any of the promises of the New Testament about eternal life in the world to come. The historical experience of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is a foretaste of the material abundance of God’s kingdom, and the abundance of his blessings to his chosen servants. These blessings were given to Abraham. We have been merely the recipients of his grace. We have trampled on God’s laws and we demonstrate no acknowledgement of, much less gratitude for, the fact that these blessings have come down to us from heaven. Indeed, we have been especially depraved and corrupt in the midst of these blessings. All the more severe will be our final punishment. It is sobering to note that had Hitler won World War II, he planned to deport the ‘Aryan’ nations of Britain and North-Western Europe to the new ‘Lebensraum’ of the Ukraine and the steppe lands of southern Russia, the very area inhabited by the people of Israel following the Assyrian exile. Recall that Jer.3:18 prophesies that the Israelites shall be brought back to the promised land from ‘out of the land of the north’. Given that only the intervention of the United States of America saved the western world from defeat in World War II, we should be alive to the precarious fate which would surely await us in any future crisis.

The saga of the Israelite people gives meaning to history, a meaning which relates not only to our personal salvation, but to the literal establishment of God’s reign on earth.

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