Therefore, the Church may not be viewed as an advancement of Israel, for it is made up of an entirely new order of created mankind. The existence of the Body of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Church, makes clear a path into a new relationship with God. That is the fact of reconciliation. It is God's purpose "to reconcile both" Jew and Gentile to Himself through the life of His Son. That believer out of Israel, one who was living in light of the Law with his faith in the God of the covenant of promise, must now of necessity come through regeneration into the only relationship available to man in this age. Whatever difference ("hostility") there might have been between the Jew and the Gentile in the past, as a result of God's election of Israel, is now forever ended. There is but one company of the redeemed in this age from the birth of the Church in the upper room on Pentecost until the Rapture. It is inclusive of both Jew and Gentile by natural birth, but exclusive to the reborn as "new creations".

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Old Testament