The spiritual Israel

From Saint Augustine’s On Christian Teaching:

“. . . This spiritual Israel is distinguished from the fleshly Israel, consisting of a single people, by the novelty of grace, not by nobility of race, and by mentality, not nationality. But such is the prophets profundity that while speaking about the former and indeed too the former he moves imperceptibly to the latter; and while speaking about the latter or adddressing himself to the latter he still seems to be speaking about the former and addressing himself to the former, not with the hostile purpose of begrudging us an understanding of the scriptures but with the healthy one of stretching our understanding. So when he says ‘I will bring you into your own land’ [Ez. 36:24], and a little later repeats it, ‘And you will live in the land which I gave to your fathers’ [Ez. 36:28], we should understand this not carnally, of the fleshly Israel, but spiritually, of the spiritual Israel. It is the church ‘without blemish or wrinkle’ [Eph. 5:27], assembled from all peoples and destined to reign with Chrsit, which is itself the land of the blessed, ‘the land of the living’ [Ps. 27:13]. And it is the church itself that should be understood as having been given to the fathers at the time when it was promised by God’s sure and immutable will, since what our fathers believed would be given in its own time was already given with the security of promise or predestination. Similarly, when writing to Timothy of the grace given to the saints, Paul says, ‘Not according to our works, but according to his purpose and his grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the eternal ages but has now been made plain by our savior’s coming’ [2 Tim. 1:9-10]. He said that grace was given at a time when there were not even people to whom it could be given, because in God’s disposition and foreknowledge what was going to happen in its own time had already happened; this he descrives by the words ‘made plain’. However, this could also be understood to mean the land of a future generation, since there will be ‘ a new heaven and a new earth’ [Rev. 21:1], in which the unjust will not be able to live. Therefore it is said to the saints quite correctly that the land itself, which will not in any way belong to the wocked, is theirs; because, in the same way, the land was actually given at the time when the gift was ratified.”

Isn’t that beautiful?