Part V — The Land Promise
One of the most prominent features of dispensationalism is its insistence on the literal fulfillment of the Old Testament land promises — the promise of a physical territory in the Middle East for the physical descendants of Abraham. This is held to require a future restoration of national Israel to the land of Canaan and a future millennial kingdom centered in Jerusalem.
The covenant-theology position holds that the land promise, like the other Abrahamic promises, finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ and in the new creation — not in a literal territory in the Middle East.
The Land Promise in the Old Testament
God promised Abraham: "Unto thy seed will I give this land" (Genesis 12:7). This promise was fulfilled — not partially or provisionally, but completely — in the conquest of Canaan under Joshua. The book of Joshua is explicit: "There failed not ought of any good thing which the LORD had spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass" (Joshua 21:45). The entire land promised to Abraham was given to his descendants.
The Expansion of the Promise
But the land promise in the Old Testament is not static. As redemptive history unfolds, the scope of the promise expands. The Psalms and the prophets look forward to a day when God's people will inherit not just Canaan but the whole earth. Paul picks up this expanded promise in Romans 4:13: "For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith." The inheritance of Abraham's seed is not a strip of land in the Middle East; it is the whole new creation.