What does Tribe teach about who is israel?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on who Israel is starts with the conviction that no single category is enough to answer the question. Brian Hunter has been working through what he calls a Venn diagram across the Unbreakable series, built from three overlapping components: sovereign election, genealogical descent, and covenantal faithfulness. His argument is that any definition drawing on only one of those circles will eventually break down, either tying a person in knots in conversation or leaving them vulnerable to narratives whose real goal is to dehumanize Jewish people and do violence to them.
Brian has been careful to say the diagram is not a chart of salvation and not a checklist for earning right standing with God. It is a working definition of who Israel is across the whole Bible, Old Testament and New. He draws on Paul's letters in Romans and Galatians to show that believers are grafted in, which means Christians appear inside that diagram at all, adopted into God's family and drawn into relationship by God's initiative rather than their own. He acknowledged that this claim will, as he put it, twist you into pretzels, but he holds it as the picture Paul actually paints. The remnant sits at the center where all three circles meet, and Brian has been clear that the definition has room for the modern nation-state of Israel without being limited to it.
The practical weight of the teaching is that getting this definition right is not an academic exercise. Brian used a clip of Tucker Carlson pressing Mike Huckabee on whether Benjamin Netanyahu had any real connection to the land as a live case study in what happens when a person only has one circle to stand in. Huckabee moved from genealogical descent to covenantal faithfulness and got pushed off both. Brian also used King David's family tree, pointing out that Jesse's mother was Ruth, a Moabite, to show that bloodline alone cannot carry the full definition. The series has returned repeatedly to a warning from its earliest weeks: failure to think carefully and biblically about who Israel is moves, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, toward the kind of dehumanization that ends in violence.
Taught from Romans 11:17 · Galatians 3:29 · Genesis 17:7-8 · Deuteronomy 7:7-8 · Romans 11:5
“A vandal is a weak person. They expend energy but not to create of their own, not to make something beautiful of their own, not to innovate of their own, not to improve, but just to tear down.”
From Unbreakable Week 5： Surrounded by Vandals, Part 2
The passage taught · Galatians 3
1 Foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you not to obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly portrayed among you as crucified?
2 I just want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by hearing of faith?
3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now completed in the flesh?
4 Did you suffer so many things in vain, if it is indeed in vain?
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- February 23, 2026 Unbreakable Week 5： Surrounded by Vandals, Part 2 Brian Hunter walks through Israel's history of persecution, asks why antisemitism persists, and connects God's faithfulness to a chosen people with his faithfulness to every broken life.
- February 22, 2026 Surrounded By Vandals Part II A Wyoming pastor walks through the Bible's portrayal of Israel, asking why antisemitism persists across history and what God's unbreakable commitment to his people means for us today.
- February 8, 2026 Surrounded By Vandals Pastor Brian Hunter explores who Israel is, what antisemitism looks like today, and how Joseph's story connects to God's unbreakable commitment to his people.
- February 1, 2026 Who Is Israel? Brian Hunter explores what the Bible means by "Israel," examining sovereign election, genealogical descent, and covenantal faithfulness to show why Israel's story matters to all believers.
- January 25, 2026 Distinct Among the Nations A Jackson Hole church works through Jeremiah 31 to explore what the Bible actually says about Israel, why it matters, and what it costs to think clearly about it.