The conflict between Israel and the Arabs has to do with a family inheritance quarrel that dates back to Genesis 12.

That's when God promised Abraham a lineage that would possess a certain piece of land, not just living in it but owning it and ruling the government in it. God also promised spiritual blessings upon this seed line.

"The reason there's such a feud in the Middle East over who ought to have the land and the reason that fight is so irrational and bloodthirsty is because it's really a family fight," says my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.) in a taped study from Israel's Jubilee, or 50^th birthday, in 1998. "It's really a fight among brothers. It's a family feud."

At issue is who is the rightful heir, something the Apostle Paul addresses in Rom. 9:6-7 when he confirms, "For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel: Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, in Isaac shall thy seed be called."

In other words, Paul's saying not everyone who's a descendant of Abraham is going to receive the promise God gave Abraham. Abraham had two boys—Ishmael and Isaac—and Isaac gets the promise. Isaac is the true heir, not Ishmael.

(By the way, the Koran mistakenly identifies Ishmael, not Isaac, as the son Abraham takes as a sacrifice.)

Then Isaac had two boys—Jacob and Esau—and Esau is rejected. Jacob is chosen and he's the issue.

When the Lord says in Mal. 1:2-3, "yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau," He's not talking about hating Esau in terms of salvation, but in terms of building His nation.

God's saying, "I've chosen Jacob as the rightful heir, not Esau. I've chosen Isaac and not Ishmael."

"The key is going to be who is the real posterity deserving the land and anybody who says Abraham is his father is going to raise his hand and say, 'Me,' and God says, 'No, it isn't going to be the descendants of Ishmael.' There are going to be some family members who are disinherited and some who are identified as the real heirs."

The whole reason the Bible places such emphasis on describing God as the "God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" is because that's how He traces the seed line for the inheritance.

The proper posterity is to the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob's name was changed to "Israel," and that's where the true 12 tribes lie. There are another 12 tribes, but they're the wrong ones.

From Genesis 16, we know Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were for a long time unable to conceive a child in fulfillment of God's promise of a seed, so Abraham agreed to Sarah's idea of having him father a child through their Egyptian handmaid, Hagar.

Abraham's child with Hagar was named Ishmael. The name Hagar, as revealed in Galatians 4, stands for Arabia. Ishmael is the progenitor of the Arab world.

"Ishmael was not a discarded cast-off without any consideration by God for his place in the purpose of God," says Jordan. "The descendants of Ishmael can say, 'God made us a great people because He promised to our mother to make us a seed <that shall not be numbered for multitude.> He made us very special in that he named our father (Ishmael) before he was born.' God fixed his heart upon Ishmael 'because the Lord hath heard thy affliction.' " (Gen. 16:10-11)

In Gen. 16:12, however, it says Ishmael "will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren."

The verse is saying that the Arabs, or the descendants of Ishmael, are going to live in the midst of where Israel lives. They're going to live in the same land God promised to Abraham's seed.

"They come along and say, 'Wait a minute, we were born first!' " says Jordan, referring to the fact that even though Ishmael was the first-born, the inheritance was given to his younger brother, Isaac. "You see, they come and lay claim spiritually to the land, and to the government, and they say, 'Were the true seed of Abraham.' "

But in Gen. 17:19, God makes clear to Abraham, "Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him."

God assures Abraham that He will make Ishmael "fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation" but that His covenant would be established through Isaac.

The promise was actually even that there would be the 12 tribes of Ishmael before there were the 12 tribes of Israel, but God's covenant would be with Isaac and his seed.

"Now you and I can understand from that there would be conflict," says Jordan. "If God promised Abraham's seed the land, and the government of the land, and Ishmael is Abraham's seed and has the promise of being a great posterity, and living in the land among his brethren, you can see where they'd say, 'Well, the land ought to belong to us. We should have the government in our hands because we would certainly want to have the control of it, and we don't want our little brother telling us what to do.' "

The inescapable reality, though, is God gave birth to the nation Israel—He physically created them as a nation in the earth because He loved them.

"He didn't create the nation because they were something special, or better than everybody else, but because He had something He was going to do with them and He made them special," explains Jordan.

When God created the nation, he gave Abraham a physical sign of their special status in the earth and it is what's "called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands," as Paul reports in Eph. 2:11.

The circumcision is the sign bore in the body of the covenant between Jehovah and Abraham of the nation's physical existence being due to God's supernatural intervention.

Abraham would never have had Isaac had it not been for God delivering a miraculous birth to a man well beyond the age of having the physical capacity for reproducing. He gave a child through Sarah, whose womb was dead according to Romans 4:19. Sarah, too, was long beyond the normal capacity to bear children when she had Isaac.

Without God's miraculous intervention, there would have also been no nation brought out of Egypt.

"That's why He says in Deut. 32:18, '. . .of the Rock that begat thee,' " says Jordan. "Jehovah physically gave birth to them. Literally created them. It was not a virgin birth, but it was a miraculous birth God produced because He was producing a people in the earth He had something very special to do with and they have a physical existence as a posterity; an ethnic group different from every other one on the earth, in that God Himself intervened to physically create them."