Genesis 17:8

"And I will give to thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land of thy sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God."

Here is the famous land promise by which modern-day Israelites claim divine right to the land of Canaan, and it is inexplicable that many Christian commentators uphold and admit such a thing. Morris, for example, affirmed that the commandments mentioned in Genesis 17:1, "were not stated as conditions, but simply as commands! ... It is clear that no action on the part of Abraham's descendants can ever permanently sever the land from them!"[14] Two gross errors attend such a view: (1) The notion that commandments of God may be ignored with impunity, and (2) that "everlasting" here means "eternally."

All of God's commands are conditions, and failure to obey is forfeiture of every blessing mentioned in connection with the commands. The great error of Protestantism today is simply that of supposing that God's commandments are mere commandments. There is no such thing as a mere commandment of God. Willis pointed out that "Everlasting here does not mean endless time, but a relatively long period of time."[15] Whatever the meaning of everlasting, Israel forfeited the promise in its entirety by rebelling against God and becoming "worse than Sodom and Gomorrah" (Ezekiel 16:48). Israel followed in the way of the pre-Israelite paganism of Canaan and became, in fact, just as wicked as the old Canaanites whom God had expelled in order to bring them into the land. And, when Israel themselves became merely another generation of Canaanites, God threw them out of the land and moved the whole nation into captivity. That marked the end of "the land promise" as far as it concerned the fleshly descendants of Abraham. Israel today has no more right to the land of Palestine than the Arabs or the French or the Germans. "When Abraham's descendants broke their relationship to God by their disobedience, they thereby forfeited the temporal blessings."[16]