Zechariah 2:12

"And Jehovah shall inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land, and shall yet choose Jerusalem."

"This is the only time in Scripture where Palestine is called the holy land";[30] however, not even this is to be taken literally. Palestine is the holy land in that it was the location on earth where the Son of God appeared in his first Advent, where he suffered, where he gave his life a ransom for all, where he was crucified, and where he commissioned the apostles to go forth into all the world with the life-giving message of salvation. It is the holy land in that sense that "The word of the Lord" did indeed go forth from Jerusalem as stated again and again by the holy prophets. It is the holy land because Jesus' church began there, the first of the martyrs bled there, and because the earthly Jerusalem is typical of a heavenly reality, "the Jerusalem which is above, which is free, which is our mother" (Galatians 4:26). It is the holy land in the sense that Jesus rose from the dead in that city; there he appeared to his foreordained witnesses; there many of his most wonderful deeds were done; and there was fulfilled to the letter his sentence of death upon Jerusalem, including the ruin of the Temple, and the destruction of her people, "because they knew not the time of their visitation."

Aside from the considerations above, Palestine is not any more holy than any other place of real estate on the face of the earth. As a matter of fact the literal Palestine was utterly, completely, and finally rejected by Almighty God. "The mountain of Jehovah's house" unto which the nations shall flow (Isaiah 2:2-4) is not a literal place at all. "We are come to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem":

"Ye are come into Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:22-24)."

Thus the truly "holy land" is wherever God may be found dwelling in the hearts of those who love him. Without that determinative factor, not even the hill of Calvary would be holy.

"Shall yet choose Jerusalem ..." "This points to Christ as King of the spiritual Zion."[31]