I’ve never believed in predestination, nor have I believed that the Twelve Tribes spoken of in The Revelation are "flesh Jews", despite the fact that there are some pretty good proof texts for both doctrines.

But lately, I’ve been thinking, “What if the Twelve Tribes in The Revelation, which come together just before Jesus returns, really are literal, physical descendants of Abraham, and not just a bunch of Gentile Christians (as I have taught and believed in the past)?"

One problem that arises is that Jews (taken from Judah, the name of their tribe) are only one of the tribes, i.e. 12,000 of the total 144,000. What about the other eleven?  These missing 132,000 people cannot be "flesh JEWS" even if they are natural children of Israel/Jacob; they are, in fact, from tribes which (with the exception of Benjamin) no longer exist.  Still, there are people in the world who are descendants of those tribes.  It’s just that there is no human way to trace genealogies back far enough to locate members of those missing tribes.

Of course GOD knows who these people are, so if there is such a thing as predestination, then he could select exactly 12,000 from the descendants of each of the other tribes and put them together into tribes. This makes those theories about the natural vine (Israel) being grafted back in again in the last days, more believable. So, okay, let's accept that this is exactly what God is going to do. He's going to bring together 144,000 literal descendants of Abraham, 12,000 from each of twelve tribes, and use them in the last days before Jesus returns. Wonderful! Praise God!

But where does that leave us in terms of identifying these people? We still will have no human way to know if they really are from one of the lost tribes. I know at least one person who has contributed to this site who is a descendant of the tribe of Judah. If he's one of the 144,000, then we have only 143,999 more to locate! But most of the people who are going to be in the 144,000 will need to be recognisable by some other trait than the fact that they are Jews (since they would be from other tribes besides Judah).
So what is that trait? How can we identify the lost tribes?  The answer is right there in The Revelation. It says that these people will "follow the Lamb [Jesus] wherever he goes”.  So that’s it!  They follow Jesus! And they do so to the nth degree, i.e. wherever he leads, even to the cross.  We probably need some time for the implications of that to sink in, because it really is an important revelation.

I may be from the tribe of Ephraim, or the tribe of Levi, or any of the others, but if I'm following Jesus in whatever he says, according to the Revelation, I must be one of the 144,000, and (if the literal descendants theory is correct) I must be a literal descendant of Abraham, i.e. a member of one of the lost tribes.  That would change a lot of things.

As fellow descendants of Abraham, we should do all we can to stir up our blood brothers in Judaism to step out and follow Jesus too. In the flesh, they are no better than us now; we’re all Children of Israel. We do not need to pander to one tribe in an effort to get the blessings that have been bestowed upon us all as members of the other tribes. But, by the same token, we can challenge the lies of other children of Israel without being called anti-semites, since we too (those of us who are following Jesus wherever he leads) ARE the literal descendants of Israel (or Jacob), the son of Abraham.

However, as a final comment, I will say that I am not firmly committed to either this theory or the previous one (i.e. that the Twelve Tribes are just spiritually representative of what could have happened if the original twelve tribes had been faithful to Yahweh). It's just that either way, the bottom line is the same: Are you following the Lamb wherever he goes? If not, then you are not part of the Twelve Tribes. If you are, then predestination or not, literal descendants or not, you must be part of the Twelve Tribes.