Throughout my life, I have noted that our Nation's foreign-policy has been to support Israel in its struggles with its Arab and Palestinian neighbors. Nearly a half trillion dollars of humanitarian and military aid has been given to Israel to defend the territory of the Israelis but, routinely, that aid has been used to expand the borders of the Israeli Nation at the loss of the Palestinians.
This American foreign policy has been strongly promoted by the powerful Jewish lobby in Washington but, also, by the majority of the evangelical and fundamentalist churches in our Nation. The root of this support from these churches is the misguided belief that the Bible holds modern “Israel” as being special in the eyes of God. This simply is not the case.
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A key Scriptural passage that is often alluded to that suggests that we need to support modern Israel is the promise to Abraham, in Genesis 12:3, “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse.” It has often been said: “Politically speaking, this statement is God's foreign policy to the Gentiles in their relationship with the Jewish people.”
This interpretation is easily debunked by simply considering the biblical context: this promise was given to Abraham before he had any children. If we are to take just this verse, at this point of time in Scripture, as the basis of blessing nations in relation to “Abraham,” then we must apply it equally to all of Abraham’s children. This includes his son, Ishmael, the father of the Arab nations.
But one might assert that this is absurd from a biblical view point, because later Scripture qualifies and narrows the definition of Abraham’s seed for us. In this, I am in total agreement. Later Scripture qualifies the promise as not to Ishmael, but to Isaac, and then not to Esau, but to Jacob, who is later renamed “Israel.”
What is overlooked or ignored is that the means of qualifying who actually inherits the promise becomes the very means of disqualifying modern-day Israel. Paul, himself, uses this very method of argument, in Romans 9:6-7, to prove that Israel also shall be redefined in light of Christ, "They are not all Israel who are of Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham's descendants." Paul goes on to say, in Romans 9:8, “It is not the children of the flesh [ethnic blood line] who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants.”
Both John the Baptizer and Jesus, Himself, tried telling the Israelites of their day that they cannot rest their spiritual laurels based on the fact that they are genealogical descendants of Abraham. Luke 3:8, “Bear fruits in keeping with repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham.” John 8:39, “They answered and said to Him, 'Abraham is our father.' Jesus said to them, 'If you are Abraham’s children, do the deeds of Abraham.'” Jesus told them in John 8:24, “You will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He [the Messiah], you will die in your sins.”
Whether or not the Israelis accept Jesus as their Messiah is the dividing line in determining who is a true descendant of Abraham. Galatians 3:29, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to promise.”
We now see that Christians {both Israelis and Gentiles} are the actual descendants of Abraham. And, according to Galatians 6:16, Christians collectively, are “the Israel of God.” Jesus had told the Israeli or Jewish Nation that they would no longer be the Kingdom of God. Matthew 21:43-44, “I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone [Jesus] will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”
The special prerogatives that had belonged to the ethnic Israelite Nation (Exodus 19:5-6) have now been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ – 1 Peter 2:9-10, “But you are a Chosen Race, a Royal Priesthood, a Holy Nation, a People for God's own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a People, but now you are the People of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
To say that the modern nation of Israel has any special standing before God is to ignore the plain teaching of Jesus and His Apostles. Jesus says that unbelieving ethnic Israelis or Jews do not have Abraham as their father; rather, their father is Satan – John 8:42-44, “Jesus said to them, 'If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.'” In stead of having warm and fuzzy feelings toward unbelieving Israel, in Revelation 2:9; 3:9, Jesus refers to them as a “synagogue of Satan.”
Just as the Israeli Nation was an enemy to Christ and His Church in the 1st Century AD, the modern nation of Israel is equally an enemy of Christ and His Church. We have recently been outraged with the brutality shown by ISIS toward Iraqi Christians, but nary a complaint has been issued concerning modern Israel's brutal expulsion of Christians over the last 65 years.
When Israel was established in 1948, the Palestinian Christian community had numbered 200,000, compared to roughly 600,000 Jews in Palestine at the time. Now the Christians are not even one percent of the population of Israel/Palestine. Of today’s estimated total 400,000 Christian Palestinians, most now are living in exile in other countries, mainly in the United States.
Even before the founding of the new Jewish State, there had been a pattern of Israeli bigotry toward Christians and their churches. A lot of churches and their members have been subject to shelling, arson, desecration, destruction of New Testaments, murder of clergy and Christian husbands/fathers and beating of women and children who hold to the Christian Faith. Such anti-Christian activity surges during times of war – 1956, 1967, 1973, 1977-78, 1982, 2006, etc. Perhaps the worst outbreak of organized desecration of Christian institutions (such as missions, schools, hospitals and churches) came on Sept. 10, 1963, when hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jews simultaneously attacked Christian institutions in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem. At any rate, the attacks were a concerted effort to intimidate Christians in Israel.
On December 29, 1977, the Israeli parliament or Knesset passed a new law making it illegal for Christian evangelists or missionaries to proselytize Jews. The law made such evangelists liable to 5 years' imprisonment for sharing the Gospel and persuading Jews to become Christians and 3 years' imprisonment for any Jew who obeys the Gospel. The law came into force on April 1, 1978. It prohibits the offering of “material inducement” for a Jew to become a Christian. A “material inducement” could be as minor as giving one a New Testament.
In the Knesset, during the debate before the passage of the law, representatives made anti-Christian speeches. For example, Knesset member Binyamin Halevy called evangelists “a cancer in the body of the nation.” Outside the doors of the Knesset, similar bigotry was expressed - Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, considered a political moderate, issued a religious ruling that copies of the New Testament should be torn out of any edition of a Bible owned by a Jew. Most conservative rabbis proclaim Christians are idolaters.
By their attitude and persecuting activities toward Christians, it is obvious that modern Israel still has Satan as their father and that they are a synagogue of Satan. This being true, why do evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in our Nation give their moral and financial support to this anti-Christian State? Why do Christians in the United States lobby our Government to provide financial and military assistance to Zionist Israel? (Since 1949, the United States has given the Jewish State half a trillion dollars. This means that the U.S. government has given more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen in a given year than it has given to the average American citizen.)
Some Christian teachers assert that the Bible foretold the establishment of modern Israel and that a day is coming when Israel will accept Jesus and the Gospel en masse. However, those prophecies pertained to (1) the restoration of the Jewish Nation after their 70 years of captivity in Babylon in the 5th century before Christ and (2) the gathering together of faithful Jews through-out the Roman Empire into the Kingdom of Christ - the Israel of God - prior to AD 70.
The Apostle Paul, in Romans 11, does not speak of a day when all of the Jews will accept Jesus and the Gospel. Rather, he says that God can re-instate those Jews who “do not continue in their unbelief.”
It is proclaimed that God gave the Jews the promised land as an everlasting possession (Genesis 17:8). However, there was a condition to that promise. God told Abraham, in the very next verse, that this promise is valid only as long as “you shall keep My covenant, you and your descendants after you throughout their generations.” This promise was fulfilled in the days of Joshua – Joshua 21:43-45, “So the Lord gave Israel all the land which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they possessed it and lived in it. And the Lord gave them rest on every side, according to all that He had sworn to their fathers, and no one of all their enemies stood before them; the Lord gave all their enemies into their hand. Not one of the good promises which the Lord had made to the house of Israel failed; all came to pass.” However, through the centuries, Israel failed to live-up to their end of the bargain by remaining true to God's covenant with Abraham and his physical descendants.
Having said that, God promised Abraham's spiritual descendants that they would not be given a small piece of territory in the Middle East. On the contrary, they would have the whole world as their possession (Isaiah 9:7; Micah 5:2-5). We know that this promise is fulfilled in the present Kingdom or Church of Christ (Luke 1:31-33; Acts 2:29-36; Matthew 28:18-20; Galatians 3:28-29). Just think, a Jew is reigning at the right hand of God and His dominion includes all of the nations of the world.
Earthly Jerusalem no longer holds any importance (John 4:21, 24; Galatians 4:22-26). Hebrews 12:22, “But you have come to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” Jesus will never reign in earthly Jerusalem. God decreed that the descendants of unfaithful King Jeconiah would never rule in Judah again. King Jeconiah was the last royal descendant of David to rule in Judah before the Jewish Nation was carried-off into Babylonian Captivity. Jeconiah or Coniah was unfaithful to God’s purposes, therefore, God decreed that none of his descendants would ever be allowed to sit and rule "IN JUDAH" (Jeremiah 22:24-30). According to Matthew 1:11, Jesus is a descendant of Jeconiah. Thus, Jesus could never sit on a throne in physical Jerusalem IN JUDAH. Instead, as we have already noted, Jesus sits on David’s throne, which has been transferred to God’s right hand.
In conclusion, American Christians have simply got to get past the view that there is something special about the ethno-political entity Israel established in Palestine in 1948. This is a huge mental hurdle for many Christians, but it is also an enormous theological delusion that leads so many to continue promoting an unBiblical view of modern Jews and the modern Nation of Israel. Christians need to view Israel as a nation among nations with no special importance. Christians need to judge Israel by the same standards we use to judge all other nations.
Christians should not give unconditional support to a Nation which has a set policy against the Gospel of Christ and the churches of Christendom within its borders. We, Christians, should think again about supporting a Nation that believes they have a Divine right to confiscate the homes, farms, schools and businesses of innocent Palestinians (some of whom are Christians) and send the residents into barbed-wire concentration camps. There are already over a million Palestinians living in such camps and the numbers are increasing daily.
We need to pray that Israel will become friendly to the Gospel and that it will cease and desist in its policies of bigotry and racism. We are to love Israelis to the same degree that we love people of other countries and ethnic groups. That is the kind of support we should give the Israelis.
