By Peter John
When God promised Abraham that his descendants would possess all of the land from the Nile River in Egypt to Lebanon and everything from the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates River, he could not have imagined that God’s promise would be delayed by a diaspora lasting nearly 4,000 years into the future.
A dispersion of the twelve tribes of Israel sent Abraham’s progeny to the far corners of the Earth, and their journey through time was marked by ethnic hatred and religious persecution. God’s promise to Abraham, it seemed, was meant only for a latter-day generation born in the far distant future.
While many of the major and minor prophets foretold a re-gathering of the tribes to their promised homeland at the end of time, the prophet Amos was especially descriptive in his words of prophecy for this promised restoration. Here is what he wrote:
“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God” (Amos 9:13-15).
Today, a great battle is taking place over the air waves of our modern media disputing not only the origins, but also the ethnicity, of those living in the state of Israel. Are they really Jews? Have the prophets who followed in the footsteps of Moses, foretelling the birth of the modern Hebrew nation, been proven right, or have we been lied to?
Isaiah prophesied:
“Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God” (Isaiah 66:7-9).
It was in the midst of the Second World War that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, decreed the birth of new Zion nearly six years to the day before it officially took its first breath in the Spring of 1948. By rejecting the Balfour Declaration endorsed by Britain and the League of Nations, Ben-Gurion in 1942 struck the rock of Horeb in the desert of international politics, and a tiny nation sprang from the ashes of the holocaust to become the first Jewish State since King David ruled over Judah. It was then that the words of Isaiah, and also the words of Jesus pointing to the “sorrow of birth pangs” in a future restoration of Jerusalem, finally came to pass.
Today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defends his country as the one nation on earth whose citizens are the re-gathered tribes of ancient Israel, previously scattered and persecuted, but held in memory by God. This would seem to be a fitting claim in light of recent, and many not so recent, historical events in the land of Palestine, leading to the creation of a tiny country that sits on the shores of the Mediteranean Sea under the most improbable of circumstances.
Israel continues to have her share of enemies, and those allied against the Hebrew nation are not confined to the surrounding Arab states that so abhor her. A host of non-regional political voices have also risen up, taking the form of a PR campaign in an effort to shape public opinion on issues affecting Israel, the region, and now Jewish identity.
We might think that such efforts are an attempt to improve the social and economic fortunes of everyone living in the Middle East, but that does not fit the evidence. Many of these activities are found in “Christian” forums or websites that vilify modern Israel as an “antichrist state” bent on world conquest.
PR agents that own up to their secular activism appear equally determined to dissolve the Jewish nation by any means possible. All of these voices are promoting the separation of Jerusalem from its Zionist roots in an attempt to erode its Jewish identity while depriving the nation of its capital city
I believe the flood of propaganda against Israel is aimed mostly at her Christian backers in the West, which is now being tested. Christians represent a long-standing base of political support that has helped Israel maintain its military superiority in a region known for its many uncertain alliances.
In fact, President Obama’s ‘efforts to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu using his own political proxies during recent Israeli elections show his contempt for the Jewish state. I believe that PR agents are now posing as Christians in every Internet venue in which issues affecting the state of Israel are talked about.
There is an effort to persuade the public to see Zionist Jews as imposters who took land away from “Palestinian” land owners in order to create a fake Jewish state, thus even the word “Zionist” is now considered by some to be a pejorative.
The claim that Israel is not actually a Jewish state is based on every conceivable distortion of history, science, and of course, the Bible. The assertion itself could well be the “strong delusion” prophesied by the apostle Paul in his letter to the church of Thessalonica, as these ideas now appear to be sweeping the globe.
What follows is a look at the reasoning put forth to bring public contempt against the modern Hebrew nation, which is being blamed for every facet of political and social distress in the holy land today.
Let’s first look at the biblical case for believing that an ethnic Jew is not a real Jew, and what the apostle Paul said about this in the book of Romans:
“For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter…” (Romans 2:28, 29).
This plainly makes the case that an ethnic Jew must accept Christ to be a saved Jew since without faith in the Messiah one remains an unbeliever. And we know God has extended salvation to both unbelieving Jews and Gentiles since the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ shortly before the birth of the Church.
But Paul goes on to say in the same letter that God has blinded Israel for the purpose of bringing the gospel to the gentiles only until the times of the gentiles are fulfilled, at which point something even more remarkable will happen: the eyes of ethnic Jews will be opened!
Let’s look at all the relevant portions of this passage:
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