Because we believed

“Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I am zealous for Zion with great zeal; With great fervor I am zealous for her.’” – (Zechariah 8:2)

“For the sake of Zion, I will not be silent. For the sake of Jerusalem, I will not be still. Until her justice shines bright, and her salvation glows like a flaming torch.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoting the prophet Isaiah at the end of his speech before the UN General Assembly, September 29, 2014

“I don’t believe that the Jewish state and modern Zionism would have been possible without Christian Zionism.” Prime Minister Netanyahu

Christian Zionists.  It is our inheritance and weighty calling as Believers who have been raised up ‘for such a time as this’ (and every generation has its ‘time’) to go before Israel and in fact lead her as she moves towards her gloriously complete national restoration.

From its inception, Christian Zionism was bound up with the whole concept of restoring the Jews to the biblical land of Israel, and of restoring the biblical land of Israel to the Jews.

And what birthed and drove this movement was an uncomplicated and unshaken belief that this restoration was foretold in the Word of God.

Lest we have forgotten, Christian Zionism – or Restorationism as it was originally known – was appointed by God to prepare the way for Israel’s national rebirth and spiritual revival. (And Ezekiel tells us that the national rebirth – which is still underway – has to be completed before the spiritual rebirth will take place.)

This is not an imagined, self-acclaiming fiction.  It is an historical fact.

It’s the way it was from the beginning of this movement – from back in the early 18th century, long before the Jews had any practical way to organize their return to their land.  While they yearned to do what no millennia-long scattered, nationally dismembered people had ever done, they had been sifted until they were left a tattered remnant on the face of the earth, without any political power or ability to realize their national hope.

At that time it was Christians who believed the Bible, who believed the prophets, who believed God’s Word, who began preaching from the pulpits that it was and always had been the Lord’s purpose to return the Jewish people to the land He gave them.

And they preached that this return was the essential final precursor to the consummation of the redemption – the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Among these spiritual giants were John and Charles Wesley, Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Charles Haddon Spurgeon and William Wilberforce.  They went ahead of lords and lawmakers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, William Blackstone, Arthur Balfour and others who would ultimately employ politics to open the way for the return of the Jews.

It was this Christian stream, of which these men were the resuscitated headwaters (resuscitated, because of course the origin was the Word of God as understood by the Apostles, but which had dried up by the time of Constantine and would remain out of sight for hundreds of years), which developed into Restorationism and ultimately into what we call Christian Zionism.  Always, at the heart of this movement – in its practical outworking – lay the return of the Jews to the geographical land from which they had gone into captivity, and the legal restoration of that land as the rightful possession of the Jewish people.

This two-way restoration is what the Bible said God would bring about.  And it had to be the Word of God that these preachers were preaching.  They could not preach politics; they could not, with anointed conviction and burning passion, preach some ordinary, or even extraordinary, man-made idea.  It had to be the Divine Word.

So that is what they preached, because God said – according to the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and others – that He would drive unfaithful Israel out of her land to wander the earth; He would preserve her people among the nations as a remnant; He would stretch forth His hand to gather them and bring them back to their “own land,” to plant them here.

That’s what the Bible said and that’s what people who believed the Bible stood up and said.  Because they took God at His Word.

For those of us who call ourselves Christian Zionists, these men are really the founders of this movement – our spiritual fathers. They said it was incumbent upon God-fearing nations to be facilitators of God’s amazing prophetic purposes for the Jewish people.  And that is what they did.

So when Anthony Ashley Cooper – the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury – came on the scene and in 1841 wrote his column in the Colonial Times entitled: Memorandum to Protestant Monarchs of Europe for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine; when, 50 years later, the Blackstone Memorial was drafted by its namesake in the USA, the same year in which William Hechler came alongside Theodore Herzl offering his services as a Christian chaplain to open up diplomatic doors for the founder of political Zionism; when 27 years later, Lord Arthur Balfour presented Lord Rothschild and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann with the Balfour Declaration, they were all going in that same stream.

When Colonel John Henry Patterson helped Ze’ev Jabotinsky establish a military unit in World War 1 to fight for the Land of Israel; when the British Intelligence officer Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen risked his life to dupe the Turks and open up Beersheba for its conquest by the Anzacs; when Captain Charles Orde Wingate – with his Bible in one hand and a Lee Enfield in the other – took and trained young Jewish fighters like Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan to defend Jewish settlements against Arab nationalist gangs – and laid the foundational military doctrine for the yet-to-be-formed Israel Defense Forces – these Christians too were moving in this stream.

And as Satan moved in Hitler to exterminate the people of God in Europe and so try to prevent their return and their national rebirth, men of God like Rees Howells petitioned the Throne expressly to see Rommel defeated at El Alamein and the German Wehrmacht bogged down on the Eastern Front – all in order to prevent the planned Nazi invasion of Palestine.

Bible believers across denominational lines saw the rebirth of national Israel and the survival of the new Jewish state in its War of Independence against all odds as proof that this was a ‘God thing.’

When the IDF fought off Syria, Egypt and Jordan in the Six Day War and the Jewish people returned to the biblical heartlands of Gaza, the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and the ‘holy basin’ of Jerusalem – with the Temple Mount and Western Wall – Christians around the world celebrated the victory as Divinely ordained.

And when, 14 years later, the Dutch preacher Jan Willem van der Hoeven and a handful of other Christians opened the doors of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), they were also flowing in the stream of authentic, original Christian Zionism.

This is why these men made the pledge to Israel – on the public record – that they would “work tirelessly for the unification of the city of Jerusalem and for the unification of the land.”

What drove all these men was the belief that they had the opportunity to do this thing, “because God has declared it in His Word,” and because they believed.

God had said in His Word that He would return the Jews to their land and that He would return the land to the Jews.  He said that He would return them to the Mountains of Israel – Samaria-Judea, and to Jerusalem – site of Mount Zion, His holy hill.  He said that He would do this physical and geographical national restoration en route to the spiritual revival and resurrection He has planned for them.

This was the fundamental belief of Christian Zionists.  It’s what made them, as Christians, champions of Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement that supported and still supports the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the Land of Israel.

At the risk of repeating myself one time too many, these Christians prepared the way and they began physically to enable the Jewish people to come back into their land because of what was written in the Word of God.

There was no complicated or complex theology behind it – apart perhaps from what the Apostle Paul referred to as God’s mystery workings with Israel.  God said He would bring the Jewish people back to their land.  He said He would restore their land to them.  And, what is more, He said this physical restoration would take place not only despite their spiritual deadness, but because of it.

For their physical restoration is an essential step on the road to their spiritual restoration.

In other words, God determined that He would bring them back in their state of unbelief into which He had bound them over; He would bring them back not as saints, but as sinners.  And indeed this is the way they came back.

This is why the whole Jewish Zionist enterprise was a ‘Godless’ thing in that sense – the Jews who began streaming home in waves of aliyah were not men who believed in their minds that they were fulfilling some end time Biblical prophecy – the Jews were not doing that.  From Theodore Herzl’s perspective, God had no part to play in his Zionism.  Herzl neither sought God’s will nor was he interested in it.  In his books ‘Der Judenstaat’ and ‘Alt-Neu Land,’ God features not at all.  David Ben Gurion wasn’t interested in God either.  His religion was listed as “Jewish atheism” and he was a committed Labour socialist.  Modern Orthodox philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz considered Ben-Gurion “to have hated Judaism more than any other man he had met.” (Shimon Peres, the recently retired president of Israel, shared Ben Gurion’s view of what Peres himself referred to disparagingly as “the Jews” when he meant those who held to the faith of the Jewish people.)

And between those two men – from the First Zionist Congress to Israel’s Declaration of Independence – the lion’s share of the Zionist enterprise in the Land of Israel was built upon the communist-socialist movement that took root in this land, that established the collective communities (kibbutzim and moshavim), which sucked water out of the swamps and poured water into the deserts, restoring them to life.

On the face of it, that entire movement was secular, yet its route was traced out before it by the footsteps of men of God.

Restorationists/Christian Zionists always knew that God was bringing the Jewish people back to their land in order to circumcise their hearts. (Jeremiah 31:31-34; Ezekiel 36:26)

Spurgeon never preached that God was going to bring the Jewish people back to their land and then drive them out; he never held up some kind of accountability chart and said, “And if the Jews don’t do this or that then they will lose their right of domicile, and they will be once again removed from the land.”  He did not say that – he made no reference to that, because that is not what is written in the Word of God.

Christian Zionism then, right up to the end of the 20th Century, flowed in the stream of facilitating as an act of Christian faith the return of the Jews to their land and the return of the land to the Jews.

But then the enemy got in the way.  And one particularly public way in which we have seen his mischief-making occur is in the changed official policy of a Jerusalem-based organization which, when it was established, was purely Christian Zionist – the very opening of its doors was the practical application of Christian Zionism per se.

Its founders stood up when the world rejected Israel’s legal extension of sovereignty over Jerusalem (which it had taken back in the Six Day War) and declared the reunified city its eternal and indivisible capital, when the international community united to reject Israel’s claim, and those with embassies in Jerusalem moved them out in protest.

This organization was established specifically to support and encourage Israel’s extension of sovereignty over all of restored Jerusalem its founders believed what was written in the Word of God.

This was its raison d’être and God blessed it and it grew mightily.  And in that same tradition, it went out and sought to hold up a hand against the efforts of the international community to reverse that restoration – to bring about the redivision of the city and the land.

In that stream I went to Madrid in 1991 as this organization’s reporter, to cover the first International Middle East Peace Conference that put the whole formula of land for peace on the table between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.  I covered that conference from the point of view of: This is wrong.  This is an anti-God movement, this peace process.  This is an effort by the God-rejecting world together with the Allah-embracing world to stop the work of God, to reverse what God has done.

Because in 1967, when Israel won the Six Day War, there were no Christians in the Evangelical/Protestant mainstream who questioned that it was God Who had returned the Jewish people to Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Nobody questioned that.

In 1991, therefore, it was the thinking at this organization that God was going to fight for Israel to keep the land, and that the world was increasing its determination to take that land away.  In other words – the battle was heating up.

We Christians were to rise up and petition our governments and withstand their efforts to steal that land.  Because that is what it is – it is land theft.

It is land theft.  It may be dressed up in a United Nations resolution or two, but it is land theft.  We understood this, and we said, this is anti-God, and it is morally and ethically bankrupt.  The Oslo Agreement with the blood-drenched Yasser Arafat and his PLO was a covenant with death and with the grave – and it was a recipe for security and military disaster that would lead to anything but peace.  Twenty-three years later, it is still suicidal and it is robbing the people of their inheritance.  And back then we said, “No!”

We said, “No,” and we went to Hebron to tell the Jews of Hebron, “We stand with you and your right to return and claim as part of sovereign Israel the ancient Jewish town of Hebron where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – the founding fathers of the nation of Israel – lie buried.”  Sixty buses came over the Judean hills to Hebron and we stood outside the Cave of Machpela with our banners, singing our praises to God and saying to the Jewish people: “Your God says…and therefore we stand with you.”

And in 1995 when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was negotiating to give Bethlehem to Yasser Arafat, we stood outside the Tomb of Rachel and we petitioned and we pleaded with Rabin and we pleaded with Israel.  We said, “Don’t give Bethlehem to the PLO. Don’t give away your land.”

But already then doubt had crept into this organization, and it would eventually give birth to a counter-teaching that began to underpin the changing face of Christian Zionist policy: that the Jewish people were not living very godly lives and consequently they didn’t deserve the right to live in the land.

According to this teaching, Israel is most surely still the land God has covenanted to the Jews (it puts no questions around this) but they won’t be fully restored to the land, and may even forfeit further sections of it, because of their ‘faithlessness.’

In other words, Israel’s physical right to the land has become temporarily conditional on her spiritual behaviour – until God restores her to Himself. And until He does, there’s no reason for Christian Zionists to fight the land fight for Israel. They should support her in other ways.

Such a position reverses the theology of Christian Zionism from physical restoration to the land first followed by spiritual restoration, setting it the other way around.

Thus, in 2005, this organization shook the halls of Christian Zionism when it stated that, because the Jewish people have no right of domicile due to their sinful state, we Christian Zionists “have nothing to say about land for peace.”

In the words of the organization’s leadership: “It is naïve to stand on God’s word about the land bequeathed to Israel when she is unfaithful to God.”

This shift feeds right into the enemy’s hands.  Don’t we understand, can’t we – who claim to have spiritual insight and a direct access, through the veil, to the Throne of God – see how bankrupt and unrealistic are the expectations we place on an Israel that – as our Christian theology teaches us – is God-blinded to the spiritual truths we embrace?

There were mutterings in the halls about pressure from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on the organization not to say anything contrary to the government’s policy to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.  Just how true or not those rumours were, only the involved know.  But the outcome was that when Israel began to uproot Jews from Gaza, the Christian Zionist world was quiet; deathly quiet.

We have been quiet for a dangerously long time.

Therefore, instead of doing as many Christians do – criticizing Israel’s governments and its prime minister for repeatedly folding under international pressure, and failing to extend sovereignty over the land of her birthright – we really need to extend our deep-felt apologies to the nation of Israel – and her leaders.

It is not they who are failing; it’s us.  And if we keep failing them, then in an application of the words of Mordechai to Esther: “If we remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but we will perish.  Yet who knows whether we have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

What, one wonders – and it is a question I would like to put to Prime Minister Netanyahu – what does he think about today’s Christian Zionists?  I know that he is deeply appreciative of all we do for his nation.  He has repeatedly, and sincerely, emphasized this.  But what does he think, now that that the voice of faith in the Word of God (to restore the Jewish people to the land and the land to the Jewish people) has gone silent – that we, like successive Israeli leaders from both the left and right sides of politics, have become pragmatic in the face of geopolitical realities?  That we have changed our minds about Israel’s right to the land of her patriarchs?

Some of us most surely have not.  There remain Christian Zionists who perceive that the reason successive Israeli leaders have failed to annex the disputed lands and bring them under Israeli sovereignty is because they – and Israel – believe that no one in the world will support it – that there is no one who will stand with Israel to advocate a ‘one state solution.’

Efforts have begun to correct this, to consolidate in the nations, and make heard, a pro-sovereignty Christian Zionist voice encouraging Israel to claim her inheritance.  For it is our desire to strengthen the prime minister and the government of Israel, encouraging them to withstand the onslaught on their historic and legal sovereign rights by the United Nations, the United States, and Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel needs to hear this voice again.  Christian Zionists, we must return post-haste to the field of battle and lead the charge for the land.  We must do so, holding the word of God very much at the centre of the equation as we encourage Israel to possess the land God has covenanted – and restored – to her.

This is Christian Zionism. This is our calling.