Sleeping at the wheel

How dispiriting it is, listening to so many Christians who profess to stand with Israel criticizing this nation and its leaders for not claiming ‘the occupied territories’ as their land, for not rejecting all Arab pretenses to these lands, for succumbing to pressure from American and European heads of state to negotiate their surrender for a Palestinian state.

I get embarrassed on our (Christian) behalf with the irate dishing out of instructions about how Israel should do this to the Hamas and how Israel should do that to the Hizb’allah and how Israel should do the other thing to Iran.

We wring out hands and wonder why, oh why, can’t Benjamin Netanyahu show a little more backbone, a little more chutzpah, a little more courage.  We ask a lot of stupid questions and make uninformed statements as if they were reasoned facts.

And we ask the dumbest question of all: “Why doesn’t Bibi just trust God?”

Shame on us.

I am almost at a place of despair wondering at what point we Christian Zionists will realize that when it comes to helping Israel where she needs us most at this time – in the taking possession of her biblical heartland and in the crushing of her sworn enemies – it is we who have dropped the ball, and not her?

I am talking specifically about our generation of Christian Zionists.  Those of us who have declared our rejection of millennia of Replacement Theology and, with contrite voices and penitent tears, have sworn that we will never again forsake the Jewish people in the face of their foes.

We have done – and continue to do – precisely that.

On the one hand, we proudly proclaim that we are a part of the glorious – though never mainstream – Christian Zionist tradition that prepared for and assisted in the homecoming of the Jews.

On the other, we are too blind to see that, at the most critical juncture in this whole physical restoration process, just a few short years ago, our movement broke sharply away from its most enduring and important precept – support for the mutual reunification of the people and the land (see second article on this subject, ‘Because We Believed’) – leaving Israel to stand alone in the face of wall-to-wall international insistence that she surrender her Divinely-restored land.

The evil one has been fighting frantically for 130 years to thwart the unfolding restoration of Israel.  For him, Israel’s restitution spells the final countdown to the end.

Before the creation of the modern Jewish state, Satan’s aim was the destruction of the Jewish people in the Diaspora – a goal he came frighteningly close to realizing in the last century just before the State of Israel was born.  He used the Ottoman Empire, the British betrayal of its mandate and closure of Palestine to Jewish immigration, and Hitler’s Nazis to try and stop God’s plan. He failed there, but since Israel’s national rebirth, his ongoing objective has been the destruction of the Jewish state.

To achieve this, the enemy has effectively been wielding one primary weapon.  And it is not the obvious one.

From 1991 to 2014, in my hearing, Israel’s successive prime ministers have all warned about the threat of a nuclear Iran. Netanyahu delivered the admonition again in his authoritative address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 30, 2014.

But, with all due respect to the prime minister, while Iran is a clear and exceedingly serious threat that must be countered and neutralized, it is not, in my convicted opinion, the most present danger.

In fact, I see how the Iranian menace has been something of a red herring detracting from the de facto deadliest hazard that for nearly a quarter of a century has been looming over Israel – the peril of a Palestinian state.

For more than 25 years the world, led by the United States, has been inching towards – and despite numerous obstacles, never away from – the creation of this Islamic ‘State of Palestine.’  The territory earmarked for what would be the 23rd Arab state is the precise geographical area featured in the book of Genesis as the heartland God gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob 4000 years ago, and to which – against all the odds – He returned the physical offspring of those Patriarchs in June of 1967.

That Six Day War was celebrated to a man by Christian Zionists the world over as a miraculous act of God that, for the first time in over 2000 years, restored the Golan Heights, Gaza, Samaria, Judea and, most of all, the ancient city of Jerusalem with its Temple Mount to Jewish control.

For a few decades, in the best tradition of our Restorationist forebears, we encouraged Israel to settle this land, and we stood against the world’s efforts to try and force Israel off it.  We gave critical coverage to the stacked-deck anti-Israel ‘land-for-peace’ process that began at Madrid and continued via Oslo.  We lobbied lawmakers and took out full-page ads in mass circulation newspapers, gave radio and television interviews, held demonstrations and rallies, and were consistently vocal and visible in our rejection – as Christian Zionists – of the efforts to create a Palestinian state at Israel’s expense.  As the post-Oslo Agreement violence against Israel’s Jews mounted our voices grew louder, our denunciations of the bankruptcy of the ‘peace process’ became only more pronounced.  Brand new pro-Israel organisations were launched off the back of this effort to oppose the forceful attempts of our western governments to pressure Israel along this road.

We drove by the thousands in long convoys of buses over the rolling hills of Judea to Hebron, where we stood outside the pantheon of the Israel’s founding fathers –Abraham, Isaac, Jacob – and let both Jew and Arab in the city know that we supported the return of Jews to this ancient first capital city of the Davidic dynasty.

We stood as Christian Zionists outside Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and messaged Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to not give the first city of David and the birthplace of the Messiah away to the murderous, anti-Semitic PLO.

Then suddenly, even before the horrific upsurge in terrorism that began in 2000 and tore through swathes of Israelis in what was called the Second Intifada – our voices grew uncertain, then muted, then still.

Caught unprepared by President George W Bush’s embrace in 2002 – during the height of this Palestinian pogrom – of the two state solution, and then flummoxed by the Israeli government’s eventual and resigned embrace of this two state policy, we allowed ourselves to be silenced by a handful of Christian Zionist leaders who suddenly began to preach a new message – “For sinful Israel there is no right of domicile in their promised land.”

Inexplicably, one of our most influential voices on the Christian Zionist map stood up and proclaimed without adequate explanation and context, that it is “naïve to stand on God’s word about the land bequeathed to Israel when she is unfaithful to God.”

The timing of this!  After Jews by the hundreds had just been blown to bits in the violent throes of the very battle for this land!

Tragically, this teaching infected organization after organization.  And as Ariel Sharon – who shortly after coming to the Prime Minister’s Office had informed the world that he equated the ‘land-for-peace’ process with the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis – radically altered his stance and moved to uproot 10,000 Jews from their homes in the Gaza Strip – and to give that land to the Arabs – the Christian Zionist world had “nothing to say about land-for-peace.”

Today, virtually to a man, Christian Zionists are doing nothing to try and stop the God-rejecting world’s relentless efforts to force Israel to give up that land.

But it was for this very purpose that God raised us up!

The leadership of an American Christian Zionist umbrella group that was founded in 2006 – after the Gaza Disengagement – and that today claims to be the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States and one of the largest Christian grassroots movements in the world, clearly states that it “has never taken a position against a two state solution [and] supports the [land-for-peace] positions of the democratically elected government of Israel.”

Out in the nations, and here in Israel, groups that identify themselves as Christian Zionists are involved in all kinds of programmes to comfort the Jewish people.

All of these things are good, wonderful in fact – don’t misunderstand me.  These programs are showing the Jewish people the demonstrable love of Gentile believers in a way some of them (the Jews) have never known in their lives before.  Wherever their work reaches, Jews are learning that true followers of Jesus are not their enemy.

They are love, but they are not Zionism.

Zionism is about the land.

All of our feast events and drama productions and social assistance programmes for Holocaust survivors and new immigrants, all our educational efforts, global days of prayer, and protests against anti-Semitism in our city squares are well-meaning, but have done nothing to slow what began as a slither but has long ago become a massive global thrust aimed at re-dividing Israel’s land.

And what is the purpose of this re-division?

It is to reverse the restoration work that God is undertaking in our day.

Wretchedly, while the enemy has the creation of Palestine as a primary theatre of his war against the Almighty, Christian Zionists have abandoned their posts and deserted the field of battle.  We may be fighting in other areas, but we have fled the front line.

For on the question of land-for-peace we still have little if anything to say, “because the two state solution is the policy of the democratically elected Israeli government.”

This, then, my brothers and sisters, is where we have fallen flat on our faces.

We have left the pure steam of Christian Zionism and have become entangled in a complex theological conundrum (involving Israel’s land issues) which renders us impotent.

As earlier Restorationists and Christians Zionists were always positioned, we are supposed to likewise be at the forefront in this battle.

This is key: As we did in history, we are supposed to go before Israel, because to move into the land requires faith, and most Israelis are devoid of this type of faith. (The relatively small percentage that have strong faith – many of the much maligned Jewish settlers – are out in the land.  And we Christian Zionists should be applauding and supporting them to the exact opposite degree to which they are being vilified and libeled and hated by the world.)

Decisions taken by Israel’s government should not dictate the path Christian Zionists follow.

Because we view Israel through eyes of love and compassion, we are permitted to be concerned about the choices she makes, and there are even appropriate times for us to quietly appeal to her to take a different course.  And because we understand that Israel makes these decisions with its eyes on Washington and the rest of the international community rather than on the Lord, we should be understanding of her reasons rather than quick to denounce her decisions.

Israel’s position is made with reference to pragmatic political considerations and, in a horizontal way, with the survival of the nation that has become almost an endangered species.

We are not affected by such humanistic reasoning.  God is good to His word.  And He is looking for those who will stand in the gap on behalf of His beloved nation, still unfaithful but now well on the road to restored faithfulness.

Biblical Zionism in its pure form is the return of the Jews to their land in order that they can be returned to their God.

Have we forgotten that it is the very return to the land, the return to the city of Jerusalem, and ultimately – according to Ezekiel – the return to the Temple – that will be instrumental in turning them to their God?

This is God’s plan!

The confronting truth is that we Christians Zionists have taken our eye off this goal.  We have fallen asleep at the wheel.  And unless we wake up and return speedily to the position we should never have abandoned, I am afraid we will end up having shamefully failed in our calling, and having failed the very nation we were raised up to help.

Worse yet, we will have failed their God, and ours.