The Times They Are a-Changin’ (Christians on Israel/Judiasm)

It’s been a long time since I wrote an article for the Apocalypse Times, and have the times changed. It seems very much like the issue of Zionism reflects the line from a Bob Dylan song in the 1960s, “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

The lyric goes like this:

Come gather ‘round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you is worth savin’ And you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’

If you are today a defender of Israel, the nation-state founded in 1948; if you believe that God had His hand in the foundation of Israel as a nation-state in 1948 as a fulfillment of eschatological prophecy; if you believe that God has a future for the Jewish people, and that the Jewish-Gentile church—mostly composed of Gentiles after the first century AD—is not God’s permanent work in the sense of “the group whom He usually saves,” then you are quite on the outs these days regarding popular opinion and “The Overton Window”—the domain of acceptable politics and opinion.

A Return to the Foundation

When October 7 happened in 2023, one might’ve expected an outpouring of support and sympathy. Instead, almost inexplicably, almost with a sense of artificial brute force, public opinion about Israel collapsed. I don’t simply think it was the pronounced Gaza War, although that is the only material and human explanation. It seems that the time for this particular anti-Israel view to become popular is now. With the scandalizing Epstein files’ release, and the vast network of elites who participated with him without any reservation, and his disgraceful views of Gentiles as a kind of lowly subhuman creature—(”let the goyim deal with the real world,” our generation’s “let them eat cake” elitist scandal)—we can at least say that it is understandable why some people in material, temporal, ethical, and political domains find the nation-state of Israel to not be a pleasant thing.

The interference of Israel in United States’ politics on a backroom level is definitively concerning. All I can say is that in every instance where Israel has overstepped the bounds, they should be held to account; and whether anyone humanly does, God will.

Furthermore, a lot of the Zionist support among Christians was not really a Biblical Zionism. A lot of these Christians could not defend their view effectively and faithfully from the Bible. Their theology did not hold water; it was built upon the dispensationalism of the late 1800s, which is decisively non-Christian (at least from its founders’ perspective) and greatly strained what actual faithful theology is. But there is most certainly a biblical and God-honoring, genuinely Protestant view of Zionism that does not require us to bless the nation-state of Israel’s mess in the 21st century or any other time.

Rather, a genuinely Protestant Zionism recognizes that it is a great pity of God Most High that He invited the Gentiles to be His people. It recognizes the great eon of 2,000 years we have lived as a mostly Gentile people of God as Christians is God’s pity, mercy, and condescension to us as outsiders.

Now, this is not to say that the Jewish people over the last 2,000 years who rejected God incarnate are special in a go-to-heaven despite unbelief way. They say they revere Tetragrammaton that they revere so greatly they refuse to say the name, but hate Jesus – the Incarnation of the Name.

But if anyone should believe in the Christ, it should be them. Insofar as a Jew today can trace their lineage to Abraham himself, in a very real way, they are kindred of Jesus. And just as it’s important for a family to stick together (unless there’s some extraordinary reason not to), certainly, the Jews ought to stick with their Christ who is at least genetically theirs. None of this very real specialness, though, will save them on the last day if they continue in unbelief.

The Real Issue of Zionism for the Christian

The real issue of Zionism for the Christian is not whether Jewish people should have a homeland. Because at this point, this is a moot question—the Jews are there. This was the discussion Christians should and did have in the early 20th century when the Balfour Declaration was being discussed and debated.

But the fact that the Jews do occupy the ancient place of Judaism of old is simply a fact, so we no longer really need to discuss this unless you just want to go to war with them, in which case, good luck, I suppose, if that’s your goal. It does seem to me by my reading of the 6 day war in 1968 on a human level that it’s inexplicable that Israel won.

And I think this should be taken into account: that aside from backroom deals and power plays and all of this that Israel is accused of doing, the nation-state of Israel is a kind of unlikely and strange happening that did happen and is happening.

For some reason, after the exile of the Jews from Israel at the end of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 136 AD until 1948, they were unsuccessful at accomplishing this particular goal themselves. It took the pity of the English, who had rights over Palestine at the time (a word traced from Provincia Syria Palaestina, the name the Emperor Hadrian gave the land as a “take that” when the Bar Kokhba Revolt was over), for the Jews to receive permission to return en masse.

Emoting Your Theology

I’ve said what the issue is not.

The real issue for genuine Christians when it comes to Zionism is the dilemma that Martin Luther experienced in his thoughts and feelings toward the people. Early in Luther’s life, he was very enthusiastic about the likelihood of Jewish conversion on a massive scale. He took this view because many of the New Testament texts seem to hint that the eschaton, or last days, will include a mass conversion of Jewish persons to Christianity, concluding the age of Gentile-dominated Christianity.

It is noteworthy that Luther believed he was indeed in the last days, and there is some reason to believe he was correct.

But of course, if you know anything about Luther and the Jews, you know that he is more famous for his antagonistic and even aggressive or violent discussion of the Jewish people. The two polarities of Luther’s view are like the warm and generous feelings that the English had toward the Jewish people when the Balfour Declaration was written, versus the common thread on both the right-wing and left-wing of politics in the US against Judaism and the state of Israel that is, at least, on the rise in our present day—equivalent to Luther’s angry sentiments toward Judaism.

You see, Luther’s views on Judaism were contingent on the reception of the Gospel. If we view someone accepting or denying the Gospel a kind of universal ethic or morality, this is like the view of the right and left about Israel and sometimes Judaism today. Not many people remain who view the whole world through the lens of the Gospel like Luther did, but today people are equivalently looking at the Jews through a different ethical polarity.

So the real question of Christian Zionism to a genuine Christian is: If the Jews do not “behave”—whatever behave means to you, either by accepting the Gospel/Jesus, or by not meddling in other countries’ politics, or blowing people up with pagers unexpectedly—will you still support Israel merely because the New Testament promises that there is a great potential that they will be God’s next “big thing” of salvation?

Or said differently, if a great return to God occurs, are they still thine enemy? Or are they brethren.

The Emotional Argumentation

Here is the problem with the direction that the right and the left are going, but especially the so-called Christian Church. Now, aside from this issue (having nothing to do with this issue, really), I believe that the whole institutional church is corrupt—not just on an institutional level, but down to the spirit that’s actually present when people attend on Sunday.

But I think how people are reacting on this issue, which is completely different than their fathers’ and grandfathers’ (or at least great-great-grandfathers’ who were pious Christian men) is that if God began to save the Jews in great numbers and bring them to an extraordinary, humbling relationship with Christ, they would be pissed as frick, to use a harsher verbiage.

Don’t you see this is exactly how Judaism reacted to Gentiles receiving an extraordinary outflow of the Holy Spirit?

Jesus was almost thrown off a cliff for saying that God usually works with the outsiders to His home congregation of the synagogue at Nazareth. God saved the Gentiles to make the Jews jealous. But as Jesus calls the final moments of the eschaton “the end of the age of the Gentiles,” all it takes is the script flipping for the distasteful Jewish ethnocentrism (and anti-Gentile views of Epstein) to merely take a Gentile variety. Imagine if someone walked into your church, rebuked the spiritual health of the pastor and the congregants, then vowed that God would begin to work among the Jews instead of Gentiles.

Now, for the sake of the argument, we must confess that this hasn’t yet happened. As far as I can tell, there’s not a major work of God among the Jews. I say this to my shame because it sucks to say this kind of thing without the “receipts” of God actually doing this in time. But I do have the text of Romans 11. And that text begins by saying that the Jews are under a curse while they reject the Christ; it quotes Psalm 69:22-23, Isaiah 29:10, and Deuteronomy 29:4.

7 What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened, 8 as it is written, “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day.” 9 And David says, “Let their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them; 10 let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and bend their backs forever.”

Paul, by quoting these very severe texts, tempts his audience—who is mostly Gentile—to glory in their standing as accepted before God, as “the people of God,” as the recipients of salvation, as sons of God. But you know the Jews had equivalent titles, and they did glory in these things. And yet John the Baptist tells them that if they fail to keep the reputation of those titles, God will tear them down at the roots and cast them into a blaze.

Paul says basically the same thing to his Gentile hearers. He effectively says these paradigms have a way of switching around, so don’t be an arrogant twat. God loves to subvert the wisdom of the wise; He loves to bring down the temple of the gloating Philistines upon their heads by the hand of a weary Samson.

So all I can say is that a Christian is required by God to not be so smug about our very great Christian heritage (that we should give thanks for) that we think we are the people—that God can never replace us with the Jews, for instance, as He literally did to the Jews with us.

While I can say that the piety that is mostly reaching our television and streamers’ video screens from Israel and Iran (and all of the dirty details coming to light, etc.) is very ugly, we don’t need to excuse bad behavior. We don’t need to somehow whitewash what is very obviously evil and sinful. But the Jews of Jesus’ day felt that way about the Gentiles, who were almost all pagan over the whole earth—who literally worshiped devils in the place of God. And yet God took those devil-worshiping pagans from every continent and every nation-state, and He has brought some of them to know who the Christ is at an eternal level forever and ever.

God is Free to do a New Thing

Christian Zionism at its root simply acknowledges that God has the right to do whatever He wants. This may include, in the very near future or even in the present, God beginning to do an extraordinary work mostly with Jewish people to the exclusion—somewhat, though not absolutely, I imagine—of His work with the Gentiles. And I think the great impetus for this will likely be the smugness and presumption of the Gentiles, even in their pious heritage and right to be called the children of God.

We don’t have to bless Israel’s mess. We don’t have to be dispensationalists who can’t put two texts together accurately. We don’t have to say that somehow there are two paths to salvation today—one for Christians and one for Jews—because that’s not what the New Testament teaches.

But we do have to acknowledge that our great station as Christians is a gift. It is pity. It is because Israel did reject God. But most of the fruit of Gentile Christianity in our day is trash. And I believe God would rightly overthrow trash (as I just called it) without hesitation. How easy that would be if it is because they are blatantly arrogant, smug, haughty things?

To the low place. Then the high.