Sponsored by

By David Zeidan

"...And the bush was on fire and the bush did not burn up." Ex. 3:2

INTRODUCTION

God chose the nation of Israel to be a channel of his revelation to mankind. Through Israel he gave the world two tremendous gifts - the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Covenant and the Messiah in his incarnation. All mankind is in Israel's debt for these two immense gifts.

In God's sovereign purpose, Israel was to be a blessing and a light to all nations, a channel of his truth, grace and salvation to all humanity.

Satan's purpose has always been to thwart God's plan. He has done his best throughout history to destroy the Jewish people and hinder the light of the Good News about Yeshua the Messiah from penetrating into their hearts. To this end he has used many devices to blind their eyes and to build up prejudice and resentment in the very core of Israel against the person of the Messiah and against those who believe in him. This Satan has achieved by using so-called Christian leaders, churches and nations in the centuries- long persecution of the Jewish people which culminated in the Holocaust perpetuated by the Nazis during W.W.II.

ROOTS OF ANTISEMITISM

Wrong doctrines, wrong interpretations of Scripture, can be deadly! They are not just harmless intellectual exercises, but can have an impact on human attitudes and deeds that carries over into real history for many centuries. Surely this is the lesson to be drawn from Christian anti-Semitism and its terrible legacy.

Hatred for the Jews is rooted in the jealousy of the expanding Gentile Church towards its Jewish Elder Brother in the first centuries AD. The early church consisted of Jews and included many Pharisees and Priests. God pushed them to forsake their exclusiveness and propagate the Good News to the Gentiles around them. Their success created the potential for division between the Jewish and the Gentile elements in the new movement. At first there was the danger of the Jewish element lording it over the Gentiles as a special elite caste, a development forestalled by the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 and by Paul's ministry and letters. Yet Paul himself had quite early in his ministry to warn the Gentile believers against arrogance towards their Jewish brethren - a warning that has gone largely unheeded down to our present time.

In the early years the Gentile believers were happy to shelter beneath the umbrella of Judaism as an official religion in the Roman Empire. Later, after the failure of the first Jewish rebellion and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and especially after the failure of the second rebellion against Rome in 135 AD, Judaism was no longer granted a privileged position and Jews were persecuted by the Roman authorities. The Gentile believers gradually sought to distance themselves from their Jewish mother, a trend greatly accelerated by Constantine's conversion to Christianity and the imposition of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire. These developments brought in large numbers of unconverted pagans into the church, eager for the political and economic benefits of belonging to the ruling religious caste. It also meant a greater influx of Hellenistic-Roman religious and philosophical concepts into the church at the expense of its Jewish-Biblical roots. The church hierarchy came to be modelled after the political hierarchy of the Roman state. The worship of Mary and the cult of saints, icons and images slowly crept in. The laity were relegated to the fringes, whilst bishops became all-powerful dictators. Political considerations of power and influence became paramount in church council deliberations.

Whilst some of these ideas and practices can be excused as the efforts of Church Fathers at contextualisation in order to win over the Graeco-Roman world to Christianity, many of the measures taken and traditions evolved in these centuries had to do with a conscious effort of the official church at distancing itself from Israel. It was politically expedient to do so, and at the same time it curried favour with deep rooted pagan hostility to and jealousy of the Jewish people. There is no doubt that as the church filled with Gentiles, anti-Jewish feelings inherited from the pagan world infiltrated into its very warp-and-woof.

It is amazing to realise the depth of frenzied jealousy and hatred apparent in the writings of many of the early Church Fathers who are considered pillars of the church. All their Christlike love and gentleness seemed to disappear when facing Israel, giving way to jealousy and hate that can only be termed diabolical

THE PRODIGAL SON, SECOND INSTALMENT

In the parable of the Prodigal Son the jealous elder brother symbolises the Jewish spiritual leadership of that time who would not accept the pardoned sinners of Israel and the Gentiles. In the many centuries since that time, the younger brother, symbolising the forgiven Gentile sinners, has managed to drive out the elder brother (Israel) from his father's house, sell him into slavery, and forcefully wrest his part of the inheritance, claiming it as his own.

This "younger brother" syndrome drove church leaders to claim all the privileges accorded to Israel in the Bible whilst leaving only total rejection and curses for the Jews. It influenced the allegorisation and "spiritualisation" of Scripture that characterises mainline churches until now. The Bible was too crude to be taken literally, it had to be accommodated to Gentile (Greek) sensibilities. Out of these streams of Gentile thought flowed the doctrines of replacement and supersession which stated that notwithstanding the New Testament's clear claims to the contrary, God had totally rejected Israel, reneged on his unconditional promises to them and transferred those wholesale to the church. Israel was now under God's eternal judgement. This doctrine, more than anything else, is to blame for the centuries of bitter persecution of the Jews by Christians.

The Gentile church of today must be willing to repudiate its wrong teachings regarding Israel. There is a real guilt of Christianity in its treatment of the Jews. Mere expressions of sorrow at the results of false doctrine is not enough - the doctrine itself must be expunged!

In the Christian world of today there is renewed interest in Israel. First the holocaust, then the restoration of Israel to its land and the Arab-Israeli conflict have further sharpened the debate on Israel in God's plan. There are extreme positions on both sides, and only a return to the simple Biblical perspective and balance can keep us from going off on man-made tangents.

WHAT IS YOUR VIEW OF GOD?

Many Christians still seem to believe in a "Trickster God" - a God who at one time chose the nation of Israel and gave them unconditional promises and privileges but later tricked them out of the fulfilment of these promises, transferring them to the Gentiles who were so much nicer than the nasty Jews! This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is a true assessment of the theology and attitude of many churches and Christians even now, fifty years after the holocaust.

Is this your subconsciously inherited view of God and of his ways with Israel and the church? If it is, then what guarantee do you have of God's faithfulness to you and to his offer of free salvation and forgiveness made to you? Having tricked them, he may yet trick you! You can have no assurance of sins forgiven or of eternal life no matter how hard you try, for there will always be someone around the corner nicer and more worthy than you!

This is not the God of the Bible! This is not my God! This is a caricature of God that has no basis in Scripture but only in hate inflamed minds of early church fathers who passed down this bitter legacy to succeeding generations.

Arab Christians today struggle with this heritage in an especially poignant manner. How can they accept the Bible which was wholly written by Jews and deals almost exclusively with the history of the Jewish people who today are seen as the arch-enemy of the Arabs? This sadly leads many of them to reject the validity of the Old Testament and rediscover the old church anti-Semitism in order to justify their hatred of the Jews and view themselves as better and more worthy of God's grace.

God however is not in the business of abrogation and supersession - let us leave that to the Muslims who specialise in that sort of thing! Our God, starting with the particular, has widened the scope of his blessings without casting away the particular. Starting with a narrow stream of humanity in order to reveal man's sin and God's character, he has widened it to include all who will believe without rejecting the first sample. He is the God of both this and that, of the universal and the particular.

The God of the Bible is a God whose "gifts and calling are irrevocable", a God who is faithful even when we fail. He is sovereign, just, faithful and unchanging, and fulfils his promises no matter what sinful man may do to thwart them.

There were conditional promises made to Israel and the nation has long suffered his chastisement as the consequence of breaking its part of the bargain. But there were also unconditional promises given which God is committed to fulfil. His sovereign calling and unconditional promises, based only on his inscrutable will and amazing love and grace are irrevocable, steadfast and sure! The Good News to believers today is that the fact of God's unchanging faithfulness to his promises regarding Israel is the guaranty of his faithfulness to the promises he has made to us New Testament believers in the Messiah Yeshua.

This is my God, the God of the Bible, the God who was not ashamed to be called the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the face of Gentile superpower cultures of that day. Neither is he ashamed of this name today, in the face of universalist and liberal trends in the church which fuel a renewed anti-Semitism, whether political or religious. The hallmark of these movements is the denial of the authority of plain Scripture. Disguised as "exegesis" and "hermeneutics" the age-old arguments are used to tell us that the scriptures do not mean what they plainly state, that Bible truths were culturally biased, and that we must allegorise, spiritualise and universalise their message. It is implied that the simple believer cannot fathom the complex arguments of the Bible, and that like his counterpart in the Middle and Dark Ages he must rely on the "experts", the modern hierarchy of commentators who stand between him and God.

We need a return to a high view of Scripture and of its authority, that enables us to obediently accept its plain statements no matter how opposed they are to the prevailing culture in our churches and society.

ISRAEL - A SAMPLE OF HUMANITY

One of the main keys to understanding the Bible is that the nation of Israel is a sample of humanity in God's lab - the world. Enrolled in God's school we study his textbook, the Bible, and realise that the subject which has most space allotted it is the history of Israel. Israel is the object lesson from which we all learn, the sample that represents us all.

A scientist desiring to define the properties of a new material has no need to gather all of that material into his lab. All he needs is a minute sample which he puts through various tests: he bends it, pulls it, breaks it, subjects it to various kinds of pressure and stress. Finally he comes up with a list of its properties which can be published. The amazing thing is that everything that is true of that minute sample in the lab is also true of every other bit of that material wherever it may be found in this wide world. It is the same material - it has the very same properties!

God in his sovereignty chose Israel as his sample of mankind. He could have chosen any other nation - the Arabs, the Chinese, the Indians - any nation whatsoever. The end results would have been exactly the same. We are all made of the same human material, fallen and sinful humanity. We all respond in exactly the same way to God's initiatives.

As we look at the history of God's dealings and relationship with Israel, we learn all we can know of God himself. His character and attributes are revealed to us in this context. We see his sovereignty in election, his holiness, his just demands of men, his patience, his love and his mercy. All of God's manifold greatness is revealed to us as we study the history of his relationship with the people of Israel.

As we look at Israel's response to God we learn everything about ourselves. This is the mirror that we must look into in order to know ourselves as we really are before God. We see out human sinfulness, depravity, weakness and unfaithfulness. We see how after experiencing God's call and forgiveness we still fail him again and again, and that every chance he gives us is eventually wasted away. We see our desperate need for God's grace and that we have absolutely no merit of our own to stand on before him.

There is no room here for arrogance. We must all see ourselves in all these tragic stories of human failure. What is true of Israel in the Bible is also true of the visible church today - we have turned after foreign Gods, we have despised his word, we have followed traditions of men rather than bow to his word. We have all filtered out our gnats and swallowed our camels. We have set up our own hierarchies and endowed them with a greater authority than God's word. No single church is immune from the sins that characterised Israel in Bible times.

THE REMNANT

As in the case of Israel, a faithful remnant according to grace is always present in the midst of ruin and apostasy. God grants renewals and revivals in the midst of the depraved standards of an immoral, neo-pagan, sex-crazed and consumer-crazed society. As the remnant in Israel represents the true Israel in God's sight, Israel as-it-should-have-been, so this remnant represents the true church before God, Messiah's Body and Bride as it is in God's eye and mind.

The remnant in Israel are the minority that believe in Yeshua as their Messiah. They are the first fruits and the guarantee that one day the whole nation will be like them.

This minority may have been small at different periods of history, but it has always existed and always will! It is not necessarily small - and it is definitely growing today. Whilst by definition a remnant, a minority, it can be a large and significant one. We remember how in New Testament times there were tens of thousands (myriads) of Jewish believers in the Land of Israel, including Pharisees and priests. This Biblical pattern is being repeated in our own times. We are back full cycle to the first century situation. Various estimates place the number of Messianic Jews around the world at over two hundred thousand - and it is growing fast!

Jews have been at the forefront of every social and political current in the last centuries. Messianic Jews are still too preoccupied with discovering their own Jewish roots and identity. The time will soon come however when they will be in the forefront of world evangelism, at the cutting edge of missions to the hidden and unreached people of the world.

ISRAEL IN ROMANS NINE TO ELEVEN

Romans chapters nine to eleven are Paul's treatment of the great issue of God's dealings with humanity throughout history. These chapters are not a side issue or a parenthesis. They are the culmination of all Paul has stated and argued for in chapters one through eight of this great epistle as he presents the great doctrines of man's depravity and of God's free grace. In these three chapters he shows that this is the way God has always dealt with man right from the beginning. Using Israel as a living example - an object lesson - he teaches us that from its election until the end of time Israel is the sample of the way in which God deals with all of us, a living example worked out in real history of all the principles and doctrines of the Bible.

God's dealings with Israel as a nation mirror his dealings with us as congregations and as individuals. We must apply the many lessons we learn personally to ourselves. As we read the Bible we must say: "This is me!" This is my failure and my weakness. This is how I responded to God. At the same time we can joyfully apply God's mercy and grace to ourselves and rely on his faithfulness.

We must also realise that God has a special plan for the Jewish people as a nation. He has neither rejected them nor finished with them. This does not mean that all Jews are saved, nor does this justify a two covenant theology. It simply implies that God does not repent of his choice and calling, they are irrevocable. He fulfils them to Jew and to Gentile alike in the Messiah.

The New Testament clearly teaches that as to personal salvation there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, of his divine standards. All need to be justified freely by his grace through faith in the Messiah. There is only one way of salvation - it is through the vicarious sacrifice of God's lamb - the Messiah Yeshua. Both believing Jews and believing Gentiles are members of the one body of the Messiah. The barriers have been broken down and there is real unity.However this unity does not extinguish cultural specifics, nor does it remove Jewish believers from continuing to be members of the nation of Israel. This dichotomy will one day be resolved when "all Israel will be saved."

THE TURNING POINT IS FAST APPROACHING

As a nation. Israel is not rejected by God. It is under chastisement for not accepting Messiah when he first came, for God chastises those he loves, his own children. But Israel is also wonderfully preserved in all its troubles, unlike so many ancient nations who have been obliterated or totally absorbed by their conquerors. Israel is also being prepared for the great final acts of human history which will take place when the "fullness of the Gentiles", the "times of the Gentiles" are fulfilled. God has a specific timetable to which he is working. Paul teaches clearly that Israel's blindness as a nation is partial and temporal. Partial because it is not all, but only some who have been hardened. Temporal because this blindness in part is not forever, it has a specific time limit in God's plan. When the fullness of the Gentiles is come in, when the times of the Gentiles is at an end, then God intervenes in a new way in history and Israel as a nation with its leaders will be restored through faith in the Messiah Yeshua. This will result in tremendous blessings to the whole world and to all nations.

Whilst scripture warns us against trying to calculate the time and the hour, it encourages us to recognise the signs of the times. We can see things shaping up to the climax, and we know that the return of our Messiah is near. In the meantime, the priority he himself has set before us is that of being his witnesses, of taking the Good News to both Jew and Gentile, of making disciples of all nations and of preaching the Gospel to every tribe and language. I have no doubt that Jewish believers will be playing an ever increasing role in this mission.

CONCLUSION

The bush is still on fire and the bush will not be consumed by the fire! Israel is here to stay and no power cam move it away until all God's purposes for this earth are fulfilled and the time comes for "a new heaven and a new earth wherein justice dwells."

As believers we should align ourselves with God's purposes and intercede for their fulfilment. Israel has a definite part in his plans. This does not mean that all that Israeli governments do is moral or justifiable, any more than the actions of any other government. But neither does it mean that we should demonise Israel as has been done in recent years by media and churches.

Our call is on the one hand to intercede for Israel and to comfort Israel, recognising the church's long history of guilt in anti-Semitism. Our other duty is to labour for the salvation of Jews and Muslims and all people groups in this world looking forward to the time when people of every tribe, tongue and nation will unite in worship around the throne of God and the Lamb.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rausch, David A. A Legacy Of Hatred, Chicago: Moody Press,1984

Potok, Chaim. Wanderings, New York: Ballantine, 1978

Williamson, Clark M. A Guest In The House Of Israel, Post-Holocaust Church Theology, Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press

Riggans, Walter. The Covenant With The Jews, Tunbridge Wells: Monarch Publications, 1992

Crossan, John Dominic. Who Killed Jesus? Exposing The Roots Of Antisemitism In The Gospel Story Of The Death Of Jesus, San Francisco: Harper, 1995

FOOTNOTES