Posted on 01/01/2007 4:25:08 PM PST by yochanan
Why do evangelicals support Israel so strongly? Is the American Jews' fear of fundamentalist Christianity based on constitutional principle, or social and cultural snobbery and political partisanship?
A Match Made in Heaven is a funny, readable, book. It is the most entertaining way to struggle with questions such as "Why do evangelicals support Israel so strongly? Is their philo-Semitism just a front for their true purpose to convert Jews? Do the evangelicals, as their opponents charge, really want to use the Jews as cannon fodder at the battle of Armageddon? Or are they simply responding to the biblical commandment to love Israel? Finally, is the American Jews' fear of fundamentalist Christianity based on constitutional principle, or social and cultural snobbery and political partisanship?"
We will discuss these questions this week, and readers, as usual, can send their questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.
How do America's Orthodox Jews relate to Zionist Evangelicals?
Joe Feld
Paradoxically, Orthodox Jews have the fewest problems with a Jewish-Evangelical relationship.
For one thing, a lot of Orthodox Jews and Evangelicals share conservative social and political positions. Orthodox Jews, for example, are rarely troubled by church-state separation issues. They send their own kids to parochial schools; they're glad to get government money via faith based programs; many are opposed to abortion, and they tend not to be too concerned about the good opinion of the "international community" - ie, Europeans.
Most Orthodox Jews also have a stronger connection to, and concern about, Israel than the secular or liberal majority. Orthodox Jews are more likely to care about a candidates' position on Israel. As a Democratic activist told me, if Cynthia McKinney ran for President as a Democrat, she'd get fifty percent of the Jewish vote.
Some Orthodox Jews are opposed to any
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
Great post. Most rapture believers quote 1 Thess 4:16-17 and don't go to 2Thess.2:2-12. There Paul asks them to "be not shaken of mind...by the letter from us about the day Christ returns". That would be 1 Thess 4:15-17. He also states that day will not come until the great apostasy when the abomination stands in Jerusalem, pretending to be Christ. The true Christ comes after him. God allows this "strong delusion" to see if we have read His word. Also, when Jesus told us of the end times in the Olivet Prophecies of Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21 he never said we would be removed before his return. Rather He told us what was expected of us until then.
Liberals (socialists, Marxists, central authority zealots) are also filled with praise for Mao and Stalin. One murdered 20 million of his own people. The other murdered 30 million. Doesn't much matter which is which.
Liberals are in love with the power of the state. Whenever that power is used ruthlessly they are orgasmic in their praise and wonder.
Defeating tyrants is the work of the enemies of liberals. The global liberal political movement IS the antichrist.
Amen!
Actually millions of Jews will be rescued from the Antichrist, who will be utterly destroyed at armageddon. Paul wrote strongly of the rapture, a few years before 1850.
If you would like to debate theological positions, at least bother to get the facts right before you launch your missive.
but there will be a vast remnant saved after the war in Ezekiel 38 and during the tribulation
Be careful, Jesus in his human nature was and is Jewish, He is the same yesterday today and forever.
because of their unbelief we are grafted in, but in a future time their unbelief will end. Paul is pretty clear in this.
Meanwhile we ought to support them and pray for their salvation.
Jesus was railroaded into crucifixion my by sin and His desire to provide salvation for me.
No race is responsible for this except the human race as a whole
the early disciples and apostles were all Jewish and continued to call themselves Jews while spreading the Gospel
there are good a bad apples in every race, but every Christian understands they are personally responsible for and saved by Christ's crucifixion.
agreed ... you're very concise ... and yes, we should pray for them, as well as everyone else ... thanks for your post
You said yourself Israel was an atheistic secular state. What would you expect from atheists.
But before you right off Israel.
Remember, Abraham after leaving his home land to go to Canaan, told a king that Sarah was his sister, because he was afraid. The king took Sarah to sleep with her. Not a very commendable guy. And yet that didn't stop God's covenant.
David's son Absalom was banging Davids wife on top of the palace. That didn't stop God's covenant.
David himself had many foibles. He was a great king but an awful father and husband. His house was totally disfunctional. And yet God called him a man after Gods own heart, and didn't stop God's covenant.
Josephs brothers sold Joseph into slavery. And yet he turned it into good for them. Generations later all their desendants are walking through the desert with Moses. Mo goes up onto Mt Sainai, comes down with the 10 commandments (15 according to Mel Brooks) and finds the people worshiping a golden calf. You don't think God didn't know what was happenning while he was up on the Mountn? That didn't stop God's covenant.
Ahab and Jezebel were 2 of the most dispicable leaders ever in Israel.That didn't stop God's covenant.
There were very few men like Daniel in the Bible.
Don't limit God by what you see as others sins.
Paul persecuted Christians before his conversion.
Peter cut off a servants ear and denied Christ.
Peter and Paul had their differences.
Thomas doubted.
Pat Robertson and Hal Lindsey have their faults.
Has God removed his covenant because of these people?
What of your sins, or my sins? Is Gods covenant removed from us?
I'm not asking to try to provoke an argument or debate. I'm genuinely curious, as I'm unaware.
There are only 2 covenants. The one GOD made with Abraham (aka the Isralites), and the one GOD made with the rest of humanity through Jesus.
Paul said, "... we have a better covenant based on better promises". I didn't write that!
What's your proof. Do I need to read everything Paul wrote to find this "evidence". When you say Paul wrote about the rapture, at what point did it occur? At the end of history I can just prior to Armageddeon, I can accept a 'rapture' but I dont see evidence for a rapture before things get bad. Christians will have to suffer like non Christians.
As far as the Jews, isnt there a reference to 144,000 being saved (I believe in Revelations). Oh, are you going to tell me that this is one of those few times that the Bible is speaking in metaphor rather than literal fact? The world created in six literal days, Eve made from the bone of Adam, the AntiChrist is some later day figure,not Nero is literal truth but 144,000 Jews being saved is a metaphor? It really means Millions.
I agree with you - the only place that the pretrib rapture really works is here in the west where we don't really know what persecution is. Corrie Ten Boom rejected the doctrine, and once quoted a Chinese pastor as lamenting the fact that they had taught Chinese Christians that they would escape before things got bad because it left them totally unprepared for the persecution they began to experience under communism.
IMO, the whole question hinges on where the "wrath of God" begins. If we determine when that starts, things become much clearer. Based on personal experience (myself having been one before) it seems to me that pretribbers include the entire 7 years as the wrath of God. Of course we're not appointed to wrath, but most of the tribulation is just that - tribulation - which Jesus Himself promised we would have in this life - with the wrath of God being poured out at the end, when mankind's sin has reached the point of no return.
One point of clarification - it's not 144,000 Jews. :) Jews only make up 12,000 (from the tribe of Judah), with the rest being from other tribes.
Your comment on the 144,000 is from Revelation 7. Well, the 144,000 is literal, see. But the tribes are figurative. No, that won't work. But, because Dan is left out..., how can it be literal? Or, maybe Dan was omitted because his tribe was removed for Idolatry (Ryrie). No, wait...., the promises are "irrevocable" so that can't be it. Maybe John got confused and could't remember the REAL names of the 12 tribes and substituted Benjamin (Joseph's son) for Dan. Or maybe there are now 13 tribes with Benjamin a "new" tribe?
Or maybe, just maybe, the Holy Spirit is dropping a hint that apocalyptic language is NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY, and that the symbolism is deliberate. That would be consistent with the rest of the entire New Testament, which insists on taking prophetic passages and telling us they are fulfilled in the CHURCH. A great example of this is in Acts 15 where Paul says the GENTILES COMING INTO THE CHURCH is a fulfillment of the "raising up of David's fallen tent"..... there was NO mention of a literal rebuilding of David's house, yet Paul insisted that the very issue here (Jews and Gentiles in the same church) are a fulfillment of that very prophecy. The NT does that THROUGHOUT, and the Holy Spirit is giving us yet one more hint in Rev 7, in the incorrect naming of the 12 tribes, that the language CANNOT be demanded to be taken "literally" unless you are willing to say the Holy Spirit Himself can't remember how many tribes were in Israel and who they were!
If you go there, the whole dispensational system falls apart, though, and what would we then do with all those charts? (smile)
Sorry for the secondary posting, but another reason why we cannot demand that the apocalyptic passages be taken "literally" is that the promise of the rebuilt temple in Ezekiel, so central to the concept of restored Messianic Judaism in the trib period, is LARGER THAN THE WHOLE CITY OF JERUSALEM, AND THE CITY IS LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE LAND OF PALESTINE! A "literal" city demanded by the pre-trib preterists is "literally" jutting out into the Mediterranean Ocean and into Syria. Look up the measurements sometime. Makes more sense to say "God is saying that the new age will have SO MANY REMNANT PEOPLES that the land cannot hold them all. I think the language Revelation uses is "a multitude that no man can number" but don't hold me to that particular citation.
I'm sure you meant to say Manasseh rather than Benjamin, who was Joseph's brother rather than his son. I believe that Dan was left out because of the prophecies for the tribes in Gen 49, where their father Jacob tells them what will happen to each of them in the "last days."
My theory is that because Dan is said to be a judge of the people in the last days, he can't also be a witness, as those of the other tribes are. Because Dan is excluded, Manasseh is mentioned instead. He is in fact the firstborn of Joseph, and got his own special blessing at the same time.
With regard to spiritualizing scripture and taking prophecy figuratively, what is the criteria then for determining when we do or don't? In my opinion, the only safe way to approach it is to trust the plain text, unless context dictates otherwise.
They are an honorable people.
For the most part support the USA.
They don't cut off the heads of those who oppose them.
I agree. I was tweaking those who demand literal interpretations of every Bible passage but then suddenly accept metaphors when they dont like what the Bible says. I read most of the Bible metaphorically. For example, I see no reason to believe the world was created some four or five thousand years ago over a six day period. The Bible was not meant as a science text and to a certain extent, not even a historical text. It is a spiritual book meant to build faith. It's not a "how to" on avoiding the tribulations.
A text without a context is a pretext, not a plain text! Biblical writings must be read -- Biblically. In terms of the whole message and pattern of the Bible. For example, a hypertext version of Apocalypse would be almost solid blue-underlined, since it is so densely linked with all that's gone before. You might almost call it an index to the rest of the Bible! For example, the "plot" is governed by the Ezekiel lectionary -- divide each book into 52 chunks, so as to read through it in a year, and the themes of Apocalypse consistently echo those in Ezekiel.
People who go in for plain-text proof-texts do things like "disproving" the Trinity, the God of the Bible. Or blending with fevered and overwrought imaginations to create deceptive and addictive "road-maps to the future."
I do find the different measures explaining the "error" of leaving out Dan in Rev 7 to be just plain weird. 12 tribes are 12 tribes. Nowhere in the Pentateuch do you find any kind of "replacement" stuff for Dan. Divvying up the land makes mention of a 1/2 tribe (Manasseh), but even then, it is clear what is going on. Revelation claims plainly and succinctly that these are "all the tribes of Israel" and then misses a tribe. I am forced to the position that either someone forgot something, or that we are given a hint here that apocalyptic language is MEANT to be interpreted symbolically.
Your point about how do we distinguish symbolic from literal is a good one, I believe. We do not, I believe, have hard and fast rules. I believe dispensationalism's greatest error is being unwilling to live without such a rigid rule and thus making up one and imposing it on the Scripture, even when the Scripture itself in the New Testament says (in effect) "No, that is NOT the rule for the interpretation of the Old Testament." It is true that one can spiritualize away almost anything if you run wild. However, that danger, true as it is, does not permit us to trump the Holy Spirit when He says clearly that the covenant promises extended in the context of a geopolitical ethnic nation state were really intended for the "true Israel" (OT terminology is "remnant"). Ephesian 3 claims furtherthat the NT has seen such a radical influx of non-ethnics into the remnant that the geopolitical ethnic exclusivity of the OT is, in fact, broken and done away with, so that "Israel" (or the "remnant" or the "church") is now a universal and many cultured family, and that ALL of the promises that many Jews (including Jesus own diciples)thought were to be fulfilled in a Jewish state are to be fulfilled through a stateless and universal people of God.
This is the beauty of covenant theology. It brings the gospel front and center as the message of the ENTIRE BIBLE and makes the person of Christ the central theme and message of the two testaments. I am filled with wonder as the promise expands in its scope and vision across the biblical timeline. This was the view, no matter what one's "millineal" views (and there were plenty of pre post and a mil views throughout history) of ALL the early church fathers, the confessing church through the medieval ages, and the protestant reformation. The radical disjunction of the testaments in dispensationalism is a late arrival on the scene for the simple reason that one will not come to it if the cardinal rule of the reformers in exigesis is used (scriptura scriptura interpres "scripture interprets scripture"). The bible will tell us how to interpret it if we will listen. We need not bring some man made rule of "literal whenever possible" to "help." Moreover, we make grevious errors when we insist on so doing.
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