There appears to be a fixation on 2/3rds of Israel being destroyed.
First, one cannot help but reflect on the holocaust. Almost all estimates that I've ever seen say that more than 6 million Jews were killed by those fascist purges. This number is roughly that of the number of Jews in Israel today. I hear that Israel comprises about one third of all Jew who now exist in our modern world.
You are a Calvinist. Did God plan for those 6 million to be murdered by Fascism? You must insist that He did. I am a believer in God's absolute foreknowledge. I, too, must admit that God created this world knowing full well that those 6 million Jews would be slaughtered by Fascism.
The question for you is this: "Is God CULPABLE for the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust?"
" We report. You decide."
You are a Calvinist. Did God plan for those 6 million to be murdered by Fascism?
You're a smart fellow so I will explain the difference. Some others may not get it, but I know you will.
Theologians generally differentiate between the secret or decretive will of God and the revealed or prescriptive will of God. The former is know only to God while the latter can be known to all men through God's special revelation, e.g., the Bible.
God nowhere in the Bible predicted the slaughter of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. God nowhere predicted that the Second World War would occur in the 20th century (unless you are reading the Nostradamus version). So God nowhere tells us the reason why in His sovereign plan six million Jews died in the Nazi holocaust (other than the overarching fact of man's total degenerated sinfulness).
Now, one the other hand, your futurist dispensationalist friends turn to the very pages of the Bible to find a prediction and details about the futurist holocaust. It's right there in Zechariah 13 according to such dispensationalist giants as John Walvoord:
The purge of Israel in their time of trouble is described by Zechariah in these words: ‘And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, saith Jehovah, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein. And I will bring the third part into the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried’ (Zechariah 13:8, 9). According to Zechariah’s prophecy, two thirds of the children of Israel in the land will perish, but the one third that are left will be refined and be awaiting the deliverance of God at the second coming of Christ which is described in the next chapter of Zechariah (Israel in Prophecy).Now, if one actually takes the time to read the context of Zech. 13:8,9 you will see that the two-thirds are cut off for idolatry and speaking words of false prophecy (vv. 2,3).
God is explicitly punishing Israel for these particular sins. And it is a great judgment.
So, putting two and two together, one sees that futurist Israel in the land must be a hotbed of idolatry and false prophecy and God, as punishment, kills off two-thirds of that generation, but brings the one-third "remnant" though it all as by fire.
The bottom line is that WWII holocaust slaughter is a matter of God's secret will. No one talked about six million dead by 1945 in the 1800s based on specific Bible verses, or why it might happen from the Bible.
But the futurist holocaust of two-thirds of Israel is, by definition, a matter of God's revealed will, otherwise we would not be talking about it before the fact.
See the difference?
It's merely a distraction. Replacement theology in all its stripes (including preterism) has been taking a beating over the last few decades because of the historical fact that rejection of the Jewish people as a nation particularly chosen by God is directly linked to antisemetism, whereas premillennialism has no such baggage. So to get around this little PR problem, the new tactic of the preterists seems to be to accuse premills of "rooting for" another holocaust for our own selfish reasons.
There are numerous problems with this tact, of course. First, it fails to distinguish anticipation of a prophesied event from rooting for the deaths such an event will bring. One wonders if the preterists apply this standard to themselves; i.e., are they cheering for the deaths of the Jews in Jerusalem in 70 and 135 AD? I would wager that most would deny doing so; they are merely recognizing that the Lord prophesied the destruction and the reason for it. Which brings one to wonder why they apply a different standard to premills.
Second, it's merely a faulty appeal to the consequences of a belief: "Premill can't be true because if it is true, 2/3rds of the Jewish people will die in the future." Yes, and?
Third, it fails to acknowledge that premills anticipate a holocaust of more than just the Jews. Those of a prewrath or posttrib persuation, like myself, believe that the Church will be persecuted right alongside Israel. Those of a pretrib POV believe that there will be Gentile "tribulation saints"--a post-Rapture Church, in effect--who will suffer the same. We are not masochistially rooting for our own persecution or that of the Gentiles who are "Left Behind"--we simply believe it to be a Biblical matter-of-fact that we will be.
The secondary part of this argument is that in order to "bring about" our eschatology, premills are manipulating Israel into a position to be annihilated so that God will have to intervene. Hardly. We encourage Israel to take a strong military stance because that is the ONLY thing keeping her enemies at bay. Those who believe that by being more reconilliary Israel can somehow appease her neighbors who have called for her destruction--"land for peace," aka "land piece-by-piece"--are either politically naive beyond belief or find a national Israel once again sitting in the Land that God gave to her fathers to be such an embarrassment to their belief systems that they are unconciously or otherwise hoping to see the Jews driven out again, or at least so humbled that they can point and say, "See, God isn't blessing them!"
Those who talk about or allude that Israel's very existence will bring death and destruction to the Jewish people are historically naive--when have the Jews ever known a permanent peace in dispersion among the Gentiles, especially those who claim to follow a Jewish Messiah? The Jews had been quietly buying up property in Palestine for more than a century before 1948 precisely because they recognized that they needed a land where Jews could be Jews without being forced to wear yellow Stars of David or forbidden to persue certain professions or own land, where they could defend themselves by force of arms if necessary.
It is truly sad that at a time when all Christendom should be celebrating together the fulfillment of prophecy and the regathering of Israel, some here are so wed to a failed eschatology (which fails on both the exegetical and historical levels) that they try to find reasons not to believe.
You know, sort of how some of the Pharisees went looking for reasons not to believe that prophecy was being fulfilled in their time.