Posted on 02/02/2002 4:22:03 AM PST by veronica
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington this past January, his initial meeting was not with President Clinton but with Jerry Falwell and more than 1,000 fundamentalist Christians.
The crowd saluted the prime minister as "the Ronald Reagan of Israel," and Falwell pledged to contact more than 200,000 evangelical pastors, asking them to "tell President Clinton to refrain from putting pressure on Israel" to comply with the Oslo accords.
The meeting between Netanyahu and Falwell illustrates a remarkable political and theological convergence.
The link between Israel's Likud government and the U.S. Religious Right was established by Natanyahu's mentor, Menachem Begin, during the Carter and Reagan administrations. However, the roots of evangelical support for Israel lie in the long tradition of Christian thinking about the millennium.
In Luke's account of the ascension, the disciples ask Jesus, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?" The question illustrates the early church's fascination with Israel and its prophetic role at the end of history--a fascination that continues to this day. Reflections on the end times draw on the Book of Daniel, Zechariah 9-14, Ezekiel 38-39 and various apocryphal books, as well as Matthew 24, the early Pauline letters (1 Thess. 4:16-17; 5:1-11) and the Book of Revelation.
An early version of Christian eschatology, called "historic premillennialism," held that Jesus would return and establish his millennial kingdom after the world had been evangelized. However, by the 18th century another model of eschatology emerged in England that emphasized the role of a reconstituted Israel in the end times.
This eschatology was rooted in three streams of British Christianity: the piety of English Puritanism; the view that Britain was the "new Israel," a theme that dates back at least to the seventh century and the Venerable Bede; and a hermeneutic that interpreted biblical prophetic texts as having a literal, future fulfillment. Among the forerunners of this movement was Sir Henry Finch, a prominent lawyer and member of Parliament. In 1621, Finch wrote a treatise in which he called upon the British people and its government to support Jewish settlement in Palestine in order to fulfill biblical prophecy.
As the year 1800 approached, several premillennial theologies emerged as a result of the insecurity surrounding the American and French revolutions. Among them were various utopian movements and the Millerites (a group that later became Seventh-day Adventists). During this period John Nelson Darby (1800-82), a renegade Anglican priest from Ireland, popularized and systematized eschatological themes while simultaneously developing a new school of thought which has been called "futurist premillennialism."
During 60 years of unceasing travel and preaching across the European continent and North America, Darby converted a generation of evangelical clergy and laity to his views. Darby held that biblical prophecies and much of scripture must be interpreted according to a literal and predictive hermeneutic. He believed that the true church will be removed from history through an event called the "rapture" (I Thess. 4:16-17; 5:1-11), and the nation Israel will be restored as God's primary instrument in history.
My bad. Reverse English.
Reading too much Hebrew will do that.
I would hope it is the former, but I fear it is the latter.
Replacement Theology (which says Christianity replaces Judaism) is also false doctrine because, among other things, the original believers in Yeshua were all Jews, and God made an everlasting covenant with the Jews.
Christians tend to believe they can vote in truth instead of line up with it, so if a majority imbibes of a particular wind of doctrine, many others follow the crowd, picking and choosing which part of the Torah they will keep and which they will exclude.
No Tower of Babel (ecumenicism) is going to bring peace and safety. The best defense is a good case of Repentance for Jews and Christians alike.
Jerry Golden: Who is a Jew and what does it mean, All Israel shall be saved?
I don't see how the issue of Christ's return has - or should have - anything to do with Christians' support for the Jews and the Jewish homeland. I would like to think it has more to do with our belief in scripture, which spells out exactly how God feels about His people, how He will never forsake them, will always restore them, and will never break His covenant with them.
IMO, the article makes it seem like Christians only support Israel because of what Israel can do for us, which in this case is host us in the millennial kingdom. I'd like to think it is rather that we love the Jewish people because God loves them, that we respect His covenant with them, and remember that we are grafted into their tree.
The end of the article -
It is true that Palestinian Christians are leaving the Holy Land. But it is not because of Muslim persecution. They are leaving because of the brutality of Israeli occupation and because Israel's resistance to negotiating a just peace with the Palestinians makes them despair about the future.
At this juncture, it appears that the hardline Likud position has the backing of both houses of Congress, the major Jewish lobbies, and the Christian Right. President Clinton and those who advocate the Israeli Labor Party peace formula, or the Oslo Accords, have little leverage with Likud. Palestinian Christians and their supporters fear that the Christian Right's alliance with Likud may in the end serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, heightening tensions in the region and leading to a new round of conflict in the Holy Land, which the Christian Zionists will readily interpret as "the final battle."
Donald Wagner is director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University in Chicago and director of Evangelicals of Middle East Understanding.
As a whole, the article makes it sound like evangelicals are focused on nothing but prophecy and what they can gain from its fulfillment. Just because evangelicals believe in prophecy does not mean that they want war. They want the survival of Israel, they want her to justly defend herself against those who seek to destroy her. If that means war happens, so be it. Most Americans feel the same way about our response to Sep 11.
And these last few paragraphs are pretty telling. Once again, according to the author, it is the JEWS who refuse to negotiate a lasting peace, and it is their brutal occupation that is hurting the Christian natives.
I am an Evangelical Baptist, BTW, but I certainly do not expect you to become one. Once again, only God could have the power to do that.
If Israel wants to start cutting off practically its only sources of support (in terms of raw electoral numbers) in this country, that's its choice.
In particular, American evangelicals have been a strong pro-Israel voice for both logical, political and religious reasons.
Terrible isn't it? How dare Christians practice the bedrock principle of their faith. Better join the ACLU today and try to stop them before they convert you. Norman Lear has a group which does much good in driving Christians out of the public square to places where they can't bother you. Check out People for the American Way. I suspect you'll feel right at home.
Or you might do as I do. Just say no.
Support for Israel would not have legs if Israel were not a fundamentally moral society.
I can't really say that I classify myself as pre-trib in the sense popularized by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins. However, your one-sentence description of the theology is decidedly incorrect.
Exactly right.
All rascism is bad, but there is something particularly satanic about anti-semitism. Look at Revelation 12 sometime. All Christians should support Israel/Jews, because the One whom the Christians call G-d, calls the Jews the apple of His eye. Cheers
By Dr. Jerry Falwell
Publisher, National Liberty Journal
Every Evangelical Christian who loves Israel is celebrating the victory of Ariel Sharon as that nation’s new prime minister. By a landslide margin, Mr. Sharon defeated Ehud Barak, and immediately set in motion a plan to prevent the fulfillment of Mr. Barak’s earlier misguided concessions to the Palestinians.
During his final days in office, Mr. Barak had offered the Palestinians a state in about 95 percent of the West Bank and control over parts of Jerusalem. In addition, according to a New York Post report, Mr. Barak had also indicated a willingness to partially relinquish Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the Al Aqsa Mosque stands above the ruins of the sacred biblical Jewish Temples.
Mr. Barak, seemingly a willing dupe of President Clinton and rabble-rouser James Carville, was convinced by the Democrat leadership in the U.S. to make unnecessary concessions to the Palestinians even though history proves that these concessions do nothing to appease Yassir Arafat, the terrorist leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The PLO has long sought the destruction of Israel, which became independent on May 14, 1948.
Bill Clinton, who poured untold amounts of money into the Barak election in 1999, was consumed with bringing peace to the Middle East as a personal legacy. His intent was clearly not to bolster Israel, but solely to direct his own individual glory before his presidency played out.
When Bill Clinton entered office, the Middle East was quite stable. However, when he left office, the region was languishing in confusion and turmoil.
The National Unity Coalition for Israel reported, “In 1991, only rogue states like Iraq spoke openly of destroying Israel: in 2001, putative and pay-rolled U.S. allies like Egypt make it an official plank of foreign policy, backing Yassir Arafat’s demands for demographic destruction of the Jewish state through the ‘right of return’ of Palestinian refugees.”
The fact is that peace is not the important issue to Israelis. Security of the region is the prime concern of the vast majority of the 5.7 million residents of Israel. Sacrificing security in the desperate hope for peace was Mr. Barak’s downfall.
However, Mr. Sharon, a 72-year-old retired general, has called on the Palestinians to end the latest four-month uprising and has vowed to hold on to a “united Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. Additionally, he has pledged not to give up control over Arab sections of East Jerusalem.
“The state of Israel has embarked on a new path ... striving for security and a real, genuine peace,” he told exhilarated Likud Party supporters. “I am aware of the fact that peace requires painful compromises by both sides. I call upon our Palestinian neighbors to cast off the path of violence and to return to the path of dialogue and to resolving the disputes between us by peaceful means.”
Autonomy over Arab East Jerusalem, captured during the 1967 Middle East war, and the Temple Mount -- revered by Muslims as “Noble Sanctuary” -- are the primary obstacles in securing an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
Tom Rose, publisher and CEO of the Jerusalem Post, told me that, in addition to working for peace, Mr. Sharon will also attempt to preempt the terrorism that has gone unpunished in the region. “That terrorism has terribly hurt Israel’s deterrent capability,” he said. “And that deterrent capability is what has brought stability to the region. When that capability goes down the tubes, the entire region becomes unstable.”
Concessions to the Palestinians, he said, do nothing to alleviate this problem. “The more concessions we make, the more violence we see,” said Mr. Rose.
Of course, dealing with a madman -- Yassir Arafat -- is frequently a losing premise.
It is important to note that Mr. Arafat wickedly exploits the children of his nation, convincing them to fling rocks and bottles at Israeli troops. When one of these children is killed, their families are given up to $2,000 as a reward for their efforts and the children are buried as martyrs.
Sadly, the mainstream American press ignores this fact. Also often ignored is the fact that PLO terrorists who blow up busses are hailed as heroes. Mr. Arafat often attends the funerals of the “martyrs” of his nation. The press typically chooses to report that about 385 people have died in the bloodshed since September -- about 330 of them Palestinians -- without explaining the diabolical reason for many of these deaths.
“Palestinians don’t want peace,” said Tom Rose, “because Arafat is an unrepentant revolutionary.”
Mr. Sharon’s victory, said Bret Stephens, editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, was more than a vote against the policies of Ehud Barak. <> “[Sharon’s victory] was a decisive vote against the ‘peace process’ as it has been pursued by Mr. Barak,” wrote Mr. Stephens. “And it was a vote for Mr. Sharon; a man whose virtues became more attractive to Israelis as the country’s situation became direr … [Israelis] rejected submitting to the cant of liberal elites in order to win the approval of the Western governments. They rejected a policy of giving without getting, as if only that could expiate the terrible guilt of their existence on this land.”
Following his victory, Mr. Sharon quickly faced pressure from other leaders in the region to continue making concessions to the Palestinians. Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohamed Said Al-Sahaf has already called Mr. Sharon a “criminal,” no doubt referring to Mr. Sharon’s authorization of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to drive out Mr. Arafat’s PLO forces.
While I unreservedly believe that Mr. Sharon is the right man to lead Israel today, the truth is that the opposition to his leadership within the region is sure to be increasingly heightened.
American Christians should be firmly in support of Mr. Sharon’s work to protect Jerusalem. (“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: May they prosper who love you.” -- Psalm 122: 6.)We must be praying for the peace of Jerusalem and for the Jewish people. And we must be encouraging our own government to be doing everything it can to prevent Mr. Arafat’s success in destroying this great nation. President George W. Bush needs to promptly make his administration a new beginning in American-Israeli relations. After Mr. Sharon’s government is in place, he must establish a 2001 budget, which the Knesset must pass by March 31. If that budget is not approved, new elections must be initiated for prime minister and parliament. Needless to say, this is a crucial time for this new leader. After 32 visits to Israel, I can tell you that the grassroots of this tiny but momentous nation express great appreciation for the unswerving support of American Evangelicals who fervently pray for a strong and secure Israel. Let us not grow weary in well doing and continue to earnestly pray for Mr. Sharon and his efforts to bring peace -- and, most importantly, security -- to our friend, Israel.
I wouldn't call myself pre-trib but the foolishness of that statement is beyond words. Clearly you do not know bothers and sisters who are pre-trib. Please don't make divisive statements out of ignorance, for the whole non-christian world to see.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.