Every so often I get a spike in readers looking for specific articles. This particular spike coincides with outbreak of conflict in the Middle East and this seems to cause a lot of interest, especially from US quarters concerning what I’ve written about Israel, prophecy and end times. Israel’s recent incursions into Lebanon, the targeting of Hezbollah and the cocnenring response from Iran seems to have provoked one such spike.
Others are writing too about the conflict. I recently saw someone quote the verse that “the God who watches Israel, neither slumbers nor sleeps” on their social media with clear reference to the conflict. Was that a right use of the verse? Meanwhile, Premier Christianity have recently published two articles.
The first “What the Bible says about the Israel-Gaza War” doesn’t in fact say much about what the Bible has to say. It picks up on one or two themes, we are made in God’s image, vengeance belongs to God and blessed are the peace makers. However, even with the mention of those themes, the author fails to show what they have to say about this, or indeed any conflict. The same would be true of the Ukraine War or of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War. It wouldn’t tell us much about the rights and wrongs of the Second World War either.
You see, the article fails to engage with a couple of things, first the phrase used by Benjamin Netanyahu from Ecclesiastes that there is a time for war, secondly, that when we look o God for vengeance, then it is as his people and its in the context of our personal response but that doesn’t deal with the responsibility of either courts or governments and their armies which are not removed from Scripture by the statement that God is the one who brings justice.
Primarily the article focuses on a few things that are good but not the same as building a Biblical argument
- Awareness of current affairs
- Feelings and the need for emotional intelligence when responding.
- Knowing history.
All of this is fair enough. He rightly references the problem of antisemitism though focuses primarily on Christian/Western failure and the Holocaust here without making explicit the significance of antisemitism in the Middle East itself and the part that plays in the “visceral hatred of Israel” and her continuing struggle for survival that he does mention.
Secondly, his description of recent middle-east history is rather skewed, focusing on the displacement of Palestinians and even using the Arab world’s chosen description of those events but failing to mention that other players in the Middle East failed to recognise Israel’s right to exist and never accepted to implemented the 1947 UN agreement. He doesn’t engage with the crucial factor that Gaza was immediately occupied post 1948 by Egypt with the West Bank taken by Jordan. Israel’s later occupation resulted from conflict with those two players.
Nor does the author really engage with the complexities and big question marks about a situation where permanent cities are still classed as refugee camps and where the UN was significantly involved in administration above the surface whilst Hamas operated out of tunnels below. Nor does he mention the longer term IDF strategy of seeking to minimise civilian casualties through sending warning shots or shooting to wound rather than to kill.
So, I have some sympathy with the reaction from James Patrick. I particularly think he is right to raise questions about whether what we hear reported about Israel by her enemies is accurate. Too often the narrative goes unanswered. Patrick is also right to challenge the shallowness, or in fact sheer absence of a Biblical case in Mark Wood’s article. However, I would argue that his own “Biblical” case is similarly lacking and falls short.
First of all, if we assume that his hermeneutic and exegesis is correct (which I don’t) that God’s covenant means that the physical land is tied to the physical descendants of Abraham, then we also have o account for the conditions in that covenant, that the people had a choice to make between life and blessing in the land or death, curse and exile from the land. We need to consider the importance of Temple, Priesthood and Kingship. All of this means that we cannot, on the basis of Biblical prophecy and covenant say that the current state of Israel has a God given right to exist in peace. How do we know that Hamas and Hezbullah are not the instruments of divine judgement as were the equally repugnant Assyrians and Babylonians? The answer is that if we follow that line of argument, then we don’t.
Now, you will be relieved to know that I don’t agree with his line of argument. You see, he simply states one interpretation of Old Testament Scripture based on a specific theological out look. I’ve written about this extensively over time so don’t intend to rehearse the details again. However, the point is this, God’s Covenant with Abraham is fulfilled in Christ. He is Abraham’s heir. Note too that if we are grafted into God’s people, then we become heirs of those promises to Abraham, in Christ. Now this either means that we are coheirs to a narrow strip of land (it cannot mean that we inherit something else whilst physical descendants get the strip of land) or r it means that the land itself, as with the physical descendants was meant to point to something bigger and greater.
This is important because Romans 11 points to true Israel being saved and this does point to significant numbers of ethnic Jews finding faith in Christ. I don’t want them to settle for something less than what God promised and what those promises to Abraham actually mean for them in Christ. Christian Zionism ends up selling Israelis and Jews around the world short in the same way that the Prosperity Gospel does/ This is no surprise because often the same faulty exegesis and hermeneutic is employed.
This means that the original article isn’t wrong by failing to treat Israel as unique but rather it is wrong because it fails to engage with what God’s Word might say about any other conflict.
—
See also
Faithroots 