Title: This Is Why Evangelical Christians Love Israel Source:
YouTube URL Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo77sTGpngQ Published:May 15, 2018 Author:Thomas Morton Post Date:2018-05-23 05:34:32 by A Pole Keywords:Israel, Palestine, Evangelical Views:2070 Comments:18
Evangelical Christians love Israel because they love their Bibles, and the first 2/3rds of their Bible focuses on Israel and extols it above all other things. So they do the same.
Evangelical Christians love Israel because they love their Bibles, and the first 2/3rds of their Bible focuses on Israel and extols it above all other things
Bible extols God above all other things!
Jews were elected and called to be His servants. A big difference.
You seem to follow a heresy of etho-phyletism, whether applied to French or Jewish.
Jews were elected and called to be His servants. A big difference.
Yeah, but if you read it, the Bible extols God above all else, and God extols Israel as "his boy", and above all other nations, and the Israelites as his special people.
The Old Testament goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on in this vein. It was a book written by Hebrews ABOUT Hebrews, and about a God whose center of operations on earth was Mt. Zion.
One can find traces of universalism, of trinitarianism, even of vegetarianism, is dangling bits and pieces of clauses in what is otherwise a 2000 page-long paean to Israel and its people.
Any natural read of the Old Testament finds Israel as the cat's meow. God punishes Israel severely on occasion for disobedience, but the punishment is always predicated on the promise of bigger and better things as a reward for returning to compliance.
The Old Testament is about Israel. Now, it's true that the first 10 chapters of Genesis deal with the world as a whole. But once Abraham shows up in Genesis 11, the rest of the Old Testament is about his extended family - and not the whole thing, either, but the particular line of it that runs through Isaac, then Jacob, and their descendants.
Israel and its religion and people being the entire primary, secondary and tertiary plot of the entire Bible up to Jesus (Genesis 1-10 are merely stage-setting backstory), it isn't surprising that people whose entire lives revolve around the Bible would be smitten with Israel.
And because the folks who do that really believe that the Bible IS the way that God reveals himself to the world, they see God through a completely Judaic lens, much in the same way that you see God through a Byzantine Greek lens,and I am told by fellow Catholics (and spite-filled Protestants) that I "have to" see God through a traditional Catholic theological lens.
This would be the place in the development of my narrative where I would take a baseball bat to the belief systems of others I don't agree with, but what's the point of that? It won't make me feel particularly good, and it won't convince anybody else.
Anyway, yes, evangelical Christians are infatuated with Israel, and this drives aspects of US foreign policy. Obama demonstrated that their view can be politically overridden, that the US does not HAVE TO have the view of Christian evangelicals as the basis of its Levantine foreign policy.
But Obama was coming from the perspective of a closeted Muslim, so he had his own strong internal beliefs about who to favor and who to disfavor.
In America there are also those who, thanks to their religious tradition, are inveterate anti-Semites. These people are generally at least as atrocious as the Zionists, and have a worse history vis-a-vis Americans (to wit: the avatar of anti-Semitism was Hitler and the Nazi Germans, and they killed about 500,000 Americans; the Jews never waged war on the USA).
People who read the Bible very precisely and realize that it doesn't say a great deal of what the various religious groups say it does, are always in the minority, and because they don't CARE as much about any of it, don't find it worthwhile to spend their time and energy to form an opposition to something. So we go with the flow.
A good thing to do would be to have a page on the income tax form in which people were required to go through the list of US budget expenditures and allocate what percentage of their income they would like to see go to the different programs.
The results would not be binding, but it would constitute the most realistic annual poll there could be of where the people really want to see their money go.
Conservatives would break for military and law enforcement. Liberals would break for schools, health care and poverty relief. Evangelicals-uber-alles would break for aid to Israel.
If I were permitted to determine who got US foreign AID, I'd pump all of it into Mexico and Central America. Those societies could be stabilized and become growing assets for their own people, paying huge dividends to us in terms of reduced immigration and increased trade. And unlike Europe, Asia and the Middle East, the US does not need to lay out vast sums for the military defense of Central America: it's not threatened by anybody.
You are making a typical psychological projection, because your ego and pride is hurt.
You are projecting. Neither my ego nor pride have been hurt. I have been surprised a few times by you in the past few days, not by the content of what you have said, but by the sudden aggression in it.
When attacked, my natural instinct is to parry and riposte, hard.
I'm still wondering why the attack in the first place. I imagine that you have a toothache, or a headache, or some other physical thing that is annoying you and making you short fused.
So I've been holding my fire because you seem out of character. The overnight does not seem to have made it any better, though.
I'm not eager to fight with you, and I'm not sure why you've gotten so testy with me.
I prefer to think that if I just leave it alone, it'll go away.
That's what's going on. I'm not nursing a wound or a grudge. When I click off, I won't think about this or anything else I've seen on LF until I click in again after lunch to see if anything interesting has happened.
That is probably true. I have very few fixed principles. Because of the time and place in which I live, those few principles that I do have are never placed under pressure.
I'm not eager to fight with you, and I'm not sure why you've gotten so testy with me. I prefer to think that if I just leave it alone, it'll go away.
Look this thread up. It was you who accosted me (what is welcome)
I just stick to my convictions. If you convince me, I will change them.
Nothing personal, just debating issues and thinking about them.
I am really not interested in fighting for fighting sake or for my ego - it would be too boring for me. I can have more than enough of it from my wife ;)
Yes, it was written by the Hebrews and their changing (over centuries) particularity shows there.
But it was inspired by the Holy Spirit as God picked Jews to be His mouthpiece to the whole mankind. Of course, some rewards and chastisements were in order for managerial reasons.
This election was not an unconditional privilege, it was a service contract.
But it was inspired by the Holy Spirit as God picked Jews to be His mouthpiece to the whole mankind.
It's that last part "to be his mouthpiece to the whole of mankind", that I would reject.
God did not say that he was giving a law to mankind at Sinai, and he did not. He gave a law to Hebrews, for Hebrews, to govern Hebrews (and sojourners) IN Israel.
He did not state that this was a model government for mankind. The Jews believe that, and the evangelicals, but that is their pride and their bibliolatry speaking. God told the Hebrews what they had to do to get rewarded with a farm in Israel. God never said a thing about eternal life as a reward for following any of the laws of the Old Testament.
The mouthpiece to the whole of mankind would be Jesus, just Jesus, and he would come at the end. Israel did it's bit, mostly for ill, and provided the ground and background into which Jesus was delivered - a failed state that was about to experience the final judgment for its failure, as God sent his only-begotten THROUGH it, to proclaim a NEW covenant, with NEW rules, for all mankind, but individually, not in tribes. In the process, Jesus pronounced the final, fatal judgment on Israel under the Old Covenant, the penalty clauses of the Torah that God said would happen IF they Hebrews did NOT obey.
If they obeyed, they would have a secure farm. If they did not obey, Israel would be destroyed utterly and they would be scattered to the world. In the Torah, God promised them that they would be reassembled, once. He did not promise they would be reassembled again and again.
They WERE destroyed, by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and scattered. And, as promised, they were gathered back in. They were in their reconstituted land for 500 years, but then Jesus came, and pronounced the final doom, in that generation, and that was it, game over: Temple destroyed, altar destroyed, no ark, no priesthood, no sacrifices - utterly wiped from the earth, never to return.
Jesus gave a NEW covenant, with NEW rules, to NEW people - anybody who would follow HIM (not Moses, not the Jews, HIM) - and with a new promise: individual life "eonian" with the Father.
That's what the world is under now.
The Law of Jesus is really different from the Law of Sinai. It only overlaps on certain basic prohibitions that involve harming other people.
So, for example, the Torah included "Do not steal" and "Do not covet" in the ten commandments, but in Jesus' two lists of mortal sins on the last two pages of the Bible, neither stealing nor coveting appears. Killing does, and sexual immorality make the list. But Sabbath-breaking does not. Idolatry does, but blasphemy doesn't.
Interestingly, lying does - a great increase over the "false witness" of the Torah, which has a legalistic "in court" aspect to it. And cowardice, or being a "cur", were not sins at all under the Torah, but they are both deadly sins under the Law of Jesus.
The Torah was very concerned with the food, fabric, cleansing and taboos. Jesus ignores all of those things completely, even casually.
Jesus Law is much shorter than Moses'. There isn't very much of it, but it is much harder to follow.
Forgiveness is also completely changed. The Hebrews had to sacrifice animals and grain. But followers of Christ have to forgive other people.
So, ultimately, no, ancient Israel and Moses are not mouthpieces of God for us at all. The Old Testament is a history book, the second most important history book, to be sure, right after the New, but it's just a history book. The New Testament alone is a LAW book, and the only law in it is given by Jesus directly in the Gospels or Revelation, or in a couple of places by the Holy Spirit in Acts.
The whole thing that it's VITAL to know from the entire Bible can be summarized in a few sentences.
Unfortunately, excessive attention and devotion to the Bible causes people to make most of it - the entire Old Testament, Paul's opinion letters - to be far more important than it is, and it causes people to equate the Law of God, given by Jesus, that could cost you your eternal life, with some rule for the Jews about eating pork, or some opinion of Paul about long hair on men.
Before it was finished, people were saved by Christ.
"Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount."
"Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham."
