In the final analysis it comes down to this: either the Jewish people were regathered to their ancient homeland by a move of the God of Abraham - as He brings the final chapters of human history nearer to its close, or it was a political contrivance of Zionist Jews backed by naive Christian literalist evangelicals and their pocket politicians. Either the Hebrew language’s revival after more than a thousand years of near extinction was a miracle, or a mere curiosity and a unique irony of human history, a simple symbol of the stubbornness of the Ben Yehuda family. EIther the many wars of the near east - most bent clearly on the extermination of the Jewish presence in the region - were records of God’s miraculous intervention on behalf of a people to whom He had promised a future, or it was the happenstance sparring game of world powers using a desert to flex their muscles one against the other, and the west’s superior weaponry made the difference against all numerical odds each time. Either the texts of Scripture that made literal and clear promises to bring back the Jewish people are a true statement of what God is doing, or they are a mixture of missed fulfillments of the past and fuzzy spiritualizations of the present that offer countless useless details to speak of a landless and spiritual people of faith - most details signifying nothing. In my mind the spiritualization of promises too complicated to actually mean much just doesnt make sense if God knows anything about communication. The details of countless prophetic words are lost to nonsense, and that doesnt fit the promises of Messiah when I look back into the text, period. When God promised Bethlehem as a place of birth, he meant the place. When He promised a man to die, He delivered exactly and precisely that. When He promised the Messiah to come into Jerusalem and be broken, that is what happened. I believe that God has spoken in the Bible, and that God is at work right now among men in a graphic display of measurable and literal promise keeping. I believe it is not the intelligence, bravery or skill of the Jewish people that has ultimately brought about the return and the resilience against attack - nor some innate lack in the Arab on the field of battle that has caused them to be rebuffed time and again. My belief that God is at work in the literal restoration is not some quiet justification of every action taken by Israel, nor for Arabs (that is not my point). Rather, I am stating that I believe the country is being moved into position by God’s hand, and that is in keeping with the literal statements of the Bible. I believe that when He said He would literally act - that is what we should expect Him to do - just as it was when He promised a literal man to die on a literal tree for sin. I believe the fact of Israel’s existence is one pronounced point of validation for a literal belief in the words of Scripture, both past and predictive. That, in my view, is the reason so many more liberal minded Americans (even some in the church) are at fundamental odds with Israel - because they represent a literal understanding of the Bible and promises exactingly fulfilled. The sadness is that as some Christian groups distance themselves from the text while trying to claim allegiance to the God who says He wrote it, they will have to erase more and more of the specifics of the Bible by spiritualizing the words into virtual nonsense. They can claim (and even truly believe) they do so out of compassion for suffering people in the region, but the underlying theological assumption will eat their beliefs in the end, eroding the Bible into unmeasured and unintelligible ethical fortune cookie wisdom. (Reflections on the Near East).
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 14:40:34 +0000
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