What does the Bible say about what is going on in Israel? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 9

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, we're going to be tackling a question we've been flooded with recently.

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You probably guessed it has to do with Israel and what's going on in Israel with Hamas and Gaza and rocket fire and all the violence, all the terrible things that are happening in Israel right now.

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What makes this so interesting is every time this happens, it happened a few years ago, it happened a couple years before that, and a few years before that, it was a really big one.

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But every time this happens, every time it's in the news, we're flooded with questions.

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Is this a sign of the end times? Does this mean Jesus is coming back soon? Is the rapture going to happen soon?

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So that's what we're going to be discussing today. I hope to give you a biblical perspective and also help you to understand even a little politically and current events related, what is going on and why.

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So today I have with me on the show, I've got Jeff, and he's the manager of our

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BibleRef .com commentary site, and Kevin. And he's the manager,

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Kevin's the managing editor. He makes everything else that we say sound better.

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So welcome to the show guys. So as I said in the intro, every time this happens in Israel, so many questions over and over and over again, to the point that it's like, wow,

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I mean, a lot of people are really worried. Some people are scared. Some people are super excited and apocalyptic freak out level of excitement.

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And it's been happening since 1948. Ever since Israel was declared by the

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United Nations to be a nation again, Israel's neighbors have been attacking it on a fairly regular basis.

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And if you look back in history, even in our 20 year history, every time this has happened, same questions coming over and over again.

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Is this a sign of the end times? Should Christians support Israel? And what does that mean in terms of the actual nation of Israel?

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So let me just answer the first question. Is this a sign of the end times?

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And the answer, maybe. I mean, ever since 1948, none of those others were a sign that Jesus was coming back soon because it hasn't happened yet.

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It's not a sign that the tribulation has begun. Could this one be? It very well could be because when the

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Bible talks about Israel in the book of Revelation, there's a lot about things happening in Israel, a peace treaty with Israel, violence in Israel, nations attacking

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Israel, et cetera. So yes, violence in Israel, current events in Israel very well can be a sign of the end times at the same time.

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Like I said, this has been happening for over 70 years now and none of the previous ones have been a sign of the end times.

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So this one may not be either. So just keep studying the Scriptures, keep looking to what

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God's Word says about what will happen in the end times when Jesus will be coming back and the signs of His coming.

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Be anxious, be excited, be passionate about Jesus' return, but at the same time, don't interpret every possible event in Israel as a clear and distinct, definite sign of the end times.

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And that's sort of the attitude that we have in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, Jesus talks about various things that could be signs of the end times and then concludes with saying, all these are just beginning of birth pains.

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And then He goes on to say, when the end times happen, it will be absolutely clear. So that's,

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I think, the perspective we need to have, anxious, excited about the Lord's return, but not interpreting everything that happens in Israel as a definitive sign of the end times.

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And that's a struggle. I love eschatology. I love studying these things, talking about these things.

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And I really hope Jesus is coming back soon. I hope the rapture happens right now.

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That would be a weird end to the podcast, but God's timing is perfect and I trust in Him and I'm not going to freak out every time something, some act of violence happens in Israel.

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So guys, what do you think? The questions you've been seeing lately, what have they been leading you to study more of in God's Word?

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Well, there's a lot of stuff that goes into this issue.

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It's a complicated issue. And we see a lot of stuff about whether or not we should support

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Israel in this whole tragedy that's happening right now.

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And there may be historical and geopolitical reasons to be supporting

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Israel. I'll leave that for others to go into, but I'll just focus here on what the

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Bible has to say about God's chosen people. So why Christians tend to support

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Israel from a biblical or a spiritual standpoint. I'll just share a few things about what scripture says about all of this.

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And when I say, by the way, that we support Israel or that Christians tend to support

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Israel, we don't mean that we agree with everything that Israel does, that we just have a blanket acceptance of all of their policies that they've ever had.

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It's not that at all, but we do acknowledge that God has had a special plan for Israel through the years.

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And we believe that that special plan for Israel is going to continue in the future.

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Here are some reasons why Christians tend to support the people of God in Israel, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

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First, the land of Israel is the birthplace of our faith. It's where Jesus was born.

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He lived, died, rose again, ascended into heaven. All happened there in Israel.

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And one day we believe that that's the place where Jesus is going to come again and set up his kingdom here in this world.

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It's going to be in Israel. Secondly, the land of Israel is special to God in scripture.

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God calls Israel the apple of his eye. Zechariah chapter two, God said, I have chosen

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Jerusalem for my name to be there. Second Chronicles six and verse six.

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Speaking of the future redemption of Israel, the prophet says the Lord will inherit

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Judah as his portion in the holy land and will again choose Jerusalem.

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It's also from Zechariah and that is chapter two. God promised the

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Jews a land and a blessing as well. Going all the way back to Genesis chapters 12 and 15,

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God promised Abraham and his descendants a blessing and that through them,

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God would bless the whole world. That same promise was repeated to Abraham's son Isaac and his grandson

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Jacob and history in the biblical record show that Israel has been, has lost their land on two separate occasions, but both times after a while they were restored to the land and restored to God's favor.

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We believe that those miraculous restorations of the nation of Israel have to do with God's blessing on the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

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The promises of God in scripture also include a future blessing for Israel. Isaiah 27 and verse six, in days to come,

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Jacob will take root. Israel will bud and blossom and fill all the world with fruit.

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Isaiah 62, they will be called the holy people, the redeemed of the Lord. The city will be called the sought after, the city no longer deserted.

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In Romans chapter nine, Paul speaks of how the remnant of Israel, just a minority of the people of Israel in the end times will be restored and will accept

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Christ as their savior. And this, all these promises are very secure. We believe,

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I love Jeremiah chapter 31. It's in that chapter that Jeremiah gives us the details of the new covenant that God says,

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I will establish a new covenant with my people. He's going to write his law in our minds and on our hearts.

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It's going to be not an external law, but an internal law as he changes our hearts.

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And then right after he promises the new covenant, Jeremiah 31 says this, this is what the

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Lord says. He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar.

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The Lord almighty is his name. Only if these decrees vanish from my sight, declares the

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Lord, will Israel ever cease from being a nation before me, declares the Lord.

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This is what the Lord says. Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out, will

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I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done, declares the Lord.

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So anytime I start to wonder whether or not God has a plan for Israel in the future, I just look at the moon and the stars.

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Hey, they're still there. That means that according to God's word, that he is still going to be upholding his promises to Israel.

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These are sure promises, and we look forward to their fulfillment someday. I think you can see that arc in history also, that when

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God makes this promise that he's going to preserve and maintain the descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, that despite all the things that the

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Jewish people have gone through, they have persevered, they have survived. And the modern political nation of Israel is just the latest development in that.

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But that history, I think, is another thing that people get hung up on, that makes the situation complicated.

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What's going on in Israel isn't as crystal clear and black and white as we might like it to be.

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So what, Kevin, you were bringing up is important, that we are not as Christians obligated to say anything that the current political government of the modern state of Israel says or does.

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We as Christians are obligated to agree with or to defend or to endorse.

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There's a difference between the people of Israel, the children people of the nation of Israel in God's eyes and the political entity.

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There's a subtle difference, but there is a difference there. And supporting Israel, honoring

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Israel, understanding Israel does not mean that we have to say, okay, that means everything Israel does, I'm automatically agreeing with Israel's side of things.

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The other thing that makes it difficult that we get questions on are issues about why is there so much strife and anger and animosity over what's happening there?

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There again, it's a more complicated question than people might realize.

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The way that you can look at the situation, it depends a lot on how far back a person wants to look.

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Back in 1948, 1949, the world at large more or less said, we're going to pick some land and we're going to give this to Jewish people for them to form a state.

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And at the time there were other people who were living in that area and through their own decisions, through their own leaders directions, through threats, through war, through a lot of different factors, a lot of the people who were living there were displaced and eventually were replaced by immigrants who came in who were

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Jewish persons. That is one of the things that drives a lot of the animosity that people have is that there is legitimately a sense in which there were people who through no fault of their own, they were removed from the land in which they were living.

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But I also made the point about how some of it depends on how far back one wants to go. If you go back to 1948, you're seeing the people we now call

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Palestinians being moved out to make room for Jewish persons.

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If you go back just a few years before that, you can see a lot of places in the Middle East where Jewish people are being forcibly moved out or thrown out or persecuted in order to make room for other persons.

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And then if we just continue to expand that, we see this pattern that just goes through literally the entire history of the

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Middle East and the world since the beginning of time of people shoving each other around and pushing each other into different places.

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So it really isn't something as simple as just saying either Jewish people were always there and they always have been, or saying the

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Jewish people just came in and conquered a bunch of poor Palestinian people and shoved them out to the side with no recourse.

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There's a lot of political maneuvering that's gone on. There's a lot of complicated intrigue between different nations.

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Some of it is very ugly. Some of it's very unpleasant. And it goes way beyond the scope of something we could talk about in a 20 to 25 minute podcast.

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But the thing that I stress for people to remember is that when we're looking at the actual political aspects of what's going on, there really is a lot of complicated subject matter that's happening here.

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So our support for Israel, their right to exist, and our interest in praying for peace and people to not be harmed doesn't necessarily mean that a person has to specifically like or agree with any particular political thing that has happened over there.

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And it's also okay for us to say that we support the nation of Israel while at the same time having a real concern for persons who either recently or at some time in the past were displaced from their homes.

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There are a lot of persons, both Jewish and Muslim, who are in that area who are suffering for the decisions of other people.

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They're not making these choices. They're not making these decisions. And other people are doing things that are causing them harm.

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So the question that I see that tends to have that recurring theme comes with that answer, which is it is really complicated and we need to be and what kind of positions we're going to take.

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Absolutely. Jeff, you brought up some good points in that I've been to Israel twice, had that distinct privilege, and hopefully most of the

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GotQuestions team will be able to go this fall, assuming the worldwide COVID situation calms down enough by then, or obviously if the violence in Israel right now calms down before then.

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But one of the most interesting things that I learned is that amongst the Palestinians, while they're predominantly

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Muslim in their religious faith, there are a significant number of Palestinian Christians.

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They've been Christians for generations. So we find ourselves often as Americans supporting a secular

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Jewish state, in a sense evicting Palestinian Christians from their homes, from places they've lived for generations.

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And also in Israel, we have a very small Christian population. You've got Jews and Muslims living in Israel.

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So it's not like Israel is 100 % Jewish, Palestinian territories are 100 %

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Muslim. That's not the case at all. In each of the trips I've been on, our primary tour leader has been a

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Jew, our bus driver, and in some sense is kind of our security guard, has been a

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Palestinian. So they are capable of getting along and they recognize it.

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And so one of the things Jeff was pointing on, it's groups like Hamas in the

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Palestinian territories who repeatedly start launching rockets into Israel. They blame it on Israel somehow.

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Israel did something that upset them. But they do this knowing what the response from Israel is going to be.

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Israel comes in to try to stop Hamas from launching these rockets indiscriminately into Israel.

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And it results in Palestinian civilians being killed, suffering, losing their homes, being displaced all over again.

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So it's a repeating pattern of Hamas wants the news to have all this negative attention towards Israel.

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They want Israel to strike back and produce civilian casualties. They potentially place rocket launchers near schools, near places where civilians live because this is what they want.

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So we should not be opposed to the Palestinian people. They are just in much of need of our love and support as Israel is.

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Palestinian Christians are our brothers and sisters in Christ. We can't forget that some of what

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Israel is doing is having a tremendously negative impact on them and their lives. So this is not as easy and as simple as the news makes it sound sometimes.

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And going to Israel, it's a beautiful country. Seeing the sites, amazing, the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem, the

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Temple Mount, amazing, tremendously. One of my favorite trips

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I've ever been on in my life. But what I learned more than anything else is the dynamics between the cultures and what's going on there and how in some places

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Jews and Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians can live at peace and have for generations. And other times, other areas, it's a constant state of war or near war.

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So this is not as clean and simple as maybe we've been told or what we hear in the news.

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There's a lot of different dynamics that all go into every decision that is made and none of it's easy.

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And all of it has tragic consequences for somebody. And I think that's one of the things that I've seen a lot of is confirmation bias or our own internal prejudices, regardless of how a person feels about the issue.

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Those tend to dominate, unfortunately, how a lot of people view the issue.

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For example, whose fault is a particular conflict? And there again, the answers are not always as incredibly easy, very simple, five -second soundbite sort of an answer.

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There are times where the state of Israel is either moving or displacing or interacting with persons and territories that in theory, they said they weren't going to, or they're not supposed to, or they had talked about not doing.

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And that makes some people upset. On the flip side, you have Israel doing things like using its own territory, the way it's legally allowed to use its own territory, but it upsets somebody or there's some sort of demonstration riot and groups like Hamas start launching rockets into civilian territories.

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So it's not as simple as the Palestinian organizations just defending themselves.

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You don't defend yourself by launching rockets at civilians. On the flip side, it's not as simple as well.

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Israel is retaliating by attacking civilians. There's a lot of back and forth about the extent to which groups like Hezbollah and Hamas are deliberately trying to incite civilian casualties.

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And as somebody who works a lot in this philosophy apologetics realm, I think it's interesting when you read some of the descriptions and accounts of those things where sometimes you can tell that somebody does not necessarily want to say something.

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They're more being forced to admit it. And when you see coverage talking about whether or not groups like Hamas are deliberately staging their military equipment and their soldiers directly next to things like mosques, hospitals, schools, or in them, the general response seems to be this sort of grudging, well, we don't know that anybody's doing it on purpose, but we do see that a lot of these things are very much in those areas.

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In other words, there's a tactical issue going on here. So when we look at casualty reports and people say, well, if this is just back and forth, why do we see hundreds or thousands of Palestinians who are dying?

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Whereas it may be only dozens of Jewish persons. That is one of the reasons why is there's a tactical decision that's going on.

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You also have issues like the Iron Dome. People ask questions about that sometime and what that is. The short version of the

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Iron Dome is it's a sophisticated system that's designed to detect rockets when they're coming in, figure out if they're going to land in a dangerous place, and then attempt to shoot them down if they come in.

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Well, the Israeli people have the advantage of being protected by that. So the

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Palestinian people do not have the advantage of being protected by that. So when you put all those together, there's a tactical difference there.

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Another notable tactic that I think we should bring up to notice is that there's sometimes not enough made of the extent to which it seems

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Israel does make an effort to avoid civilian casualties.

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There was a recent issue with a building. There's a lot of controversy over other persons who were in that building, press,

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Associated Press, Al Jazeera, and so on and so forth. That's a separate question from the fact that Israel chose to basically contact everybody in the area an hour beforehand and say, we're going to take out this building because we think it's a military target and you need to leave.

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There really is no fair moral equivalency between Israel giving an hour's worth of prior warning and then knocking down a building versus a group like Hamas indiscriminately launching hundreds or dozens of rockets into a civilian population.

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So while there's room for us to agree or disagree on political issues and on tactical issues and so on and so forth,

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I do think there is a sense in which Christians can say, we're allowed to draw some clear lines on specific strategies and tactics and say some of these are easier for us to accept or agree with than others.

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And very much of what's happening that's hurting the Palestinian people is being done by people who claim to be representing their best interests.

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And they're inviting these reprisals. And that's something that I think, as we're supporting

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Israel, we can also support the Palestinian people by saying we cannot support those because of the results that they bring.

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So Kevin, let's bring this back around. What should be our attitude towards both the nation of Israel today, biblically speaking, and towards the conflict we're seeing in Israel?

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What does the Bible say directly that applies to this? That's something we need to think through because there's a human toll that's being taken.

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No matter how you look at it, there's human tragedy involved. And so how can we respond biblically?

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I think we have some very clear instruction in Scripture. One is to pray for the

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Jewish people and their leaders. Pray for the Palestinian people and their leaders.

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Pray for all the world leaders who have a hand in a response to all of this. We're told in 1

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Timothy 2 to pray for our leaders. And so we need to be praying for the leaders of the world.

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Secondly, pray for peace. Psalm 122 is one of those Psalms of ascent. And as the people were going up to Jerusalem, those worshipers in ancient times, they would sing these songs.

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And here's part of what Psalm 122 says, pray for the peace of Jerusalem. May those who love you be secure.

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May there be peace within your walls. May there be security within your citadels. For the sake of my family and friends,

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I will say peace be within you. For the sake of the house of the Lord, our God, I will seek your prosperity.

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Jerusalem has never seen peace, I don't think. And that's a prayer.

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One of these days, this prayer will be fulfilled when Christ returns, I believe. But we need to be praying to that end.

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Pray for the peace in that city. There are about, they estimate about 170 ,000

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Israeli citizens, both Jew and Arab, who identify as Christians that are living there in the nation of Israel.

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So we do have brothers and sisters in Christ on both sides of the conflict. And we need to be praying for them as well.

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We also need to be praying for more people to be saved, both Jews and Arabs, that they would see

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Jesus as He truly is, the Messiah and the Savior of the world. Pray that God would open hearts.

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And also we need to be showing love to the people that we know that happen to be from Jewish descent or from Arab descent.

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Anti -Semitism has no place in the Christian life. Anti -Arab discrimination has no place in the

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Christian's life. We need to be actively seeking out ways to show the love of God and to build relationships that are grounded in grace.

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Amen. I mean, my favorite verse in the entire Bible about Israel is in Romans 11, when it says, all

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Israel will be saved. And there's debate about when that'll happen, what exactly that verse means.

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But at some point, Israel as a nation, by and large, will receive Jesus as its

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Messiah and will finally be fulfilling the role that God called them to way back with Abraham, to be a light to the nations.

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And so this is a difficult issue. Obviously, as Jeff said in the very beginning, there's no way in one podcast episode we can possibly tackle all these things.

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But we just want to help you to understand better what the Bible says about Israel, why Christians tend to be strong supporters of Israel, and what our attitude should be towards what exactly that means to support

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Israel. And I think their conclusion is, yes, God still has a plan for Israel. God has not yet fulfilled all his promises to Israel, and we are confident that he will do so in the future.

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So yes, we absolutely should support Israel. But that does not mean necessarily agreeing with everything the modern day nation of Israel does.

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And towards the Palestinians of all this conflict, our attitude is to be compassion. We are to be praying for them.

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We have to seek their good as well, and ultimately to pray that they would receive Christ as Messiah, just as the nation of Israel will one day.

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So I hope our conversation today has been beneficial to you. I hope it's helped you to understand what's going on a little bit better.

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And that's why we're here. If you have any further questions about this, please join the throngs of people who are already asking us questions about it.