What You Should Know About Christian Zionism

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We are now live on the Conversations That Matter podcast and I'm your host, John Harris. We're gonna talk about Zionism today, specifically

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Christian Zionism. Of course, I'll have to define Zionism, so we'll be a little more broader than just talking about Christians and their support for the nation state of Israel.

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But I think this is an important topic for this reason, mostly, this is why

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I'm doing it at least. I think there's been a lot of really, really bad takes going out there online.

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And I think if we're gonna be involved in this, which we are, and it's hard to entangle ourselves as far as foreign policy is concerned from the situation in the

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Middle East, specifically Israel and her enemies, we do need to understand a little more about what actually is taking place there.

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And also, I think historically, how Christians have viewed that particular real estate, that piece of land.

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And I think this is, for me, something that I am more interested in in a historical way.

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Of course, I am interested in the theological angle to this, which we'll talk about a little bit, but the history of ideas angle is

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I think something that's being ignored. And because of that, there's a lot of things you'll hear online.

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For example, you'll hear things like dispensationalism is the forerunner of Zionism or inspired

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Zionism or lay the groundwork for Zionism or is the same thing as Zionism.

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Oftentimes, you'll see these two things conflated. And that is probably one of the worst, in my opinion, critiques

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I've ever heard. It's just ignorant historically, but you hear it so often. And because of that, let me just use that one example.

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If you're going to critique Zionism and you enter the discussion with that kind of an error, then what you end up doing is there's a lot of Christians, in fact, the majority in the

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United States that are not going to be quite as open to what you're saying simply because you've already made a confusing statement at the very least, or at the worst, you have accused them falsely perhaps of supporting something that their theology in their minds does not support or doesn't have to support.

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And so I am very interested in an America first foreign policy. I'm very interested in as Christians, obviously applying scripture, understanding it, and then applying it to the situations around us.

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And because of that, I do think this is a topic to look into a little bit, but I do say a little bit.

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And the reason I say that is because there does seem to be somewhat of an obsession with this topic that I have noticed from honestly multiple sides.

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I've seen for the majority of my life, I suppose people who are very pro -Israel and see that as part and parcel to the

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Christian faith. And they've obviously had political influence. And then of course,

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I've also seen as of late, especially people who are very against Israel and are very interested in trying to take the

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United States either out of that conflict, or I kid you not,

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I've seen people who seem to want the United States to spend their energy and time and resources giving it to the other side.

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And I'm someone who does not wanna see a country that I belong to, which is in debt, has a lot of problems, especially with the border issue and has obviously moral issues that have been going on for several years.

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I don't wanna see us distracted from our domestic issues to go to places like Ukraine and Israel and put a lot of treasure and military equipment and even perhaps boots on the ground in these places.

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That's what I wanna avoid. That's what I don't wanna see. I like George Washington's foreign policy. So a little bit about who

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I am, so you know some of my biases going into this. But I think it's interesting. And I do think it's necessary that Christians of all people understand what the

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Bible says about this, which we're not gonna focus quite as much on in this, what their Christian history says about this, and then actually what happened.

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And this is the main thing I'm gonna be focusing on, the historical record, what actually happened from the medieval time to the

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Reformation, to the Puritans, and I'm focusing more in on the

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Anglo -American sphere, to the establishment of the modern state of Israel, to where we are today.

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And I think if you understand history, you better have your own bearings on these political discussions.

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You understand the issues, the working issues. You're not going to be taken in and somewhat,

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I would say, deceived by some of the forces that are out there that want to deceive you for some reason.

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So I think this is an educational experience, and I think it'll be something you'll appreciate no matter where you come down on the issue.

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That's my goal. If you don't even agree with my take on the issue, hopefully this will be a very enlightening discussion, and you will also be able to formulate your own critiques and your own opinions in a much more faithful and responsible fashion.

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So how does that sound? Hopefully that's gonna be the discussion we have, and I will get to comments as we go,

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Lord willing, but we have a lot to cover. And I literally crammed as much as I could. In fact,

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I was working on the early church and what the early church thought of the Jews and Palestine, and I thought, it's too much.

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I gotta start in the Middle Ages because it's just too much. So maybe we'll do some follow -up if there's questions about this particular topic, but I want to give you in one episode what

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I think are the main takeaways, the main things you need to know to be able to make informed opinions politically and even theologically, to be quite honest.

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I think this will help you theologically speaking if you have the long view of how Christians of various persuasions have viewed this topic.

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So that's what we're gonna be doing today. I appreciate everyone who's already in the chat asking questions.

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Apparently that's anti -Semitic, so strong to ask questions. Well, we're gonna be doing it. I'm already getting accused of anti -Semitism here from Michael.

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Man, that did not, I didn't even say anything yet. Hardly anything. All right, well, let's get into it. Let's talk about Christian Zionism.

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I need to define it before we do anything else. Christian Zionism is, according to Donald Lewis, who

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I think wrote, by the way, a little side tangent, the best book on this topic. If you wanna understand this topic, you need to get

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Donald Lewis's book. Seriously, it's on Audible too. If you wanna listen to it, if you're that kind of a guy or gal, go get it.

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A Short History of Christian Zionism from the Reformation to the 21st Century. You gotta read this book if you wanna be informed.

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Now, obviously you don't, that's a hyperbole. You don't have to, maybe you've read other books, but if you want the, you know, the too -long -didn't -read summary of everything and you wanna go deeper than I'm gonna go, that's the book

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I would recommend you pick up. So here's what Donald Lewis says. He says, I define Christian Zionism across time as a

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Christian movement which holds to the belief that the Jewish people have a biblically mandated claim to their ancient homeland in the

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Middle East. Today, the term Christian Zionism is widely used of Christians who hold that the state of Israel's right to exist is based on biblical teachings.

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So that's pretty cut and dry. He says, the term Christian Zionist can be found as early as 1896 when the

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Jewish Zionist leader, Theodore Herschel, referred to William Heckler, a

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Anglican chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna as a Christian Zionist. The following year, Herschel again used that term to describe

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Jean Henry Dunant, a Swiss banker and founder of the Red Cross and an observer of the first Zionist conference.

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So a pretty prominent guy there, the founder of the Red Cross. So you have Herschel using this term in 1896, but as so many things, for example, social justice is a good term to maybe parallel here.

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So many things, the movement predates the term, right? And we're gonna go back into history to see there's actually ideas that you could parallel that are the forerunners of, that serve as the basis of what we find today as Christian Zionism, the ancestors of this in a history of ideas kind of way that weren't referred to as Zionism or as Christian Zionism.

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So a mistake I often see is people saying things like, well, the term wasn't used, therefore the movement didn't exist.

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That's not true. Oftentimes movement go before terms. You had social justice in the French Revolution, even though they didn't really use that term.

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You had, by the way, the allies when they went into Germany, you have many descriptions in early historical books about the atrocities committed against Jewish people.

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And because the word Holocaust isn't used often, as often as it became used in the seventies, you'll see here guys trying to make the case that no one talked about the

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Holocaust. No one used the Holocaust, knew about it. It was invented later.

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Well, that's obviously from a historical perspective, absolute rubbish. And it's because you're confusing the use of a term with the ideas behind it.

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So we are interested in the ideas behind it, not just the use of a term, but that's how early the term was used, the late 1800s.

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Now we're gonna start with a medieval church. And I wanna start off with the context of, for the lack of a better term, sort of an anti -Jewish disposition that existed throughout

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Europe during the medieval church. I don't wanna get too into detail about this. And I realized this is often very overplayed and used to the advantage of modern liberals when they're pushing things.

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If you go even to the Holocaust Museum, this is one of the first thing that's in DC. There's several obviously, but the one in DC I'm thinking of, there are several things that will confront you initially.

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One of them is this. And this is actually overplayed, I would say more than the Darwin connection, which is interesting to me.

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I would think the Darwinian connection is extremely important, but it's sort of mentioned in passing.

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There's a whole film on Christian antisemitism, right? That's what they call it. And the medieval church, of course, is part of this.

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And so in 1215, there was a fourth Lateran council and the council declared that Jews were to wear distinctive dress in public.

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They changed the status of Jews, both politically and theologically, as servants of sin. It banned them from public office.

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It forbade them from appearing in public in holy week and imposed a tax on them to be paid to Christian clergy.

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Yet Christian rulers of Europe were often protective of their Jews, who served them well, which made uniform enforcement of the council's decrees difficult.

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And this is one of the things you'll find is oftentimes these broad

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Catholic council decrees are, they look different in different places. And you have

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Jews doing just fine in certain areas and in other areas they're under persecution. And it ranges depending on where and when.

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And the question, the natural question, obviously, which we don't have time to get into, is why was this the case? How did it go from, in the early church, it was composed mostly of Jewish people, right?

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That was the early church. And then you have, after 70 AD, this diaspora.

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And then somehow there's a development that brings you to the time of European peoples saying, there's a problem with the

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Jewish people that exists in our midst. And I think it's like a lot of ethnic minorities who do not assimilate.

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I mean, it's actually a problem the United States is navigating right now with a number of different peoples, not just Jewish people.

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But I think the more control one has in a particular country, the more there's going to be an air of suspicion about them.

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So if they don't assimilate and they have an in -group preference for their own group, and they also are very high performers, they're going to be seen as a subversive element.

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And there's much more that could be said, but that's sort of a thumbnail sketch. 1215 to 1350, the

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Franciscan and Dominican friars developed and refined and sought to implement a new Christian ideology with regard to the

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Jews, one that a lot of the Jews know legitimate right to exist within European society, according to Jeremy Cohen, who

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I'm assuming is probably Jewish himself in the friars and the Jews. Now, like I said, this varied a lot.

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And I could point you to examples of places in Europe where Jewish people are doing just fine. They're successful.

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Obviously they lived in Europe, right? So they lived in Europe for centuries and were fairly successful in many

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Western countries, especially. So it's not that it was all bad all the time, all persecution, even

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Martin Luther himself. And I actually have a book on my shelf from John Chrysostom as well. Those two are often used as kind of the big anti -Jewish folks from church history.

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Both of their critiques were primarily theological. And if you study Luther in detail, you'll find,

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I think it was even his last sermon. He is pleaing with the Jews, hoping that the Jews come to know

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Christ. He had a care for them to the end. His least circulated book was on the Jews and their lies. But of course, today that is probably one of the most circulated books now.

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But at the time it was not very circulated. Martin Luther, of course, said a lot of inflammatory things about a lot of different groups, including the

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Pope and the Catholic church and Anabaptists. And he, in that particular work, was very frustrated that they were blaspheming

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Christ. They weren't receiving the evangelistic efforts. There's also a suspicion about them that this is the time of the

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Crusades and that they're trading with the Muslims. Are they going to be used against us, right?

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There's all kinds of things going into that particular sentiment. But even those two examples from church history show a care to evangelize, a cause to accept these kinds of people if they convert.

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And this was at a time when religion, of course, is part and parcel to your identity as a member of an ethnicity or a nationality.

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They didn't know liberalism. Liberalism wasn't invented yet. It didn't organically develop yet.

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It was a society that included a very strong religious tie. So from that, we have the

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Reformation. And in the Reformation, Martin Busser and Theodore Beza taught that the

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Israel of Romans 11 referred to the Jews instead of the church. And this was a shift.

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Now, this wasn't something that was unknown to the early church, but this was something that was especially post -Augustan.

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The Roman Catholic Church interpreted Israel there as referring to the church primarily.

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And of course, the Roman Catholic Church primarily amillennial. And there's a shift though that takes place.

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We start seeing post -millennial make a dent. We start seeing historicist views, pre -millennial views start to bubble up.

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And behind a lot of this is the interpretation of certain passages,

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Romans 11 being one, in more quote -unquote literal ways. So Martin Busser and Theodore Beza, obviously we're not talking about dispensationalists yet.

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And maybe I'll remind you as we go through this that oftentimes I'm not talking about a dispensationalist, but it's the same kind of logic that is used to promote the idea that Jews are going to come back for an in -gathering in the land.

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So Martin Busser and Theodore Beza, right? Israel, Romans 11 refers to the Jews, not the church. Then you have the Geneva Bible, 1557 and 1560 editions identify the nation of the

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Jews as Israel, same thing. In the 1560 edition also said that he showeth that the time shall come that the whole nation of the

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Jews, though not everyone particularly, shall be joined to the church of Christ.

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Now, this is creating an interest, a revived interest in Jewish evangelism and the state of the

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Jews. The shifts might look small, they might look like they're not, this isn't like a far stretch from where Martin Luther was at, but actually

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Theodore Beza is doing something Martin Luther was not. Martin Luther did not interpret

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Romans 11 this way. Theodore Beza does. So there are these shifts. And then you have Johannes Wollebus, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, a reformed theologian in Basel.

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He expected a national conversion of the Jews and then Jean Labadi, a

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French reformed pastor, believed Israel's conversion would usher in the church's golden age. So now you have the conversion of the

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Jews is going to have an impact on the church. Now, these weren't widespread beliefs, but they were starting to bubble up.

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And it was because of the study of scripture, because you had people now who were not just tied to the hierarchy of the

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Roman Catholic church and whatever they said, but you had people independently studying the word of God, trying to make sense of it, trying to read it in context.

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I mean, your reformers are always quoting the early church, right? And this is going to produce a variance of views, and it's gonna produce the recovery of older views as well.

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This brings us to restorationism. Now, if you don't know what restorationism is, this is a very key element to any discussion about Christian Zionism, because this is the forerunner of Christian Zionism.

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Notice, we're still in the 14 and 1500s and 1600s.

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We are just coming off of the middle ages. We are in the Reformation time. We are not anywhere near the systemization of dispensational theology in the 1800s.

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But restorationism becomes a huge deal, especially in the

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English speaking world. You have in the early 16th century, Hebrew scholars, Martin Morehouse and Wolfgang Capito.

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They promote the idea that the physical return of the Jews would be accomplished. You have English nationalism also starting as a political development to increase and gain sway.

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And in this vein, you have John Bale and John Fox helping to foster a unique Protestant identity for England.

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Remember, England was Roman Catholic. Now they're Protestant. And this is a big deal.

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And so you have guys like John Fox. If you ever read Fox's book of martyrs, it's focusing primarily on the

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Roman Catholic church and what the Roman Catholic church has done to those who are of the true faith, who are reformed believers.

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So England is, the fate of England, the mission of England is now tied in with more and more associated with the opposition to the

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Roman Catholic church. And this plays out obviously on the battlefield through wars with Spain and France.

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This obviously is a contest in the colonial sphere. Who's going to get the gold?

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Who's going to find the spice? Who's gonna find a way to Asia? But this is all a way to promote, again, societies that your identity, your national identity is tied to religion.

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It's a way to promote religion. Remember even Christopher Columbus, now he's not English, but he had this, they call it millennium.

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If I'm, I'm probably botched that. His millennium focus, we'll say it that way. When he was trying to go to the

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United States, obviously he thought he was going to India and he was going to though create this trade route, enrich

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Europe and then defeat the Mohammedans, the Muslims in a final crusade.

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It was all this eschatological stuff, right? And you're reading what Columbus wrote and you're like, what in the world is going on here?

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And guys like David Barton take it and they say, look, Columbus was, he was like an evangelical or something. He sounds like us. Well, no,

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I mean, but this kind of thing was happening and these views aren't necessarily old or new, rather I should say they're old.

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And so you have English nationalists like John Bale, John Fox, they're associating England with this and they have a zeal to spread

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Protestantism, including making converts of Jews. So now reformed people are interested in the conversion of Jews more than they used to.

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Thomas Brightman, 1562 to 1607, developed a historicist post -millennial eschatology, which means that this isn't, this isn't preterist.

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This isn't something that happened. This is something that is happening. This is unfolding, right?

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So before us are these prophetic events. They're happening in real time. And he predicted a distant future

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Jewish return to Palestine and their participation in setting up Christ's kingdom. So historicism becomes a big part of the restorationism.

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Sir Henry Finch, who dies in 1625, argued for national Jewish conversion and restoration to Palestine.

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William Gouge argued references to Israel, Judah, Zion, and Jerusalem referred to the Jews and their abodes, not figurative interpretations.

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They believe Jewish conversions would begin around 1650 with a Jewish -Turkish battle on the shores of Galilee in 1695.

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So don't think that, oh, those crazy dispensational types who go and date set or something, right?

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Today, the ones that you associate with maybe when you were growing up and there was a prophecy conference and you heard,

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I don't know, the 20, was it the 21st of May in 2012, I think it was, that we're all gonna be raptured or something.

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Well, no, there's people setting dates for a long time before that and saying things like, there's gonna be this historical event, this biblical event, it's gonna happen in history, and this is the date.

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It's gonna be 1695. We're gonna have a Jewish -Turkish battle. Of course, the Turks were the big, it wasn't

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Russia back then, it wasn't Iran back then, it was Turkey, right? That was the Ottoman Empire. Then you have

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John Milton, Milton, you know, Paradise Lost and all that. Well, he believed in mass conversion of the Jews and restoration of the

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Jews to Palestine as well. So this is becoming a thing in England long before you have any dispensational theology.

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You have restorationism and the English Puritans. They bring this to the United States. You have in 1655, the

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Jews are readmitted to England. They were banned in 1290, so they're readmitted at this point.

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The Whitehall Conference determines that God chose England to restore Israel. England's fate was tethered to that of the

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Jews and that the civil war, the English civil war, was partially a judgment from God for the way England treated the

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Jews. There should be activism also on behalf of the Jews and helping the Jews legitimated the

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English nation. So this is something, I mean, you know, all those respect, Cromwell respecters out there, right?

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Who just really don't like Jewish people, but you love Cromwell. I've seen some of these guys, right?

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We got to deal with this, right? Cromwell, he had some views that if you heard them, you would probably think, well, this is really, really similar to what

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I would consider to be the very dispensational, pro -Zionist lobby in Congress today or something, right?

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What that is at least framed as. Nope, no, this was, these were the

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Puritans. You have John Owen, 1616 to 1683. He believed Christianity would be revived with the defeat of Roman Catholicism and mass conversion of the

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Jewish people. So this is tied to the, also, like I said, the defeat of Roman Catholicism.

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Now, one of the things I want people to notice as we go through this is how often eschatology is a result of, at least the views of eschatology, they're the result of historical developments, context, what's happening in England, what's later we're gonna see happening in America and in Europe and in the

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Middle East. Who are our enemies? Is it the Turks? Is it Russia?

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Is it the Cold War? You'll find that eschatology belief among Christians, eschatological belief, tends to conform itself often to these changing geopolitical maps.

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I'm not saying there isn't a correct eschatology. I believe there is. I'm not saying the Bible isn't understandable.

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I think it is. I do think the apocalyptic literature is difficult. And I do think that of all the theological categories out there, eschatology seems to be the one that is the most wedded to fashion and style and the necessity of the need of the moment.

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And nothing's changed. We're still in that. When I was in seminary and I was watching young leftist types reject dispensationalism, right?

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That their parents believed. They were doing it because, well, my parents didn't believe in climate change.

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And so they bought big boats and they didn't steward the environment well or something.

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And that's because they thought we're all gonna be raptured out of here and they didn't care about the earth. So we got to reject all that, right? That was, what was the motivation behind that?

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Was it theological or was, I've thought about this a lot. I think that most of what I saw even in seminary was a reaction to political and social environments.

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And it was not necessarily driven by a study of the text, understanding theology, and that kind of thing.

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Theology kind of conformed itself more or less. You're gonna see this kind of thing throughout time with eschatology, especially.

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So we have this restorationism in England, but also in America. Baptist John Gill supported restorationism in his

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Bible commentaries. Bishop Thomas Newton, who's not a Puritan, published popular dissertations on the prophecies.

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I just mentioned he's not a Puritan. I couldn't fit everything in my slideshow perfectly. And he argued that God had decreed that only wicked nations persecute the

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Jews. Persecution is the spirit of potpourri. The spirit of Protestantism is toleration.

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Now, this is where you see a lot of Roman Catholics trying to say, hey, we're the only ones that are really anti -liberal.

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We're the only ones that are really the alternative to Zionism. We'll talk about that later. But it is true that liberalism does emerge from European and particularly

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Anglo context. You see this very early. And it's not viewed as a, it's not like the liberalism we have today, right?

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Classic liberalism isn't the same. But the spirit of toleration, you can almost see the seeds of where this perhaps went.

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And I'm not saying toleration's all bad or anything like that. I'm just saying that you see this subtle shift going on.

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And this is what makes us different than the Catholics. The Catholics don't tolerate the Jews. We do.

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We do as Protestants. The picture, by the way, is John Gill, who I mentioned before.

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Increase Mather, so we're in America now, held to a historicist premillennialist view and believed

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Jewish return to Palestine would overcome Muslims and Catholics. So this is gonna be part of the defeat of our enemies, the

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Catholics and the Muslims, and it's gonna accompany this return. Jonathan Edwards, and he was post -millennial, but same thing.

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He would read the newspapers and wanna know what was happening in the Middle East, because he anticipated the Jewish return to Palestine and mass conversions.

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And he tied it to American identity. Robert O. Smith says, just as Christian Judeo -centrism is grounded in the understanding that Jews have a central role to play in Christian apocalyptic hope,

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Jews understood, literally or figuratively, are central to the narrative of American national identity.

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Now, I don't know if I would go as far as Robert O. Smith on this, but it's interesting that any historian would say such a thing, that there was, at a time when there was hardly any

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Jews in this country, and the ones who were here were probably Sephardic, and I think it was like 1780, you had about 2 ,000 here.

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So at the time that Jonathan Edwards is writing, I mean, did he even know any Jewish people? Maybe some merchants or something that came to the shores of the

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Massachusetts Bay Colony, but man, I just don't even know. You know, they come to Boston maybe on a ship, but I don't think there was a high population of Jewish people, if any, living in that region.

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Thomas Scott, 1747 to 1821, was a British post -millennialist whose biblical commentary emphasized

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Jewish return and conversion, influencing American thought. So you have now Bible commentaries as people are now studying the

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Bible, learning what the Bible says, people are giving their opinions, and some of these opinions are emphasizing restorationism.

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Now, another stream that we have to talk about in all of this is German pietism. This is a picture of the chapel of the

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Institute for Jewish Converts of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the

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Jews, 1846 in England. But the inspiration for this particular center was

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German pietists. They focused on evangelizing Jews rather than restorationism. They believed it would usher in post -millennial renewal.

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So there was an eschatological angle to this. Philip Jacob Spanier, who was a pietist leader, who emphasized that the church must evangelize

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Jews in order to receive blessings and fulfill God's plan. So we're not gonna be, we're gonna be disobedient.

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We're not gonna receive the blessing if we don't do this. London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews started in 1809, and this was founded by German pietists, even though it's in England, and it aimed to convert the

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Jews, reflecting evangelistic priorities. Then you have Alexander McCall. He produced the

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Old Paths or a Comparison of the Principles and Doctrines of Modern Judaism with the Religion of Moses and the

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Prophets in 1837. And this contributed to the emergence of Reform Judaism to the detriment of Rabbinical Judaism.

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And you wanna know why? Because what happened is Alexander McCall, he's interested in converting the

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Jewish people. And if he's interested, he's gotta try to figure out what are their hurdles? What's holding them back?

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Well, okay, they have this whole tradition that has grown up around the rabbinical literature, right?

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Today, people kind of broad brush this. It's always been a little interesting to me that Talmudic Judaism, you'll hear that thrown out all the time.

30:10

Talmudic Judaism, that's kind of a broad category, but the Hasidics that live not far from where I am right now, the

30:17

Hasidic communities in the Catskill Mountains and so forth, they would be part of this. They'd be rabbinical. They would be following the

30:24

Talmud. And if you go in their houses, by the way, which I have many times for furniture repairs and so forth, back when

30:29

I used to do that, you will see just books, shelf after shelf, full of these old books.

30:34

It's the Talmud. The Talmud is huge. And there was a guy once,

30:40

I think I talked to him. Yeah, he said, have you read the Talmud? I'm like, well, no, who has got time for that?

30:47

Well, I've read the Talmud. And then I was like, wait, what do you mean? And it was like he had read probably a summary in one little book or something.

30:53

No, the Talmud's huge. So this was quite the undertaking. And Alexander McCall says, you know what?

30:59

I'm gonna take down this rabbinical Judaism. I'm gonna show it's inconsistent. I'm gonna show it's out of step with the

31:05

Old Testament. And as a result, reform Judaism actually got a shot in the arm because those who followed the rabbis, they were so discredited.

31:16

So you have another kind of Judaism that doesn't need the Talmud that pops up, that sees it as an identity, but they're not wedded to the rabbis.

31:25

Interesting. I did not know about the development. I found it absolutely fascinating when I saw this, that it was

31:31

Christian evangelism that actually kind of led to reform Judaism. So from restorationism, there's a transition that happens that gets us to Zionism.

31:42

And let me bring you through some of this because that's where we wanna go. We wanna understand Zionism itself.

31:48

Edward Bickersteth, 1786 to 1850, influenced Lord Shaftesbury. And he's gonna become an important figure.

31:56

And he believed, Bickersteth, that the Jews needed to be given their own land to overcome the stumbling blocks that prevented them from converting in England.

32:04

In other words, England's got too much anti -Jewish sentiment. They need to go somewhere else where they can be free and live a life unmolested from us.

32:13

And maybe that'll be the means to their conversion. After their return to the land, Bickersteth believed that there would be a mass conversion.

32:20

And the next event on the prophetic calendar was the return of Christ. So you wanna see Jesus, right? Seems like there'd be a big motive to let's get him back in the land.

32:29

But this was linked to the Jews' return. So the country who gave the Jews aid would receive blessings and be favored among the nations.

32:37

So now there's a competition. Which country is gonna do it? Interestingly, his views were interpreted as anti -Semitic due to the avoidance of changing restrictions on Jewish rights in England.

32:46

In other words, because Bickersteth is saying, let's send the Jews to Palestine and we don't wanna conform our society to Jewish people, he's an anti -Semite essentially.

32:58

So here you have what sounds like a Zionist, right? But he's also an anti -Semite because you don't want the

33:04

Jews around. He wants them over there. He doesn't wanna conform England. He doesn't wanna just let them assimilate and or change the arrangements of England.

33:12

He wants them somewhere else. So this is why I tell people when you start conflating things like world

33:20

Jewry, right? The Jewish people that are in charge of banks and so forth around the world or international

33:26

Judaism. And the state of Israel. We're gonna find out even more information that shows you that's totally off, totally wrong, totally deceptive.

33:37

Don't buy into it. Those are two different things. We're talking about two different things. But when you talk about anti -Semitism and the polar opposite of it being, well, it's gotta be

33:46

Zionism, right? There's Zionism and there's anti -Semitism. That's not always the case either. It's really not.

33:52

There's a bunch of people that you could consider by today's metric, at least anti -Semitic, quote unquote, that would have been very strong Zionists.

34:01

Edward Bickerson, very influential. Now, Lord Shaftesbury was someone influenced by Bickerson and Shaftesbury was a member of parliament.

34:09

He was a key figure in Christian Zionism. And he appointed the British vice consul in Jerusalem in 1838, established

34:15

Christ Church in 1848 and supported an Anglican Lutheran Bishopric after that.

34:22

And he hoped for Jewish conversion but prioritized restoration. In other words, he's bringing Christian influence to that region.

34:30

And he's doing it because he's under the influence of Bickerstaff, he wants to see this conversion. Then we have

34:36

Charles Simeon, 1759 to 1836. He was an influential Anglican minister who linked the conversion of the whole world with the conversion of the

34:44

Jews. So that's also kind of a motive, right? If you think that the Jews getting saved means everyone else is gonna get saved, then,

34:49

I mean, what are you gonna work toward, right? So he argued it was more important to convert Jews than Gentiles because they would become evangelists in the last days.

34:57

He also argued for a restoration to Palestine. So this is the transition you see.

35:04

You see a building up of fervor for the Jews returning to the

35:09

Holy Land. It's related to the blessing of England. It's related to anti -Catholicism.

35:15

It's related to prophetic fulfillment. It's related to all kinds of things.

35:22

And it's long before dispensationalism was systematized. All right, so here's the trends of the 19th century.

35:30

There's what happens in the 1800s. And the picture you see here is of the Damascus Affair where a rabbi is preparing his defense from the

35:36

Talmud. The Damascus Affair, let's see. I think we're gonna read about it here in a moment.

35:44

Yeah, that was in 1840 and it involved accusations against Jews in Damascus for the murder of a monk.

35:50

And they said that he used the blood to do the Lord's Supper, essentially. Used the flesh for matzah, used the blood for the blood of Christ, and it led to all these anti -Jewish riots and so forth.

36:02

Arrests, torture, and it caused concern among British evangelicals. So there's this persecution.

36:08

So that's the picture you see here is a rabbi who's being accused of doing this and he's preparing his defense. But you first have the prophecy enthusiasm.

36:17

Society for Investigation of Prophecy, 1826, linked Jewish restoration to French Revolution's apocalyptic significance.

36:24

So the French Revolution is where you really start to see some serious apocalyptic schemes happening, where this is significant in God's economy and this is gonna be linked to other developments, including the return of the

36:39

Jewish people, the in -gathering, as it were, in Palestine. So people are interested in this kind of thing because of geopolitical events.

36:46

You have a shift away from post -millennialism during this time. Edward Irving promotes the new Adventist hope, shifting from post -millennialism to historic pre -millennialism, or historicist,

36:56

I should say, pre -millennialism. And then you have, like I just mentioned, concerns over Jewish conditions.

37:02

So you have the Blood Bible Affair or the Jews in Damascus are under suspicion.

37:08

Then you have the 1858 British evangelicals spearheading protests against the

37:15

Edgardo Morterra case. And this is a situation where British evangelicals are concerned again because an

37:25

Italian Jewish boy was taken from his parents' home based on a claim of secret Christian baptism.

37:31

The English Jewish Board of Deputies publicly expressed gratitude to the Evangelical Alliance and other

37:36

Protestant groups for their support in the issue. So you have these evangelical groups starting to mobilize on behalf of Jewish persecution.

37:44

After the pogroms in Russia, following Tsar Alexander II's assassination in 1881, where a young Jewish woman was among the seven conspirators, there was a public meeting at the

37:56

Mansion House in London on February 1st, 1882. And this meeting included

38:02

Lord Shaftesbury, and he appealed in religious terms to the Russian emperor to protect the Jews.

38:08

So if you want to understand it, okay, why is the United States involved in affairs in the

38:16

Middle East? Why are they sticking up for Israel at times and that kind of thing? Why do they care about what happens to people in these distant places, these populations that are under persecution in other places in the world?

38:27

Well, there's a tradition of this. And you see Lord Shaftesbury doing this in 1882. He's petitioning

38:32

Russia to basically knock it off. Don't treat the Jews. Now, why is that England's business?

38:38

Why is England involved in that? Why are they exerting pressure? Of course, there's probably a lot of motivations, but there's behind all of this, and the reason there'd be any public support is a motivation toward trying to help people who are in an unfortunate position, right?

38:57

And so there's this big heart behind it, as Trump would say. Concrete action then develops to do something.

39:04

We gotta do something about this. So the Syrian Colonization Fund was formed to help 220

39:09

Jewish refugees who wanted to work in agriculture in Palestine and continue to support

39:15

Jewish settlement in Palestine. Then you had the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the

39:20

Jews, and they formed the Committee on the Persecution of the Jews in Russia to help facilitate the high volume of Russian immigrants to Palestine.

39:26

So you have Russians immigrating to Palestine, mostly they're low income, they're farmers, and you have

39:34

England now assisting in this. You have societies in England welling up to assist in this kind of thing.

39:40

William Hatchler was an Anglican chaplain who assisted Jewish relief in Palestine and collaborated with Hedor Herzl.

39:48

And in 1882, he tried to settle Jews in Cyprus, but failed. So he also discouraged

39:53

Jewish evangelism in the Messianic Age in favor of restorationism. So this is something that we're gonna talk about in the 20th century, but Hatchler was a little early.

40:03

He actually said, let's invest our efforts, not in evangelism, but in restoring them to the land.

40:08

They're not gonna be saved yet. They'll be saved once that peace is put into place. In 1896,

40:14

Herzl called him a Christian Zionist. Now, there were some opponents of Christian Zionism.

40:22

I wanna highlight two here, and it's gonna surprise some of you. William Miller was one. 1742 to 1849, he believed the

40:28

Jew has had his day and rejected Jewish restoration to Palestine as incompatible with his expectation of the immediate return of Christ.

40:37

Of course, William Miller, a date setter, the leader of the Millerites, the forerunner,

40:42

I believe, of the Seventh Day Adventists. So influential figure, but oftentimes he's linked with another figure, and that's

40:48

John Nelson Darby. John Nelson Darby systematized dispensationalism, but did not believe

40:54

Christians should engage in political efforts to restore Jews. He thought God's dealings with the

40:59

Jews were on hold due to their rejection of Christ, and restoration would happen after the rapture. So John Nelson Darby, not wanting to lift a finger to help any of this out,

41:08

William Miller looked prophetically thinking the Jews, that's a done thing.

41:15

We don't talk about that anymore. Now, I will point out, John Nelson Darby is quite often brought up in this whole discussion as funded by the, well,

41:25

I've heard both. I've heard the Schofield Reference Bible is funded by the Rothschilds, and John Nelson Darby is funded by the

41:30

Rothschilds, but that he is somehow working on the behalf of the

41:36

Jews to lay the foundation for Zionism, and that's the, and even,

41:42

I kid you not, I've seen people on X say things like, it's John Nelson Darby's influence on Congress, on American politics that is the real problem, and we gotta kick that dispensationalism started by John Nelson Darby.

41:57

The funny thing about the whole thing is John Nelson Darby was against Zionism. He didn't lift a finger to help.

42:02

I mean, maybe you could say against is too strong of a word, but he did not support it, we'll put it that way, and his reasoning,

42:09

I mean, there's really two reasons. One is prophetic, it doesn't match his calendar, and the other is he didn't believe in activism.

42:18

So there you have it, John Nelson Darby. So hopefully this will make some of you guys, if you've ever used that, maybe you'll not use that example anymore because that's not a good example.

42:29

Another interesting quote here, and I'm gonna read this. This is from Arno Clemens Gabiline.

42:36

In 1905, he assisted C .I. Schofield on the Schofield Reference Bible. He is one of the most influential dispensationalists, early dispensationalists in the

42:47

United States, and this is what he has to say. Zionism, we wish to say, is not the divinely promised restoration of Israel.

42:54

Zionism is not the fulfillment of the large number of predictions found in the Old Testament scriptures, which relate to Israel's return to the land.

43:01

Zionism has very little use for arguments from the word of God. It is rather a political and philanthropic undertaking.

43:08

In instead of coming together before God to search their own scriptures, humbling themselves before God, calling upon his name, trusting him, he's able to perform what he so often promised.

43:18

They speak about their riches, their influence, their colonial bank and the court, and they court the favor of the sultan.

43:24

The great movement is one of unbelief and confidence in themselves instead of God's eternal purposes.

43:30

It is therefore an attempt of the Jewish people to solve themselves the question of their national future and national welfare without considering the spiritual and divine side at all.

43:40

Now, let me ask you this. I haven't finished the quote, but does that sound like someone who's a pro -Zionist? And again, this is someone who worked on the

43:47

Schofield Reference Bible. So the next time you wanna say, oh, the Schofield Reference Bible is this big

43:52

Zionist conspiracy. Remember, Arno Clemens Gaebelein worked on this.

43:58

If Zionism succeeds, he says, and no doubt it will, it will be a partial return of the Jews in unbelief to their land.

44:05

Is such a return anywhere foretold in the scriptures? We do not know of a single passage which tells us that such should be the case, and yet it is evident by all the predicted events which fall into the closing years of this present age, that in order that these events can be fulfilled, a part of the

44:19

Jewish nation must be back in the land. All among them is the believing remnant. The great majority will be unbelieving.

44:25

Not alone, that but a temple must be built again, and quite often Zionists have mentioned this, and a daily sacrifice be brought.

44:31

We mentioned a few scriptures which cannot be fulfilled except as part of a Jewish people dwell in Palestine. So the second part sounds like the pro -Zionist side, but he's not pro -Zionist.

44:40

So he didn't give any help to the Zionist cause. He didn't believe in the cause.

44:46

He didn't believe in what these people were doing, but he did see it as what these people mean for evil, or what these people, these people who aren't working according to God's power, their efforts eventually are going to be used by God to fulfill prophecies.

45:03

So that's, I thought that was fascinating. So again, next time you hear John Nelson Darby, Schofield reference

45:09

Bible, remember those guys. Remember what we talked about just now. It's just, it's not, frankly, it's just low information and just not that in -depth analysis.

45:22

If you hear people saying that, it's just the case. I don't know how else to say it. I can't, I'm trying to be nice about it, but it's embarrassingly bad.

45:29

Okay, Theodor Herzl. Now this is a very controversial figure. This is often, he is often called the father of Zionism.

45:38

He died in 1904, but he was a Jewish Zionist leader who published the

45:44

Jewish State in 1895. Now, if you haven't read the Jewish State, you probably need to, if you wanna understand

45:49

Zionism. And so I'm gonna give you a kind of a crash course on the Jewish State.

45:54

We're gonna take a little side tour and then come back to the main topic of Christian Zionism. But that's who

46:00

Theodor Herzl is. He organized the first Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel. He argued for a

46:05

Jewish homeland, but not necessarily in Palestine. He actually favored Uganda of all places. You have

46:11

Leon Pinkster, or Pinkster, I can't pronounce it. Pinsker, I think that's how you say it,

46:17

Leon Pinsker. So he wrote a book called Auto Emancipation. And in that book, 1882, it came out.

46:23

He argued for a Jewish homeland, but not in Palestine. He preferred Argentina. So both these guys are

46:29

Jewish, but they're secular Jewish. They're not religious. And they don't care about, well, I mean, I'm not gonna say they don't care at all, but they're not pushing for Palestine, right?

46:38

It's literally just a survival mechanism. We just don't, we wanna be left alone. We wanna have our own country. Let's go to Argentina.

46:45

Let's go to Uganda. So the early supposed Zionists aren't even after going to Palestine. I don't know how many of you guys knew that, but it really did come out of an effort to stop persecution.

46:57

James H. Brooks, the father of American dispensationalism, spread the view through Bible conferences. And yes, he was a dispensationalist.

47:06

He was a Zionist. He was a dispensationalist, but he had to, and we're gonna talk about that in a minute, but he had to sort of go off a modified form of dispensationalism.

47:16

Anyway, there's these Bibles conferences, and he did not think believers should engage though in political activism.

47:25

And so, oh, did I just say he was a Zionist? I didn't mean to say that. Sorry, he was opposed to Zionism. He even saw voting as compromised participation with unbelievers.

47:33

So my bad, I was thinking of someone else for a minute there. So let me scratch what I just said. James Brooks, that he is the father of modern

47:39

American dispensationalism, and he was anti -Zionist. So there you go. You can add that as another dispensationalist who was against Zionism.

47:48

Now let's take the excursion I said we're gonna take, Theodore Herzl. Let's do a summary of the book, because if this really is

47:54

Zionism, which I think, yes, Zionism's a secular effort, essentially, that Christians became engaged with because of restoration instincts and also just humanitarian concern.

48:08

But if it's really the book, Der Judenstaat, the Jewish state, then what does the

48:14

Jewish state say? Let's take a detour here for a minute. The idea which I have developed, says Herzl, in this pamphlet is a very old one.

48:21

Well, interesting. So he's saying, yeah, yeah, then start with me, the restoration of the Jewish state. Inevitably, if the present generation is too dull to understand it, rightly, a future, a finer and a better generation will arise to understand it.

48:33

The Jews will wish for a state, they shall have it and they shall earn it for themselves. So this is going to continue if it doesn't happen now.

48:42

It's inevitable. It's also global. We are working not only for ourselves, but for many other overburdened oppressed beings also.

48:49

This is broader than that, just Jewish people, according to Herzl. This is gonna help all the people of the world, all the oppressed people of the world, right?

48:57

If you're sensing the liberal instinct, sense harder, you know, it's keep sensing because that's exactly what's going on.

49:05

This picture, by the way, is the first alia to the Ottoman Palestine alia, just the word for the coming back to Palestine, essentially the immigration.

49:14

And at the time it's under the control of the Ottomans, but you have Jewish people showing up. So what Jews are we talking about? Well, Herzl is talking about persecuted

49:22

Jews in Europe. I will give you my definition of a nation, he says, and you can add the adjective Jewish. A nation is in my mind, a historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy.

49:32

That is in my view, a nation. And if you add Jewish to it, you have the Jewish nation. So it's an interesting definition of a nation that you have to have opposition apparently to be a nation, but for the

49:43

Jewish people, it's they've had a lot of opposition. So he views Jewish people as constituting a nation based on that.

49:52

The picture in the background here is Jewish men examining damaged Talmudic texts in Russia in 1881 after a pogrom.

49:59

But here's what Herzl had to say. He said, we are what the ghetto made us.

50:04

We had doubtless attained preeminence in finance because medieval conditions drove us to it. The same process is now being repeated.

50:10

Modern conditions force us into finance. Now the stock exchange, by keeping us out of all other branches of industry, being on the stock exchange, we are therefore again considered contemptible.

50:20

So he goes on about how, look, we're successful and because we're successful, basically there's not a place for us.

50:28

People get, more or less, they get upset about it. They get jealous of it, that kind of thing. Educated Jews without means are now fast becoming socialists, he says.

50:37

So the ones who don't achieve success are driven into the hands of socialists. And why would that be?

50:42

Because socialism doesn't see race. It's about the brotherhood of mankind and the elimination of these class and racial differences.

50:53

Hence, we are certain to suffer very severely in the struggle between the classes. So he's saying, it looks bad for us in Europe.

51:00

And there's no escape. What is the result of transporting a few thousand Jews to another country? Either they come to grief at once or prosper, then their prosperity creates antisemitism.

51:07

So you could say, go to America. You could say, go to this more friendly place. But he said, the process will just repeat itself.

51:14

So the problem, he says, is a failure of assimilation. The absorption of Jews by means of their prosperity is unlikely to occur.

51:21

The struggle to obtain the present form of marriage accentuated distinctions between Jews and Christians, thus hindering rather than aiding the fusion of races.

51:27

In other words, well, actually, I'm trying to remember another context of this.

51:34

Because I must've thought it was important because I clipped it. I don't remember what country he was referring to in Europe on this.

51:40

But the argument that he's making is that intermarriage, changing laws on marriage won't actually do anything to stop antisemitism.

51:53

In vain, he says, are we loyal patriots? Are loyalty in some places running to extremes? In vain, do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens?

52:02

In vain, do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art or wealth by trade and commerce?

52:08

In countries where we have lived for centuries, we are still cried out as strangers and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews already made experience of suffering.

52:18

So he's saying, you got newer arrivals in these places that have assimilated. We haven't, we've been there longer.

52:24

We love the places we live, we sacrifice, but we're not actually accepted and we're persecuted.

52:31

So based on this, let's all go to Africa or let's all go to South America. That's the motive, overcoming antisemitism.

52:40

It's a, the Zionists and of kindred associations are going to help us essentially.

52:48

The Jewish question still exists, it would be useless to deny it, is the remnant of the middle ages, which civilized nations do not yet seem to be able to shake off, try as they will.

52:59

They certainly show a generous desire to do so when they emancipated us. The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers.

53:06

So you get a high enough numbers and this emerges, right? You could argue in the United States in 1780, 1790, that wasn't, there wasn't high enough numbers perhaps, right?

53:15

But as the numbers increased towards the late 1800s, you see what Herschel's talking about, even in the

53:21

United States. And so let's see, what else? How much more do I have? Not, not much.

53:27

Let's see here, let me go back a slide if I can. Satisfying non -Zionist

53:33

Jews. The assimilated give expressions to the secret grievance in philanthropic undertaking.

53:38

So Herschel says that you got these philanthropists that come along and they try to help.

53:45

And they're many, he says, an apparent friend of the Jews turns out on careful inspection to be nothing more than an anti -Semite of Jewish origin disguised in the garb of a philanthropist.

53:56

So there's these rich Jews that are basically paying for the problem to go away because they don't want to be associated with the poorer

54:01

Jews that will cause a liability for them. So don't look for help from the upper classes in the

54:07

Jewish ranks, he's saying. That's kind of telling. He says the movement though would be to the advantage of the nations from where Jews are leaving.

54:17

So if you have Frenchmen, for example, they're going to be able to occupy the jobs and so forth that are left behind by Jews who leave and go to whether it's

54:28

Palestine or Africa or South America, they'll be able to occupy that. It'll be good for them and so they should support it.

54:34

So he's trying to make the argument. It is good for the goyim, it's good for the Jewish people.

54:40

It's just good for everyone if we just have our own place. Satisfying Gentiles, the more opportunities.

54:45

He says the departure of the Jews will involve no economic disturbances, no crisis, no persecutions. There'll be an inner migration of Christian citizens into the positions evacuated by Jews.

54:54

So this is also privilege, right? This is if you held an experienced position at a business, for example, it's who's going to get that position, a

55:04

Christian, if the Jewish people leave. There'll be less conflict. It'll be just great. It'll be great for everyone.

55:11

So here's the strategy. The Zionist movement and the Jewish colonial trust was going to be the organization that would facilitate this.

55:18

And he thought that we must not imagine the departure of the Jews to be a sudden one. It will be gradual, which is exactly what happened.

55:24

Continuous and will cover many decades. The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. That's exactly what happened. You had from the late 1800s, you had these waves of Jewish people coming to Palestine.

55:36

Now he's not thinking about Palestine. He's thinking we could direct this somewhere else, but it starts in Palestine really.

55:42

And it's farmers. And the honest antisemites, he says, will combine with our officials in controlling the transfer of our estate.

55:49

So even the antisemites are going to help us, guys. And here, two territories come under consideration,

55:55

Palestine and Argentina. The company will buy estates or rather exchange them for a house that will offer a house in the new country and for a land, new land in the country.

56:04

So basically economically, we're going to facilitate this by take the assets of the people leaving are going to be traded for what they're going to.

56:17

And it's going to be on a very cheap rate. He did all the math and the economics work out. The conditions, there will be light, attractive, healthy schools for children.

56:25

I mean, it's paradise. They're going to have modern work systems. There will be continuation of schools for workmen.

56:32

I want you to pay extra close attention here because this is where the modern kind of liberal state comes into being. Or it comes into view,

56:39

I should say. There will be places of amusement for the proper conduct of which the

56:44

Society of Jews will be responsible. The seven hour workday is going to be the regular workday.

56:50

We're going to have a labor test to provide everyone with work. The officials will receive an increase in salary when they have children and they get married and all these social programs, it's going to be so great.

57:01

Free education, free amusement, entertainment. I mean, it's going to be great. I think of a democratic monarchy and an aristocratic republic are the two most superior forms of state, he says.

57:12

And the result, the society will be the new Moses of the Jews. So is this religious?

57:19

Is it? No. This is totally, this is Moses. It's not Moses. It's not Jesus. It's not the

57:26

Messiah. It's the society. The society will be the new Moses. And the undertaking of that great and ancient gesture of the

57:32

Jews in primitive days bears much of the same relation to ours that an old opera bears to a modern one.

57:39

We are playing the same melody with many more violins, flutes, harps, he mentions all these instruments.

57:46

And so this is the culmination. It's a modern nation, he says. We are a modern nation. We wish to be the most modern in the world.

57:55

We're going to be the best guys. Shall we end by having a theocracy?

58:00

No, indeed. Faith unites us. Knowledge gives us freedom. We shall therefore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming on the fore on the part of our priesthood.

58:10

We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our volunteer force within the confines of their barracks.

58:19

So separation of synagogue and state, if you will. This is fascinating.

58:26

This should be fascinating to all of you because this is the father of Zionism.

58:32

Essentially, right? And what he's describing here is a very modern, liberal state that he wants to create.

58:38

It's a secular state. And that is what Israel is today. Israel is a secular, modern state.

58:46

And I hear all these things about online, that they get to have their ethno state, but we can't have all that kind of stuff.

58:52

To an extent, I understand you have your birthright citizenship thing, or what do they call that? Where you're born, you're

58:59

Jewish in another country, but you can come and immigrate. That obviously has been, that's a tradition that's been in place for a while, because that's how the state formed was immigration primarily, but they are a very liberal state.

59:14

And I'll show you some of the policies at the end of this. All right, so that was my little side show on Herzl and Judaism, or sorry, on Zionism and all that.

59:26

So you can understand some of the motives here. Now, it's funny because if you read, if you've read like the book that had a lot of, oh, what's it called?

59:38

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, right? And they make Herzl like this big figure, and these elders, all they meet up, and it's a lot of, the root of a lot of,

59:45

I think of the Jewish conspiracy stuff. Although it's not like those ideas didn't already exist at all.

59:53

But there's a lot of things that I think discredit that as an inauthentic document. But Herzl is kind of at the center of that.

01:00:02

He's kind of like, and the funny thing I'll show you in a moment is that there was Jewish opposition to what

01:00:08

Herzl was trying to do. It's not like there's a smoke -filled room and all the Jews got together and they're like, you know what, we're all together.

01:00:14

We're gonna all go to Palestine or something. They weren't even looking at Palestine necessarily. But there was a lot of opposition.

01:00:21

In medieval rabbinic Judaism, there was the belief that a vow on the part of the Jews, there was actually a vow, for reasons that were not clear, never to organize or to return to the ancient home of Palestine.

01:00:32

That was actually part of rabbinic Judaism. In 1806, the great Sanhedrin of European rabbis had declared that the

01:00:39

Jews were not a nation. Wow, that sounds different than what you just saw from Herzl, but rather a transnational religious group awaiting its messianic hope for transformation at the hands of God, not of humans.

01:00:50

This is, by the way, the belief that you will find every now and then when there is a

01:00:56

Hasidic rabbi or something, I see this in New York, and he makes the news because he's anti -Israel.

01:01:04

And the liberal media loves it, right? Because they're very anti -Israel and so they'll promote this guy.

01:01:10

And you're like, well, where'd that come from? How did that, why is he not? Well, it's because he has this belief. He thinks it's satanic to try to restore

01:01:18

Israel. He thinks that only the Messiah can do that. And that's a belief that was held for a long time. It still is by some in rabbinical

01:01:25

Jewish circles. In 1845, an avant -garde group of rabbis met in Frankfurt and Maine to modernize

01:01:32

Jewish rituals and beliefs, rejecting the traditional hope of a personal Messiah and advocating that Jews should redeem the world themselves.

01:01:40

They opposed the idea of a Jewish ghetto in Palestine, instead favoring further dispersion to spread the recognition of one

01:01:46

God according to Jewish tradition. Christopher Sykes noted that in the mid 19th century, Germany, the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and the desire to integrate into Western civilization outweighed any feelings of anger among German Jews.

01:01:58

So German Jews in mid 1800s are under this influence that we've got to just integrate into the countries around us.

01:02:07

And that's our mission field. That's how we're gonna spread the one true God. It's not going to be going to Palestine.

01:02:14

1891, the past, present and future of Israel conference leading reform Jew, Emil J.

01:02:21

Hirsch said that the modern Jews believe the country wherein we live is our

01:02:26

Palestine. And they gave you up the Messianic Cope. They didn't have a Messianic Cope anymore. And they wanted to assimilate.

01:02:32

You also have German rabbis, 1897. They opposed the first Zionist Congress in Basel. So with the

01:02:37

Congress that Herzl is organizing, they literally couldn't meet where they wanted to meet because of opposition from German rabbis.

01:02:47

So they had to go outside of Germany to meet. So it sounds like all the Jews are together, right? Well, not necessarily. There's a variety of beliefs here.

01:02:53

1917, the great majority of British Jews were unsympathetic to Zionism. Some were merely indifferent, but many were openly hostile.

01:03:01

At the time, only 8 ,000 British Jews out of 300 ,000 belonged to a Zionist organization, says

01:03:07

Donald Lewis. Now, why would this be, right? It was because you have a lot of Jewish people who want to just be part of the countries where they live.

01:03:16

They feel like they have a decent deal there. It's not so bad. It's not universal persecution everywhere.

01:03:23

We like it here. And we think we can be accepted. We have been accepted in some places.

01:03:29

Stop trying to sow this discord. Stop trying to, just because it's bad where you are, don't try to make us feel like it's bad where we are, right?

01:03:37

That's the sentiment. In 1920, the British ambassador reported that the great mass of American Jews appear to be bitterly opposed to the

01:03:45

Zionist leaders and the rich Jews are divided amongst themselves. At the time of the establishment of the

01:03:50

Jewish state, Reform Jews in America represented at the American Council of Judaism in 1943 opposed Zionism, but newly arrived

01:03:57

Jews from Eastern Europe were more likely to be supportive. So there was a lot of Jewish opposition to Zionism early on, but it happens anyway.

01:04:07

So how did it happen? Well, the Balfour Declaration. Assimilationist lobbyist, Lucian Wolfe of the

01:04:12

League of British Jews contended with lobbyist, Shaim Wiseman, two Jewish people.

01:04:18

But Wiseman was a Russian born Jewish chemist who became the first president of Israel. So Wiseman is against this

01:04:25

British born Jewish person who is more of assimilationist, doesn't want Jews going to Palestine.

01:04:33

And Wiseman defeats him. And it's through lobbying. Wiseman argued that Zionism represented international

01:04:39

Jewry. So I just showed you, it doesn't, but Wiseman argued effectively that it did, that this was the position of Jewish people throughout the world.

01:04:48

And when you have a war going on, you want the support of rich Jewish people, right? That's basically the position

01:04:54

England is in. So international Jewry wants a homeland in Palestine, he says. He says, the Jews, especially

01:04:59

American Jews hold immense power and are courted by Germany. Russian Jews could keep Russia in the war despite antisemitism, because England needs

01:05:07

Russia to stay in. Jews and Britain share the goal of defeating the

01:05:12

Ottomans, right? So we got a shared enemy. And a Jewish Palestine would secure

01:05:17

British strategic interests, especially the Suez Canal. So we can work together here.

01:05:22

It'll fulfill military goals, diplomatic goals. That's the argument. And that argument works.

01:05:29

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government publicly says, supports a national home for the

01:05:36

Jewish people in Palestine. Now, Arthur Balfour was the foreign secretary. That's the person that this is named after.

01:05:44

And he likely had just a Sunday school interest in the Jews, but he believed in their plight and he was emotionally invested because of that.

01:05:51

Prime minister at the time, Lloyd George, approved of the declaration likely for pragmatic reasons to attract

01:05:56

American Jewish support, which funny enough, he wasn't gonna get. But he already, and he already actually, he wasn't gonna get because of that.

01:06:03

He already had American Jewish support. He didn't need it. But he was under this spell that this would help him with that.

01:06:09

And he thought it would also pressure Russia to stay in the war, that Jewish people would be invested in Britain winning, the allies winning, so that they could have their

01:06:18

Jewish state. So he dangled this though, in front of like four different groups of people.

01:06:25

He dangled it in front of France, in front of the Ottomans, in front of Arabs. So Lloyd George would have gladly gone back on his word on this.

01:06:33

Lord Curzon, the only member of the cabinet who was born and raised in England, had practical concerns and opposed the

01:06:38

Balfour Declaration. So did Edwin Montague, the only Jewish cabinet member, fearing it would fuel antisemitism.

01:06:45

Seven of the eight members of the cabinet had not been born and raised in England, and five were known to be Calvinists. This is significant because it was

01:06:52

Calvinists and those living on the fringes, so like from Ireland and from Scotland, who were propelling this.

01:07:01

It wasn't an Anglican from England. It were these, and the only

01:07:08

Jewish person is against it, right? Again, Jewish people are all for this. The only one on the cabinet who's Jewish is against it.

01:07:13

It's these reform guys who would have been affected most likely by the teachings that we've already gone over, the restorationist teachings that push for this.

01:07:25

So now we get to dispensationalism more, and there is, because I'm gonna answer the question, why are so many dispensationalists today, though?

01:07:33

They seem to support Israel, they're Zionists, so what's that about, right? This is what we're getting to. First, there's a few things you gotta understand about this.

01:07:42

Dispensationalism rose to prominence, and it rose to prominence because of some factors that existed.

01:07:50

Until the 1970s, liberal Protestants were the more influential factor in American Zionism than dispensationalists.

01:07:58

That's true. Up through the 1970s, it was liberals who were the pro -Zionist folks.

01:08:05

The social gospel critics at the time of the turn of the century up through the 1920s, they attacked premillennialists as pro -German and pro -business, and those would have been the dispensationalists too.

01:08:17

Oftentimes these things are interchanged. I know theologically those aren't interchangeable, but oftentimes when you're reading some of the scholarly work, those things get interchanged, but these were the dispensationalists.

01:08:30

They're pro -German and they're pro -business. Have you ever heard a dispensationalist called pro -German? That was the accusation, funny enough.

01:08:36

And they associated, so there was these hurdles that they had to overcome, but here's what happened, and these were the conditions that helped dispensationalism gain sway.

01:08:44

It was associated with authentic Christianity. So R .A. Torrey presented dispensationalism as anti -modernist in the fundamentals.

01:08:51

So the modernists, the liberals, the social gospel guys, they're not dispensationalists, but the dispensationalists who wanna quote -unquote take the

01:08:58

Bible literally are all against social gospel stuff. So guess what? They get associated with authentic Christianity.

01:09:05

They interfaced also more with Jewish people, the dispensationalists, because by the mid 20th century,

01:09:11

Jewish evangelism was dominated by pre -millennialists. And really, let me give you my interpretation of this.

01:09:17

The fundamentalists and then what became the evangelicals, those guys were the conservatives and they wanted to keep

01:09:25

Christianity. And so, and I understand I've been very critical of neo -evangelicalism, but just give me the broad, bear with me for a moment here.

01:09:35

Those guys, because they were still authentic Christians or had enough of a volume of authentic Christians in their circles, they were interested in things like evangelism.

01:09:44

The main lines weren't doing it anymore. They were dying. And so the efforts to reach

01:09:49

Jewish people are now falling to the fundamentalists and evangelical groups that happened to be mostly dispensational because of what

01:09:59

I described before. Dispensationalism is associated with authentic Orthodox Christianity. Now this has adapted to Zionism by William Blackstone.

01:10:09

So remember I said before, look at all these dispensationalists who are against Zionism or not interested in it. Well, William Blackstone is the exception.

01:10:16

He is America's first prominent Christian Zionist. And he was a dispensationalist who modified

01:10:21

Darby's teachings by promoting activism to bring about a return of the Jews to Palestine before the rapture.

01:10:27

He was a date setter. 1897, he thought Israel would belong to the Jews again. He modified to 1933 later.

01:10:34

Does that sound familiar? And he believed America was the independent, enlightened and progressive government that could afford a home for all of Israel who wished to return.

01:10:42

It's funny. You see this language, that liberal kind of instinct of like we're heading to, like it almost sounds like the post -moral stuff, right?

01:10:50

Cause the social gospel guys are mostly post -moral. It's like, you know, he's still wedded to this

01:10:55

America's, this enlightened nation with this mission and they're progressive. And this is, you know, they're the ones that can bring this about in Israel.

01:11:02

So it sort of dovetails with what Herzl's saying. He authored the Blackstone Memorial in 1891 and he petitioned the

01:11:09

Jewish restoration in response to Russian programs. It was supported by John D. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, future

01:11:14

Supreme Court Justice Luis Brandeis and the future president, William McKinley. So some prominent folks get on board with the program because of this.

01:11:24

And again, this is, you know, they're not getting on board for theological reasons so much as charity and that kind of thing, humanitarian.

01:11:31

And so that's another development. Now here's the third thing. So again, dispensationalism is associated with authentic Christianity.

01:11:40

It's adapted to Zionism. And number three, it benefits from geopolitical events. In the aftermath of World War I, there was the fracturing of the

01:11:47

Ottoman Empire and the withdrawal of Russia from European influence. There was also concessions of Germany to France and the independence of Ireland, which all seem to allow a situation where a 10 nation

01:11:59

Confederacy in Europe could form and a Jewish Palestine could reemerge. So this, people are looking at their newspapers after World War I and they're saying, oh my goodness, this matches what those dispensationalist guys are saying.

01:12:11

The dispensationalists also opposed the League of Nations while mainline denominations endorsed it.

01:12:17

So this is another interesting thing. And this is a weird sort of undercurrent in all of this.

01:12:23

The dispensationalist types tended to be the fundamentalists, right? And the fundamentalists were very anti -communist.

01:12:28

Think of like Karl McIntyre, right? Types, very anti -communist. They very anti -globalist and they're very suspicious of like the one world order that's gonna come to be.

01:12:38

And oftentimes this is also, Jewish influence is associated with this.

01:12:44

So you actually have this weird situation, right? In our minds, it's weird. It wasn't weird back then, but you have a lot of dispensationalists who actually think that there's these globalist conspiracies and the

01:12:54

League of Nations sure look like one and they're against it. And the American dispensationalists did not want to cooperate with non -believers or heretics in addition to that, because you have all these mainline guys and social gospel guys who are going for League of Nations.

01:13:08

They said, we don't wanna be with them. So they're skeptical of it. They don't want utopian schemes without Christ. And they thought the

01:13:14

US should be independent. They're basically conservative politically. And so, they benefit from these geopolitical events that make separations that the dispensationalist folks end up gaining from.

01:13:27

And they become kind of like part of the, they're not known as dispensationalists primarily, but it's just the sort of default eschatology eventually of the conservative fundamentalist evangelical types in the

01:13:42

United States. Not to say those other views weren't still represented in conservative circles, but this becomes the prevailing one.

01:13:50

So pre -World War II, dispensationalists had certain views on Jews though. Like I said before, it's not as cut and dry as many seem to think out there.

01:14:00

Dispensationalists often accepted anti -Semites analysis of why Jews were despised in the world. This perspective made dispensationalists remarkably susceptible to anti -Semitic conspiracy theories and Nazi propaganda during the 1930s, says

01:14:14

Weber in The Road to Armageddon. Arno Gablein, who we mentioned before, questioned the authenticity of the protocols of the elders of Zion, but found parts believable and appreciated that Hitler stopped communism.

01:14:26

Though he rejected Nazi racial theories and the de -Judaizing of Christianity. Harry Ironside of Moody Church was concerned some fundamentalists were using the protocols to stir up anti -Jewish resentment or sentiment.

01:14:39

For example, Isaac Halderman in The Signs of the Times wrote that Jews took advantage of their foes, cheated when they could, and lied themselves out of threatened danger.

01:14:46

William Bell Riley defended Hitler and pushed the idea of a Jewish communist conspiracy.

01:14:52

It's all dispensationalist guys. Apparently Moody Monthly, The Sunday School Times, and Revelation Magazine all legitimize to some extent the protocols of the elders of Zion according to Hebrew Christian quarterly lines.

01:15:04

So you have some dispensationalists who are saying things that you would never associate with dispensationalism today.

01:15:10

And I'll tell you why that changed too. In the dispensationalist scheme, Jews are separated out and not candidates for assimilation, which has caused some to view as anti -Semitic.

01:15:20

Yet after World War II, Paul Boyer reports that anti -Semitism was regularly denounced and disappeared from their literature.

01:15:27

What happened, guys? Where did this quote -unquote anti -Semitism go? It went with the Holocaust. That's what happened.

01:15:33

World War II changed it. The pressure against persecution of the

01:15:40

Jews was so great that you don't talk this way in respectable company.

01:15:46

The view's eliminated from the dispensationalist circles. It's not there anymore. Now, the mainline views on Israel before World War II are interesting.

01:15:55

From 1945 to 1948, much of the American religious support for Israel actually came from mainline Protestant denominations.

01:16:02

I mean, people like Anglican James Parks on the left there and Richard Naber, Karl Barth, Methodist Franklin Little on the right, who promoted the idea that supersessionism was anti -Semitism were all essentially

01:16:15

Zionists. In 1948, 80 % of Americans supported the Jewish state. So this was a very popular thing in America.

01:16:22

I mean, you don't get 80 % of Americans to support anything, but in 1948, they supported the

01:16:27

Jewish state. That's insane. That's really high. And you have to think it's because the Holocaust happened.

01:16:33

That's a big part of it. We're directly after World War II, and this is seen as just the logical solution.

01:16:42

So none of these guys, obviously, are dispensationalists, but they are the big drivers and the most influential drivers in Christianity in the

01:16:49

United States still because there's a transition going on. And the main lines still are the most influential, but these guys are the

01:16:57

Zionists, right? And then you have liberal Protestants blaming the Protestants for the

01:17:03

Holocaust. They're blaming themselves. You ever met a self -hating Christian? Yeah, they're saying, hey, you know, the problem is these

01:17:08

Christians. And they became instrumental in pro -Zionist fervor in World War II. I've told the story before when I was in seminary at a

01:17:15

Southern Baptist school, mind you, I was in a class where my professor said this to the class essentially that, yeah, you know,

01:17:24

Christians are responsible for the Holocaust and we should probably apologize. That would be the wise thing to do to Jewish people.

01:17:31

And that was in a Southern Baptist school, but this was something the main lines were saying for years,

01:17:39

I guess, things like this. Towards the Jewish state. So how did we get from that situation to the

01:17:48

Jewish state? How did that come into being? I mean, we had high levels of popular support in America, but that's not obviously in the

01:17:53

Middle East. It's not where these Jews are gonna live. So how did they get the Jewish state? Well, there's increasing Jewish influence, like I mentioned, in Palestine.

01:18:00

As early as 1907, Jews are defending settlements in Palestine and they're only hiring

01:18:05

Jews. And then you have John Henry Patterson who commanded the Jewish Legion. He was

01:18:11

Jonathan Netanyahu's godfather. So he's giving military, they're benefiting from England's military knowledge and military defense at times.

01:18:20

And I thought this was an interesting tidbit that John Henry Patterson was Netanyahu's, Jonathan Netanyahu's godfather, commanded the

01:18:28

Jewish Legion, 1917 to 1921. Ordo Wingate, a British intelligence officer stationed in Palestine in 1936, established the

01:18:36

Night Squad to counter Arab terrorism in Palestine and trained Jewish volunteers, including Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan, who became,

01:18:44

I think, generals in the Israeli military, IDF. He was a Plymouth Brethren and saw his duty to help the

01:18:51

Jews fulfill biblical prophecy. Then you have the Jewish population growth from 1917 to 1939.

01:18:57

Jews in Palestine increased from 7 % to 28%. So this is, the long and short of it is their influence increases because they have numbers, they have people immigrating there, they're creating infrastructure, and they have the sort of, the support of the

01:19:15

British. And I say sort of because the British support kind of wanes and ebbs and flows, but they benefited from it.

01:19:21

This escalates though into a civil war. In 1920, there was the Jerusalem riots that sparked the formation of Haganah, a precursor to the

01:19:29

Israeli Defense Forces. Then you have the Haj Amin al -Husseini, the

01:19:34

Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937, coordinating violent opposition to the Jews. He gained support from Muslim nations and met with and encouraged support for Hitler.

01:19:43

So he sent people to fight with the Nazis. So there was a shared, Hitler said nice things about him and he is engaged in trying to drive the

01:19:52

Jews out of Palestine. 1936, you have the Arab Revolt, which weakened Palestinian society and escalated tensions.

01:19:59

And you have Israeli militant groups forming out of this, the Stern Gang and Irgun, led by Yitzhak Shamir, engaged in attacks, especially the most famous one in 1946 on the

01:20:10

King David Hotel. And there's a reaction to the partition plan that Great Britain wants to foist on them.

01:20:18

And it leads to 900 Jewish deaths by 1948. So there's violence, there's an escalating civil war.

01:20:24

Now, I mentioned that partition plan, and that partition plan, sorry, did I mention, I meant to say the

01:20:30

United Nations, not Britain there. Britain sort of passes the baton, right?

01:20:35

So Britain's in charge of the diplomacy after World War I because the Ottomans are defeated. Now Britain has this area.

01:20:43

And Prince Faisal is sort of in charge at first of this area. If you've ever watched Lawrence of Arabia, you know the story of the

01:20:50

Arab Revolt and Britain's behind that. But the British are effectively in charge. And after the 1929

01:20:55

Arab Riot, the Passfield White Paper in 1930 angered Zionists. It's seen as favoring the

01:21:01

Arabs. And it sort of like caps things like the amount of Jews who can come in.

01:21:07

And the attempt of the White Paper is to try to stabilize the region and prevent more less discord, or sorry, prevent more discord, yes, between Jewish people and the

01:21:21

Arabs who live in the region. But you can't please both sides. There's no, and this is the thing, from our foreign policy, we have to realize these people have been fighting forever.

01:21:31

You're not going to find a solution that pleases both. It's just not gonna happen. Trump thinks he can cut a deal.

01:21:36

It's not gonna happen. The best you can do is manage the problem, really. I mean, you're not, one side's gonna win.

01:21:43

The Foreign Office leaned pro -Arab, the Colonial Office pro -Zionist. So you have the British government split.

01:21:48

One sector is pro -Arab, one sector is pro -Zionist. So they're constantly grinding their own gears. The Peel Commission in 1937 proposed that Jews received 20 % of Palestine's land.

01:22:00

The White Paper, another White Paper in 1939, it was seen by Zionists as appeasing Arabs because it limits

01:22:05

Jewish immigration. And then the Anglo -American Committee on Palestine in 1946 investigated

01:22:10

Jewish immigration and Palestinian issues. So Britain passes the baton and says, let's work with the

01:22:16

Americans. What we're doing isn't working. We just get violence every time we try. And then finally, the

01:22:22

United Nations, it becomes their problems. The UN Special Committee on Palestine in 1947 recommended partitioning 56 % of the land, which was mostly desert to the

01:22:32

Jews, and 42 % to the Arabs. Now, you can imagine the Arabs aren't too happy about this.

01:22:39

We get to a Jewish state. We get to a Jewish state because of the UN. The Northern Baptist Harry Truman supported

01:22:46

Israel's creation and likened himself to Cyrus, but this is despite his complaints about Jewish people.

01:22:52

He does it to win New York. It's purely pragmatic. It's for votes, but he's in office at the time and he supports it.

01:22:59

In 1948, you got the independence. David Ben -Gurion becomes,

01:23:05

I said someone else was the first president, so I'm not, I'm trying to remember. I thought David Ben -Gurion was the first president, actually.

01:23:12

He's definitely the first leader, identifiable leader. And the interesting thing about David Ben -Gurion is he actually fought with the

01:23:19

Ottomans. I believe it was against the British. So he, but anyway, history's weird like that.

01:23:27

So David Ben -Gurion is the one who declares independence in 1948. You have, he's the first prime minister.

01:23:32

That's what he is, first prime minister. Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq immediately invade. So how do you feel about, you know, you're a country, day one of your country's existence, you're invaded by four countries bigger than you.

01:23:44

And it causes 4 ,000 Jewish people to die, but they, these countries are defeated miraculously almost.

01:23:51

And it causes around 70 ,000 Arab refugees with an equal number of Jews fleeing surrounding countries to settle in their place.

01:23:58

Arab countries did not want Jews nor Arab refugees. And this is the problem we have today, guys. This is why we still have this political football in the

01:24:06

Gaza Strip. It's, the reason there's friction is stemming back to that time, that 700 ,000 people left in the wake of the independence.

01:24:19

And it's a long time ago, the wake of Israeli independence. But the countries surrounding countries don't want to accept them.

01:24:26

And their homes and businesses and infrastructure is now occupied by Jewish people who are now fleeing the surrounding countries.

01:24:34

So Muslim countries are kicking all the Jews out. And they do, where did the Jews gonna go? They go to Israel. And now they have, oh, there's homes for us because look at all the people who just left, fleeing

01:24:42

Israel. So this is the dilemma. This is just one of history's, I mean, like, you know, how do you come in with an ethical standard and say, this is right, this is wrong.

01:24:55

It's messy is what it is, but it's reality because time marches on and people just get used to this.

01:25:01

And that's the state of affairs we still have. It didn't stop in 1967. It didn't stop in 1973.

01:25:08

It didn't stop in any of the events that have happened since then in Jewish history,

01:25:13

Israeli history. It is, this has been the ongoing issue. So you have people who want back in or say they do, and they say, well, those are our houses we left, but we were coming back.

01:25:26

We had every intention of coming back. They say, you know, the Jewish people came in, it was finders keepers, man, you left.

01:25:33

This is ours now. That's the dilemma. That's the dilemma. The plan

01:25:38

Dalit or plan D led to village destruction. This was in,

01:25:45

I believe it was the fall, October, November of that year of 1948. You have a basic, it's kind of like a massacre.

01:25:54

So this is one of the, one of many since then incidences where you had civilian casualties and you even had a member of the

01:26:05

Israeli cabinet, Aaron Sisling saying that we have committed Nazi acts.

01:26:11

We in Israel. And it's those kinds of things though that prompt more people to leave.

01:26:21

Now, how do we get from there to Israel's our greatest ally? Because at the time, the

01:26:26

United States is not that supportive of Israel. I mean, the population is, I mean, we're supporting them being a state.

01:26:31

So you're supportive in that sense. They're a country, but as far as like giving them arms and helping them militarily, not so much.

01:26:39

The United States was not supportive initially. The Jordan River irrigation project was an issue that the

01:26:45

U .S. withheld aid to Israel because of. They were diverting water that was meant for Jordan.

01:26:52

And the United States said, well, you shouldn't be doing this. And then you have the Qibla operation in 1953, similar to the situation

01:27:00

I just described before where you have now another case where civilians are killed and it gained bad press for Israel.

01:27:08

You have the Suez crisis in 1956. Eisenhower opposes Israel's actions. Remember during the

01:27:14

Suez crisis, Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal, forms a blockade.

01:27:20

You have the British, the French, and the Israelis coming in to stop that essentially.

01:27:25

And Eisenhower, the Americans are not in favor of this. But something changes and something changes.

01:27:31

And I'm not gonna say this is all AIPAC because it's not, but that's, it looks like that from my slide, doesn't it? Lobbying starts in the 1960s.

01:27:38

You have AIPAC, which helps secure weapons to Israel in the 1960s. But something way more significant happens.

01:27:44

And that is the Six -Day War in 1967. It displaces 300 ,000

01:27:49

Palestinians and 100 ,000 Syrians. It also seemed to confirm that Israel was the in -gathering and helped link secular

01:27:56

Jewish identity to the land, as well as change perceptions among religious Jews like Mark Tenenbaum.

01:28:02

That modern Israel was indeed the fulfillment of prophecy. What does that mean? It means you have the convergence.

01:28:08

This is the date, guys. This is it. This is when you have the convergence of the necessary forces to bring about the state of affairs we have today.

01:28:18

You have a bunch of crazy, miraculous -looking military accomplishments that Israel pulls off in this war.

01:28:28

And as a result of that, you have, and this is where the dispensationalism also comes in, you have

01:28:35

American Christians, who by now are the conservative ones, are mostly in dispensational churches and so forth.

01:28:43

They look at this and they're saying, this is it, guys.

01:28:49

This is it. If I was skeptical before, this looks like it. The Lord's with them. This looks like the in -gathering.

01:28:55

We can identify this nation state of Israel as the fulfillment of the promises given to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David.

01:29:04

That's what this is. This is the land promise. This is it. You also have, at the same time, you have some religious

01:29:11

Jewish people who start warming up to the idea that maybe God is with them. We thought before you had to wait till Messiah comes.

01:29:17

But look, look what they did. Maybe God's with them. And then you also have secular Jewish people that are proud of it.

01:29:24

They're saying, I can't believe that just happened. I'm proud of Israel and I'm supporting Israel now. Those are the forces that have converged to create the modern conditions for the

01:29:33

Zionism that we know in our modern American context that started post -1967, really.

01:29:42

Now, I wanna put lobbying in perspective here just for a little bit, because you hear a lot about Jewish lobbying.

01:29:49

So China spends $457 million. That's not including dark money. That's what we know about, to lobby

01:29:55

U .S. politicians. They're the top from 2016 to 2024, making it the top foreign spender.

01:30:01

Foreign entities like China must register with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, though. So we have to monitor them. In contrast,

01:30:07

Israel spent around $192 million over the same period, but had the added advantage of benefiting from pro -Israel

01:30:13

PACs in the U .S., which are not bound by FARA regulations. Though organizations like AIPAC, the

01:30:20

United Democracy Fund, and other pro -Israel PACs, through those PACs, nearly $279 million was spent on lobbying and campaigns supporting members of both parties, though skewed towards Democrats.

01:30:33

So I wanna just sort of eliminate two myths here, or not myths, but well, the other myths, I guess. One is that it's unique to the

01:30:40

Republican Party. It's not. The spending, if it tilts any way, it probably tilts Democrat. But it's to both parties.

01:30:46

That's the main takeaway. The other thing is that Israel gets this loophole, right?

01:30:52

They have AIPAC, and they have these other groups, and they don't have to abide by FARA. Here's the thing.

01:31:00

Actually, there's a lot of other groups that don't have to abide by FARA that lobby for their countries.

01:31:07

Iran even has one. I'm not kidding. I looked it up. And if you go to the website, it's like, I forget the name of the word, but it's all about peace and pro -peace.

01:31:16

It sounds like a hippie website, right? It's all about love, make love, not war. It's pro -Iran, though. And they don't have to abide by that.

01:31:23

It's very similar to AIPAC in that way, except for the fact that they have no money. It's like, well, you know, they have like $600 ,000 they've given or something.

01:31:30

There's a lot of other countries that, there's no loophole that Israel's using here. It's just that there's enough rich Jewish people in the

01:31:39

United States that happen to support Israel and Christians who happen to support Israel and other secularists who happen to support

01:31:46

Israel that are all giving to these organizations like AIPAC. That's what it is.

01:31:52

So, yeah, these other countries could have organizations that form in the

01:31:57

United States that do the same thing, but they, so far we haven't seen anything that rises really to that level.

01:32:05

At least we have, you know, things that are on the behalf of industries and so forth, but not on the behalf of countries like this.

01:32:12

If you consider AIPAC to be on the behalf of a country, which I think you should probably. The only other

01:32:17

Middle Eastern countries with similar influence are Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both of which also oppose Iranian dominance in the region.

01:32:24

And from 2016 to 2024, Saudi Arabia spent 310 million while Qatar spent 256 million.

01:32:30

Qatar made headlines also recently because they gave Donald Trump a $400 million Boeing jet.

01:32:37

And other Middle Eastern countries, like I said, have non -fair foreign organizations. Like, oh, that's what it is, the

01:32:43

National Council of Resistance of Iran, but they don't have the same level of influence. So I just wanna put lobbying in perspective, but this has been going on with Israel for a while.

01:32:52

And it's been going on internally. Now, what's the basis of Western support? I think this is probably the main, this is what

01:33:00

I've always thought is the main thing. I agree with Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon said that the United States is concerned by more than strategic values.

01:33:07

He said, we have a bond to Israel that is much stronger. It's a moral commitment, a moral commitment because of what happened during the

01:33:13

Holocaust and a moral commitment because it is a democracy, the only democracy in the region.

01:33:19

So you have the same sentiment coming from Germany, from France, from England.

01:33:24

In 2023, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz responded to the Turkish President Erdogan, where Erdogan made a statement questioning

01:33:32

Israel's legitimacy. And the German Chancellor said, Israel is a democracy. And we will emphasize in every conversation and every opportunity that this is our view.

01:33:42

You have Oliver Dowden, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK stating that Israel is a democratic country. It's a rules -based country.

01:33:48

It's part of our broader Western family of nations. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, likewise said that Israel has, let's see, he said that his country and Israel are two democracies attached to the rule of law and respect for an independent and professional judiciary.

01:34:05

This seems to be the basis that Western countries support Israel on, that it's a liberal democracy.

01:34:11

That's the moral justification they need. Now you can add to it, you put it in Christian garb and all the rest, but that seems to be the main thing that support that Western countries, including the

01:34:22

United States have. And according to Richard Nixon, that's what's going on. So this tendency though, to base support for Israel on a liberal democracy seems like it's a substitute for a

01:34:35

Christian cultural affinity. In other words, and I'm just gonna sort of give you the too -long -didn't -read on this for the sake of time, but from the

01:34:43

Muslim's perspective, it's like the Crusades didn't end. We're still in the region. We still are doing our thing there, and we're doing it because we are in support of this new thing, liberal democracy.

01:34:56

But here's Dr. Mohammed Ammara, a Sunni Islamic scholar at Al -Azhar. I think he's died, but at the

01:35:03

Al -Sharif Islamic Research Academy in Cairo. He said, from an Islamic perspective, the state of Israel is not a religious embodiment of Judaism, but rather part of a broader

01:35:11

Western agenda. Occupy the land and we can resolve. The true nature of the conflict is not rooted in religion, but in the usurpation of Islamic land and the establishment of a base to advance

01:35:20

Western dominance over the Islamic world. You had the Ayatollah Khomeini also say the same thing in 79, or maybe he,

01:35:29

I don't know if his was in 79, but he said, Israel was originated through a conspiracy and collaboration of the imperialist countries of the

01:35:36

East and the West. It was created to suppress and colonize the Muslim nations. So this sounds a lot like the free

01:35:43

Palestine guys, but this seems to be like, broadly speaking, if you want to zoom out all the way, that's what's going on here.

01:35:50

It's, do you support liberal democracy in the region or do you see this as a crusade of the

01:35:58

West that's enslaving a Muslim country? And of course you have to assume that you believe that that region belongs to Muslims because Jewish people obviously were there before heavy levels of Jewish immigration, but the immigration is what, and the wars and so forth, it was what contributed to the

01:36:15

Jewish dominance we see now. So let's talk about the evangelical trends in our country specifically, and in Great Britain to a lesser extent.

01:36:26

Evangelical trends have been to support Israel. And this is sponsored because, this happens because of sponsored trips to Israel that have become commonplace.

01:36:34

I don't know how many times Christian groups are going over to Israel. Sometimes it's because there's groups in Israel that see it to their advantage and they pay for it.

01:36:42

Other times, it's just, it's all set up there now, right? It wasn't before, now it is.

01:36:49

You can go over there and it's a tourist thing. And when you take the tour on, oftentimes you're visiting sites of Israeli independence and you're gaining appreciation for the nation state of Israel.

01:37:02

And that's by design in any of these trips, not all of them, but many of them.

01:37:09

Figures like Oral Roberts and Billy Graham obviously went over there and it did help cultivate this sort of support.

01:37:16

You had American Institute of Holy Land Studies in 1957 forming which helped give Christian colleges and universities access to Holy Land sites.

01:37:23

So now you can go study there. You have in 1963, the National Association of Evangelicals hosting

01:37:28

Rabbi Mark Tannenbaum from the American Jewish Committee. It's the first time you've had a rabbi at their gathering.

01:37:35

Billy Graham even lobbied Nixon for Israel aid in 1973. So this trend is for evangelicals to see

01:37:43

Israel as a friend, an ally. And this just seems to keep increasing.

01:37:50

Jerry Falwell said in 1984 that evangelicals rapidly became pro -Israel over a 20 year period.

01:37:56

And of course, I just did a podcast with Jay Burden because Falwell formed alliances with Israel leaders like Menachem Begin.

01:38:06

So, but this was formed over a 20 year period gradually since 1967, really, that's what he's saying.

01:38:12

Since the 1967 Six Day War, you've had evangelicals really warming up.

01:38:18

And this is the more dispensational leaning group. You also don't have Christian renewalists like David Pawson and Derek Prince.

01:38:26

These guys are not dispensationalists. They're very critical of dispensationalism, but they're very pro -Israel. And their theology inspired the

01:38:33

International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and is held by the new Apostolic Reformation Movement, which has incorporated renewalism, they call it.

01:38:41

Prince saw Christian's duty to make amends to the Jews for the Holocaust by supporting

01:38:46

Israel. And you can still go there today for the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem.

01:38:53

It's an active political organization that's supposed to represent Christians and support

01:38:58

Israel. And, but they're not dispensationalists. So it's not unique to dispensationalism, but of course, because a lot of the people in evangelicalism were dispensationalists and because they were able to make it fit into their scheme, that became a justification.

01:39:16

The end of the Soviet Union also, and this is huge, sees Iraq and then Iran as the new evil empires.

01:39:23

And so if those guys are the evil empires and those guys are gonna be where the Antichrist comes from, then of course,

01:39:29

Israel's now the good guy too. And I remember when I was at Master's, or I guess

01:39:35

Seminary, Master's Seminary, I did a semester there in 2011. I still remember John MacArthur was preaching, you can probably still find the sermon.

01:39:43

He preached that the Mahdi was going to be the Antichrist, whole sermon on it. And I just thought, this is strange.

01:39:51

The reformers thought it was the Pope, right? And now it's, but this, it shifted. It shifted depending on who the enemies were.

01:39:59

And so dispensationalism has been, and just eschatology in general, has been remarkably adaptable to these changes.

01:40:07

You also have outside influences. You have the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs publishing the Christian, published

01:40:13

Christian news from Israel to update Western Christians on Israeli events. So literally the Israeli government is trying to court the support of Christians.

01:40:22

You have broadening support during the Cold War, which led to Judeo -Christian coalition. So this is a term that sort of gained sway during the

01:40:31

Cold War, started to become more popular. It was further boosted by archeologist, William Foxwell Albright's work and message during a time of renewed interest in biblical archeology.

01:40:40

So now we have all these archeological digs confirming the Bible story and that kind of thing.

01:40:45

And it's creating a tie between us and Israel. So all of this is happening in a short period of time, but it does gradually form over the course of decades.

01:40:55

One of the things I'm concerned about in all this is that this has produced in some ways less evangelism, a less evangelistic emphasis,

01:41:04

I should say, among Jewish people in the Holy Land. So you have Southern Baptists who pioneered the witness theology, which is just to basically like friendship evangelism, just be a good witness.

01:41:13

You have Douglas Young, the founder of the American Institute of the Holy Land Studies, saying the

01:41:18

Jewish conversions would only happen after the rapture. So our efforts should go into reconciling with Jews instead.

01:41:24

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association produced His Land in 1970, a film which was edited for Jewish audiences where the final gospel message was removed.

01:41:32

John Hagee's Christian United for Israel, John Hagee's group was endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu and does not focus on evangelism.

01:41:40

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is a humanitarian effort, and it uses language that appeals to Christians, but it's not evangelistic.

01:41:48

You've probably seen those commercials. The International Christian Embassy, which I mentioned before, advocates for Israeli politically, but downplays proselytizing.

01:41:59

And then Christian Friends of Israel does not proselytize at all. So you have some of these organizations that are pro -Israel, and they're also

01:42:06

Christian, but like we've lost the point. We've lost, like why? Well, because we support them politically.

01:42:14

And we've lost, or I don't know how widespread this is, but it's widespread enough that the focus on evangelism has been lost.

01:42:22

Now there were dissenters to some of this. I wanna highlight two of them. There's obviously a lot more, but I just thought these guys were interesting.

01:42:28

So the first one, Donald Gray Barnhouse, one of the most prominent American pastors who had a long tenure as a pastor of the prestigious 10th

01:42:37

Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was the editor of the prophecy journal, Revelation. And in 1949, he warned

01:42:44

Israel must remember that there were promises to Ishmael as well as to Isaac.

01:42:49

And they will drink a bitter cup if they continue in their cruel and heartless way. The land has been sworn to Jacob, yes, but Jacob is to rule it one day in righteousness and not in cruelty.

01:43:01

So there you have Presbyterians saying, yep, the land's gonna be yours, but you can't rule it that way. You also have

01:43:06

Charles Ryrie from Christianity Today, 1969, saying, we must remember, no matter where our sympathies lie, that in these modern wars, no side is in blameless entirely.

01:43:16

And while the efforts of a political state may ultimately be used by God in the mysterious accomplishing of his purpose, his use of the wrath of men does not excuse the wrath or make right the wrongs that the state may commit.

01:43:28

In other words, we must not assume that the end justifies the means. And the return of the Jews to Palestine is clearly taught in the Bible. And many

01:43:35

Israelites feel that they are now fulfilling these prophecies, but to the Christian, this seems to be a sign of the imminent return of Christ.

01:43:40

But no Christian can afford to forget that what we are seeing is a political and or a racial and or a religious phenomenon, not a spiritual one.

01:43:49

That is amazing to me coming from Charles Ryrie, okay? His Bible is still one of the most popular study

01:43:56

Bibles and certainly one of those popular dispensational study Bibles. And here you have Ryrie saying, we're not obligated to support the modern state of Israel.

01:44:06

So food for thought, throwing it out there. Probably isn't surprising to people that have listened this far.

01:44:14

Now, I'm just gonna briefly touch on this. I didn't do a lot of study in it, but Roman Catholic views also seem to be changing on this subject, interestingly.

01:44:22

So you have Jacques Maritain in, I don't know, early 20th century and then

01:44:28

Rose Therring in the mid 20th century. Both of them, one's a Catholic philosopher, one's a

01:44:33

Catholic nun fighting antisemitism. And you have John Maria Osterreicher, one of the architects of the

01:44:41

Nostra Aetate or the In Our Age, which opposed antisemitism. And this is what

01:44:49

Don Lewis says. He says, some well -known Roman Catholics supported Zionism prior to Vatican II, notably the British diplomat,

01:44:54

Sir Mark Sykes, who worked to convince Prince Faisal of going along. And a few

01:45:00

Catholic theologians and writers, Jacques Maritain, who I think we just mentioned. And he helped draft this international declaration of human rights.

01:45:10

The English writer, G .K. Chesterton, apparently also. But these guys, a lot of them grew up in Protestant homes.

01:45:17

So to what extent is this Catholic, I don't know. But the Catholics do seem to be changing their views on this as well.

01:45:25

Now, I'm getting towards the close here and then I'll take your comments because this is a very long podcast. But this is what

01:45:31

I want to sort of emphasize about the modern state of Israel. The modern state of Israel is a secular state.

01:45:37

Their national anthem, Hatikvah, I think that's how you say. It has these lyrics, with eyes turned towards the

01:45:44

East, looking toward Zion, then our hope, the 2000 year old hope will not be lost to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

01:45:53

That's as close to as religious as it gets. It's really not religious. It's the

01:45:59

Israel guarantees freedom of religion, has a secular legal system, uses democratic mechanisms, sponsors Jewish, Arabic and secular schools with extensive accommodations for LGBTQ and abortion.

01:46:10

As of 2023, Israel's population is approximately 9 .7 million with about 73 .5 %

01:46:16

Jewish and 21 % Arab, mostly Muslim. You got Christians, Druze and others. In the 25th

01:46:22

Knesset elected 2022, there are 10 Arab members out of 120. So you can be

01:46:28

Arab, you can be Muslim and you can serve in the Knesset. You can serve in Israeli government.

01:46:34

Most of them are Muslim or represent Arab majority parties. So there are

01:46:40

Arab parties and they usually have between eight and 12 seats. So this does exist in Israel. This is not, you know,

01:46:46

I hear people be like, oh, it's a Jewish ethno state and that kind of thing. Yeah, there's some things that like privileges, like you can be born somewhere else.

01:46:54

And if you're Jewish, you have easier time immigrating and that kind of thing. But this is really a secular state.

01:47:01

And it's on the basis of there being a secular democracy that I showed you before that the

01:47:07

Western countries tend to support them. So that's the slideshow. Now, a few takeaways,

01:47:12

I'll get to some questions. Hopefully that was an educational experience. And although there's a lot of other questions you probably have, and maybe there's enough to go into another podcast on this topic.

01:47:24

Hopefully you realized a few things. One of them is that eschatology tends to be very adaptable and it changes according to conditions, generally speaking.

01:47:33

Another one is that Zionism is not a new idea. It is an older idea that the

01:47:40

Jewish people have a homeland, even in Palestine, in that region. And it's certainly not unique to dispensationalism.

01:47:47

In fact, you could defeat dispensationalism, which some guys wanna say, we're gonna defeat it, right? We're gonna defeat dispensationalism, get rid of it forever.

01:47:54

And then we're gonna get rid of all this pro -Jewish sentiment in our government. Yeah, right.

01:48:00

Good luck, right? Good luck trying to do that. It's not contingent on that. It didn't start because of that.

01:48:06

And it's not gonna end because of that. I don't wanna get into like psychologizing why that becomes the scapegoat, but that's one of the things

01:48:15

Don Lewis actually talks about quite a few times in his book. He probably says it three or four times that, look, people who do make this conflation of like Zionism and dispensationalism are the same thing.

01:48:24

He says, I keep reading this. I'm like, where are you getting this? This is not, this may be a trope that's thrown out there, but it's not accurate.

01:48:31

So let's at least try to be accurate, right? You can disagree with dispensationalism all day long and give great arguments against it.

01:48:37

I have a few of my own that I think don't seem to fit in my mind, but I'm not gonna engage in this kind of thing because it's just not accurate.

01:48:47

And I wanna represent accurately, right? So I think that's another thing. I think it's also important to know that none of this stuff is a monolith.

01:48:59

There's converging forces and you don't just have international Jews across the world and they're also in support of the

01:49:07

Jewish state and it's all the same and there's a lot of differences. And I've pointed this out for a long time, but you do have different Jewish groups who believe different things.

01:49:18

And there are Jewish people, and there was even at one time a majority of Jewish people in Europe and even in the

01:49:26

United States who are very unsupportive of a Jewish state in Palestine.

01:49:32

I think that's probably changed more so, but there's still a lot of animosity against Israel, even from Jewish people.

01:49:39

I live in New York right now. I see it quite often. It's on university campuses primarily, but you have

01:49:46

Jewish students. There's a town I could take you if you really wanted to come that's not far from me, that the protesters are out just about every weekend.

01:49:54

And there are Jewish people who will be standing there with their signs against Israel, calling it an apartheid state and a

01:50:01

Nazi regime, and they're Jewish. And so don't think of this as a monolith.

01:50:06

You have to be more specific, I think, when you're not careless,

01:50:12

I guess is what I'm trying to say. You can't be careless when you're just, it's sloppy when you're just throwing terms out there and saying, well, of course we know all the

01:50:19

Jews support Israel or something. It's not necessarily the case. And there've been politicians in the past who believe that and crafted policy based on that when it wasn't accurate.

01:50:29

What else? I think it also probably emphasizes the importance of being careful in conversations about eschatology.

01:50:39

I think that's one of the things I've learned from going over this is that there is a broad spectrum.

01:50:45

Even in the reformed world, there's a broad spectrum on eschatology throughout time. And there's many godly men who believe many different things.

01:50:54

And so it's not determinative necessarily of, it could be, but it doesn't have to be determinative of political or social beliefs.

01:51:04

Oftentimes it just sort of, it's suited for them. It is, it becomes, it adapts to them.

01:51:13

But I wanna extend grace in charity where I can because it's a complex topic.

01:51:19

And I don't think, I think what's happened in Christian circles, especially reformed Christian circles is we are so used to worldview thinking, quote unquote, over the past 30, 40 years that we look at eschatologies that way.

01:51:31

And we think, well, this is what determines what you'll do with your policy. When oftentimes it can be the other way around.

01:51:39

And I do think that strong sentiments for recognizing the plight of Jewish people, seeing them as persecuted.

01:51:49

Now that same sentiment, by the way, is going towards people living in the Gaza Strip. That has contributed to shifting theological views.

01:51:59

It's oftentimes other things, it's other circumstances that will motivate someone to have those particular beliefs.

01:52:07

Obviously there's also people who are just very, you know, convicted from scripture in their eschatological scheme. But I don't think that that's the main issue here at all.

01:52:14

I really don't. I think that that is more of a surface thing and it's prominent, we should understand it, but it's not the driving force,

01:52:22

I'll put it that way, behind why Christians have supported Zionism. So that's my take after going through all of that, right?

01:52:30

That's what I'm seeing jumping out at me. So yeah, there's so much more

01:52:36

I probably could say, but let's get to some of the questions and then we'll end the podcast. There's a lot of, man, there's a lot of comments.

01:52:43

I'll try to start at the beginning. I haven't been paying attention to any of the comments, so hopefully we can, and some of these comments

01:52:51

I don't get, I'm gonna be honest with you. Omni bar, hope you get your Omni barcode money. Man, okay, I don't know what that's talking about.

01:52:57

All right, someone does not like me. I'm curious if you and Joel Webbin would be willing to debate this topic.

01:53:06

I don't know what we would debate to be quite honest with you. I am not familiar. I've only seen little clips here and there and I haven't seen anything in a long time from Joel on this particular topic.

01:53:17

I know he's very against dispensationalism. I don't know anything else about where he's at.

01:53:23

I'm assuming he's, probably the last time I actually talked to him about any of this was probably a few years ago, unless there's a conversation that has happened since then that escapes me.

01:53:36

And at the time he was more of like post -mill, reconstructionist, theonomous guy.

01:53:43

And I'm not even sure if he's quite there anymore. So I don't know exactly where he's at. I don't know what we would have to debate.

01:53:48

I'm basically just giving you the historical record and you basically just have to deal with it.

01:53:54

This is the record. I'm not crafting a theological argument here. I'm not trying to convince you of a certain eschatology.

01:54:02

I'm just telling you, this is actually what happened in history. So how do you make sense of that?

01:54:08

You gotta have a paradigm that makes sense of what actually happened. You can't make up a fantasy of what happened. That's all I'm saying. Let's see.

01:54:17

Can we just have our own place? Yeah, you know, Michael, what

01:54:22

Herschel wanted for Israel, I want for my country, except without the liberalism, right? Yeah, I feel that, man.

01:54:28

I feel that, man. I really do. Tribe of Judah ceased to exist, says

01:54:34

Jim, after 70 AD. Romans 11 happened in the 60s. That was the jealousy pole.

01:54:40

Yeah, I don't buy this. This is a preterist view of that whole thing. I think it's a weak argument personally.

01:54:45

I don't want to get into the eschatology of it right now. It's so far removed from the conversation I'm having about what happened in history of Zionism.

01:54:54

I just, I have a hard time seeing that fit the biblical prophecies, to be quite honest with you, but.

01:55:00

And yeah, and I've heard arguments for it. So I understand, I think, sort of basically where people are coming from with that.

01:55:07

Let's see. Man, there's so many, and I have to, I'm sorry I have to be choosy here, guys. I don't know what else to say.

01:55:14

There's just a lot of comments coming in. If you put a question mark by it, I'm more likely to get to it, just so you know. Christ is the fulfillment, says

01:55:21

Marbie Dogg, of the Abrahamic covenant and the Mosaic covenant and the David's covenant. Christ is the new covenant, which everyone, including modern

01:55:28

Jews, can be grafted in. I think there's a broad agreement on this in various eschatological positions.

01:55:36

But the question then becomes, is there a far and a near fulfillment? And I think a dispensationalist would probably say that, yes,

01:55:45

Christ is the fulfillment of these things. A covenantal person actually would too. They would both say that.

01:55:52

But do the land promises uniquely belong to Israel? Or is it gonna be a

01:55:58

Jewish kingdom that we, what's the kingdom setup?

01:56:04

What does it actually look like? And what's the timescale? When are the events shaping up to produce this

01:56:12

Jewish kingdom or is it not a Jewish kingdom at all, right? That's really the question. But I think they'd all, that's the thing.

01:56:18

Everyone could sort of rally around language that sounds similar to that. Of all the other 11 tribes, okay,

01:56:24

I don't know what that's about. Let's see here. When Paul says salvation is from the

01:56:33

Jews, do you think he means only the tribe of Judah? Okay, this is like an internal conversation I'm not part of, so I'm gonna try to leave that alone and get to some of the newer comments.

01:56:48

Jesus came from both the line of Joseph and, okay. This is, I think there's a side conversation that was going on when

01:56:53

I was doing the podcast that. All right, Matt Borish. Hey, Matt.

01:56:59

Dispensational theology does not require its adherence to view the 1947, I think he meant to say the 1947

01:57:04

Jewish state as a fulfillment. That is true. I just showed you examples of some believers that don't seem to go that way.

01:57:12

Dispensational theology, oh, he said, doesn't have to view that. And okay, so I basically,

01:57:19

I took the words out of his mouth. I knew what he was gonna say before he said it. Let's see.

01:57:26

Maybe, John, you need to do a show on what is a Jew? What is a

01:57:33

Jew? So you want my theological answer? Is a Jew according to a spiritual

01:57:38

Israel or do you want the ethnic kind of identity of Israel?

01:57:45

See, that could be a whole long podcast, longer than this one, just going through scriptures on those two different things.

01:57:53

Israel is the Christian church, not the 1948 state. No one's denying that.

01:58:00

You guys insisted on denying that when Dispies say Jews, they're referring to descendants of Israelites. Okay, well,

01:58:08

I don't know where this conversation's going, but I think it's time for me to end it. It's been two hours.

01:58:14

Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. I do wanna say in closing, we are having a men's retreat and you can go to musicandmasculinity .com.

01:58:23

I think you're gonna really enjoy it. It's a wonderful time. It's a relaxing time. You get to be with all kinds of brothers and sisters in Christ who love the

01:58:31

Lord. I also wanted to mention, though, that I will be speaking before that, and I haven't mentioned this before, at the

01:58:40

World Right in Front of You Conference in Batavia, Ohio. And that's on August 28th through 30th, at the

01:58:46

World Right in Front of You Conference. You can go to, I think if you Google blue -collar confessionalism, it'll come up.

01:58:54

So that's an event that's coming up here soon, blue -collar confessionalism, the

01:58:59

World Right in Front of You in Batavia, Ohio. And there's gonna be a great lineup from what I understand at that conference.

01:59:05

It's held at East River Church. And you got William Wolfe. Oh, I'm actually happy. I'm gonna see William Wolfe, my good buddy.

01:59:12

Rob Pacienza. I don't know if he's still coming, actually. Jake Mentzel, Keith Foskey, Ryan Denton, and Michael Foster and Emily Foster are all gonna be speaking at that event.

01:59:24

And I just, I'm honored to be there as well. Looking forward to seeing it. So I hope you guys can sign up for that, and I would love to see you there.