Allen Jackson - Christianity and Antisemitism - Part 2
I want to take two or three passages. How much time have I got? I got a bit. It’s a confusing topic, and I’m going to take just a minute. It’s a less formal service. I said one time to a group of people with whom I was traveling to Israel that the average Israeli on the street was much more comfortable with a Muslim than they were with a Christian, and one of the men that was traveling with me came and he said, «Allen,» he said, «I think you misspoke». And he repeated the phrase, and I said, «No, I didn’t misspeak». And he said, «Well, I don’t understand». And I said, «Well, the Christian community has killed far more Jewish people than the Muslims have ever imagined».
And it’s really a lack of awareness of our own history to understand the degree to which the church has been involved in this. In fact, the church has been… and when I say church, I’m not speaking of the true church but I’m speaking of generic church, buildings and labels and denominations and movements, but the church has been a primary incubator of a hatred of the Jewish people for century upon century upon century. The churches of Europe did precious little during World War II to protect the Jewish communities. That’s just a matter of fact. Hitler was a baptized Catholic. I’m not denigrating the Catholics, and the good people of faith would say, «Well, he wasn’t a good one».
But you will understand if the Jewish people are not impressed with your distinction. They just understood he was a man of faith. We had a terror event on New Year’s Day in New Orleans by a man who was Muslim, and there are those amongst the Islamic community that will say, «Well, he wasn’t a good one». For the families involved in that event, that distinction is not simple. You understand? It’s infiltrated particularly Western culture but primarily through the influence of the church. The reason I’m taking a moment with it is we have to be a voice to begin to change it.
You see, the Bible tells us in the book of Romans that we are indebted to the Jewish people. Without the Jewish people, we would have no Scripture, we would have no prophets, we would have no Messiah, we wouldn’t have known the law of God. We would have no story. I’m going to read you some passages in just a moment, but I want to set the formal language for this is replacement theology; that God replaced the Jewish people, and every place you see Israel or Jewish people you just pencil in church, and I believe it’s bad exegesis and bad theology, but it’s caused now, because we have such a gulf between the communities, it’s a difficult conversation and the Christians' lack of awareness doesn’t help us.
When I studied in Hebrew University, I was in a program for overseas students. There were a few dozen of us that were graduate students, but there were several hundred that were taking a junior year abroad, Jewish students. And I was there several weeks in class before it became, somehow it came out in class that I was a pastor. I’d been wearing shorts and a T-shirt for several weeks, I didn’t look like one, and the whole class turned around and they said almost in unison, «We’ve never seen one of you before up close». And they were overwhelmingly American students, but they had had very little dialogue with anyone in the Christian community.
I remember that day in class they said, «Why is your Bible so small?» speaking of the New Testament. They said, «Ours is much bigger,» speaking of the Old Testament, and the majority of them had never read the New Testament. That’s why when I say to Christians we’re going to read our Bible, they go, «Oh, I don’t like reading the Old Testament». I’m like, «Oh, that’s helpful. That’s helpful». You know, that’s like signing a contract and only reading the parts you like, the part that entitles you to the goods and services you want and you just skip over the part that talks about your responsibilities. You understand it’s illogical with the contract. It’s equally illogical with your Bible. But on that one extreme, we have replacement theology that says the Jewish people failed and therefore they’ve been set aside.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a dual covenant theology; and this is prevalent in many places as well, and it says that the Jewish people don’t have to deal with Jesus, that God made a special covenant with Abraham, and that it… so we don’t have to have that awkward conversation with the Jewish people. Well, I believe that’s equally erroneous. Our Messiah was an observant Jewish rabbi. When you walk through the gates of the New Jerusalem, the book of Revelation tells us that the gates you enter on will be inscribed with the names of Hebrew men, and at the center of the city is the throne with that observant Jewish rabbi seated there. It’ll be an awkward place if you hate the Jewish people. You can’t really understand the redemptive work of Jesus apart from the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible.
So if we love the Jewish people, we have to be willing to tell them what we know of the person of Jesus. Now, bear with me a moment. The goal is not to convert them to Christianity. The goal is to introduce them to their Messiah. Christianity is a label. We got lots of people that sit in churches that call themselves Christians that don’t honor the Word of God. I’m concerned for them. So the goal in our interaction with our Jewish friends is not to teach them to worship like we worship but to introduce them to the person of Jesus so that they might know him as their Messiah.
Now, there’s a lot of labeling that goes on around that and my encouragement to you is don’t get into it. I mean, to all of us, all of us want to find ways that make us special. «Our worship’s better than your worship. The translation we read is better than your translation. Our DNA is better than your DNA». Something, self-righteousness is a malady of religious people, and we all are pretty good at it. And when you can, it’s better to stay out of those places where you’re trying to elevate yourself above other persons because your nomenclature, your labeling is better than theirs. Talk to them about the person of Jesus and why you understand him to be the Messiah.
The language, when we talk about church, at this point in the unfolding of the story, is very much a non-Jewish institution. I have a lot of Jewish friends that are very comfortable in church world, but I have a lot of Jewish friends who are not. Synagogue is a Jewish word for the place where they worship, and most Christians wouldn’t be comfortable there. We’re not trying to convert them to a label change, we want to introduce them to a person of Jesus. Now, with that in mind, I want to take you back to the New Testament because the reality is we better stand together. Amen?
Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 2, this is Paul writing to a church in a Roman city where he began his ministry by going to the synagogue. And when he gets tossed, he’ll go talk to whoever will listen. «Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ», he’s talking to a group of predominantly Gentile, non-Jewish believers. «You were separate from the Messiah, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise…» And if you were in that position, he describes your condition. He said you were without hope and without God in the world. «But now…» And Christ and Messiah are interchangeable terms. «In the Messiah Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility».
We stand together, united through the shed blood of Jesus and his redemptive work; that it isn’t about our DNA, it’s about our faith in Jesus. The New Testament says that Jesus was the end of the law as a means of righteousness. One of the habits we have in reading our Bibles is we change the punctuation and I’ll give you another verse where we do that.
In Ephesians 6 it says, «For we wrestle not against flesh and blood». You know the verse? We’ve changed the punctuation. We wrestle not. Hard stop. That’s not what it says. When the Scripture says Jesus was the end of the law as a means of righteousness, it doesn’t say he was the end of the law. God didn’t change his mind and murder and adultery became okay. But we don’t establish our righteousness with God by keeping the rules. It doesn’t mean that the rules don’t have merit. God’s character hasn’t changed. You can’t be murderous or adulterous or a fornicator and participate in the kingdom of God. I don’t care how often you sit in church.
In Romans chapter 11, the church in Rome has been divided. The Jewish leadership that brought that church into existence was expelled by an emperor so the Gentiles stepped into the leadership roles. There was an emperor change. The Jewish people were welcomed back into Rome, but they weren’t welcomed any longer amongst the believers because the Gentiles now were holding the higher seats. And so the message has already begun that God rejected the Jewish people, and Paul addresses it. It’s Romans 11. He said, «I ask then: Did God reject his people»? And that next phrase is the strongest available term in the Greek language. By no means. God forbid. May it never be. You’ll find it translated all of those ways. It’s a very emphatic response.
«There’s just no way he did,» he said. «I’m an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don’t you know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he appealed to God against Israel»? And the answer is no, we don’t know the Scripture far too often. Same chapter, verse 22, «Consider therefore the kindness and the sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness». It intrigues me that we are willing to say to the Jewish community, «You rejected an opportunity, and therefore you have been separated from the opportunities in the kingdom of God».
And typically where you’ll find that perspective, you’ll find an equal perspective that says as Christ followers, there’s nothing you can do to forfeit your place in the kingdom. Understand those two statements side by side are incompatible. So listen to what Paul is saying. «Otherwise, you also will be cut off. And if they don’t persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. After all, if you were cut off of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree».
Paul is using the image of an olive tree, and he’s representing the Jewish people, and he said that they were branches cut off because of their unbelief, and as a result of that, there were those of us who were not a part of the original plant were grafted in. So our nourishment, our sustenance, our viability comes from our relationship with that original tree. And he’s cautioning us. He said, «If the original branches were cut off, what makes you think you’re above that same pruning»? And then he also says that those branches can be grafted back in. God has not rejected the Jewish people. He’s provided for them the same thing he’s provided for every person born on this planet, and that’s an invitation to redemption through his Son, Jesus of Nazareth.
It’s not secured by joining a church, a denomination, by keeping a set of rules, by being kind or generous or loving. It’s not that those things are wrong, but they will not qualify you for redemption before an Almighty God. It requires of us receiving by faith the gift of righteousness made through the sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth, an observant, Jewish man. So it makes perfect sense to me that Satan would cause the people of faith to hate the Jewish people. There’s a very clear logic in that for me. If you wanted to disrupt the momentum of the people of faith, if you wanted to disrupt the purposes of God, you would turn them against one another and create an irrational, illogical, blinding hatred and separate them. It’s not new. It’s been a challenge for the people of faith since the season when the New Testament was assembled, and it persists in the earth today. It’s illogical. It’s irrational.
Hamas, a group of terrorists, attack a group of civilians in the most brutal of ways. I saw the videos. It’s unbelievable. It’s not necessary to describe them. It’s unthinkable. And it wasn’t just terrorist actors. Within the second hour after the attack began, I watched the video, the cars and trucks began coming from Gaza. I saw citizens pushing wheelbarrows and pulling wagons, not simply to loot the property, to do heinous, murderous things. Now, I understand not everybody that lived in Gaza was that way, but to demonstrate on behalf of that behavior and to assign a moral equivalency between a sovereign nation defending its citizens against that kind of brutal attack against innocent civilians and to have it supported by the previously most elite institutions in our nation is an expression of a hatred towards the purposes of God that is stunning.
Anti-Semitism is fueled by the spirit of antichrist. The same spirit that will drive all the destruction and the hatred that you read in the book of Revelation is the spirit that has been poured out upon the Jewish people. So I would encourage you not to engage with the ideas that the Jewish people have been replaced, nor to engage with the ideas that say they don’t need to deal with Jesus. But you’re not trying to convert them to your style of worship. The New Testament says don’t let anyone judge you with regard to holy days or new moon celebrations or all of those… and it intrigues me that to this day we argue about which is the right day to worship. Every day.
If people will come, we’ll have church on Tuesday at 3 o’clock. I tell you this because the days ahead of us, and I don’t mean the week ahead of us but the season ahead of us, I believe the distinction between the true church and the false church is going to continue to become more and more clear. We see already major expressions of established Christendom rejecting the authority of Scripture and biblical values and marriage, any number of ways, and I believe that will escalate. Even while we see great revival and an outpouring of the Spirit of God, the distinction between the true church and the false church will grow and you’ll have to be able to see beyond labels and affiliations that for centuries, for decades, at least, have been reliable. They’re no longer reliable.
You can’t distinguish every congregation just by a label. You’ll have to know the Word of God and the character of God and the Spirit of God well enough to make those distinctions. Rabbinic Judaism, there’s many ways of understanding Judaism, but Rabbinic Judaism, which focuses on keeping the rules, is one of the most profound expressions of the spirit of antichrist in the world, but it’s matched by some expressions of Christendom that are very prevalent in America. We’re going to have to be wiser. We’re going to have to be biblically-informed. Our instructions are to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, not an absence of conflict. Jesus said he gave us his peace. Jesus didn’t live a life free of conflict. He faced consistent, persistent conflict throughout his life and he’s ultimately crucified as a criminal, tortured to death in public, but he said, «My peace I give to you».
We never find Jesus panicked or anxious, even when he stands in the face of authorities that are threatening to execute him. Whether he stands in the face of a storm or he’s confronted with death or demons or disease, he always responded with the authority of the kingdom that he presided over, and he said, «That peace I give to you». We may face storms or challenges or threats, but we can stand in the authority of our King and his kingdom because we are submitted to him. We follow him and we bear his name. And with his help, we will show the respect that is due the Jewish people and the debt that we owe to them, and we will love them enough to tell them the truth in gracious ways.
I brought you a proclamation. I don’t want to read the whole thing with you here, I want to say a prayer, but I think it’s a wonderful proclamation you can take with you. It’s a psalm from the time when the Jewish people were exiled, when they forfeited their place in Jerusalem. You know you can be the covenant people of God and forfeit your freedom? I think that should be on the radar, on the breath of every American believer. If we don’t choose to honor God, we will forfeit our freedoms. I’d get mail. I know not everybody likes that, but I believe it to be true. But Psalm 137 says, «By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormenters demanded songs of joy; they said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion! ' How can we sing the songs of the Lord while we are in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill».
We don’t want to forget the purposes of God. We’re too easily captivated by the pressures of our own selves and our own sphere. If we can recognize that we’re a part of the larger purposes of God, it will bring a meaning to your life and a purpose to your life that will enable you to overcome those personal challenges that feel we were so aware of. We’ve been called to something larger than that, not to ignore ourselves, but to understand we are servants of a King and the purposes of his kingdom. Amen? If you’ll stand, I’d like to pray with you. There’s too many coughs in the room to ask you to join hands. Afraid you’ll start spraying one another with Lysol. Remember those days? Thank God we’ve been delivered.
Father, thank you for your Word. I thank you that you have a people in the earth; that you’ve called us from every nation, race, language, and tribe; Lord, that through the blood of Jesus we have been delivered out of the hand of the enemy, that his power over us has been broken, every claim against us has been canceled. We praise you for that tonight. And, Lord, I pray for your people in the earth, that you would awaken us to your truth. Give us a hungering and thirsting for yourself beyond anything we’ve ever known. We pause tonight to pray for the people of Jerusalem, for the inhabitants of the land. Grant them a revelation of yourself. It will write a new future for them. Lord, I pray for those men and women that have been held hostage for so long. I pray that you would strengthen them, that your angels would stand guard around them. Lord, we pray that they would be released expeditiously. Lord, I pray you would restore what seems to have been taken. I pray that you’ll comfort those who have suffered. We pray for the families in New Orleans that are overcoming. Lord, I pray for those in California that are facing a horrific fire. Lord, we are a people who are dependent upon an Almighty God and we cry out to you tonight. Lord, we turn our hearts to you and we know that you are well able to deliver and heal and restore, and I thank you that we will see it with our own eyes. In Jesus’s name, amen.