Allen Jackson - Why Israel Matters? - Part 1
We’re gonna pick up a study on Why Israel Matters because Israel does matter, and I don’t believe that you can understand the Bible, to be candid, if you don’t have some insight and understanding into the role of Israel and the Jewish people. I think large sections of it will remain a mystery, or, at least, you’re easily manipulated. Well, I had planned, I’d known I wanted to do this for a bit and had been working on it. I thought, you know, finally, I have kind of just a nice little polite Bible study and I could get my maps out. I sat down to do our reading portion for the weekend, and I read Luke 12:56, which I put in your notes, «Hypocrites». I’m like, «oh, it’s a little harsh. You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret», the older translations sometimes say analyze «the present time»?
Jesus is speaking, and he said, «How is it that you’re better at anticipating weather, you can look at the clouds and the direction of the wind and have some some sense of what’s next, but you do not have the ability to analyze the season in which you’re living»? And I read it, and I read it again, and I thought, «Oh, it’s not gonna fit neatly into my little thing. I got to revisit my outline, and the maps aren’t gonna make the cut». You know, if I had to bring it back to our vernacular, the wording we’ve been using lately, it’s we have to watch and listen and think. And I don’t really think we wanna do that, to be honest. We’d just rather not be bothered. We’d rather do what we wanna do and focus on what we wanna focus on and, you know, it’ll work out. But we can’t do that and imagine we’re salt and light.
And I read the passage again, but, you know, there really isn’t anything new under the sun. We struggle to read the signs. We read the ones that are convenient, and we miss the ones that aren’t. I do that every time I go for a drive. Now, how many times you’ve been asked that question, right? «Do you know how fast you were going»? «Oh, I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me,» you know. «Do you know what the speed limit is»? «Is there a speed limit»? I mean, you know, when it’s not convenient, we have kind of a convenient memory. And God is moving in the earth in an unprecedented way, in my opinion, and there’s tremendous confusion in the church.
To be honest, I’m stunned at the capitulation of the church. Our reluctance to stand up for a biblical worldview and Judeo-Christian values, but I think we’ve got to pay attention. And I just thought I would start off by watching and listening and thinking with you a bit. And it is related to why Israel matters, I promise, but there’s so much happening at an unprecedented pace. And the most predictable constant that I can find in this current post-inaugural season is that those who oppose President Trump will be loud and unrelenting in their opposition.
Now, that really isn’t new. We’ve been watching that for a lot of years now. But beyond politics or personal preference, the people who don’t agree with him have proven a willingness to tell any lie, fabricate the most remarkable accusations, and then brazenly repeat what they know to be totally false. And I’ve watched this charade long enough that even though the present version, you pause and you think, «Well, is that credible»? I go, «Wait a minute, you have no credibility because you’ve never repented or apologized or said, 'Oh yeah, by the way, all that other stuff, that wasn’t accurate.'» But the persistence, the volume, and the broad cooperation of the legacy media makes it very difficult to interpret what’s truly happening. It isn’t simple. I thought maybe just a few facts from history would be helpful.
One of the things that these days is drawing intense attention is DOGE and Mr. Musk. I don’t know him personally, but as President Trump announced plans to restructure the federal government and remove entrenched activist bureaucrats, the left has reacted with outrage. …right? Many have claimed that such firings are an unprecedented attack on the civil service. But actually history tells us a very different story. The blueprint for mass firings in the federal government was not drafted by Trump. It was authored by none other than President Bill Clinton. And I can give you just a few of the details. Bill Clinton as president took drastic action when he entered office. He fired many federal appointees and those reporting directly to them. He reached three levels deep into the management hierarchy of the federal government.
It included upper level, mid-level, lower-level managers. Sweeping dismissals were unprecedented at that time in modern history. The stated reason for those actions was to reform government and to make it more efficient. Under the guise of the 1993 Reinventing Government Initiative, Clinton oversaw the termination of almost 380,000 federal employees. The initiative was led by Tennessee’s very own Vice President Al Gore. And it was marketed as an effort to cut bureaucratic bloat. Clinton publicized that his administration reduced the government payroll from 2.1 million employees to just about 1.7, almost 1.8, by the end of his term. However, while he claimed to be trimming the size of government, he was in, reality, expanding it dramatically.
Again, what we’re watching, at least the part we’re watching now, is not new. Rather than actually reducing the government’s reach, Clinton tripled its size by shifting millions of jobs to government contractors. The maneuver allowed his administration to hide the true expansion of government within the bureaucracy. And the workforce under his administration grew from 2.1 million to 9.1 million. The restructuring was the foundation of what has become the deep state, an unelected bureaucratic class that exercises significant influence over government operations, often in opposition to elected leaders who challenge the status quo. It’s the same entity which Trump is now attempting to confront was a product of Clinton’s drastic reshaping of the federal workforce.
So it isn’t unprecedented. It isn’t unheard of. It isn’t unknown. It’s very much a part of the contemporary practice of government. And our government is bloated. They spend billions of dollars on ideology and worldview. When I was in Jerusalem last summer, as you approached the consulate, the American consulate, the most prominent visual was an enormous pride banner. They wouldn’t have allowed you to flown a Christian flag, but they’ll take the worldview they’re spending billions of our tax dollars for and advocate for their worldview. I think as the debate over federal employment rages on, it’s important to remember who first wielded the ax. Trump may be making headlines for firing government employees, but he’s merely following in the footsteps with the one who did the masterclass: Bill Clinton.
The Department of Education was in the news this week. God bless that man. It’s a cabinet-level department that was founded by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. I think the average American thinks it began in 1776. It’s a relatively new insertion into the cabinet level departments of our government. The expressed goal was to close the gap between students performing at lower levels with the students who were achieving higher. They’ve been successful. Now, everybody’s at the lower level. What a colossal failure.
Our educational system, by almost every metric, we’re spending more money than we’ve ever spent, and the outcomes are diminished. The department was a formation under President Carter as a response for the help from the teachers unions during his election. It remains today a stronghold of power for the teachers unions, and the children have suffered to the point that in the past year, the president of the teachers unions said they were the primary authority over the education of the children, not parents. Talk about a bloated imagination of your role. Education must be reimagined. And I would submit to you, especially at the university levels, it has failed.
And then Israel, remember we’re reading signs. I went home this week, and I knew Mr. President Trump was gonna have a news conference with the Prime Minister of Israel, but how many of those have we seen? And I was just kind of moderately interested. So the television was on, I wasn’t pay much attention, and they did the introductions. And then I heard President Trump say, «The United States is going to get involved in Gaza». Well, please, understand that statement is a major shift in the discussion of Israeli and Mideast peace discussions. But what he did was acknowledge the obvious. What he said is so plain, you have to be so distracted to miss it. He said, «The pattern of the last 70 years is a failure». No duh! I mean, Israel has been vilified; more than half the motions in the UN deal with the nation of Israel, tiny little Israel. They’ve been vilified by the nations of the world, far too frequently our own, suggesting that they were the problem in the Middle East.
And you may or may not know that, in 2017, then President Barack Obama gave $300 million to the Palestinians for the construction of concrete production facilities. Now, we don’t have the work orders that have «tunnel» printed on them, but it’s hard to imagine all that concrete that’s gone into the tunnels of Gaza was completely separate from the US’s provision. If that isn’t sufficient, this is a matter of record. President Obama, just before leaving office, delivered 50 billion, with a B, dollars in cash to Iran. They flew it in palletized, and that’s according to Facebook’s fact checkers. But get this: without congressional approval. Because he said, «It wasn’t part of a treaty, and it didn’t require congressional oversight».
Just a casual awareness to what’s happening demands that Gaza be reimagined. The two-state solution is unacceptable. It has failed. I saw the videos. They abused wives and daughters while their husbands watched. And then they murdered the husbands as the wives and daughters watched. They set babies on fire. You can’t repopulate that. They’ve held hostages for over a year. When they’re released, they’re emaciated. It’s going to require a different solution. I don’t imagine that the US ends up with a territorial commitment in Gaza. But I do believe we have to have the courage to say the two-state solution has failed. Millions of Syrians left Syria because of a Syrian civil war, and they have found homes in Europe and other places of the Middle East.
I believe there has to be a more effective solution. Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank of the Jordan River is a biblical step forward. You know, as you’re watching and praying, you’ve got to think, and you have to think beyond the loud noise that is pumped at us. We have leaders who are willing to stand up and say, «There are two genders and can be identified at birth». That’s not only good science, that’s good theology. They’re willing to identify the distinctions between men and women, not greater or lesser, we’re just different, that we shouldn’t compete in athletics, that it has an impact on the military, that our military isn’t a social experiment. Their job is to win wars, that education should be to educate children, not indoctrinate them with propaganda, that DEI is ungodly and wicked. Judging people by their appearance is unacceptable.
It’s not a biblical principle. But the challenge, and it’s a real challenge, is that, if the politicians are the only voices that say it, it will be as reversed more quickly than you can imagine, and what happens will be far more severe than what was faced previously. For those ideas to gain traction and to take root, it requires the people of faith to acknowledge that they have a biblical foundation and to use our voices and our influences to be advocates for that. And we’re reluctant. We don’t want to lose friends, we hear the noise, we see the pushback.
And so we be quiet. And if we do, I believe, we will face the judgment. I don’t want politicians to have more courage than those of us who say we’re people of faith. It’s a very important season to pay attention and to stay grounded in your Bible. If you’re not reading your Bible, it’s impossible. It’s just impossible. Because we have drifted for decades so far off course, I’m not sure we even recognize the narrow path and the narrow gate. We’ve convinced ourselves that we can lead immoral lives and ungodly lives, and God will shrug his shoulders.
Folks, he won’t. We’ve convinced ourselves that grace trumps justice, and it doesn’t. We’ve convinced ourselves that judgment is only for somebody else, that it won’t come to us, and so we’ve welcomed to our kitchen tables and our holiday tables ungodly behaviors and ungodly activities, and then we chase it with the line, «Well, they’re saved». If you’re leading an ungodly life, what is the evidence? The recitation of a prayer? I don’t want to face eternity with that and I don’t want anyone that I care about to face eternity with that. It’s a very important time for the church. It’s an exciting time. It meets most of the definitions I know for biblical expressions of renewal, or awakening.
Times of change, times of upheaval, times of turmoil, times of division, the Gospels are filled with it, and it follows right through the letters of the New Testament. I happen to believe we’re living through a time when the Spirit of God is moving profoundly. And I want to move with him. So let’s pick up this notion. Israel is going to be in the news a bit. And you will hear all sorts of bellicose blubbering. You want to have a biblical perspective, and that’s what I’d like to take a few minutes to try to help you establish a bit of why Israel matters and, particularly, to those who are Christians. I think the first and the most significant principle is that the Jewish people, the nation of Israel, are a chosen people, chosen by God.
Many, many ways we could unpack that far beyond the scope of this session, but in the New Testament, the word «Israel» occurs 77 times. And those words are never applied to the church. The word «Jew» occurs 75 times in the Old Testament and 188 times in the New Testament. Just as a matter of comparison, the word «Christian» appears three times in the New Testament. It gives you some sense, it’s not the only evidence, but it gives you just a bit of perspective of the significance God attaches to the people in the nation of Israel. And I think probably the first step in understanding that is that they are a unique people. There’s just no one else like them in history, in God’s economy, in God’s relationship with Adam and his descendants. The Jewish people were chosen. They’re unique.
Look at 1 Chronicle 17. This is King David’s prayer. He said, «There is no one like you, O Lord, and there’s no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears. And who is like your people Israel, the one nation on earth whose God went out to redeem a people for himself, and to make a name for yourself, and to perform great and awesome wonders by driving out nations from before your people, whom you redeemed from Egypt? You made your people Israel your very own forever, and you, O Lord, have become their God».
Now, again, a very straightforward passage, some simple observations. God chose Israel. They didn’t choose him. He chose them. Israel is not like all the other nations. They weren’t in the beginning of the book, and they are not today. God established with them, in the words we just read, an everlasting covenant, or agreement. It’s the strongest word for commitment in all of Scripture, Old Testament or New «covenant». It’s the most binding agreement that God can make with humanity. When we pray, we don’t pray for Israel as if she were like all the other nations. See, I have discovered something in my journey is that the most effective prayers we pray, the most powerful prayers we pray, are when we pray in alignment with the Word of God. It’s why we will often pray prayers that are just taken from Scripture.
We wanna add the authority of our voice, and there is an authority, a spiritual authority, in your voice, but you wanna add your voice to agreeing with what God has said he will do. Well, when we pray for Israel, we want to pray in alignment with the Word of God, not the alignment of the UN or a politician or a party or an ideology. I’m pretty certain that the archangels don’t have a meeting in heaven and go, you know, «Do you think the UN will get it right»? There are some distinct features with regard to the Jewish people in the nation of Israel that the Scripture gives us in Exodus 19 and verse 5, it says, «If you fully obey me and keep my covenant, out of all the nations you’ll be my treasured possession.
Although the whole earth is mine, you’ll be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words you’re to speak to the Israelites». It’s what God says to Moses. There is no other nation on the earth today, nor has there ever been, to whom God has ever spoken those words. Imagine if it said that about the United States or Middle Tennessee or your tribe. But it doesn’t. One of the things that is distinctive about the Jewish people is the Messiah, the Savior of all humanity, came through the Jewish people. Our Lord and Savior is an observant Jewish Rabbi.
Look at Romans chapter 9 and verse 4, «the people of Israel, theirs is the adoption as sons, theirs is the divine glory,» and this was New Testament, if you’re paying close attention, «the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen».
Again, God adopted them as a nation. The divine glory, that means the manifest presence of God, was with Israel as long as they walked in obedience to him. Sometimes in the most significant ways, pillars of cloud and pillars of fire, the parting of the sea, the provision of manna. You see, we talk about the power of God and the miracles of God and the presence of God. But the pattern for that is what God did with that covenant people. Our imagination of what the glory of God looks like is derived from what we saw God do in the midst of the Jewish people, the nation of Israel. The covenants, all the biblical covenants are with Israel.
There’s a lot of fear in the church these days because we recognize, intuitively, if we haven’t recognized it consciously, that the world has changed. The way we practiced our faith two or three years ago isn’t sufficient for what’s before us right now. Don’t be frightened by that. Ask the Lord to give you an understanding heart. We’ve got to learn to see in some new ways so we can respond with boldness and courage. Let’s pray:
Father, I pray you’ll give us new courage, new eyes to see, new understanding hearts that we may respond with great faith to what you’re doing in the earth. I thank you for it. In Jesus’s name, amen.