Allen Jackson - How Far Is Too Far? - Part 1
The topic is «Supporting Israel: How Far is Too Far»? It’s a question that’s relevant this week because Israel is still at war. They’ve been at war for over 600 days. There’s a new chapter in that initiative. The conflict with Iran has broken into a more direct confrontation. Israeli planes have been over Iran. Part of what sparked my response in this lesson wasn’t those things. I was supposed to be in Jerusalem this week. But so much of what I have, the discussion I’ve heard in the public square has had to do with severe questioning about the appropriateness of what Israel is doing.
And perhaps more on point, the desire that’s been expressed repeatedly that the United States not be a part of that. And I’ve heard a lot of confusion and a lot of equivocation and a lot of things candidly I don’t agree with. And so I wanted to take a bit of time with you and see if we could look at it from a biblical perspective on what that would be. I’m not at all interested in the United States getting involved in another war in the Middle East. I think we have paid a great deal of blood and treasure.
On the other hand, I don’t think every conflict is the same, and the voices that were cheering for us to go to Ukraine and flying Ukrainian flags and wearing Ukrainian pins and you were chic if your social media was plastered with support for Ukraine are many of the same voices now that are decrying whatever involvement we have on what’s going on in Iran. So I think we needed a bit of a biblical perspective and that’s where I wanna start.
In your notes it says «Operation Rising Lion,» that’s the name that’s been given by the Israeli to this current operation, their attempt to eliminate Iranian nuclear ambition. And if you haven’t been paying any attention for the last couple of decades, the Iranians have had an unrelenting ambition to secure nuclear weapons and they’ve said that as soon as they did that, they would eliminate Israel and attack the United States with those nuclear weapons. And if I’ve learned anything with my engagement in the Middle East through the years, it’s that if your adversary tells you what they intend to do, you should believe them. It’s not a part of the world where idle threats tend to carry the day.
So I want to start in Revelation chapter 5 and verse 5 with a verse, the scene is in heaven and John has been taken into the throne room of God. There’s a scroll that holds the keys to the future, and the message is that there’s no one worthy to open the scroll. It’s a book and nobody’s worthy to open the book, and John begins to weep because he’s anxious to know the purpose of the vision and what the future holds. And that’s where we step into the narrative.
It’s Revelation 5:5. Says: «One of the elders said to me, 'Don’t weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. And he is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.'» Do you know who the Lion of the tribe of Judah is? It’s not a trick question. It’s Jesus. It’s one of the titles attributed to Jesus. And the message that’s given to John is Jesus is here and he is worthy to open the scroll. I think what is noteworthy is that the last book of the New Testament refers to Jesus as the Lion of the tribe of Judah. It’s very much a Hebrew title. By this point in the unfolding narrative of the scripture, we understand Jesus is the head of the church.
But that’s not the title attributed to him in Revelation. Doesn’t diminish that reality. I’m not suggesting it does. I’m telling you I think there is significance that Jesus is presented at that point as the Lion of the tribe of Judah. And if you ask me for my conclusion from that, it’s that God has in no way distanced himself from the Jewish people. Quite the opposite: in the conclusion of the book, at the culmination of the age, it’s the Lion of the tribe of Judah that’s returning to the earth. It’s an important point. In fact, Jesus has gathered from the nations of the world, the Jewish people and is establishing them in the land that he promised to Abraham. And before we get to the conclusion of that book and the conclusion of this present age, the Jewish people will once again emerge at the center of the message of the kingdom of God as we prepare for the return of the Messiah. Fact. «I don’t like it».
Okay, doesn’t change it. And if you permit me, I would submit to you that Operation Rising Lion, Israel’s attempt to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, is underway these days. And I am very confident that the Lion of the tribe of Judah is fully engaged. So I’ll give you a hint. I think our engagement in that to an extent makes perfect sense. And to deny it and act like we don’t notice it or to ignore it would put us in a very precarious place and I’ll explain that a bit more. The best way I know to understand our world these days, and I’ve said it to you on multiple occasions, is that we’re living through a season of shaking. And that’s more than a month or a few weeks or even the change of season that we’re used to in a calendar.
That season of shaking in my awareness was initiated when we heard about a virus coming our way from Wuhan, way back now in 2020. There’s a verse in Hebrews chapter 12 that I think helps us understand what I mean by this, and it’s repeating a prophecy that had been made earlier in scripture, but we’ll limit it to Hebrews 12. Says: «At that time God’s voice shook the earth, because he promised, 'Once more I’ll shake not only the earth but the heavens.' The words 'once more' indicate the removing of what can be shaken, that is, created things, so that what cannot be shaken may remain».
It goes on in the passage to explain that the reason God shakes the earth is to let you see those things that are not stable, that are not trustworthy, to expose that which can withstand the shaking. And he says the only thing ultimately that will withstand the shaking is the kingdom of God. From 2020 until today it seems to me there have been a number of things we have watched crumble. And I don’t believe it’s the devil causing that to happen or the demonic host or the spiritual forces and principalities of darkness. I think God is shaking the earth. I think God moved in the midst of all of the drama around COVID and exposed things that we thought, that I thought, were trustworthy that proved not to be.
I would have told you I trusted the CDC implicitly prior to 2020. Was not even enough. I trusted places like the FBI. I mean, that seems laughable from the position we stand in today. But until the shaking began, it just wasn’t as clear to me. Now you may think I was naive and I’m willing to live with that. Well, I would submit to you, and there have been a number of episodes of shaking, tremors if you prefer, if you’re gonna use earthquake as the image.
I think there have been a number of tremors and October 7th, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, was another one of those episodes of shaking. The fact that there was people in the Muslim world that hated the Jews, that wasn’t news. We didn’t need any shaking to know that. We’ve been living with that for quite a season. What was not clear to me at that point was the depth of the antisemitism, antisemitism is a fancy word. It just means the hatred of the Jewish people. And I was not aware of the depth of the hatred of the Jewish people that was flourishing in this nation. I was caught unprepared by that. I wasn’t prepared for some of the most celebrated academic institutions in our nation to defend Hamas and the people that perpetrated that attack.
You see, I was invited to Washington, DC, to the Israeli Embassy to review the footage of what happened on October 7th. And to be perfectly blunt, it was too awful to describe very much of it. It wasn’t human in its behavior. I spent a good deal of my young adult life taking care of animals, and animals behave far more appropriately towards one another than what I watched in those videos: Hamas and people from Gaza, because the first wave of the attack were the terrorists that were trained and funded and supported by Iran, but the 2nd and 3rd waves of that were the inhabitants of Gaza coming over on bicycles and their personal vehicles or motorcycles, whatever they could do.
Once they understood it was open season here, they came. I watched them cut off the heads of people with hoes. I watched them break into homes and watched them gather a family together, fathers and sons and daughters and wives and rape the women in front of the husband and fathers and then murder the men in front of the women. And then put the women in vehicles to take them back to Gaza. So it was very uncomfortable for me then when I saw people at some of our most celebrated academic institutions and the faculties and the administrations and the politicians who support them and give billions of dollars to those institutions, defending that behavior. It was unthinkable to me that there could be a hatred for the Jewish people that was that deep.
That’s been a little less than 2 years ago, the 600 days Israel’s been at war since that day until this one. And I wasn’t aware when that shaking began, the antisemitism was uncomfortable for me, I didn’t have any imagination what the outcomes were going to be. At that point, Hamas was deeply entrenched in Gaza. Hezbollah, Hezbollah in the north, in Syria, and Lebanon with tens of thousands, over 100,000 rockets, Iranian-built and funded, some with Russian support, aimed at the heartland of Israel. Israel was caught on a multi-front war with very well-funded adversaries. There seemed no way to survive. It seemed unimaginable 20 months ago that we would arrive at a place where we are today where Hamas has been decimated, Hezbollah has lost their influence, Syria’s leader has been deposed, and Iranian capability to defend themselves has been almost totally eliminated.
It was unimaginable 20 months ago. And that happened with an administration in Washington, DC, that was not supportive of that. The constant hue and cry from our media and from many of our intellectual elites was that we needed a humanitarian ceasefire. And the general population are so disengaged and unaware that we weren’t using our voices to cry for a humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine. Our celebrities and politicians were flying to Ukraine for photo ops with Ukrainian leaders, more than a million people have been killed in that conflict. We were in close communication with leaders in the church and pastors in Ukraine, individually and as a congregation. But in Gaza we were told it had to stop, that Israel was wrong.
The shaking, this most recent episode, it seems to me has exposed something in our nation, and if God exposes it, he gives us an opportunity to change it. One of the lessons we’ve been processing since COVID is we don’t want to just live through sin. If you find yourself caught in something that is ungodly, whether it was done intentionally or you find yourself in that place and you didn’t necessarily do it intentionally, but you discover that you’re standing in an ungodly place, the goal is not to hurry past it. The goal is not to whistle more loudly. The goal isn’t to blame somebody else.
The biblical prescription is to repent. If you live past it, you keep the consequence. If you deny it, if you say it wasn’t my fault, all the things, you live in the consequence, the judgment’s yours. If you repent, you can be forgiven and set free. So the point of the shaking, I think oftentimes is to help us understand with clarity where we are. It’s diagnostic in its attempt and I think the events that have been unfolding have tremendous potential for change in our nation, which perhaps would help you understand why I’ve been uncomfortable these last few days where a lot of people who have rather conservative worldviews and significant voices are saying what’s happening in Israel with our engagement is completely inappropriate. Sometimes they’ll say, well, you know, Israeli politicians aren’t honest. Put all of those in America. I assure you that Israel is every bit as polarized politically, in the media, in all those ways as we are at home.
So reading a quote from the media in Israel can be every bit as difficult to understand as reading a quote from the media in the United States. Where do you go for truth? So we need a little different understanding. We need a little bit more insight. And I think to get to that, to me this isn’t fundamentally a political issue. Our response to Israel does not begin with geopolitical decisions and ideas about nation states and military capacity because what we’ve watched happen in the last 20 months was impossible. It was just impossible. It was unimaginable. It couldn’t be accomplished. And yet it has been.
So I think we need another layer of understanding. It isn’t about politics or petroleum dollars. Truthfully, Israel and the Jewish people are not just another country or another group of people. They occupy a different place in God’s economy. Doesn’t mean everything they do is right, doesn’t mean we should support everything they do. Every expression of ungodliness or wickedness or evil that you can find in Middle Tennessee flourishes in the land of Israel. Nevertheless, I think we need to understand why Israel matters and I think our map will help us. If nothing else, it’ll probably help me embarrass myself. And you can be witness to that.
I don’t think we’re probably overly aware of geography, education being what it is. I was not educated on electronics, so my ignorance is here for all of you. Israel is a tiny little strip of land at the end of the Mediterranean. It’s not much larger than Middle Tennessee, or New Jersey if you prefer. I prefer Middle Tennessee. It’s a small place. It’s very easily overlooked. It isn’t significant. This is Israel. Their worldview stands isolated in the region. In fact, if you take the surrounding countries from Turkey through the Middle East to Iran, the countries north of Iran to Afghanistan, you come south to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, across North Africa, all of those nations, that entire geographic region, is under the influence of Islam.
There’s a significant size disparity: Iran is 80 times larger than Israel, just Iran. But this from Turkey all the way around through North Africa, and it really extends beyond that, but just that part that fits onto this map, that portion of the geography of the Middle East and North Africa is under the influence of Islam. This is tiny Israel, about 7 million Israelis there. And the global talking point echoed by the EU, the United Nations, most of the elite voices in the global community, that has been echoed for decades, is there cannot be peace in the Middle East until Israel gives up some land. How many of you have heard that? Land for peace.
Well, I think it’s just worth noting in passing, as time will be an issue, that Lebanon, the country to the immediate north of Israel, no longer has a sitting government. They were displaced by Hezbollah, funded by Iran, the nation at one time the most beautiful nation in the Middle East, a Christian Arab nation at one time, it’s hard to believe today. They’ve been totally disrupted. They have no functional government. It’s difficult to talk about them as an independent state. Syria’s dictator Assad of many years has been removed. Syria is a kind of a blank slate at the moment. They’ve had a civil war that caused more than 5 million Syrians to be pushed into Europe, displaced from their historic homeland.
And there’s been no call from the Muslim street, Muslim world, from the global community, from the EU, from the UN, from the NGOs, that those Syrians that were displaced into Europe be returned and reestablished in their historic places in Syria. They’ve been quite happy for them to be an invading force that got pushed into Europe. So there’s no peace in Lebanon, there’s no peace in Syria. We know a bit about Iraq and the unrest and the disruption that’s been there. We know a bit about Iran today. I mean, we could go around the map.
So, places where they have no peace said they will not give peace until Israel gives up some of their land. It’s absurd. It’s as absurd as some of the things happening in our own nation. There’s no logical explanation for some of the things we’re watching happen in our nation. The only way you can rightfully understand them is if you have an awareness or a willingness to accept spiritual influences that influence human behavior. There’s no logic to this. And again, the fulcrum, the complaint, has been…wonder if I can…pray for me. Look at me. Gaza is this tiny little place here, and the West Bank is outlined in white.
So people that they argue have been displaced and I’ll come back to that. What’s been said about Israel for more than three decades now is there can be no peace until those people are established in that homeland, but those rules don’t apply to Syria. They don’t apply to Lebanon. They don’t apply to all the Jews who were expelled from the nations of the Middle East when modern Israel was reborn. It’s not a logical argument. You can’t understand the conversation that’s happening today about Israel and Iran, and Iran’s threats to annihilate Israel, if you just look at it from a purely geopolitical context. And the people saying we shouldn’t be involved say that the United States military industrial complex can’t be trusted. No kidding. Abundant evidence for that. I don’t disagree in the least. We have politicians who will line their pockets, who take bribes.
If we’ve learned anything since the beginning of this year, it’s the fraud, the waste, the looting, the stealing, the dishonesty that’s been taking place in our nation at the highest possible levels is really beyond our ability to comprehend. But that’s not really an adequate way to understand what’s happening with Israel. Israel didn’t cause that. They didn’t initiate that. I think those of us who are Christ followers, we need a little different level of understanding and engagement. I’m trying. Look at me. If I can use that map and not say something inappropriate, we’ve all had a miracle right here in front of God and everyone.
There’s some biblical verses I would share with you, and some of you say, you know, «You just… don’t drag the Bible into this». It is about the Bible. It has a great deal to do with that. Since I have a session where I’m probably going to annoy a good number of people, if we don’t imagine that the Word of God should be engaged in current culture, your Bible’s no good. You’re no different, you’re just a historian, you’re a theoretical theologian. And my Lord was not a theoretical theologian. He offered himself on a cross. That wasn’t a theory. And human nature hasn’t changed. We desperately need a biblical worldview or we’ll offer our children up for mutilation.
We’ll offer them up for sacrifice. We’ll allow secular culture to redefine marriage, and we will stand on the sidelines and act like we don’t notice, and we’ll have a polite Bible study and talk about first century political leaders. And then we’ll have to give an account. So I think the biblical perspective on who the Jewish people are and what role God intends for them is essential to understanding how our nation should respond to the Jewish people. It is not just a political decision. It should have very little to do with political parties and alliances and allegiances. It should have a great deal to do with biblical worldview.
And again, we don’t live in a theocracy. I understand the people that say you’re gonna plunge the world into a nuclear war because we believe in arms. Stop. Who’s been plunging us into all the other wars? Genesis 12, I’ve told you on many occasions that the opening chapters of Genesis establish the big rock ideas of the Bible, the ideas that are fleshed out in the 65 books that follow that.
And in Genesis 12, God is speaking to Abram and he said, «I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I’ll make your name great, and you’ll be a blessing. And I’ll bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I’ll curse; and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you». That promise isn’t made to everybody, it’s made to Abram. You and I receive blessings from Almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, today because of the covenant that God made with Abram in the book of Genesis.