Allen Jackson - How Far Is Too Far? - Part 3
How do you explain thousands of years and hatred towards a specific group of people who didn’t even occupy a nation, they didn’t occupy a space? I don’t believe you can understand it apart from spiritual explanations. I believe it’s a spiritual force. I believe antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, is fueled by the spirit of Antichrist. So it captures my attention when I start to hear powerful voices and people with big blocks of influence saying we shouldn’t support them when they’re being threatened with annihilation by an enemy. Really? «We don’t want to get drug into another useless war».
It isn’t quite the same. I don’t think they should have carte blanche. I don’t think we should surrender our independence, that we shouldn’t use our thought, but I do believe we have a responsibility. And I believe we have to grapple with the awkward reality that we’ve ignored our responsibilities for so long. You know, the most awkward part perhaps of the hatred of the Jewish people comes in the chapters immediately after World War II, when the camps were discovered.
What do you suppose happened? The majority of Europe did not want the surviving Jews back. They’d confiscated their homes, they’d liquidated their bank accounts, they’d appropriated their art, their places had been filled. Sounds a lot like the book of Romans. They didn’t want them back. They didn’t want to be reminded of their silence. They didn’t want to deal with the awkwardness of it. They were gonna live through their sin. They weren’t gonna repent of it. There are some shining examples that were different.
Many of you know the story of Corrie ten Boom and «The Hiding Place». Some of you have seen the movie of «Schindler’s List» and you know the story of Oskar Schindler. If you visit Israel today, in Jerusalem there’s a Holocaust museum, and the perimeter of the museum has trees that have been planted. Each of them has a name attached to it, representing the righteous of the Gentiles, the righteous from among the nations, the non-Jews who stood up for the Jews, and I’ve been there with thousands of people and I’ve heard my Israeli friends say so many times, they would look at the groups I’m with, and say, «Why are there so few trees»?
The year that Corrie ten Boom died, her tree died. When the Jews were released from the camps, they were still hunted, hated, and unwanted. There’s a chapter of that that we don’t know a great deal about. They had nowhere to go. And there wasn’t clear direction. All of Europe was in disarray. The world was trying to sort out what we were going to do next. The leaders of the surviving powers were dividing up the world. And so the Jews decided they would try to reestablish themselves in their historic homeland of Israel. By that time it was a region of the world. It wasn’t really designated into countries. The region of the world was known as Palestine. There was no central government of Palestine. There was no president of Palestine; I’ll talk about that a bit.
Time’s not going to allow. But they began, they would find anything that would float and try to go back to Israel. There’s some horrific stories. The MS Saint Louis came towards America, first to Cuba and then to the United States. It was in June of 1939, before the outbreak of the war. They saw the specter of the Nazis and what they were gonna do to the Jewish people. The passengers on that boat could see the lights of Miami glimmering from the deck of the ship. But the United States would not allow them to disembark.
There were more than 900 Jewish passengers on board that ship. They could see the lights of Miami. They’d been refused entry in Cuba. They were refused entry in the United States. They were refused entry in Canada, and they sailed back to Europe and more than half of them were murdered. There were more than 100 ships and boats that were used to bring over more than 100,000 clandestine undercover immigrants trying to make their way into Israel. Many of them were intercepted. The Zionist movement, the people that were in favor of establishing a Jewish homeland, would do anything they could to secure something that would float and put people on it and send them in a flotilla towards Israel. One of the ships was torpedoed by a Russian submarine. And more than 780 people from that boat died.
One man survived to tell the story. The most famous of the ships was «The Exodus». It was renamed. It’s inspired, some of you may know the author Leon Uris. It inspired the best-selling book by that same title and a movie that came from it. I found a picture. I didn’t. Somebody that helps me found a picture. It’s not exactly a luxury cruise liner. It’d been condemned, the boat, but it was something they found that could float. And they filled it with hundreds of people and they made their way to the shores of modern-day Israel. Under the authority of the British government, the British mandate, and the British wouldn’t let them disembark. And there were no nations in the world that wanted them. There were no nations in Europe that wanted them.
So they sailed back towards Europe and they sat on the boat for days. And finally they were forced off the boat and they were put in an internment camp. Think of it. Their families were rounded up. Their property was confiscated, their wealth was stolen. The majority of their families were murdered in death camps. After the war, they were released. They weren’t welcomed back into the cities from which they’d been collected. They tried to go to modern-day Israel. They weren’t allowed to land there and they find themselves in an internment camp. Hated, hunted, and unwanted. Today, we looked at the map a moment ago, there’s about 7 million Jews in the sea of hundreds of millions of people who are sworn to their destruction. They occupy a tiny little strip of land, hardly worth noticing on a global map.
The wealth of Iran is immense. The petroleum wealth of Iran has funded Hezbollah and the wealth and the resources needed to threaten Israel with terrorists for decades, to fund Hamas and the terrorists who decimated those communities along Gaza, all the while doing everything in their power to create the ability to create a nuclear weapon, saying they would use it on the free world as soon as they could. And the nations of the world said, «Let’s talk about it». Leaders of Europe are calling for a meeting in Brussels on Friday of this week to talk about it with the Iranian leaders once again. No, I think to help the Israelis ensure that Iran does not have the ability to unleash a nuclear weapon against them is a responsibility.
Again, I don’t think we should do everything that Israel asks. I don’t think they have hands that are clean on every topic. I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that there’s enough information beyond the immediacy of this that suggests those of us who are people of faith have an assignment to see the hatred directed towards the covenant people of God not be unleashed. There’s a biblical verse. I’ll tell you this, it’s uncomfortable and I don’t have time to unpack it in detail. It doesn’t make it less true. The spirit that drives the hatred of the Jewish people is the same spirit that will drive the hatred towards Christians as we approach the end of the age. It’s the spirit of Antichrist. It’s very biblical.
Jesus told us it would happen. It’s in your notes. It’s Matthew 24. He said, «You’ll be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you’ll be hated by all nations because of me». He said, «At that time many will turn away from the faith and betray and hate each other». Why? Because there’s such great pressure, people say, «I’m not one of them. I’m not one of them». I have a dear friend. He’s in heaven now, but he grew up in Italy, Jewish. His father had a very powerful position serving the Italian king. And his father had the wisdom to understand what was approaching with World War II, and he sent him with his wife… this man and his sister to England. The father was captured and murdered by the Nazis. He thought he could survive under the flag of the Italian king, but it didn’t work.
My friend grew up in England. His mother was terrified, she didn’t tell him he was Jewish. He said, «I never understood why the rabbi would come by the house and check on us». He was past 16 years of age before he came to understand his heritage. So when Jesus said, «There’ll be such hatred directed towards people of faith that people will betray one another and deny it and hate each other and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people,» prophets, folks aren’t just people who predict the future.
Prophets are supposed to be truth tellers. And it’s too narrow of a definition to think of prophet in terms of clerical robes or biblical language or King James English. Prophets are the people we expect to tell us the truth. It seems to me we have a flurry of false prophets amongst us. Many of them live in the church, but many of them live in places where we expect the truth to be told, and it’s not. The hatred that we’ve seen directed towards the Jewish people for two millennia is coming towards us. I believe we have an assignment to stand with the Jewish people.
I’ll give you one more bit of history. Tim inspired me. A lot of confusion about the Jewish right to that land. The map of the Middle East has all been drawn since the end of World War I, all those nations, and I don’t have time to unpack that in detail. Palestine was not an Arab nation in 1948 when Israel was recognized. It was not. The Jewish people did not have a homeland. In 70 AD, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, the second temple in Jerusalem. From 70 AD until 1948, there was no Jewish homeland. They were scattered to the nations of the world. 1948 at the end of World War II, the UN, primarily through the prompting of the United States, recognized the birth of the modern nation of Israel.
At that time, Palestine was not an Arab nation. The Jewish people did not take over someone else’s territory. At that point in history, Great Britain had authority over the Middle East. They’d become tired of governing the volatile area, and they asked the UN to help resolve the problem. Before Great Britain was given the responsibility of administering the region after World War I, the Turks had controlled the area since the 1500s, and the Turks are not Arabs. You may have heard of the Ottoman Empire. It’s the Turkish Empire. Palestine has never been the name of any country ever.
The name «Palestine» came from the Romans. I told you the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70. They left the Jews in the land. They thought if they destroyed the temple and they destroyed Jerusalem, they would behave. They didn’t. Sixty years later, they rebelled again, the Bar Kokhba revolt. And that time, when the Romans put down the rebellion, they were so angry with the Jews they forbid the Jews to live in Jerusalem. They did their best to eliminate the word «Jerusalem» from the vocabulary. And when they did that, an attempt to rid the region of any Jewishness, they renamed the region «Philistia,» after the Philistines. Remember Goliath?
The word «Palestine» is a corruption of the Philistines. Not a corruption, something that was done bad, just how language emerges through time. And the Philistines were eliminated by the Babylonians in 600 BC. They were long gone from the area. Palestine was a region; it was never a nation. In the same way we talk about Middle Tennessee or the Southeast, you know, when we talk about the southeastern United States, it’s not a nation. There’s not a president of the Southeast, it’s a region on the map. There was never a president of the state of Palestine or a government. The region of Palestine did not have any connection to uniquely Arab ethnicity. Muhammad wasn’t even born until the 6th century.
The Romans labeled the area «Palestine» in the 2nd century. The vote in the UN, the partition vote to establish the nation of Israel in 1947, extended the opportunity for two nations to be recognized: an Arab nation on the west side of the Jordan, the Arab nations rejected the plan. They said they didn’t want it. Israel accepted the offer. In May of '48, the modern state of Israel was born. The day the modern state of Israel was recognized by the UN and the United Nations, Arab nations, five Arab nations, declared war on the local population and the new Jewish state.
There was no chance of survival. There was no more chance of survival in that than there was a chance in October of '23 that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran could be dismantled. And yet we see that today. That tiny fledgling nation with no standing government, with no central government, with no army, with no armaments, with no weapon supply, somehow survived. The people in the West Bank could have had peace. They chose war in an attempt to drive the Jews into the sea. When the ceasefire was declared a few weeks later, Israel had defended the territory they’d been granted. Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza. The people who lived on the West Bank had Jordanian passports.
When I lived in Israel and attended Hebrew University, the people on the West Bank had Jordanian passports. Arabs in the West Bank became a part of Jordan. The Arabs in Gaza became a part of Egypt. When the PLO was created, Jordan controlled the West Bank. The Palestine they wanted to liberate wasn’t the West Bank. They wanted to liberate Israel. It’s been muddied. The Jewish-owned newspaper was called «The Palestinian Post». Jerusalem has only been the capital of one country: Israel. King David established Jerusalem as the capital of Israel about 1000 years before Christ.
If you’re counting, that was 1500 years before Muhammad was even born. And if you’re offended by the newness of the Israeli nation, Jordan was created in 1922 by Great Britain. The Syrians were under French control until 1946. Lebanon received independence from France in 1943. Iraq became an independent nation in 1958. The total land mass of Arab states, not including the non-Arab states in the Middle East, Iran and Turkey are not Arab states. So if we exclude them, just the Arab states of the Middle East comprise 98,4% of the land mass, leaving Israel 1,6%. Land for peace. The word «Jerusalem» or «Zion» appears nearly 1000 times in the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. It never appears in the Qur’an.
The only way to understand what’s happening in the Middle East is to have some spiritual awareness. I believe Israel has a right to that land. I believe the Jewish people have a God-given right to that land. I don’t believe that the hatred that is directed towards them will relent. We have been very active in this. In the weeks before President Obama left office, he directed a plane loaded with $1.7 billion in cash to Iran. At the same time, he unfroze more than a billion dollars in Iranian assets, so he put at the disposal of the Iranian mullahs almost $3 billion. When President Biden came to office, he removed all the sanctions on Iran. Their economy flourished again.
The events of October the 7th and 23 were made possible because of American funding and freedom. So when I hear people saying we should have no involvement whatsoever, I don’t want to see us embroiled in a long-term war. But I believe the Jewish people have a right to that land. And I believe it will bring good things to us if we will honor their right to that land and do our best to see that it’s defended. My time has slipped away. There’s one more group of people that I believe very much need your prayers. It’s the Iranian people.
The Iranian people, they’re Persian. They’ve been ruled since 1979 by a brutal, violent group of authoritarian dictators, the mullahs. I’ve done multiple interviews myself with Iranian individuals, some who live in this country and some who don’t, pleading for someone to care enough about the population of Iran to help them be liberated from the brutal authoritarian dictators that have threatened them. I put the question to someone who is an expert on the region this week. I said, «How would we know if the people are capable or willing»? And he said, «Well, some would have to gather in public». And he said then, «Watch for the response of the military and the police». He said, «If you see them lay down their weapons,» he said, «it will crumble quickly. But if they begin to execute the population».
So I would submit while we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, we pray for the Iranian people. They have lived under cruel authoritarian abuse. And the great wealth of Iran has been used to murder people indiscriminately, not just in Israel. Americans, thousands of Americans have lost their lives and had their bodies mutilated because of the hatred that’s been perpetrated by the Iranian mullahs. And Israel, with very little support from the global community, has been forced to face that by themselves in these last 600 days. And God has brought about a victory that is really inexplicable. So, don’t lose heart, don’t be distracted by false prophets. You don’t have to be boisterous; we can stay humble and pray.
So let’s ask the Lord to complete what he has begun, and to spare our young people that hundreds and thousands of them won’t become embroiled in another expanding conflict. God can do that. If he sent David to the battlefield to take down a bully, he knows how to eliminate Iranian nuclear threats, amen? Won’t you stand with me? If I don’t stop, the nursery workers will be in here. Thank you all, you did a great job. Give those young people, they survived, huh? Won’t you take somebody’s hand? If you don’t know 'em, tell them who you are. If they won’t talk to you, turn loose of their hand.
Father, thank you. I thank you that you’re involved in the affairs of men and nations. I thank you that your purposes are breaking forth in the earth. Or they’re not subtle. It’s not understated that you have begun a shaking that is making things clear that was not clear, and we praise you for it. Lord, and we pause first of all to ask in humility that you would give us understanding hearts and eyes to see. May we not be deceived. We have a desire to walk uprightly before you in obedience. We pray tonight for the peace of Jerusalem. Those people, Father, that are sheltered in homes and in private places away from public streets and they’re unable to go out. I pray for where there’s great fear, that you will bring peace. I pray that you’ll turn back rockets, that you’ll turn back missiles that have been launched at civilian populations, protect the people.
And Lord, I pray for those that are in positions of authority that are making decisions that they would have wisdom beyond themselves. That you would disrupt the threat of destruction that has been shouted from Iran now for decades. May it be turned back, may it be dismantled. May it be rendered impotent. And Lord, I pray you will bring freedom to that nation. That the Iranian people will be free, that there will be a freedom for the gospel to be proclaimed, for the truth to be told. Where they have suffered under authoritarianism and cruelty and domination and manipulation, that there would be a new season of freedom and liberty. Lord, it’s beyond our wisdom, but we ask you to be involved. We praise you for it. I thank you, Father, that you’re moving in the earth and for the great privilege that we have of being a part. May we be faithful to that assignment, in Jesus’s name, amen.
And Lord, I pray for those that are in positions of authority that are making decisions that they would have wisdom beyond themselves. That you would disrupt the threat of destruction that has been shouted from Iran now for decades. May it be turned back, may it be dismantled. May it be rendered impotent. And Lord, I pray you will bring freedom to that nation. That the Iranian people will be free, that there will be a freedom for the gospel to be proclaimed, for the truth to be told. Where they have suffered under authoritarianism and cruelty and domination and manipulation, that there would be a new season of freedom and liberty. Lord, it’s beyond our wisdom, but we ask you to be involved. We praise you for it. I thank you, Father, that you’re moving in the earth and for the great privilege that we have of being a part. May we be faithful to that assignment, in Jesus’s name, amen.