Put up your sword

Jesus did not say “take up your sword” but “take up (your) cross”, (Mark 8, Mt 16  Lk 9). In Luke 22 two swords “were enough” to fulfil prophecy, but they were not to be used John 18.

We Christians are given one weapon only, God’s Word: and one enemy, “The cosmic powers” (Ephesians 6).

We are told that the saints conquer by the blood of Jesus and the word of testimony, (Revelation 12).

We are shown that Jesus defeats his enemies by his Word, Rev. 19:15.

What then gives us the right to invent, create, manufacture, give/sell, use machines designed to destroy people?

Turning our backs on swords and guns, on rifles, tanks, bombs, missiles and chemical weapons may be hard, may require sacrifices, but it is God’s Way: the way of the cross.

Will you, will we … ?

Inspired by Evil

What Hamas did on 7 October 2023 was inspired by evil. Israel’s response a few days later is inspired by evil. My mother used to say “two wrongs don’t make a right”; you cannot defeat evil with evil.

Of course it didn’t begin on 7 October: to think that demonstrates no sense. Evil acts are inspired by evil and must be dated back to Adam. Hamas and Zionism both serve the same evil master, they are on the same side: destruction. From the first, the satanic intent – define it how you will – has been to destroy the
Good Creation.Holy Scripture shows us how easy it has been for God’s purposes to be perverted. But God has never given up on God’s intention to nurture creation through the created. God chooses: Noah, Abram, Jacob, Moses, David: and all prove unequal to the task. But each learns from the other ‘the way of the Lord’. Mistakes are made and lessons are learned.

Throughout time the Satan has targeted God’s chosen. They are God’s ministers, and if they can be seduced… Too often! The destruction of Israel was there with Judah and Joseph, with Gideon and his ephod, with Saul and David…But the Satan miscalculated, misread, as evil so often does because it cannot comprehend goodness. So focused was it on the destruction of unreconstructable Israel in A.D. 70 and A.D. 135 and thereafter, that it failed to see the Real Israel, for 300 years.

Rejuvenated Israel was harder, the teaching more robust, learning as it had from its Hebrew past: “Dear friends,” wrote John, “do not imitate what is evil but what is good”, and Peter, “do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called, so that you may inherit a blessing.”It was not new, for Psalm 34 urges, “… Turn from evil and do good… Seek peace and pursue it… The face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”Paul tells the church at Rome, using words similar to John, “do not repay anyone evil for evil… Do not take revenge…” And “Do not be overcome with evil but overcome evil with good”.

There is not, cannot be, such a thing as a Christian nation, only a Christian people, a holy kingdom. Those, whether Christian, Jewish or other, who support Israel, the nation state are in rebellion against Jesus, God’s king who refused the sword. They have aligned themselves with the Satan whose strategy is to destroy ‘Jewish Israel’ from without and God’s Israel from within.We have to decide: are we followers of the way – John 14, Genesis 18 – or are we so in love with ‘the world’ that we are blinded to the truth.There are a few winners in the wholesale rush to destruction we see in Gaza, in Israel, in Yemen, Iran, Ukraine, North Korea, USA and UK.

The call is to the righteous everywhere: reject the Satan’s desire for perpetual emnity; reject the pursuit of bloodstained victory.

Seek peace, refuse war.

Be Blessed.

WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO THEIR HOMELAND?

bible-re-jews-return-1Download

Has the church ‘replaced’ Israel

I don’t think I can do better than to quote a footnote from Christopher J.H Wright’s commentary (IVP 2014) Jeremiah 31

‘Supersessionism or ‘replacement theology’, as it is sometimes also called, is a view that I certainly do not hold. It flies in the face of the great biblical trajectory of the continuity of God’s people. As I have argued elsewhere, the Bible nowhere says that ‘Christians have replaced the Jews’. Rather it affirms very strongly that God’s purpose always was that Israel would be expanded to include the Gentiles. The New Testament affirms that this happened when, first, the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, representatively accomplished through his death and resurrection the restoration/redemption of Israel (e.g. Luke 24:13-27; Acts 13:32-33), and second, when God through his Holy Spirit initiated the eschatological ingathering of the Gentile nations into that restored people (Acts 15:13-18), creating a new united people in Christ (Eph. 2:11 – 3:6). There is an organic spiritual continuity between Old Testament Israel and the multinational community of believing Jews and Gentiles who are united in the Messiah Jesus. The Bible does not portray Israel being ‘replaced’ by the church, but rather (and very emphatically in both Testaments) of Israel expanding to include the Gentiles. When I, as a Gentile, became a believer in Jesus, I did not replace anybody. I joined God’s people and became a child of Abraham, as Paul told the Galatians.’

Western Bias

The bias (racism) of the un’christian’ West is out in the open. When Israel pleads “self defence” we not only listen, we send cash and bombs.

When Palestinians cry “self defence” we label them ‘terrorist’, deny them cash and drop bombs on them. It’s not new, we British were duped into doing this during the Mandate, nearly 100 years ago.

If you are a Christian …. ? Following the way of the Lord is to do with justice and righteousness, not guns, bombs and mass murder.

Who is the real Israel?

Answering Christine.

Christine, a Facebook contact, asks, ‘who are the real Israel?’ the question is ingenuous: Christine knows who Israel is, it’s the Middle East nation state of that name. The question arises because of my statement that the nation state of Israel is not the same as biblical Israel. So, the question is ingenuous but genuine.

Christine asked me to supply Scripture references. At first glance that sounds reasonable, after all I claim to be a Christian, as does Christine, and shouldn’t Scripture teach us? However, if we have learned anything in the past century it is that you can make Scripture mean anything if you try hard enough. A mixture of the prophetic, the eschatological and the apocalyptic makes Hollywood’s best look like a 1950s B movie. The very latest Scripture was written more than 1800 years ago and for the Hebrew canon you can add another 500 years. Where should we start?

1. The first point to make is that we have to read Scripture as story: God’s story, otherwise we tie ourselves in theological knots, trying to make sense of the apparent contradictions.
2. The promises were to Abraham and Abraham’s seed. Paul understands the ‘seed’ as singular and applying to Jesus. The blessings in view are righteousness and justice for all peoples, (Genesis 18)
3. God’s choice is Jacob, but does God stop choosing at Jacob or should we learn something about our own involvement in responding to God’s choice? Jacob wrestled with God and was Israel [you know the refs for these]. But with Jacob’s sons, the 12 tribes, we already have confusion: an ethnic mix. Judah = Tamar, (Gen 38); Joseph = Asenath, (Gen 40); Reuben slept with Bilhah. Gen 46 lists Jacob’s family and we learn that Simeon had a child by an unnamed Canaanite woman. But who were the other mothers? From whence did the brothers find wives?and Zilpah and Bilhah were almost certainly not ethnically related to Jacob or Abraham.
4. Exodus chapter 12 tells us that Israel left Egypt accompanied by a ‘mixed crowd’. But they were already mixed as we’ve seen. We are not told who but it’s likely they were other peoples enslaved by Egypt: e.g. Cushites, Hittites, Canaanites. And what might we deduce from Caleb? Joshua 14:6, 14. Compare Gen 15:19. And noting Judges 3;5-6?
5. In 1 Kings 19:18 e.g. Who is Israel? (but best to read chapters 18 and 19 and compare Rom 11:17) and in Jeremiah 31:7b, where we read of ‘remnant’? Then try reading Jeremiah chapter 30 noting the apparent contradictions, and that Israel aka Samaria had gone into exile over 100 years previously. We could summarise by asking is Ahab included in Israel? Hananiah (Jer28)? And what of all those kings who did ‘evil in the sight of the Lord’?
6. Then consider the complexities of Isaiah, not least chapters 44 to 46, spoken to Cyrus the Persian as God’s anointed saviour for Israel. We might note especially 44:5 and wonder at what can be deduced from 45:25 and 46:3 ‘all the remnant of the house of Israel’ (NRSV. NIV has ‘you who remain’). See also inter alia Isa 10:20-22; 11:1-16; In Isa 37:31 it is ‘the surviving remnant of the house of Judah’, and Jeremiah 6:9 and 23:3.
7. As with so many other prophetic passages the requirement for return from exile is righteousness and proper conduct: cp. Ezekiel 16 especially verses 42-58. Then the ‘everlasting covenant’ in 16:59-63, since God ‘will establish’ it, must replace the broken one which we see at verse 59. ‘All Israel’ as in Romans 11 cannot be every single person descended from Jacob. That would make complete nonsense of much of the Old Testament. The promise of return is given in Jer 29 where the exiles are told ‘You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart’. (v.13). In passing, it is interesting that the exiles here (29) are told to settle, to ‘find wives … and give daughters in marriage’ buy Jer 52 records a total of only 4,600 being carried into exile: just asking.
8. So, who is Israel? The conclusion of Isaiah chapter 19 is fascinating, and what are we to make of Ruth?
9. In his gospel John points out that ‘(Jesus) came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name he gave the right to become children of God…’ (Jn 1:10ff). Clearly,being Jewish wasn’t sufficient: what did John the Baptist say to the Pharisees and Sadducees who came for baptism? ‘do not think that you can say to yourselves, ‘we have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.’ (Matt 3:9). Paul points out that there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles Gal 3:23-29; Rom 3:9-12ff; 8:12-17; 9:6ff; 10:12. Col 3:11.

it is important at this point to take an excursus into the problem of the church. The Greek word throughout the new Testament translated as church is ‘ekklesia’, which actually means ‘assembly’, or a group as in a congregation. It is only translated strictly correctly for us in Acts chapter 19. In the Hebrew Testament the words ‘qahal’ or ‘migra’ or ‘eda’ are used variously for gatherings, sometimes sacred gatherings, of Israel. The Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, translates these using ekklesia. e.g. Lev 8:3; Deut 23:2,3: 2 Chron 6:3,12,13; Josh 8:36.

The Greek for ‘Church’ would be ‘kuriakon doma’ the Lords House, but this doesn’t appear in our New Testament. The single appearance of kuriakon (κυριακον) at 1 Cor 11:20 refers to the ‘Lord’s Supper’. In the New Testament ekklesia means a gathered community, except in Act 19, the followers of Jesus. Other groups at that time regarded themselves as ‘the real Israel’. For example the Essenes and some of the Pharisees. There is no evidence that Jesus, Peter, Paul or any of the New Testament writers thought that they were creating a new religion. To the contrary they were calling Israel back to faith and extending Israel to include faithful Gentiles. Peter had to be taught that (Acts 10), Paul learned the hard way (Acts 9).

10. Who is Israel? Throughout time all those who have loved mercy, walked humbly and done righteousness and justice. Israel consists of those who love and follow the way of the Lord (Gen 17:1-2 and 18: 16-33 noting especially vv17-19 and what follows). Israel can NEVER be a nation state since Jesus IS Israel and those belonging – whether original or grafted in – are called to be global ambassadors. Glorifying a nation state: whether Israel, USA, Britain, China, Russia or any other is idolatry and must be resisted.
11. In chapters 15 and 16 of John’s Gospel we can read Jesus’ own understanding. In brief: Jesus is the vine – see inter alia Isaiah 5, Matt 22:33ff, and Rom 11:11ff. Then 15:19 thinking about how Christians find Matt 5-7 so problematic. Israel is redefined around Jesus himself. (Paul uses ten and a half chapters to show how this works historically and theologically: Romans 1:16 -11:36). We (Jesus’ followers) will be rejected by the synagogue because that belongs to the prince of this world who stands condemned. Jesus changes Everything! Empire is condemned; unrighteousness is condemned; false religion is condemned; relying on power, whether economic or explosive, is condemned.
12. Where is the real Israel? You will not find Israel bombing, murdering, deceiving, stealing, rejoicing in the deaths of children. That is the ‘Israel’ that went into exile 2500+ years ago and never made it home. A physical return and rebuilt temple, yes, but it wasn’t the return they expected. They didn’t return in righteousness, weeping for their sin, but in arrogance. Many at the time of Jesus regarded the exile as still in place, hence the interest in Daniel’s prophecies.
13. Some saw in Jesus the Messiah God intended from the beginning. Only in Jesus, the real Jesus of the gospels, is there hope. It is my prayer that Christians everywhere will reject all that makes for war and engage with Him who comes to bring peace on earth. He, Jesus, is the real the Only Israel. We need to be grafted in. Amen