January 29th, 2023 - Some thoughts inspired by Holocaust Memorial Day:
I will not violate my covenant, or alter the word that went forth from my lips. Once and for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David. His line shall continue forever, and his throne endures before me like the sun (Psalm 89:34 -36).
We must always come before a holy and all-knowing God with humility and fear. We acknowledge that His word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. But our light and our understanding of God and his plans can only ever be finite and partial, and by faith. I remember a tutor, Dr. John Colwell saying, the greater his learning, the wider the gulf seemed between himself and the Almighty. The more he knew the less he understood of the God he worshipped. As I have studied God’s word over the years, by His grace, he has opened my eyes to fresh understandings. My own attitude to God’s-people-Israel and its future has been challenged and changed recently. There is much yet to learn and a long way to go. If we allow scripture to read us, we come to see many failings, prejudices and preoccupations for the Spirit to work on. God’s word doesn’t just reveal a pretty, tree-lined path along the way. It frequently cuts to the very quick of the soul and shows us up for the people we are and can be. It lights the way, but shows up the dark too. In our best moments, our own righteousness pales in comparison with the Lord.
It was in such a spirit that I have wrestled this week, like many, with the horror of the Holocaust, with the reality of the awful things which seemingly ordinary people are capable of doing to others and themselves, plumbing the very depths of human wickedness. From the brickyards of Pharaoh, to the courts of Haman and Herod and the twisted results of the mind of Hitler; from Pol Pot in Cambodia’s killing fields, to the Janjaweed in the deserts of Darfur; from the so-called ethnic cleansers in the jungles of Rwanda and Burma, and the frozen forests of Eastern Europe. Dare we forget to mention the British-Australians and the American settlers in their dealings with the indigenous and enslaved peoples; or the Education Centres in today’s China. Genocidal atrocities continue to scar human history. They seem to blight any suggestion of innate human goodness…
We ask… how could these things happen; how could people made in the image of God do things to others similarly made? We could never do such things!’ Are you sure? Have you trawled your mind and its thoughts lately; taken a fearless and thorough moral inventory? What might you have done, or do, to save your own skin or the lives of your family? Bible-believing Christians have the answer in one small word – sin. For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory. Jesus said the heart of the problem was the problem of the heart (Matthew 7). He offered mercy for that heart condition and was murdered by his kin.
Along with tribal tension and racial prejudice, of every stripe, Anti-Semitism has deep roots and is alive and well. We do well to remember that the world, and that includes the church, had better things to do than to come as quickly as they might have done to the aid of the Jewish people who were systematically sought, selected and slaughtered (Shoa). The horrible truth is that there always was and still is an attitude (held by nation states, institutions and individuals) to the Jewish person and nation which is consciously or otherwise predisposed to the dismissal, disrespect, dispersion or even the wholesale destruction of this particular people – one-by-one, million-by-million…
In 1924 at a Christian gathering in Berlin, Adolph Hitler spoke to thousands and received a standing ovation when he made the following proclamation: “I believe that today I am acting in accordance with the will of Almighty God as I announce the most important work that Christians could undertake — and that is to be against the Jews and get rid of them once and for all!” January 27th 2023 was Holocaust Memorial Day – here we are, 99 years on!
What explains this hatred of the Jews? Why is anti-Semitism so rampant in so many different nations? What is so bad about the Jews? Why, over the last two millennia, have the Jews been expelled from over 80 different countries? Historians and experts have concluded there are at least six possible reasons/theories for this hatred - Racial, Economic, Outsider, Chosen People, Scapegoat and Deicide. This last theory, simply put, is that the Jews were the “Christ Killers!” Time won’t allow us to test these theories; which brings us to the real (the biblical) reason why the world hates the Jews.
The truth is that the world hates the Jews because the world hates God. The Jews were God’s firstborn, His chosen people (Deuteronomy 14:2). Through the Jewish patriarchs, the prophets, and the temple, God used the Jews to bring us His Word, the Law, and morality to a world of sin. He sent us His son, Jesus the Christ, in a Jewish body to redeem the world of sin. Satan, the prince of the earth (John 14:30; Ephesians 2:2), has poisoned the minds of men with his hatred of the Jews. {See Revelation 12 for an allegorical depiction of Satan’s (the dragon’s) hatred of the Jewish nation (the woman)].
Satan’s single, avowed intent was to wipe out the Jews through the Babylonians, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Hittites, and the Nazis. But he’s failed every time. All attempts to curse Israel have failed. God made an unbreakable covenant with Abraham, part of which was the promise to curse anyone who cursed his people (Genesis 12:3). Look at the nations that tried! If we turn our backs on Israel and refuse to stand with her in her time of need, we will be a cursed people. This is the best reason there is to address our own prejudices.
Anti-Semitism did not cease with the church. In 1543 Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet entitled “A miserable and accursed people; stupid fools, blind and senseless; thieves and robbers; the great vermin of humanity and Lazy rogues. For such ruthless wrath of God is sufficient evidence that they [the Jewish people] assuredly have erred and gone astray. Even a child can comprehend this. For one dare not regard God as so cruel that he would punish his own people so long, so terrible, so unmercifully. Therefore, this work of wrath is proof that the Jews, surely rejected by God, are no longer his people, and neither is he any longer their God.” (On the Jews and Their Lies)
That depraved view flies in the face, completely, of the plain truth of the Bible. No real Christian who knows their bible can have anything to do with Anti-Semitism. It cannot be supported or condoned and should be spoken against. God is not finished with Israel.
1 I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? ‘Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars; I alone am left, and they are seeking my life.’ But what is the divine reply to him? ‘I have kept for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.’ So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace (Romans 11: 1-6).
There was a remnant of believing Jews – those who saw Jesus as their Messiah and by grace through faith, they believed. There still is. The leaders of the nation refused Jesus, yes. But many Jews came to him. The Jewish priests came to Jesus in Acts. The early church was almost 100% Jewish, its apostle and writers were Jews. 64 of 66 books are Jewish books. The greatest messenger of all, Paul the Jew, brought the gospel to the nations, to the Gentiles.
The anguished Paul tells us, “For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs 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!” (Romans 9:3-5).
We say we love the things that the Lord loves, that you love the Lord. But you hate your brother. The founder of the Christian religion was the Jew’s greatest friend. He is God, man and a Jewish man at that, some might say that greatest of all…
Israel, the nation, is very special to God. We read in Deuteronomy 7:6-8 these words: "For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt."
It is true that Israel, today, is in the place of rejection. The nation is a secular, unbelieving (as to the claims of Scripture and their Messiah, Jesus Christ) nation. We are dismayed at how the modern nation subjugates its Arab neighbours. But Paul urges the gentile church then, as now, to be humble and to remember that it was by God’s grace, alone, that they were saved, grafted into the olive. It was not because they were better than the Jews.
God’s temporary and partial rejection of his beloved was because the nation went their own way, sought a righteousness that was their own. They were blessed, yes; but they’d forgotten to be a light to others. The church must beware the same thing. We Christians are redeemed by the grace of God in Christ the Lord. God loves us, but we have not displaced Israel as the apple of God’s eye. We will have to wait for the future kingdom when Christ returns; then all the questions about Israel and the church will be settled. Then we will know. In the meantime, let us never forget to pray for God’s chosen people.
“Not just today, but every day for the Peace of Israel we should pray. Driven and homeless and lonely too, their only crime, to be born a Jew. Across the world resounds a cry of a stricken race which cannot die. Through centuries the nations fall, but the Jews still weep at the wailing wall. O Father, above the debt we owe to this race, should cause our prayers to flow in a daily stream of grace, that they shall find release from hatred’s flay. Give us the vision, Lord to see, that love for Jew is love for Thee.” (For Israel’s Peace, Clara Bernhardt)
MFR 28-01-23