I once stated publicly that it was easy to demonstrate that supporting Israel has not blessed America and a pastoral colleague saw my statement, and sought me out to query me about this. He said he would love to get together and grill me about how I could make such a statement when it is clear that America is the greatest nation on earth, and therefore, he asserted that I probably did not have a credible leg to stand on. As you have seen, though, from my previous two parts of this series, not only is this argument able to be sustained, once you start investigating this subject it becomes easy to see that the idea that standing with Israel has blessed America is not only wrong, it actually becomes quite absurd the more that you look.
I should note before I go any further that I do not write these arguments with any intended antagonism towards America. Quite the opposite actually. America is a great nation that has achieved much good in the world over time. And it saddens me to see such a great nation diminished by such bad ideas. It is also worse that a great source of this problem stems from heterodox teachings from the evangelical church in the United States, especially. The church has a lot to answer for in the way it has mislead Americans on so many topics. From prosperity heresy to giving a shroud of cover for forever wars in the Middle East, the Church has done a lot of damage in America and has blasphemed the name of Christ in the process.
And it is without dispute that the Church is largely to blame for this. As Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe notes, “The Christian and Jewish lobbies for Israel, at least until now, were deemed the most important ones by Israel. And extraordinarily, it seeks their help in gaining legitimacy in this century as well.”[1] Without the evangelical church’s focus on artificially restoring the nation of Israel this effort would not have been possible. This support for Israel did not just spring up after the fact, as some people assume. As Pappe notes,
“Zionism began as an evangelical Christian concept and later an active project. It appeared as a religious appeal to the faithful both to aid and be prepared for the ‘return of the Jews’ to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state there as the fulfilment of God’s will. But soon after, the Christian involved in this campaign politicised this ‘theology of return’, once they realize that similar notion had begun to emerge among European Jews, who despaired of finding a solution to the never-ending anti-Semitism on the continent. The Christian desire to see a Jewish Palestine convinced with a similar European Jewish vision in the late nineteenth century.
For Christian and Jewish supporters of Zionism, Palestine, as such did not exist. In their minds, it was replaced by the ‘Holy Land’ and in that ‘Holy Land’, from the very beginning, there was no indigenous population, only a small community of faithful Christian and pious Jews…”[2]
These deniers of the existence of Palestine amongst Jewish and Christian Zionists exist still to this day, as you have probably seen. You may have even been one yourself once. I once was one of them until the plain reading of history broke that spell for me. But from the very beginning this effort to recreate the nation of Israel in Palestine, or the land of Canaan, was a joint Jewish and Christian effort. That is not to say that all Jews and Christians supported it, but that large segments of both sides have been working behind the scenes and publicly to get this done. This is well documented,
Read full text: https://revmatthewlittlefield.substack.com/p/has-standing-with-israel-blessed-7db
