When God promised Abraham that his descendants would possess all of the land from the Nile River in Egypt to Lebanon and everything from the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates River, he could not have imagined that God’s promise would be delayed by a diaspora lasting nearly 4,000 years into the future.
A dispersion of the twelve tribes of Israel sent Abraham’s progeny to the far corners of the Earth, and their journey through time was marked by ethnic hatred and religious persecution. God’s promise to Abraham, it seemed, was meant only for a latter-day generation born in the far distant future.
While many of the major and minor prophets foretold a re-gathering of the tribes to their promised homeland at the end of time, the prophet Amos was especially descriptive in his words of prophecy for this promised restoration. Here is what he wrote:
“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God” (Amos 9:13-15).
Today, a great battle is taking place over the air waves of our modern media disputing not only the origins, but also the ethnicity, of those living in the state of Israel. Are they really Jews? Have the prophets who followed in the footsteps of Moses, foretelling the birth of the modern Hebrew nation, been proven right, or have we been lied to?
Isaiah prophesied:
“Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God” (Isaiah 66:7-9).
It was in the midst of the Second World War that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, decreed the birth of new Zion nearly six years to the day before it officially took its first breath in the Spring of 1948. By rejecting the Balfour Declaration endorsed by Britain and the League of Nations, Ben-Gurion in 1942 struck the rock of Horeb in the desert of international politics, and a tiny nation sprang from the ashes of the holocaust to become the first Jewish State since King David ruled over Judah. It was then that the words of Isaiah, and also the words of Jesus pointing to the “sorrow of birth pangs” in a future restoration of Jerusalem, finally came to pass.
Today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defends his country as the one nation on earth whose citizens are the re-gathered tribes of ancient Israel, previously scattered and persecuted, but held in memory by God. This would seem to be a fitting claim in light of recent, and many not so recent, historical events in the land of Palestine, leading to the creation of a tiny country that sits on the shores of the Mediteranean Sea under the most improbable of circumstances.
Israel continues to have her share of enemies, and those allied against the Hebrew nation are not confined to the surrounding Arab states that so abhor her. A host of non-regional political voices have also risen up, taking the form of a PR campaign in an effort to shape public opinion on issues affecting Israel, the region, and now Jewish identity.
We might think that such efforts are an attempt to improve the social and economic fortunes of everyone living in the Middle East, but that does not fit the evidence. Many of these activities are found in “Christian” forums or websites that vilify modern Israel as an “antichrist state” bent on world conquest.
PR agents that own up to their secular activism appear equally determined to dissolve the Jewish nation by any means possible. All of these voices are promoting the separation of Jerusalem from its Zionist roots in an attempt to erode its Jewish identity while depriving the nation of its capital city
I believe the flood of propaganda against Israel is aimed mostly at her Christian backers in the West, which is now being tested. Christians represent a long-standing base of political support that has helped Israel maintain its military superiority in a region known for its many uncertain alliances.
In fact, President Obama’s ‘efforts to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu using his own political proxies during recent Israeli elections show his contempt for the Jewish state. I believe that PR agents are now posing as Christians in every Internet venue in which issues affecting the state of Israel are talked about.
There is an effort to persuade the public to see Zionist Jews as imposters who took land away from “Palestinian” land owners in order to create a fake Jewish state, thus even the word “Zionist” is now considered by some to be a pejorative.
The claim that Israel is not actually a Jewish state is based on every conceivable distortion of history, science, and of course, the Bible. The assertion itself could well be the “strong delusion” prophesied by the apostle Paul in his letter to the church of Thessalonica, as these ideas now appear to be sweeping the globe.
What follows is a look at the reasoning put forth to bring public contempt against the modern Hebrew nation, which is being blamed for every facet of political and social distress in the holy land today.
Let’s first look at the biblical case for believing that an ethnic Jew is not a real Jew, and what the apostle Paul said about this in the book of Romans:
“For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter…” (Romans 2:28, 29).
This plainly makes the case that an ethnic Jew must accept Christ to be a saved Jew since without faith in the Messiah one remains an unbeliever. And we know God has extended salvation to both unbelieving Jews and Gentiles since the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ shortly before the birth of the Church.
But Paul goes on to say in the same letter that God has blinded Israel for the purpose of bringing the gospel to the gentiles only until the times of the gentiles are fulfilled, at which point something even more remarkable will happen: the eyes of ethnic Jews will be opened!
Let’s look at all the relevant portions of this passage:
“I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew…” (Romans 11:1, 2).
Note that Paul here identifies himself as a Benjamite, referring to ethnic Jews as being God’s people and saying God had not rejected them. This passage clearly contradicts those who assert that Paul’s use of the word “Israel” is in reference to the Christian church, or that the Church has become Israel. He continues:
“What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded. (According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day…I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles…”
According to Paul, God has purposely blinded the Jews so that unbelieving Gentiles can receive the gospel of Christ and be saved. He concludes his passage by prophesying the salvation of FUTURE Israel:
“Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?… FOR GOD IS ABLE TO GRAFT THEM IN AGAIN…. For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, UNTIL THE FULNESS OF THE GENTILES BE COME IN…
For if the first fruit (gentile believers) be holy, the lump (Jews to be saved) is ALSO holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches…. For God hath concluded them ALL in unbelief, THAT HE MIGHT HAVE MERCY UPON ALL… SO ALL ISRAEL SHALL BE SAVED…For this is my covenant unto them, when I SHALL take away their sins” (Romans 11:12-32).
This is indisputable proof that God will open the eyes of future Israel and save a remnant of ethnic Jews before Christ returns. Note that gentile believers would not need to be grafted in “AGAIN”, this would only apply to unbelieving Jews. The fact that most modern Jews remain in unbelief will not prevent their eyes from being opened once the times of the gentiles have been fulfilled, as Paul prophesied they will be.
“For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree?” (Romans 11:24)
Those who deny God’s covenant promise to save future Israel say that national Israel is a nation of “false Jews” created by Satan to defraud the public, but they have no Scriptural support for that claim. The rebirth of the modern Hebrew nation fulfills scores of Old Testament prophecies calling for the return of the Jewish people to their promised homeland in the latter days.
There is not even one bible prophecy that warns of a false Jewish state created by Man or orchestrated by Lucifer. We know that Jesus himself prophesied the rebirth of modern Israel in Matthew 24:32, and that is why the angel of the Lord spoke to me audibly in 2008 about a 1942 meeting of Zionists in New York City attended by David Ben-Gurion, an event that I previously had no knowledge of whatsoever!
“For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim: Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; and shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days” (Hosea 3:4, 5).
“I will bring you from the nations and gather you from the countries where you have been scattered — with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath” (Ezekiel 20:34).
The modern Jewish nation was born in the midst of the Holocaust, which was a poignant example of “outpoured wrath” in fulfillment of this prophecy. We can be sure that modern Israel is the re-gathering of those scattered throughout the earth in these last days, just as God’s Word says.
This brings us to the false claim that says Zionist Jews have no ancestral ties to Abraham based in part on Arthur Koestler’s book, Thirteenth Tribe, published in 1976. Koestler was not anti-Semitic, however he believed there was evidence that Ashkenazi Jews living in modern Israel were descended from Khazarian converts of the Turkic Khazar Empire, to which many Jews had fled seeking refuge in the 8th century.
While Keostler’s research was based on early genetic profiling technology and limited data, later DNA studies using more robust data and more advanced tools reached a very different conclusion. The majority consensus among those involved in the lastest research is that despite what is referred to as admixture with local populations, genetic sampling from Ashkenazi, Caucasian, Middle Eastern, North African, and Sephardi Jews, are consistent with common Levantine ancestry, meaning that modern Jews have proven ancestral ties to both one another and to the earliest known populations of Jews living in the Middle East.
The following study quote affirms modern Jewish identity:
“Through integration of genotypes on newly collected samples with data from several of our past studies, we have assembled the largest data set available to date for assessment of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic origins. This data set contains genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms in 1,774 samples from 106 Jewish and non-Jewish populations that span the possible regions of potential Ashkenazi ancestry: Europe, the Middle East, and the region historically associated with the Khazar Khaganate….
Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population-genetic structure, we find that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations, and among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews with populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly with the populations that most closely represent the Khazar region.
Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region.” [1]
Of course, we as Christians know that what matters is not a genetic link to one of the 12 tribes of Israel, but rather faith in Jesus Christ. We also know it was God Himself who used the Abrahamic bloodline to bring our Lord Jesus into the world, and we know that restoration of modern Israel pertains to the re-gathering of ethnic Jews in fulfillment of prophecy before Christ returns. We can be certain that the woman in Revelation chapter 12 is the Jewish state of Israel.
There is another assertion contradicting Jewish identity that says the word “Jew” was invented during Hebrew-to-English translations in the 17th century and cannot be used to identity descendants of Abraham today. It’s an absurdly semantic argument but I thought it would be helpful to explain the origins of the word “Jew” because its use in Scripture is valid.
The word “Jew” was derived from the name of Jacob’s fourth son, Judah (Hebrew: Yehudah) and originally may have referred only to descendents of Judah, one of the original twelve tribes. Did you catch that? Judah was a tribe OF Israel, so any suggestion that a Judahite (Jew) was not a descendant of Jacob (Israel), is just an attempt to deny the genealogical link between modern Jews and their ancestor Judah, who was a son of Jacob, or Israel.
Note that Judah was the tribe whose progeny brought about the birth of Jesus Christ, so it makes sense that it would be the best known of the tribes of Israel using a shortened form of that name today. We are all familiar with reference to Christ as the “Lion of Judah,” which simply identifies the tribe to which the Jewish Messiah belongs.
Modern usage of the word has come to mean anyone whose ancestral practice of Judaism (another reference to Judah) connects them to one of the tribes of Israel regardless which tribe they are from. Why? Because modern Jews don’t usually know which tribe they are from. Only in some cases do they have access to reliable family records based mostly on oral tradition, as all genealogical records held by the priest-hood were destroyed in 68AD.
The wars that took place between the tribes of Israel referred to in the book of Kings was a division between the tribes that located themselves north of Jerusalem and those that located themselves to the south where they controlled Jerusalem. They were all tribes of Israel, but the northern portion (10 tribes) was called by the name of Israel and the southern portion (2 tribes) was called by the name of Judah. Obviously all the tribes retained their lineage to their ancestor Jacob (Israel), meaning the tribe of Judah (and modern Jews named after them) have the same ancestral ties to Jacob, or Israel, today.
Or course, the most often quoted passage used against Zionist Jews being “real” Jews is in the book of Revelation:
“Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee” (Rev. 3:9).
Since we have already shown that modern Zionist Jews are the true progeny of the original 12 tribes, and that future Israel is to be saved according to the apostle Paul in Romans 11:26, we have only to ask what Jesus means by his reference to those who “say they are Jews, and are not…” Who is he talking about?
I would like for you to think about Satan’s perspective on this particular question. If it is Satan’s intention to deny Jewish identity, as we know it is, what must Satan do to bring that about? He must simply have his proxies on Earth make that claim for themselves! Even those who deny the Jewishness of those descended from the twelve tribes of Israel are making this false claim and inviting God’s retribution against them.
Here are three groups that I believe fulfill this prophecy in the book of Revelation:
1) Group one is a PR campaign of political activism funded by the anti-Semitic institutions of Antichrist government posing as Christians (“real Jews”) in public forums and using these ideas to deny Jewish identity and foster contempt of the Jewish state. Satan believes that if he can destroy Jerusalem, or at least control it, he can prevent Messiah from bringing an end to the Age. [2]
2) Group three: Pseudo-Christian cult groups that agree with the stated positions of group one and who see themselves as being “true Jews” usually based on racial attributes. These individuals typically assert that only those of the black race are “real Jews,” however there is an Anglo-Saxon equivalent called “British Israel” that believe only they are “real Jews.” Of course, no one who claims to be a “Jew” without knowing Christ has fulfilled God’s requirement of them and those who know Christ won’t deny the future salvation of ethnic Jews.
3) Group three is Islam, whose core teaching is that the birthright of Abraham was passed on to Ishmael in a rejection of the biblical account in which Isaac received the inheritance as God intended. Muslims are taught that ethnic Jews have no connection to the covenant of God with Abraham whatsoever. In effect, Muslims are asserting themselves to be “real Jews” by invalidating the birthright of Isaac and claiming it for themselves. Islam represents those who “say they are Jews, and are not,” whether it subscribes to the word “Jew” or not.
I might conclude by making mention of the charge that Israel is engaging in apartheid policies toward Palestinians who were displaced from their homes when Israel first marked out its national borders in 1947-48. The truth is that “Palestinians” were already dispossessed Arabs with ancestral ties to surrounding Arab countries, such as Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. In fact, those same Arabs were invited to become Israeli citizens if they so chose, and many did.
By contrast, over one million Jewish citizens in surrounding Arab states were forcibly expelled and their possessions confiscated as an act of retribution for the founding of the modern Jewish state, which the Arab nations perceived as an act of war against them.
Proof of this is in the numbers. More than 20% of the population in Israel today is made up of Arabs. How many Arab states have even a 1% Jewish population? The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is sheer propaganda.
Pray for the peace of Israel and know that a remnant is prophesied to find salvation in the arms of her Messiah in the days just ahead!
God bless you,
Peter John
Endnotes
[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Khazar_myth#Genetic_studies
http://www.jewfaq.org/ashkseph.htm
[2] http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=84&x_article=2127
http://www.timesofisrael.com/germany-said-to-indirectly-fund-anti-israel-church-group/