It brings me no joy to write this one. Yet, here I am, typing away, wondering who in their right mind would deliberately read something with a title like this. But I think this might be the most important post in this series.
Set against the foreground of the dumpster fire that is US politics right now, the geopolitical scene is splintering into fresh shards of antisemitism as the fight for Zion continues to escalate in the Middle East and elsewhere. To be sure, all Americans need to be engaged citizens now and in every election. However, believers are called to a higher standard, one that transcends race, patriotism, and social location and propels our faith forward to the Kingdom that is arriving in and through our risen Lord.
As I grow in my own apprenticeship under Jesus, I am compelled to consider my own understanding of the controversy of Zion and what it could mean for me or my family. As political tension and hatred grows here at home and abroad, the of challenge that only becomes more real.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, famed German pastor and spy of the 1930s and 40s, is credited for the words “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless.” His prophetic words are chilling.
In my previous pieces on this blog, I have offered the the following propositions surrounding the controversy over Israel and the people who live in it:
- The controversy of Zion is the historical continuum of Gentile strife over and divine jealousy for the land and people of Israel and the city of Jerusalem.
- The origin of the controversy is God’s election of and ongoing commitment to the family of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and the bloodline of David through Messiah Jesus.
- God has a decisive timeline to resolve this controversy.
My final proposition, broken into two statements, follows below. And I believe if my audience takes the time to read onward, the gravity of this will sit bitterly in the pit of our stomachs:
The hostility of Gentile nations and individuals against the people and the land of Israel will have its most gruesome expression in the generation of the Lord’s return.
That’s a hard statement. A host of well-studied pastors and scholars I respect disagree with me on this take, so much so that they avoid facing the vast scriptural evidence for such an audacious and explicit claim. The thought of the Jews going through another round–it’s unbearable. But the Bible is clear that the brutality of Gentile hatred against Israel will reach it’s pinnacle in the years leading up to Jesus’ return. It’s an incredibly tough pill to swallow, especially in light of the monstrous evil the world woke up to on October 8th and the ongoing antisemitism worldwide since. Scripture is clear that this is not a problem that will improve:
At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book.
Daniel 12:1
Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another…For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.
Matthew 24:9-10, 21
Blow a trumpet in Zion;
Joel 2:1-2
sound an alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the LORD is coming; it is near…
a great and powerful people;
their like has never been before,
nor will be again after them
through the years of all generations.
In every one of these passages (and a great many more which I did not include here), the context of the trouble is Israel-centric. The “you” Jesus has in view in Matthew 24 are the Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem. As horrible as the holocaust was, as bad as October 7th was, more is coming. We know that blood will pursue the nations that are hostile toward Israel (Eze. 35:5-9), but that doesn’t make the brutality any less real. It will play out on the world’s stage. Jesus says the generation that sees all these evil abominations won’t pass away until they are complete.
Which brings me to part two of my proposition:
The primary reason for persecution of non-Jews in the days ahead will be identification with Israel and the Jewish people through our prophetic stance regarding her suffering and her vindication.
Revelation 12 gives us a powerful symbolic retelling of this reality, highlighting the theological implications behind this coming, unthinkable future. In this chapter, the great dragon (later identified as Satan) hunts down a woman who is about to give birth. Many speculate about the identity of this woman. I believe she is, without a doubt, Israel. There are simply too many Old Testament allusions in this precise description to ignore the link.
The woman gives birth to a male child who is taken up to heaven and given a rod of iron to judge the nations (all imagery from the Hebrew Bible that is short-hand for the Messiah). But because the dragon cannot devour the child, he fixes his wrath on another object: the woman.
This is critical to understand. Satan has wrath. He has fury, hatred, and rage. Satan’s wrath is explicit in this passage, and yet the typical Christian understanding of Satan and his hoards is often a trivialized one. We tend to think he’s out to get us because our cars wouldn’t start on the way to church or because a tense encounter with some relative left us shaken or because we had numerous opportunities for “wrong thinking” to creep in or fell off the wagon to some bad behavior we’re trying to curb.
To be sure, demonic forces work in our lives and the world around us, and I don’t intend to minimize the struggle we all face to leave our sinful natures behind. But at the risk of sounding insensitive, I would go so far as to say that those pictures of Satan are soft, churchy, Americanized caricatures that play right into his plan to deceive us into looking at the wrong thing while he works his real plan elsewhere. I’m afraid we are so busy watching out for the enemy in our own personal struggles that the church in America has utterly missed his bigger target and far more valuable goal.
Satan has wrath, and that wrath has an object. The object of Satan’s wrath is not Jesus, and it’s not me, and it’s not the church. Read the chapter. The object of Satan’s wrath is the woman–it’s Israel. He hates her. He’s furious with God’s choice to bless all humanity through this family, and so he will do everything in his power to destroy them. He’s out for Israel and the promises made to the family of Abraham.
We know from the rest of the chapter that the woman flees into the wilderness, where she is nourished and partially protected from the dragon. And when she flees into the wilderness, the dragon goes after two groups of people:
So the dragon was enraged with the woman [Israel], and went off to make war with the rest of her children, who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”
Notice that John doesn’t say “the church” or “followers of Jesus” or even “the Jews.” He specifically breaks the target up into two groups, as he does elsewhere in the Revelation.
- To “keep the commandments of God” is to refer to the Jewish people. Paul himself said the commandments belong to Israel.
- But to “hold to the testimony of Jesus,” that’s a different group. That’s a people who are clinging to the reality that Jesus is the long-promised Messiah of Israel. And that group includes many Jews who believe as well as non-Jews from the nations who proclaim this truth.
The harsh reality of Revelation 12 is that if you hold to the testimony of Jesus, you’ve hitched your wagon to those who are fleeing into the wilderness. You’re a target. And in Revelation 19, we learn that the “testimony of Jesus” is not merely confessing Him as your Lord and Savior. The “testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” But what prophecy are we talking about here?
In the context of the chapter, its the truth that God will show up for Israel during her time of trouble in order to save His covenant people and bless all the nations. It’s the prophecy that has been thumping along through the Torah, Psalms, and Prophets, the plumbline of the entire Hebrew Bible. It’s what Paul writes about to the Romans, it’s what the prophets are concerned with. It’s what Moses foretells, and why Jesus sobs over the fate awaiting Jerusalem.
For Moses, Jesus, the apostles, and John of Patmos, the good news of the return of Jesus and God’s Kingdom is not primarily about personal salvation or being forgiven from sin. The gospel is the good news that God will make good on His promises to bless all humanity through the restored nation of Israel under the reign of their Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.
This is the heart of the controversy of Zion. People simply don’t believe it. It’s controversial on every level. But regardless of how uncomfortable that statement above makes us, we shouldn’t be deceived. The war in Israel today, the firestorm comes tomorrow, is not about a westernized conception of justice, Zionism, or Palestinian statehood. It is about the holy covenant, the one Jesus cut with His own blood. It’s about the gospel.
Can you imagine walking into church this Sunday and hearing your pastor say something like this? This kind of thing will get you run right out of the pulpit! It lands you imprisoned or worse in parts of the world. In the West, politicians lose elections, businessmen get fired, and the average church-goer is quickly hushed up, labeled, or canceled by church leadership for espousing this truth.
Despite the fact that this is the gospel every biblical book presents, you’re mocked when you preach the gospel like this. It’s too controversial, too messianic, and too Jewish. And perhaps that’s our problem. As I have mentioned before, we are so afraid of Jerusalem being precious to God, so oblivious to God’s election of Israel, so jealous of Him choosing them and not us, that we have sold out for a different gospel.
People like Bonhoeffer didn’t sell out. They were pushed out of churches and humiliated in the public sphere because they refused to be silent on the issue of the Jews in their day. They paid for it with their lives. And if we hold to the testimony of Jesus–if we believe that He is the long awaited messiah of Israel and rightful King of the cosmos enthroned in heaven in this moment–then their legacies stand as a urgent warning for us today.
…if you are unwilling to show the self-giving agape love of Christ by openly risking all you have for the sake of those who are suffering, who have no voice, you are no Christian at all, but a hypocrite and a fraud. God will reject your worship because the very thing that He required of you, you ignored.”
Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church, pp. 82-83
If we do not have the guts to speak against the evils being committed against the land of Israel and the Jewish people, or the courage to preach a gospel that puts a very Jewish Messiah at the helm of this world and the age to come, if we take an atheological stance on modern Israel or simply lull ourselves into thinking that the Jewish people can take a backseat to our own domestic woes, then we are dangerously close to forfeiting our right to worship God.
Like I said, it brings me no joy to write this.
As I have explained before, for the believer, standing with Israel is not a political move. It looks like pursuing a covenantal connection with the land of Israel and the Jewish people. It means taking a prophetic stance regarding world events, namely why Israel is suffering and how she will be vindicated. We know holding to this will end in persecution, suffering, and martyrdom for many. These are sections in my Bible that I admit that don’t like. I just don’t. But there they sit, leaving me with the haunting question of whether I could really give my life for what I believe:
And a white robe was given to each of them; and they were told that they were to rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers and sisters who were to be killed even as they had been, was completed also.” Rev. 6:11
So the dragon was enraged with the woman [Israel], and went off to make war with the rest of her children, who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.” Rev. 12:17
Satan is not enraged that I accepted Jesus into my heart at age 9. The nations do not care if I’m a Christian or whether I’m nice to my neighbor. But the nations reel over Zion and Israeli possession of the land. The enemy rages over God’s chosen people, circling her, ready to strike in her day of trouble. And if we do not care about that, that could very well be the cause of our own apostasy in the end.
The issue that got people like Bonhoeffer intro trouble in the 1940s was not the issue of Jesus. It was the issue of the Jewish people, which is the issue of Jesus. He’s Jewish, and he’s returning to Jerusalem to vindicate His people.
In the days ahead, God’s irresistible purpose to rule creation through His image bearers and dwell among them will win. And it won’t be at the ultimate expense of humans. Somehow, His purposes will be accomplished through us. But suffering is part of the plan. It will not be easy, cheap, or likely the type of suffering we expect. In many ways, I struggle with the ethical and moral implications of what I believe. For as much as I write about this stuff, I often fear that should I find myself in the generation that sees Jesus return for His beloved family, I may not be up for the task.
But I love singing the old hymn How Deep the Father’s Love for Us. So many lines in that beautiful song can be reimagined with Jesus’ family, the Jewish people, in mind. Our theology of the suffering servant works on more than one level. What their Messiah went through for them, His servants will go through as a witness to the nations, to save many people’s lives (Gen. 50:20, Deut. 32:36, Matt. 24:9-14).
On more than one occasion, I have asked if I have so high a view of myself that I cannot see Jacob’s Trouble for what it is? Am I so theologically fussy that I cannot comprehend the price of mercy? Am I numb to the wounds that mar God’s chosen people? Am I asleep in the days I am living?
I am not yet in a place on my own journey where I can give an honest answer to any of these questions. I may never be. There is no reason I should gain from the inheritance that belongs to Jesus. I’m riding on the coattails of a blessing I do not deserve. But if it costs me something to be my brother’s keeper, I pray I’m steadfast, courageous, and selfless enough to endure to the end.
Maranatha.
Up Next, the final installment in the series: The Controversy of Zion, Part 5: The Season of the Lamb
Two Precious Stones 