Tag Archives: zionism

There’s Little Peace in Bethlehem

Posted on by
Reply

Christmas is a time to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Sadly, the very ground where Christ once lived and taught and died to redeem mankind knows no peace today. The little town of Bethlehem, which witnessed the birth of the divine Prince of Peace, lies at the heart of the besieged West Bank of Palestine, held hostage to a twisted plot of diabolic sophistication which has enlisted even Christians and Western nations into its confused web of intrigue. The sudden fall of Syria to a Zionist-globalist funded and armed cabal of ‘good’ terrorists should hardly be a cause for celebration but for deep concern among Christians.

If recent history means anything it will be our Christian brothers and sisters, nearly a million strong in Syria, who will be targeted, killed, and driven out just as happened to Iraq’s Chaldean Christians after 20004. Christians in fact are the most vulnerable group in the Middle East, invariably caught in any crossfire between between Muslim and Zionist factions. Unsurprisingly, Israel has wasted no time in opportunistically moving their tanks even as far as the outskirts of Damascus to expand the Zionist influence and power. Nothing new there.

Here at home, for millions of so-called Christian Zionists, the sweeping away of one more Israeli enemy represents a victory, and yet they fail to understand that their pro-Zionism stems from a Christian heresy, wholly based on a literalist and selective interpretation of Sacred Scriptures as found in the Scofield Reference Bible, a mainstay of millions of Evangelical Christians. For example, the Scofield commentary (italicized) on Genesis 12:3: “I will bless them that bless thee. and curse them that curse thee” reads: “Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew—well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

Continue reading →

Unfinished Business

Posted on by
Reply

Has the Catholic Church under Francis fully retreated from her core Divine mandate to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19) by adopting a cozy kind of doctrinal “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” mindset? This past September 13, the putative leader of the Roman Catholic Church admonished his young listeners in Singapore, “Every religion is a way to arrive at God… There is only one God and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian: they are different paths.” This stunning revelation followed on the heels of his earlier statement to the Grand Imam of Indonesia, “…each cultivating his or her own spirituality and practicing his or her religion, may walk in search of God.”

If the Church, as we truly believe, was established by Christ to be a light to all the nations; not merely one light among many but the light which illumines the darkness, this means that until there is one fold and one shepherd then Christ’s Church on earth has unfinished business. Allegorically speaking, why would God’s building contractor (the Church) set down its toolbox with the house only half finished? Consider how the missionary zeal that was a defining hallmark of the Catholic Church as late as the 1950s has slowly fizzled out during the intervening decades. In fact, it is now Catholics who are now being recruited in vast numbers into Pentecostal and other sects, particularly in Latin America. But this particular dereliction of missionary zeal has been particularly unfortunate for the Jews, our elder brothers in God’s Covenant, who are thereby being denied access to the promise of its fulfillment, which is Christ. It is a false charity to withhold a vital truth from someone simply because it might offend their ears.

Case in point is the Solemn Intercessions which form an integral part of the Good Friday Liturgy. Among those intercessory prayers is one now designated “For the Jewish People.” Pre-1962 Catholics prayed “For the Conversion of the Jews.” Notice that already the operative word “Conversion” has been deleted, apparently because it denotes some implicit threat or form of hostility. But is conversion not required of each and every one of us on some level? Conversion, regardless of our present state, is designed to bring us closer to God, not to threaten our peace of mind. It is a positive value, not a negative one. So why are we afraid to speak of conversion in regard to the Jews, or anyone else for that matter?

Continue reading →

A Prelude to Armageddon?

Posted on by
Reply

One should only wade into the mine-infested waters of political Zionism with the greatest trepidation, for fear of being instantly tarred as ‘anti-semitic.’ Still, I feel compelled to take note of a savagely brutal war being waged by Israeli Semites on their fellow Semites whether of Christian or Muslim persuasion, namely the Palestinian people. The issue involves much more than a simplistic appraisal of whoever is claiming to be wearing white hats v. black hats if we are to arrive at even a modicum of actual truth.

In the first place a bit of context to a very complicated historical situation is needed. That involves drawing a distinction between the Jewish religion and the Nation of Israel. The confusion lies in the fact that in the Old Testament a theocratic state existed combining the two and which lasted shortly beyond the time of Christ. The Jewish religion was liturgical, revolving around the Aaronic priesthood and Temple sacrifice. But with Jesus, a new high priesthood in the person of Christ himself fulfilled the “promise” and the former rites of sacrifice were enfolded into the new rite which Christ instituted at the Last Supper and consummated on the cross. Thus the old religious liturgy was renewed and restored in the form of the Catholic Mass, Christ himself being the New Temple not made by human hands. He founded a new priesthood based not on a bloodline but on the twelve men chosen by Christ, as eternal high priest, to be his apostles and heirs, all of them Jewish.

But the leaders of the ‘Nation’ of Israel whose responsibility had been to welcome the Messiah when he arrived did the opposite. They rejected Christ because His stated messianic objective was not to elevate the nation to geopolitical supremacy as they had anticipated. They were more interested in being liberated from the Romans than being liberated from the ancient curse of sin. So the tree which should have had one strong trunk branched out into two competing trunks, both coming from the same shoot. But only one thrived even as the other withered. The Jewish ‘nation’ followed its own path, even persecuting Jewish followers of Christ, until the year 70 AD when, in a suicidal rebellion against Rome, it was utterly destroyed. The Temple was smashed and the survivors scattered to the winds. Even today one can read the Jewish historian Josephus’ tragic account of Jerusalem’s destruction in his History of the Jews, it is a truly heart rending account.

Continue reading →