Out of Zion

Guest (Male): Welcome to Out of Zion with Susan Michael, an exploration of the Bible and the land of Israel. From ancient biblical sites to the story behind the stories, join Susan on a journey through the most exciting book on the planet. Hit the subscribe button for future episodes, which will deepen your faith and bring the Bible to life. And now here's our host, Susan Michael.

Dr. Susan Michael: Well, hey there and welcome back. This is the Out of Zion podcast, our Israel Answer series. We're taking a few weeks here to connect the Bible to modern Israel. So we're spanning the gap, filling in some information to help prepare you for our future episodes where we're going to answer questions about Israel, about the Bible, and about you and how it affects you.

Last two weeks, we talked about the development of Judaism and then Christianity. This week, we're going to talk about an ugly reality that has been there throughout all this history, and it is the ugly face of antisemitism. This is a really important issue for you to understand, so I encourage you to stick with me for a few minutes here so that you understand what is going on today and the responsibility on our shoulders to stand against it.

In 2014, there was a global study of the entire world and it determined that 25% of people on the planet held antisemitic views. That's a lot of people. 70% of them had never met a Jewish person. What does that tell you? We have a problem here. It's a problem of propaganda, of conspiracy theories, of lies. These people had never even met a Jewish person and yet they held these negative views about them.

Well, since 2014, nothing has gotten better. It's only gotten worse. Antisemitism is surging around the world. It's at epidemic levels in the Middle East, it's at pre-Holocaust levels in Europe, and it's even surging here in the United States. Last year, 2021, New York recorded a 100% increase in antisemitic incidents over the year before. In Los Angeles, they recorded a 59% increase from the year before.

So let's talk about this. What is antisemitism? In simple terms, it is hatred of or bigotry toward Jews. But I'm going to use a term every once in a while of Christian antisemitism. What would be a definition of Christian antisemitism? That would be when a professing Christian uses the Christian scriptures to denigrate Jewish people and support antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. That's what we call Christian antisemitism.

Many of you listening to me are evangelical Christians and you would argue there can be no such thing as Christian antisemitism. It's an oxymoron, right? How can you be a Christian and hold hatred or bigotry towards anybody, but especially the Jewish people, the roots of our faith? Unfortunately, history has proven that it is a reality. The picture that I know of that helps you to understand this evil of antisemitism is to talk about it in terms of a mutating virus.

Then it begins to make sense. We're all familiar with terminology about viruses these days, so it's not a big jump here. But the evil pursuit of the Jewish people has been around since the beginning of time really, for millennia. That is why the historian Robert Wistrich calls it the longest hatred. Every time we think that we have wiped out this irrational hatred of the Jewish people, it seems to be dying out. What it does is it just reinvents itself.

It's like a virus. It'll go dormant for a while, you think you've got it, and then it comes out in a mutated form with a different language or maybe a different face, but at the end of the day, it's all about the same goal: to rid the world of the Jewish people. There's a lot of history. I won't go into it where it got started, what the roots of it are, but back even before the time of Christ in the world of the empires changing from the Persian empire to the Greek empire to the Roman empire.

There was a lot of back and forth with the Jewish people and these ruling empires. There seemed to be the first antisemitic writing out of Egypt. But in the Bible, our first story that seems to depict antisemitism, not just a pagan religion. Let me explain. All these empires were based on paganism and you either worshiped the emperor himself or you worshiped the emperor's gods and you were required to to show your loyalty to the empire.

Of course, the Jews couldn't do that. Their God had told them not to worship any other god. Later on, the Christians were in the same boat. So this would often put them at odds with these pagan empires. But in the Bible, the story of the book of Esther seems to go a step further. This isn't about the Persian king and about worshiping him. This is a member of the royal court, the consort Haman. He hates the Jews because they won't bow down to him.

So he devises this plan just to have them all killed. Just kill them all. So the story of Esther really is a very good example of just an irrational hatred of the Jewish people. In the ancient times, paganism may have had some part to do in it. Then under the Greeks, we have the story of Hanukkah, which isn't in the Bible. It happened in between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

But it was all about the Seleucid King Antiochus the Fourth Epiphanes, and he tried to enforce paganism on the Jewish people and they revolted. They actually defeated his forces, regained sovereignty, and that's what the celebration of Hanukkah is all about. But you would think once these pagan empires gave way to the Christian empire, when the Roman empire became Christian in the fourth century AD, you would think that this antisemitism and this struggle with the Jewish people would have ended.

But that's not at all. Instead, antisemitism just came into the heart of Christianity and Christian Europe where the Christian people preached against the Jewish faith and then began to discriminate against the Jewish people and passed all kinds of laws against them. I talked a little bit about this last week, I'll repeat it very briefly. It's the preaching against the Jewish religion that started in the Church Fathers.

Then that became translated into laws that discriminated against the Jewish people. They couldn't hold certain jobs, they couldn't have certain professions, they couldn't own land. At times, they were rounded up and forced to live in ghettos. At times, they were actually expelled from countries. At times, their children were kidnapped and they were forced to be baptized, trying to force them to become Christians. It's a really long, terrible history of what we would call Christian antisemitism.

Sometimes we tend to think that was the Catholic church or that was the other church, that's not us. We're Protestant now, we're evangelical. But unfortunately, the story is continued under the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther. He reached out in very friendly ways to the Jews. He said no wonder you haven't converted to Christianity the way you've been treated. So he was very nice to them, expecting that they're now all going to convert to Christianity.

When they didn't, he turned against them and he wrote terrible antisemitic things against the Jewish people. His writings were later reprinted and used by the Nazis in order to keep the church quiet while he carried out what he said Christianity had actually already been preaching. So Christianity did not carry out the Holocaust, but the Holocaust definitely paved the way for it. Christian antisemitism paved the way for the Holocaust.

But now the Nazis, their antisemitism was not based on a religious philosophy. It was based on racial theories and eugenics and the belief that the races are different and that there are some more developed races and there are underdeveloped races. There are underdeveloped races that are polluting the human genome and so they needed to be eradicated. Top of the list of developed races was the Aryan race and bottom was the Jews.

The Jews were living there among the Aryans. So the Nazi policies were based on racial antisemitism, saying these Jews were subhuman, they were evil, they were tainting the racial pool there in Germany and they needed to be eradicated. So they tried to eradicate all 11 million Jews in Europe. They made it through six million, but their goal had been 11 million. It's just a horrendous piece of history.

The fact that Christian antisemitism paved the way for it, provided a bit of a foundation for it is a travesty. It's something that every Christian needs to understand this and come to terms with it and learn how to now approach the Jewish people with humility first of all, a bit of repentance, and with mutual respect. So we've gone from pagan antisemitism to Christian antisemitism to racial antisemitism, and that brings us up to today.

Today we wouldn't support any of those three expressions of antisemitism. So today the virus has mutated and it's come out with an expression that the Western world is actually tolerating. What is it? Today, the face of antisemitism is largely a political one. It's all about the Jewish collective, not the Jewish individual, but the collective, the Jewish state, the state of Israel.

So you can demonize Israel and accuse them of being evil and Nazis and racists and all these crazy accusations. The Western world will tolerate it. The world will tolerate it because this is an expression of antisemitism that has found the face for today and it's a political face. Now, not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Of course not. Israel's not a perfect place. It's made up of fallible human beings just like America is.

America is far from perfect, but I love America and I support America, and I love Israel and I support Israel. It doesn't mean that they're perfect. It doesn't mean I agree with everything that they do as a state or as a policy. But I've studied their history and the facts are on their side. I know the people of Israel and they are wonderful people, a good-hearted people. So we're going to talk more about these things in future episodes on our Israel Answer series.

But let me move on because there is one other type of antisemitism in the world today. I'm not going to spend any time on this one, but there is also another expression of antisemitism that the world tolerates and it is the Muslim expression of antisemitism. Within Islam, there is a theological basis for antisemitism, but it's been beefed up with racial ideologies that came down through the Nazi ranks to the Middle East back earlier in World War II.

It also has a political expression because of the situation with the Palestinians. So it's not purely religious, but it is religious. It is political and it does have racial undertones. Yet a secular globalist West tolerates it. It's mind-blowing, but that is because antisemitism is actually an evil spiritual force. It's not just a political force, it's not just a social force. It's not just anything that can be explained away or gotten rid of.

It keeps coming back. It is always there and it is a relentless evil pursuit of the Jewish people. This brief outline shows you there is no rational explanation for this other than a biblical one. We have to understand spiritual realities to understand antisemitism and its history. So we go all the way back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3:15 where God tells the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head and you will strike his heel."

Of course, this is a prophetic word about the Messiah would come and would crush the head of the evil serpent. But before that happens, there is this enmity between the forces of evil and against the woman. There's another scripture that depicts this beautifully and that's in the New Testament in the book of Revelation chapter 12. There it describes a woman who is clothed with the moon and the sun and 12 stars around her head, symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel.

She is pregnant and going to give birth to the male child who will rule the world. This is a perfect depiction of the people of Israel and their calling to be the vehicle, the birthing people for God's plan of redemption. They're going to birth the Messiah into the world. It says that sitting at her feet to devour the male child is this dragon. Later it says the dragon goes after the woman and she is whisked away into the wilderness for safety.

He comes after her again and it says the earth just protects her. So the serpent gets the dragon gets so mad because he cannot get at the woman Israel. So he goes after her other offspring, those with the testimony of Jesus. So the spiritual enmity against Israel is this same enmity that goes back to the Garden of Eden. It is against the Messiah that's going to come and crush the head of the evil one.

Until then, he will do everything he can to stop that from happening. If he can destroy the woman, he will destroy God's plans and purposes. If he can destroy the church, he will have destroyed God's plans and purposes. So another scripture that I always quote that for me describes this biblical explanation of antisemitism is in the Psalms, Psalm 83 verses one through four.

Just picking a few of the phrases here and there, but in brief, it says, "Oh God, those who hate you have said, let us cut them off as a nation that the name of Israel would be no more." So this is very clear that it is the enemies of God himself that are after his people, his people Israel. It is a spiritual battle and this is why, my friends, that we as Christians are called to pray for them, to bless them, and to stand in solidarity with them.

Because we understand the spiritual battle and we have been equipped with the spiritual weapons to fight spiritual battles in prayer. So this is our calling in these days and this is why it's so important that we make this connection between the Bible and Israel today, this evil pursuit that we must stand against. I hope that you have learned something today. I would like to offer you a free booklet.

If you want to understand more about just what I've covered today, this history of antisemitism, I wrote a little booklet, very simple, easy to read to equip you so that you can review it, you have something you can share with others. In today's show notes, we give you a link to where you can download that book. You'll find it on the outofzionshow.com website under resources, free resource for you. Take advantage of it.

So we're going to be back here next week for the next two weeks. We're going to continue connecting the Bible to Israel today, and so I want to see you back here then. Until then, God bless. I want to offer you a free download: ten reasons to stand with Israel. Actually it's ten reasons why Christians should stand with Israel. Get your free download by going to the link in today's show notes or go to www.outofzionshow.com and click on the tab for resources.

We'll have it there as well. But be sure, download this free resource for you. We're going to be talking about some of the points in it in the coming weeks. So we want to make sure that you have it, you can print it out, you can share it with friends and family. Invite them to join us here on the Out of Zion show for our Israel Answer series. So we'll see you back here next week and until then, God bless.

Guest (Male): We hope you have enjoyed this episode of Out of Zion with Susan Michael. Be sure to subscribe to Out of Zion now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, pray.com, Salem1Plus, Salem Life Audio, outofzionshow.com. Out of Zion with Susan Michael is a production of ICEJ USA. All rights reserved.