Out of Zion

Dr. Susan Michael: Hey there. There are two competing views of Israel. One is by some that call it a miracle and a cause for celebration or others that call it a calamity, something to be exposed and stood against. How can this be? Stick with me and I will begin to explain it.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Israel Answers series, connecting Israel, the Bible, and you. Join Susan Michael as she explores timely issues and current events from a scriptural perspective to equip the Christian world with a balanced and biblical response. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, which will ignite your faith and bring the Bible to life in your everyday world. Now, let’s join Susan with your Israel Answers.

Dr. Susan Michael: If you want to keep peace around the Thanksgiving table, you're always told to avoid politics and religion. I would add one more: avoid talking about Israel. It has become that controversial. Why is that? That’s what I want to talk about today.

Many Christians have traveled to Israel and have come home loving the country. Some are totally committed to blessing the Jewish people and politically supporting Israel with great fervor. Others in our world say that Israel is evil. They even use words like Nazi and they're causing great suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people and therefore, how could Christians support that?

I want to begin talking about that today and over the next coming weeks. This is just absolutely not true. I've been traveling to Israel for over 40 years now. I hate to admit it, but I have. I've studied, I got a master's degree there. I have studied for a lifetime on all the issues surrounding Israel: politically, theologically, culturally, religiously, all of it. I can tell you that this depiction of Israel as so evil is just wrong.

In this episode, I want to begin to talk about why is Israel so controversial? What is it behind the controversy? In the coming weeks, we're going to begin talking about just why is it that we believe Christians should be supporting Israel? First is Israel was the first and has been a sufferer of fake news before Trump ever came up with the term. Yes, there was always this fake news about Israel.

I was very perplexed by it back in the '80s when I was studying there and you would see what was really the truth and yet, how did the media depict Israel? Then what did the Arab leader say about Israel? It didn't add up. We all were talking about the lies in the media about Israel. Now we call lies fake news and that really is what was there.

We learned as we studied the situation not to go by what the Arab leaders said in English to the Western world. You had to go by what they were saying, especially in Arabic, to their own people. There was a great difference there and they were trying to pull one over on the Western world. A lot of reasons for that, I won't go into, but I just want to give you one example of what I'm talking about.

That was back in 1994. Yasser Arafat, who was the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, met with the Prime Minister of Israel at the White House, shook hands, and began a process for peace. Right after that, Yasser Arafat, who actually was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for this, went to Johannesburg, South Africa and spoke in a large mosque there.

He did speak in English, but he was in Johannesburg, South Africa. He didn't expect anybody to be listening other than the faithful Muslims that were there at mosque that day. Someone secretly recorded it and took it out to the world. After making these overtures about peace and his commitment to peace, he went to Johannesburg and he said this: that it was a jihadist war that will continue. He called for the faithful there in Johannesburg to get behind the fight.

He said Jerusalem is not only for the Palestinian people, it's for all the Muslim people. You are responsible for Palestine and for Jerusalem. He was calling them to get involved in this Jihad, this holy war. Then he said this: "This agreement," meaning the agreement that he had just made with Israel, "I'm not considering it more than the agreement which was signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh."

What does that mean? We know in history that the agreement that Muhammad made with the Quraysh tribe allowed Muhammad to go into Mecca and to pray there. Two years into the agreement, Muhammad was now strong enough to defeat Mecca and take it over. He called the agreement to have been abrogated and he went in, slaughtered the Quraysh tribe, and conquered Mecca.

The lesson here is that in Islam there is a type of agreement that is based on this history. Therefore, it is an agreement that can be broken as soon as the Islamic forces are strong enough to complete in battle what they were not able to do previously. That's how Arafat saw the agreement. Of course, this word did get out to the West and there was a lot of case about it. Often this type of thing is said in Arabic; it's not broadcast to the West. There is a fake news you have to be able to navigate to get to the truth.

Secondly, Israel is up against ideologies that are ruling our world. The ruling ideologies in our world today are globalism, secularism, and moral relativism. Israel flies in the face of all three of these because Israel is a nation-state based on nationalist aspirations of a century ago while today, globalism looks down upon nationalism.

Secondly, Israel is a Jewish nation-state. It is for the Jewish people where they are free to practice the Jewish religion and so a lot of the state holidays and culture is based on the Jewish religion. This flies in the face of the ruling ideology of today of secularism. The secularists look down on any Jewish or Christian observation of religious practices. I have to say that they do not look down upon Muslim observance, but they do look down upon Jewish and Christian observance.

Thirdly, the world is increasingly relativistic in its morals. In other words, there's no right and wrong, no truth and falsehood, no black and white in the matter. It's all gray and it's all up to you. You determine what you believe is true, what you believe is right, and what you believe is moral. That is moral relativism.

The Jewish world gave our world the Ten Commandments and based on the Ten Commandments is our whole system of jurisprudence. What nations have determined is right and wrong, what is moral. A world that's moving towards moral relativism hates the Ten Commandments, hates the morals of the Bible, and the Bible is the foundation of Judaism and Christianity.

Thirdly, Israel is up against the age-old hatred called antisemitism. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the history of antisemitism and in the future, we're going to talk more about antisemitism, but I just want to share this one statistic that shows you the problem that Israel is up against.

In 2014, there was a global study of antisemitism and they interviewed people in over 140 countries. They determined that 25% of the world's population holds antisemitic views. That is a lot of people and 70% of them have never met a Jewish person. What that tells us is that we have a problem here of propaganda, of misinformation, of disinformation, of lies, of fake news that has destroyed the reputation of the Jewish people in 25% of the world's population.

Israel is up against a global problem here. This is not solved overnight or by any one little group in one little corner of the world. It's a big problem and she needs our help with it. Fourthly, Israel is up against a spiritual war that is not easily understood by a secular world, by non-Christians even. We find it described in three key verses in the Bible.

The first one is in Genesis 3:15 where the Lord speaks to the evil serpent and says that there will be enmity between the serpent and the woman until her seed will crush the head of the serpent. This is a perfect description of the enmity between the woman, which is the Jewish people that will give birth to this Messiah, and the evil forces against the Messiah.

In the end, the Messiah wins, but for millennia, we have enmity and we have hatred that is spiritual. It's not about wars and militaries and nations and governments; they just reflect a spiritual reality of enmity. We see it also in Psalm 83 verses one through four, which I'm paraphrasing here, but it says, "Oh God, those who hate you have declared, let us cut them off from being a nation that the name of Israel would be declared no more."

The enemies of God himself are against this people seeking to wipe them off the face of the earth. It's very spiritual, but it's being expressed in military confrontation, in governments, in armies, in government policy. The third verse I want to share with you is actually a whole chapter. It's in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation chapter 12.

This chapter describes the people of Israel as a woman who's crowned by the sun and the moon and the 12 stars for the 12 tribes of Israel and she's pregnant. Sitting at her feet waiting to devour the male child that she will deliver is an evil dragon. Throughout the rest of the chapter, it describes how this dragon is not able to destroy the male child and comes after the woman and she is whisked into the wilderness for safety.

It says that the earth even covers her and protects her from this. Then the dragon gets so frustrated that what does he do? He turns and goes after her other offspring, those with the testimony of Jesus. The church was born out of Judaism, it was born out of the people of Israel. Here we have this depiction of this evil spiritual fight against Israel the woman, against her male child the Messiah, and against her other offspring the church.

This takes us to my last and final point this week. Not only is Israel up against these forces, but the Christians are too. We are also up against fake news like we've never been against it before. It is astounding the hatred for the Christian world, the hatred especially for the Bible-based segment of Christianity, evangelical Christianity.

We are maligned, we are hated, we are falsely accused: fake news. We are also up against the same ideologies against the globalism, the secularism, and the moral relativism, very much so. We are up against the same spiritual war as I just explained, depicted in Revelation 12. I hope that this little summary has helped you understand a little bit of what's behind the controversy against Israel.

Next week, we're going to talk about an issue that is used against Israel as an accusation and that is: was Israel really founded on stolen land? The next week, we're going to talk about: is Israel a racist apartheid state? Then after that, I want to begin listing for you reasons why Christians should support Israel and stand with the Jewish people.

Stick with me, make sure to subscribe to this channel so that you receive notifications every week when we put up a new teaching. I want to offer you a free download. We have a download, 10 Reasons Why Christians Should Stand with Israel. Get your free download by going to the link in today's show note or go to www.outofzionshow.com and click on the tab for resources.

We'll have it there as well. 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 Answers series. 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, Salem OnePlace, Salem Life Audio. Out of Zion with Susan Michael is a production of ICEJ USA. All rights reserved.