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Refuting Errors About Jesus and Israel

HighBeamMinistry.com

“I will bless those who bless you, I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:3)

 

I was recently attacked vehemently via text for my support of Israel.

 

At the outset, I will say this as clearly as I can:

 

I wholeheartedly support the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. I don’t always agree with their policies and, because they are human, they make mistakes. But I know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I know His everlasting promises to His people. And I know that the Jews are still at the center of His ongoing prophetic plan for world redemption.

 

How else can you explain the defeat and exile of an entire nation in A.D. 70 only to have the Jews return to their God-given homeland 1,428 years later (A.D. 1948), and reclaim their greatest king’s city, Jerusalem, 19 years later (A.D. 1967)? How else but by God’s hand can you explain how the Jewish people rebuilt a backwater region of swamps, deserts, and fallow land into one of the most prosperous, powerful, and productive nations on earth in a little over 125 years?

 

As I’ve written before, out of all the earth’s nations, only the children of Israel were created via a miracle of God. All other people groups are direct physical descendants of Adam and Eve, who were formed by God’s hand out of the adamah, the dust of the earth. Only the Jews were created by God’s direct, miraculous power, enabling a woman who was far past childbearing at 90 years old to conceive a son, Isaac, the child of the Abrahamic covenant. “But God said, ‘No. Your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will name him Isaac. I will confirm my covenant with him as a permanent covenant for his future offspring’” (Genesis 17:19, italics author).

 

Permanent covenant.

 

Did you get that? Not only are the Jews the only people on earth created by a miracle, they are also part of a unique, permanent Abrahamic covenant through which all the world will be blessed. Through that covenant, God brought forth the Jewish Messiah who opened the door for all non-Jewish nations to rejoin our Heavenly Father’s family via Jesus’ saving work. Make no mistake. God does not graft the Jews into a Gentile New Covenant, the ultimate expression of the Abrahamic covenant. God grafts believers from all Gentile nations to the cultivated olive tree of Abraham’s family under the Jewish New Covenant.

 

Jewish? Yes. Don’t even try to argue the point with me. Go to the scriptures. The New Covenant was announced in Jeremiah 31:31-34 and referred to in Ezekiel 11:17-20 and 36:24-30 for the people of Israel—the Jewish people primarily—not the Gentiles. However, it’s available to every Gentile. It was ratified through Jesus’ sacrifice and instituted on the Feast of Shavuot (Pentecost) in Jerusalem to Jewish residents and pilgrims. It was only later, in Acts 10, that the messianic Jews realized that the Heavenly Father intended to use the New Covenant to reclaim His children from every nation, tribe, and language on earth.

 

This is where I unapologetically stand.

 

So, what did the mean text say, you ask? I’ll leave the personal attacks out. They’re baseless. But I do want to address a few of the texter’s points because we hear them frequently in the litany of anti-Israel and antisemitic diatribes online and in the media today. We must be able to refute those errors.

 

Diatribe No. 1 - “As a reminder Jesus was a Palestinian…”. Wrong.

 

Jesus is a full-blooded Jew who was born in Israel’s ancestral homeland—first, the long explanation.

 

The region was known as Canaan until the Israelites conquered it under Joshua c. 1406 B.C. After Canaan’s conquest, the area was known as the land of Israel.

 

The Assyrian Empire conquered the northern half of Israel due to Israel’s idolatry (734-715 B.C.). One hundred twenty-nine years later, in 586 B.C., the Babylonian Empire conquered the southern half of Israel—the kingdom of Judah—for the same reason, and the land became a Babylonian vassal state. When Persia conquered the Babylonians, Judah became a vassal state to Persia (c. 539 B.C.), whose king, Cyrus, later decreed that the exiled Jews be allowed to return to their native land and rebuild the Lord’s temple.

 

About two hundred years after that, the Greek Empire conquered Israel’s land. According to one source (blogs.timesofisrael.com), Herodotus referred to the broad region from Egypt to Syria as Syria Palaestina. For the record, that was a reference to an area, not a nation or people.

 

And then came the Romans. They defeated the Greeks, captured Jerusalem in 63 B.C., and created the province of Palestine.

 

Just kidding.

 

The Romans called it the province of Judea. The Jewish homeland, with its Jewish population, was in Judea until Emperor Hadrian provoked the Jews into the Second Jewish Rebellion in A.D. 135 (vojisrael.org). When the Jews were defeated, “Judea’s name was changed to Syria Palaestina (following the Greek tradition, later shortened to Palaestina) in 135 A.D. by the Romans as punishment and to destroy the connection between the Jews and their homeland. Many of the remaining Jews were either sold into slavery or sent to Egypt. Arabs from surrounding countries quickly began inhabiting the land once owned by the Jewish people” (Ibid.).

 

Gee. Arabs fighting Jews for the land. Solomon was right. There’s nothing new under the sun.

 

After the second Jewish rebellion, Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea, Palaestina, not as a reference to the Philistines, Israel’s mortal enemies, as is often taught today, but to erase the name Judea with a more generic regional name that had been used in the past (jewishvirtuallibrary.org). For the next 1,400 years, the area referred to as both Judea and Palestine (britannica.com) was ruled by several foreign nations (vojisrael.org), but there was never a Palestinian state, country, or official people. The Jews and Arabs in the region were all referred to as Palestinians from the Roman exile to the birth of Israel in 1948, simply because they lived in the region nicknamed Palestine.

 

Therefore, Jesus was not, and never will be, a Palestinian. How could Jesus be a Palestinian when the place that would have given Him that designation didn’t even exist until 100 years after His life? Jesus is and will always be a Jew by birth, ethnicity, and nationality. Period.

 

Diatribe No. 2 - “…who sought asylum in Egypt due to a genocide.” Wrong.

 

A simple reading of scripture refutes this.

 

Herod the Great was Rome’s king over Judea at the time Jesus was born. Herod was an Idumean. The name Idumean comes from “Edomite,” a person who was descended from Edom (aka Esau), Jacob’s brother (Genesis 25:19-26). Anyone who has read the story of Jacob and Esau knows of the animosity between the two boys and their descendants —the Israelites and the Edomites. Because Esau spurned his birthright and Jacob took the corresponding blessing, there was bad blood and fights between the two family lines over who owns the firstborn designation. This dispute is significant to know because, in ancient cultures, the firstborn ruled the family after the father died. The firstborn son also gets a double inheritance and the responsibility to care for his mother and unmarried sisters. In short, the firstborn son rules the roost.

 

You got it. The fight is over who has the right to rule the Abrahamic clan. The same holds between the descendants of Ishmael (Islam) and Isaac (the Jews), but that’s another blog post.

 

Let’s fast forward. With King Herod the Idumean on the throne, that meant the house of Esau ruled over the house of Jacob when Jesus was born. Suddenly, Wise Men, likely Jewish sages from the Jewish community in Babylon, show up in Herod’s court asking where the newly-born king of the Jews is. After all, hadn’t they seen the prophesied star of Numbers 24:17-18 indicating a Jewish king’s birth?

 

“I see him, but not now;

I perceive him, but not near.

A star will come from Jacob,

and a scepter will arise from Israel (i.e., a king will arise from Jacob’s family through Judah’s tribe).

He will smash the forehead of Moab

and strike down all the Shethites.

Edom will become a possession;

Seir (i.e., Edom) will become a possession of its enemies,

but Israel will be triumphant” (italics author).

 

To Herod the Edomite, the Wise Guys’ question reveals a shocking threat to his reign over Jacob’s family, the Jews. He can’t have a Jewish king just waltz in and depose him now, can he? So, after finding out from the chief priests and scribes that the Jewish king would be born in Bethlehem, along with learning the two-year window between the star’s appearance and the Wise Guys’ question, King Herod dispatched his death squads to David’s city to kill all the boys two years old and under. Meanwhile, an angel relays to Joseph Herod’s plot and the Holy Family scurry off to Egypt, out of reach of the murderous Edomite.

 

Did Herod commit genocide by murdering the male toddlers of Bethlehem? No. According to evidenceunseen.com, Herod’s contract on the Bethlehem boys wasn’t a mass slaughter of a population. Because Bethlehem was small, only a few male children were likely killed. Rather than a genocide, Herod’s decree was more of an attempted hit job to prevent a potential claimant to Israel’s throne.

 

Therefore, Jesus’s family did not seek refuge in Egypt due to a genocide. They sought refuge because God told them to via an angel of the Lord to escape a targeted assassination.

 

Diatribe No. 3 - “Isreal (sic) doesn’t have the right to exist.” Wrong.

 

This statement is the most disturbing and ignorant error I’ve heard regarding Israel. Who on earth claims the authority to declare a nation or people group has no right to exist? Haven’t we seen that scenario against the Jews played out already, and numerous times at that, since the days of the Exodus?

 

By merely being alive, people have the right to exist. Everyone on earth has the God-given right to band together around geopolitical, religious, cultural, linguistic, or other unifying factors. As Americans, we’ve enshrined this in our Declaration of Independence.

 

But let’s make it simple, shall we?

 

Israel has the right to exist, as does every other nation on earth, whether we like the way they act or not. Why?

 

First and foremost, because God said so. The Lord brought the Jewish people into being and gave them their land. According to God, His people do not own the land upon which He established their nation. The Lord said it unequivocally to Abraham in Genesis 13:15, “…for I will give you and your offspring forever all the land that you see,” and “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God” (Leviticus 25:38, italics author). Promise made, promise kept—forever.

 

Israel wasn’t the only nation that the Lord blessed with territory. He did the land-gift thing with other countries, like Edom (Deuteronomy 2:5), Moab (Deuteronomy 2:9), and the Ammonites (Deuteronomy 2:19).

 

Should He choose to do so for covenant discipline’s sake, the Lord reserves the right to remove the people of Israel from their land for a time, “By my great strength and outstretched arm, I made the earth, and the people, and animals on the face of the earth. I give it to anyone I please” (Jeremiah 27:5, italics author). Israel did lose its land during the Babylonian and Roman exiles for covenant reasons. But the critical point is this: Israel is back in her ancestral, biblical homeland, which means the Lord’s discipline is coming to an end. As such, the Jews have the right to return in full, which they have by the hundreds of thousands since the late 1800s.

 

Secondly, because the nations of the earth agreed with God! “Israel does have a right to exist. This right is clearly mentioned in UN Resolutions 181, 242 and 338. In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared that the wall built by Israel in the West Bank was illegal, but it also declared that Israel had the right to exist” (forward.com, italics author).

 

“On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain a corpus separatum under international control administered by the United Nations” (history.state.gov).

 

So, yes, Israel has the right to exist by God’s decree and international agreement. To deny that now is ignorance and denialism. To delegitimize Israel is to promote national and ethnic annihilation. To state such a position in today’s anti-Israel, antisemitic climate is to side with the “From the River to the Sea, Palestine must be free” call for genocide. Yes, Jewish genocide!

 

The person who holds this view is ignorant at best and reprehensible at worst. They should submerge themselves in Holocaust studies to understand the depths of depravity perpetrated against the Jewish people because of delegitimization. Because of the Holocaust and history’s long record of antisemitism and horrendous persecution of the Jews, there is no other place on earth for the people of Israel to dwell other than in their own homeland.

 

Diatribe No. 4 - “It’s colonialism.” Wrong.

 

This idea is easy to refute. How can a people who are indigenous to an area for over 3,000 years colonize their own land? Only those who have usurped Israel’s land since 1,406 B.C. can be labeled colonizers. Would the texter say the Native Americans are colonizing the land their tribes held before the Europeans arrived?

 

Conclusion

 

As I close, all I can think about is how good it is to stand with the Lord on an issue and how terrible it can be to oppose Him.

 

May Jesus bless all those who stand with Him. May He bless those who bless Israel and the Jewish people with all their virtues and faults.

 

May Jesus have mercy on those who stand against Him.

  

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Sources:

 

Shining the Light of God’s Truth on the Road Ahead

 

Pastor Jay Christianson

The Truth Barista, Frothy Thoughts

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