Unknown: Well, Shalom, and welcome back for part two of our
series on understanding the times. And last week we covered
a lot of information and I realized that and we're going to
do the same thing this week. So, I want you to know I'm offering
you a free outline of this seminar series, all four parts.
All you have to do is email me at Susan at ice j usa.org. That
Susan at ice j usa.org. requests the outline for understanding
that times and we'll be happy to send it to you because we do
cover a lot of information. And you might even want to get that
outline and then listen to it a second time and follow along.
We're living in absolutely historic days, and just as
miraculous as the gathering of the Jewish people to the land of
Israel. So is the miraculous shift of the Christian world
away from an anti semitic past and towards the Jewish people in
our days, we are getting grafted into that olive tree that
supports our faith. But before we began talking about this and
what a miracle it is, we must understand the past and
understand where we come from. So first, I want to talk to you
about anti semitism. And then I want to talk to you about its
influence on Christian history. You know, the hatred of the
Jewish people, anti semitism. It's a unique phenomenon in the
human experience. There's really nothing else that compares to
it. The first documented instance of anti semitism we
actually read about in the Bible and the story of Esther, where
we have Haman who wanted The Jews to bow down and reverence
him. And when they wouldn't, he turned against him with all the
might of the Persian Empire and he fully intended to wipe them
out. The reason we have that story, the Book of Esther, is
because of the absolute significance of what Esther did.
She saved the Jewish people from extinction, not just of the Jews
of the Persian Empire, you you have to understand, the Jews of
the Empire of the Persian Empire were the majority of the Jews of
the world had Haman succeeded in annihilating the Jews within the
Persian Empire. That would have been it for Jewish history, we
would have had no birth of Jesus 500 years later. Now, you would
have thought then, eventually when these ancient kingdoms and
empires that were a little ruthless, once they gave way to
Christianity, you would expect the story to change but
unfortunately, we have the story of how The Christian kings who
were also the head of the Christian church, persecuted the
Jews, because of the church's teaching against Judaism. They
blame the Jews for killing Christ and said that they
deserved punishment and to be persecuted due to Jesus's
crucifixion. So I'm going to talk more about that in a
minute. But I want to give you an idea here about the
seriousness of anti semitism. Because once Christianity then I
have to say the age of the Enlightenment came and science
replaced Christianity as the primary source for authority in
the world. Now it was science. And so here we have science as
the backbone of the Nazi ideology of saying that there
were differences in races, and that the Jewish race was
subhuman. And it needed to be wiped out.
So these older forms of anti semitism, whether it's It was
the ancient empires or it was Christian anti semitism or it
was Nazi anti semitism based on racism. None of that's really
accepted today, thankfully. But instead, we have a whole new
form of anti semitism. It's raising its ugly head, actually
with two faces. One anti semitism is rife throughout the
Muslim world. And secondly, there's a political form of anti
semitism that is against the Jewish state, called anti
Zionism. So we're going to talk more about all of this. What I
want you to take away from this brief introduction is that the
evil pursuit of the Jewish people has continued for
millennia. And this is why the historian Robert wistrich called
it the longest hatred. It doesn't stop all it does is
reinvent itself with a new generation and a new ideology
with a new face. But the goal is always the same, and it's to rid
the world of the Jewish people. So now that you understand the
spiritually evil nature of anti semitism, I want to talk to you
specifically about its influence on the Christian story on
Christian history. Now, we all know that Jesus and the early
Christians were all Jewish. They kept the Sabbath, they kept the
feast. In the beginning, they worshiped right alongside the
Jewish people in the temple. But over time, certain tensions did
develop and a record of one of the earliest tensions is found
in the book of Acts, chapter 15. And this is when the Holy Spirit
has begun to fall on Gentiles. And the mainstream Jewish
community did not like this because it was bringing pagan
influences in through this messianic body. And the
Messianic Jews didn't know what to do with it. They hadn't been
expecting God to fall for the Holy Spirit to fall on the
Gentiles. So they had a church Council and thankfully the
finding of the church Council in Acts 15 was that you and I, the
Gentile believers coming into the body of Christ did not have
to become Jewish. We did not have to be sec circumcised. We
did not have to obey the law in order to follow Jesus. But this
did indicate to us that there were some tensions going on in
the book of Acts. It was between the Gentiles coming into the
body of Christ it was with between them and the Messianic
believers. And then it was between the Messianic believers
and the largest, the larger Jewish world. Now, as a result
of this ruling, and large scale missionary activities of the
Apostle Paul and the other apostles More and more Gentiles
are coming into the
church.
And it's taking on a different
face a different look. A lot of these Gentiles coming into the
church, they didn't have any appreciation for the Jewish
roots of Christianity. I mean, they didn't even understand a
lot of the laws or know about it. And so they were leading the
church in kind of a foreign way. And so there's more and more
tension. But then in 70 ad, we have a traumatic moment for the
people of Israel. When the Roman Empire comes in, they do a siege
of Jerusalem. It ends very badly, they destroy Jerusalem,
they destroy the temple. And now the headquarters for Judaism has
been destroyed. The temple was the headquarters,
the high priests that serves in the temple they were the
leaders.
So the the headquarters for mainstream Judaism moved up
north of the country into the region of time period. The early
church is still they're coming back to Jerusalem but they
actually had fled because of the Roman siege. So there's now like
a geographic difference between mainstream Judaism and the head
of the church, and then the head of the church is becoming more
and more Gentile. And we have leaders developing in other
cities like Antioch or Alexandria or or in areas that
are primarily Gentile and primarily pagan. Another main
moment in the history of this growing rift taking place was in
135 ad a hole 50 years later, 60 years after the destruction of
Jerusalem, we have a small band of Jews that still try to rebel
against the Roman rule and try to reestablish Jewish
sovereignty and they followed a leader who was known as bar
coke. The bar kokhba revolt did not succeed. It failed. But in
the meantime the the Jews that were trying to follow bar kokhba
and trying to make this rebellion succeed actually
proclaimed him to be Messiah. So those Jews that follow Jesus as
Messiah could not have anything to do with following bar kokhba.
And it actually became bloody. There were missing Anik Jews
that believed in Jesus were actually killed during this
revolt because they didn't join in. This is known as the real
split. This is the Rift, this is it. It's all over between any
kind of unity between Judaism and Christianity between the
synagogue and the church. It's divided now. So throughout the
Gentile world, though we have the churches growing and growing
and church leadership is developing in these other areas.
areas of the Roman Empire. And then there's another form of
tension. And that is that throughout the Roman Empire,
Judaism was recognized as a legal religion. They were
allowed to practice Judaism. And as long as Christianity was seen
as a part of Judaism, it was protected. But once this
division took place, now the Christians are completely
unprotected. They're persecuted by the Roman authority. And
because of the bar kokhba revolt, then eventually the
Jewish religion is also outlawed, and it's a time of
great persecution of both Jews and Christians. And, but there's
a little bit of animosity here, between the two groups. All of
this changes in an a moment, in the year 312 ad, when the
emperor of the Roman Empire becomes Christian, and he
declares the state religion of the Roman Empire to be
Christian. Now this is a major thing for the Christians, all of
a sudden, they're no longer persecuted. They won. They're
victorious. But the poor Jews are still persecuted now, not by
the Romans as a pagan Empire, that by the Christian empire of
Rome. So as the church left its position as a persecuted
minority and took on political power, it became spiritually
corrupt, and its stance towards the Jews was very negative. As
the Church Fathers began to try to differentiate between the
church in those ugly Jews, those persecuted Jews, they began to
preach against Judaism. Now, the reason is that they didn't want
there to be any confusion between the Christians and the
Jews. Jewish religion so they they taught against Judaism that
this is the root of a problem that lasted for centuries. So
it's very important that you understand here. The preaching
was not against the Jewish people as individuals. It was
against the Jewish religion as Church Fathers attempted to draw
a distinction between Christianity and Judaism. But
they preached so negatively against Judaism, that they
actually paved the way for anti semitism and the persecution of
the Jewish individuals. So I'm just going to give you one
example. St. JOHN chrysostom, because he is known as the
golden tongue. He was a beautiful orator
of the love of God. Now listen to what he said. He said, The
synagogue is worse than a brothel.
It's a den of scouts.
It's the temple of demons. It's a place of meeting for the
Assassins of Christ. And as for me, I hate the synagogue. I hate
the Jews for the same reason. And he actually said, God hates
you, too. So this is the beginning of what we call
replacement theology. This is where the Church Fathers
preached that Judaism had been completely rejected by God,
because they had killed Christ. They were rejected, they were
cursed, and they were now replaced by the church, in the
plans and purposes of God. This teaching brought great damage to
the Jewish people for centuries. During the long ages of the dark
ages of the Middle Ages, every type of degrading law was then
passed against the Jewish people because remember, you know, Most
of us, we, I know, speaking as an American, I live in a
democracy and I don't really understand the whole concept of
a state church, and that the head of my government is the
head of my church. Back in the Middle Ages, this was very much
the case. And these
corrupt
secular leaders were the head of the church and they took this
anti Jewish preaching in the church and used it to pass laws
against the Jewish people. So the Jewish people weren't
allowed to work certain jobs, they weren't allowed to own
property, they weren't allowed to prosper in any way. And they
were frequently given the option of being baptized or being
persecuted or being even expelled and sometimes their
children were kidnapped and forced to be baptized. Now, I
want to read for you some excerpts from A confessional
that a Jewish person had to confess when they were baptized
into Christianity. You'll understand now why the Jewish
people look upon conversion in such a negative way because this
is what was forced upon them. And this is what a little bit of
what they had to say it's a very long confession. I've only
pulled out a few sentences. But this is the heart of it. They
had to say, I renounce every right and observance
of the Jewish religion.
I promise that I will never return to the vomit of Jewish
superstition. We will not practice carnal circumcision, or
celebrate the Passover,
the Sabbath, or any of the feast days connected with the Jewish
religion. I renounce absolutely everything Jewish so you can
understand why baptism became a very dirty word for the Jewish
people, it meant a betrayal of everything that they'd ever
known as Jewish and against their families and against their
heritage and against their forefathers. So it's very, very,
very sad part of history. Now, in addition to force baptisms,
we had them being forced to live in walled in neighborhoods in
the cities called a ghetto. This began in Venice, Italy. But then
they that progressed, and it wasn't enough just to have them
living in a Walden section of the city that was locked on
Sundays and locked on Christian holidays so that these dirty
Jewish people couldn't come out into the streets and mix with
the Christians as they went back and forth to church or as they
celebrated their Sunday. That wasn't bad enough. So churches,
some countries began to expel the Jews. You know, the The
first country to expel the Jews was England. And in 1290, King
Edward the first of England was the first to expel Jewish
citizens from his nation. And they were expelled from them
France and Italy and Hungary and Switzerland and Germany and
Austria. And if you know your map, you can see how that they
would flee one country into the neighboring country. And then
they'd have to flee that country and go into the neighboring
country. And then they had to flee that one and they went
next, and then they had to flee there. And you can actually
follow this on the map. You know, here in the United States,
we we have a little saying that in 1400 92, Columbus sailed the
ocean blue and Columbus founded America. But in 1492, Spain also
expelled every two. This was during the Spanish Inquisition.
So I know that at this point in the story, a lot of you are
thinking, but I'm not Catholic. I have nothing to do with that
background. I'm Protestant. I'm evangelical, I'm a boring
employee, real Christians wouldn't do that. And that's why
I'm, we always have to tell you the story about the father of
the Protestant Reformation, because it's just more of the
same. Martin Luther, and when he broke away from the Catholic
Church, and he had a lot of very tough things to say about the
Catholic Church. But one of them was that he said, No wonder the
Jews have been converted to Christianity. You know, our
Pope's and our monks have treated them, like dogs, not
even human beings. And so he began to reach out in a very
friendly way to the Jewish people. But it wasn't genuine.
All he wanted was for them to convert to Christianity and when
they didn't convert, then at the end of his life when he was
older, and according to the historians, he was quite grumpy
in many ways and his health was bad. But he really turned
against the Jewish people. And he wrote a book called The Jews
and their lies. And I want to quote to you from Martin Luther,
the father of the Protestant Reformation. He said here,
perhaps I will attract some of the Jews to the Christian faith.
But when he didn't, sorry, on to the next quote, next quote, he
said, First, their synagogue should be set on fire. Secondly,
their home should likewise be broken down and destroyed.
Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and town
moods and their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death
to teach anymore and their parents Sports and traveling
privileges should be absolutely forbidden to the Jews. To sum it
up dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domain, if
this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better
one, so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable
devilish burden the Jews.
Now what's so alarming is that 400 years later, in luthers,
country, Germany, Hitler came up with the final solution, and it
was extermination. So I want to be very clear here now that
Christianity did not create the Holocaust. Nazi ism was not
Christian. It was anti christian. But Christian anti
semitism made the Holocaust possible. Without the history of
anti Jewish persecution and anti Jewish legislation, the
Holocaust would have been inconceivable. Hitler and the
Nazis found in medieval Christian legislation, a model
for their own and they read, and they reprinted and distributed
Martin Luther his writings in order to validate what they were
doing and get public support for it. Hitler told to Catholic
Bishops that did actually question his policies on the
Jews and he said he was only putting into effect what
Christianity had preached and practiced for 2000 years.
Now, the
Holocaust historian Raul hilberg. In his book The
destruction of the European Jews, he said it this way He
said First, the early church declared, you have no right to
live amongst us as Jews. Then their secular rulers followed
and said You do not have the right to live amongst us. And
then the Nazis came and said, you do not have the right to
live. Now, this is the deadly progression of anti semitism.
And the fact that the Christian church had any role to play in
this history is a shame. And it's something that we all have
to come to terms with. But the good news is after such a sad
history, and as such a terrible stain on the history of
Christianity in the world, that today, you and I are privileged
to be a part of an amazing shift in history away from that anti
semitic past and towards the Jewish people. And to understand
how this shift is taking place, there's three things The
foundation for it began about 500 years ago, when the Bible
began to be translated into the everyday languages of the
people, and was mass distributed through the printing press. More
and more people were then able to read the Bible for
themselves. And they began to see that the Bible was full of
promises to the Jewish people that one day, they would be
drawn back to their land, and that God had made all these
promises that were still yet to be fulfilled. And they began to
actually pray for the restoration of the Jewish people
to their homeland, and the fulfillment of God's promises to
them. Of course, these prompt these Christians also knew that
a one of those promises was the return of the Messiah to the
land. But that laid a great foundation. But there's two
other things in history that have happened that have
solidified This turn from our anti semitic past because
remember, even Martin Luther had the scriptures in his language.
So that's not a failsafe. But we have learned from the heart and
the tragedy of the Holocaust. And we have understood the role
of Christian anti semitism. And it brought about a monumental
shift nothing less than an earthquake within Christianity.
The Catholic Church learned and and has repented of its guilt
here. They have they reevaluated their theology towards the
Jewish people, they actually even change some of their
liturgy, their Good Friday liturgy, and they have really
made a great effort to build a relationship of mutual respect
with the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. Now, the other
thing that has happened, though, has been the birth and the
existence of the State of Israel. So you and I were not a
part of the Catholic Church, maybe in that shift, maybe you
are. Also the Lutheran Church made a huge shift. They actually
disavowed the writings, the anti semitic writings of their
founder, Luther. There's been other moves in the historic
churches in Europe, but but some of us don't feel connected to
that we're a part of an evangelical church and, and we
have been more profoundly affected by the existence of the
State of Israel. Because we've been able to go there on tour,
we've been able to see where Jesus walked. But while we were
there, we came to know the Hebraic culture, the Jewish
religion of Jesus and to meet his brethren, the Jewish people,
and we have begun to build a relationship with the Jewish
people built on mutual respect. So these three things together
the translation of the Bible The which brought about a whole
movement of Christianity, which today is the fastest growing
segment of Christianity, the evangelical segment, and will
one day be the largest segment of Christianity. So the
translation of the Bible, the lessons of the Holocaust, and
here the existence of the State of Israel has brought about a
change that you and I are privileged to be a part of. No
longer are we looking down on the Jewish people and heaping
condemnation on them and instead, or honoring them, just
as the Apostle Paul said, to honor them as the roots of our
faith, because they support us. He said, We don't support them.
They support us. So this is a major
change and what a privilege to be a part of this generation,
that we can be a part of the positive part of Christian
history, and our relationship towards Israel and the Jewish
people. This is at the very heart of the Ministry of the
International Christian embassy Jerusalem, we have helped to
pioneer a whole new relationship with the Jewish people in
Israel, and through our branches all around the world. I know
that here in the United States, I've been a part of a major
shift, and a tremendous relationship between Jews and
Christians. It's been such a blessing, such a privilege to be
a part of this. I'm so thankful that I'm a part of this
generation. But we don't understand what a miracle that
we are a part of. And the Jewish people look at us as a miracle.
Sometimes they look at us and they don't really believe us
because they know all that history. And that's why it's so
important that you also know that history so that as you
engage with the Jewish people in your nation, that and here in
Israel, that you know, this history because they certainly
do and You can help build a whole new relationship with them
built on mutual respect, and unconditional love or not in
this because of anything, we think we're going to get back
out of it. We're in it because God's hand is on them. He's
brought them back to their land. He's blessing them. And we want
to be a part of that blessing. Praise the Lord. So as I said in
the beginning, if you'd like to have an outline of today's
teaching, along with actually the whole series, send me an
email at Susan and ice j. u. s. a.org. asked for the
understanding the times outline and we'll send it to you and
I've got another free offer for you. If you want to know more
about anti semitism, I have a free booklet that you can
download. Just go to www.ic e jusa.org. forward slash Asch
free booklet and you can download a free booklet on anti
semitism. It reviews this history. It reviews anti
semitism around the world today, and what you and I can do in
order to stand against it. I'm so grateful that you spent this
time to learn about this painful history and the miracle you're a
part of I asked the Lord to bless you as you go forward in
your week. Please come back. Listen to part three. We're
going to talk about the spiritual battle against Israel
and the Jewish people how we see that and how we can stand
against it. So be sure not to miss part three, and I'll see
you there.
God bless you. Shalom, Shalom.
like everywhere else Israel has been hit by the Coronavirus. You
come here to Ben Gurion Airport and you see that there are very
few planes in and out of the country. But the few that are
coming are bringing Jews on them from all around the world who
are desperate to make aljada Israel they see Israel as safer
as having a better economic potential for the future for
them. And Israeli officials have managed to bring evacuation
flights even amidst all the corona travel bans and it's
exciting to report that the Christian embassy has brought
over a thousand Jews on these rescue flights over the past
four months since February. Every month around 250 Jews
coming home to Israel on flights sponsored by the Christian
embassy. And we want to challenge you to help us keep up
this pace. In the coming months that we bring at least 250
Jewish people home on alioth flights, you can go to our site
on.ice.org slash rescue 250 and you can help book a seat for
some Jewish family to come home. The flights that are coming now
are bringing Jews who are stuck in limbo. They thought they were
going to make Ollie all this year and they left their jobs.
They sold their apartments and all of a sudden Corona hit. And
many of them have been destitute. We've also had cancer
patients who needed to Get to Israel for life saving surgery.
Many emergencies help us with our rescue 250 campaign,
bringing at least 250 Jews home. Despite the corona you could be
part of this remarkable story that even amid the Coronavirus,
all the Bible prophecies about the Jewish people coming back to
the land of Israel in the last days, it is still happening.
Nothing has been able to stop it. But we need your help. Go to
our site and help book a flight for a Jewish family today.