I want to ask you guys, because I mean, I’ve been to Israel several times. Every single time I’m there, I have a red alert app and rockets are going off the whole time you’re there. And it’s like, well, just, that’s what it is. But I feel like now’s different. I mean, that’s not a profound statement. It’s different. Why is the war right now, what’s going on right now, why is it different?
Well, I hope that a big takeaway here for you is to see that why do the nations rage? The writer of Psalm says they rage against God. God made a choice. He chose the Jewish people. He chose the land of Israel and the spiritual darkness and the enemies of God are raging against God. They’re attacking His family like David said. And so as we get closer and closer and closer through these birth pains to the second coming of our warrior king, triumphant king, Jesus, the Messiah, then we’re going to experience greater levels of attack to keep that from happening. And so one of the things that’s happening right now is that the nations have fallen asleep in a lot of ways. The church mostly is asleep, and we’re being reawakened to the fact that, wait a second, this is about God. This is about God’s kingdom. It’s not about the Jewish people being better or more deserving. This is about the kingdom of God coming to a place on Earth. That from there, there will be a king that comes and reigns triumphantly and will rule over the earth with justice.
And so there’s this alignment of, I would say, evil actors with a different religion that is an antithesis to the God of Israel. And those would be Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Turkey, to a large degree. It’s a spiritual battle. And so you’re seeing something that we’ve seen worse than anything we’ve ever seen to the Jewish people since the Holocaust. And I think this is a really sad wake up call to the rest of us. Every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we say, Never again! We’ll never let the Holocaust happen again! It just did. It just did on October 7th. And so we need to step back and say, okay, Lord, whoa, what can we do?
Yeah. A visual I have in my mind: When I was a kid, there was this restaurant we used to go to and there were all these baseball cards that made up the image of Babe Ruth. So when you backed out, you saw the image of Babe Ruth. As you got closer, you just saw baseball cards. You’ve seen stuff like that? The conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war happening right now, I view it like that. When you back up, it’s actually very clear. This is an attack on what God has chosen. As you get closer, you start saying, wait, this is way more complex. Where’d the picture go? That’s when you start getting into the skirmishes between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and all these, it starts getting really complex. So it is complex, and it’s also not complex. When we zoom out, we realize this is about God choosing the Jewish people, and the enemy hates what God chooses.
If God stamps his name on something, the enemy then attacks it, which is why he attacks Jew/Gentile, because that’s a distinction God made. So the enemy has tried to attack it for 2,000 years. There’s no longer Jew/Gentile. Another distinction he made is male female. Are we seeing that war go on? Why? Because God stamped it. That is my image. There’s a distinction right there. And in the same way when God says, I’m choosing the Jewish people for an unending covenant, the enemy attacks it. And we can try to make this, oh, this is really just about the land of Israel, and it’s about they want part of the land or they want to have their own two state solution. And although those things are valid, as we zoom in, when we zoom out, this happened a hundred years ago, and when they were all over Europe, there was still a leader that rose up that said, we need to kill the Jews. That wasn’t about the land of Israel.
So when you see the scope of history, you realize this is actually just about the Jewish people because Hamas and Hezbollah, they’re not friends. Iran is not friends. Iran are Persians, they’re not Arabs, and they are Shiite Muslim. And then you have Hamas, which are Arabs, and they are Sunni Muslims. They would have a war together if they didn’t have Israel in their sights, but they’re willing to make all these deals and come together as nations that would usually fight, and as Muslims that would usually fight. And they’re unifying over the hatred of Jews. And I am saying that because they said. That that is in their charter. Both Hezbollah and Hamas in their charter will say, we are going to kill the Jews. In Hezbollah specifically, it says that the end of this play essentially is when Allah tells them where every Jew is hiding so they can murder them. So this is about the Jewish people.
When we zoom in, we start looking at, oh, there’s a two-state solution. They really want their own state. Not really, because that chant, you’ve probably all heard: Free Palestine from the river to the sea. Palestine will be free. The river’s, the Jordan River, the sea is the Mediterranean Sea. From the river to the sea is all of Israel. It’d be like saying, I just want half of the United States from sea to shining sea. It’s like that’s the whole thing. So that’s not what they’re fighting for. That sometimes is just the smokescreen to, we just want to kill the Jews. And so I think we have to realize that, that is really, when you zoom, out the picture. Yes, there’s complexities and there’s lots of things we can dive into, but I think that is the thing we need to keep at the forefront.
