Many years ago, I encountered the Hebrew Roots movement. I was surprised to see many Christians keeping mitzvot, something that I had never witnessed when I was growing up. It is now almost mainstream for Christians to keep the Biblical feasts. When I was growing up, the term ‘Yeshua’ was never used. Christians only referred to ‘Jesus’.
When I began writing about Christians who loved Israel and the Jews, I suspected that this was a paradigm shift on the same level as the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther. I think the first revolution in the Jesus movement was a move away from Israel, geographically and spiritually. Roman paganism was grafted onto the Torah. Constantine inserted Rome into the Jesus movement, and eventually, the Jesus movement moved to Rome as Catholicism. I think Martin Luther moved back, but only on a theological level. This final Yeshua revolution is going to reconnect Yeshua’s followers with their spiritual and geographic homeland.
The Yeshua/ Christian Zionism movement was not simply Christians who took on a new political cause. This was a shift in the basis of their belief and connection with a Jewish Jesus. I have recently begun listening to online sermons by pastors and preachers regarding Israel. While Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are in the spotlight, there is a schism, a theological gulf opening in the Christian world that goes deeper than politics. This gulf is focused around Israel, and while it is expressed in politics, its roots are in the Jesus/Yeshua conflict.
100 years ago, it would have been inconceivable for a Christian to say that Jews were not the physical offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It would have been inconceivable for a Christian to say that the Jews were not a separate nation, genetically differentiated from the rest of the world. Yes, the church preached replacement theology, claiming to be Israel, but the pesky Jews running around Europe did not pose a challenge to the church. It would have been inconceivable to say that the Jews were not a separate nation that God was punishing.
The Church spread the belief that Jews were being punished in the exile and had been irredeemably rejected by God. Everyone knew that the Jew was the other, the stranger in a strange Land. No one wanted to be a Jew, and everyone knew who the Jew was, who to hate. For most of history, in most of the world, it was illegal to convert to Judaism or to teach Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism and the Talmud were demonized by the church and this was (and still is) the mainstream belief among Christians.
Denying that the Jews are the descendants of Jacob flies in the face of this replacement theology that has been mainstream Christian belief since the first Jesus movement began in the Galilee. Yet it drives these old-school Christians to other fallacies in an attempt to maintain that Jews are not the Chosen People. They’re now claiming that Iran never had a nuclear weapons program, a claim that endangers the very existence of all the free world. Yet they make this claim because it means that five seconds before Iran fires a nuclear-tipped ICBM at America, it will fire one at Israel.
But many Christians have rejected what has been mainstream Christian theology since the Council of Nicea. The existence of the state of Israel is an existential challenge to any Christian and any church that ascribes to replacement theology. While it seems undeniable that God has brought the Jews back to Israel as he promised and as the prophets predicted, many pastors and public figures are claiming precisely that: that the Jews are not the descendants of Israel and have no claim to the land. The Church is the way to the covenant through belief in Jesus. These old-school “Jesus-Christians” have no choice. Acknowledging that modern-day Israel is the manifestation of biblical prophecy means that all of the other prophecies are going to manifest as well. While all of my friends and most of my readers have come to terms with that, choosing to join fates and their belief with Israel, many others see the end of days as a world series of religions with winners and losers. And they will do anything, believe anything, in order to see the Church win, even if it means rewriting both the Tanakh and the New Testament.
Just as the prophecy predicted, Jerusalem is a “stone of stumbling” for all the nations that came against Israel. It is not my place to preach Christianity to people who believe in Jesus or, more accurately, Yeshua. But it is clear that Christianity is changing, and Israel is the determining factor revealing the tectonic fractures in the bedrock of Christianity. It is prophetic that this political division is coming at a time when standing with Israel is such a clearly defined statement of belief. I cannot tell my Yeshua believing friends, the allies of Israel, what to believe or even what to do. But I can urge my Israeli friends to open their doors and their hearts. To do so, I need to tell my Yeshua believing friends that a precondition for connecting with Jews is to reject proselytizing, to go so far as to reject the expectation that Jews will, or even should, accept Jesus. Until you do so, Jews cannot trust you as brothers.
This is absolutely reciprocal. Judaism discourages conversion and prohibits proselytizing to Gentiles. We are expected to be a light unto the Nations, that is to teach them the Torah without the expectation that they will convert. We are to be a priestly Nation channeling our devotion to the one God. The Tucker Carlsons and Candace Owens of the world have rejected this as our role and their pathway to God. They do not believe in Yeshua. They believe in a non-Jewish Jesus that was born in a metaphoric Bethlehem that existed, and still exists, in the basement of their Church. Their Christian faith has no need for Israel or the Jews.
So be it. I have enough soul friends, and in this case, more is not necessarily better. Each one of these friends is a precious gem brought to me by God’s process of redemption. I treasure them beyond words.
