Title: This Is Why Evangelical Christians Love Israel Source:
YouTube URL Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo77sTGpngQ Published:May 15, 2018 Author:Thomas Morton Post Date:2018-05-23 05:34:32 by A Pole Keywords:Israel, Palestine, Evangelical Views:2269 Comments:18
Evangelical Christians love Israel because they love their Bibles, and the first 2/3rds of their Bible focuses on Israel and extols it above all other things. So they do the same.
Evangelical Christians love Israel because they love their Bibles, and the first 2/3rds of their Bible focuses on Israel and extols it above all other things
Bible extols God above all other things!
Jews were elected and called to be His servants. A big difference.
You seem to follow a heresy of etho-phyletism, whether applied to French or Jewish.
Jews were elected and called to be His servants. A big difference.
Yeah, but if you read it, the Bible extols God above all else, and God extols Israel as "his boy", and above all other nations, and the Israelites as his special people.
The Old Testament goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on in this vein. It was a book written by Hebrews ABOUT Hebrews, and about a God whose center of operations on earth was Mt. Zion.
One can find traces of universalism, of trinitarianism, even of vegetarianism, is dangling bits and pieces of clauses in what is otherwise a 2000 page-long paean to Israel and its people.
Any natural read of the Old Testament finds Israel as the cat's meow. God punishes Israel severely on occasion for disobedience, but the punishment is always predicated on the promise of bigger and better things as a reward for returning to compliance.
The Old Testament is about Israel. Now, it's true that the first 10 chapters of Genesis deal with the world as a whole. But once Abraham shows up in Genesis 11, the rest of the Old Testament is about his extended family - and not the whole thing, either, but the particular line of it that runs through Isaac, then Jacob, and their descendants.
Israel and its religion and people being the entire primary, secondary and tertiary plot of the entire Bible up to Jesus (Genesis 1-10 are merely stage-setting backstory), it isn't surprising that people whose entire lives revolve around the Bible would be smitten with Israel.
And because the folks who do that really believe that the Bible IS the way that God reveals himself to the world, they see God through a completely Judaic lens, much in the same way that you see God through a Byzantine Greek lens,and I am told by fellow Catholics (and spite-filled Protestants) that I "have to" see God through a traditional Catholic theological lens.
This would be the place in the development of my narrative where I would take a baseball bat to the belief systems of others I don't agree with, but what's the point of that? It won't make me feel particularly good, and it won't convince anybody else.
Anyway, yes, evangelical Christians are infatuated with Israel, and this drives aspects of US foreign policy. Obama demonstrated that their view can be politically overridden, that the US does not HAVE TO have the view of Christian evangelicals as the basis of its Levantine foreign policy.
But Obama was coming from the perspective of a closeted Muslim, so he had his own strong internal beliefs about who to favor and who to disfavor.
In America there are also those who, thanks to their religious tradition, are inveterate anti-Semites. These people are generally at least as atrocious as the Zionists, and have a worse history vis-a-vis Americans (to wit: the avatar of anti-Semitism was Hitler and the Nazi Germans, and they killed about 500,000 Americans; the Jews never waged war on the USA).
People who read the Bible very precisely and realize that it doesn't say a great deal of what the various religious groups say it does, are always in the minority, and because they don't CARE as much about any of it, don't find it worthwhile to spend their time and energy to form an opposition to something. So we go with the flow.
A good thing to do would be to have a page on the income tax form in which people were required to go through the list of US budget expenditures and allocate what percentage of their income they would like to see go to the different programs.
The results would not be binding, but it would constitute the most realistic annual poll there could be of where the people really want to see their money go.
Conservatives would break for military and law enforcement. Liberals would break for schools, health care and poverty relief. Evangelicals-uber-alles would break for aid to Israel.
If I were permitted to determine who got US foreign AID, I'd pump all of it into Mexico and Central America. Those societies could be stabilized and become growing assets for their own people, paying huge dividends to us in terms of reduced immigration and increased trade. And unlike Europe, Asia and the Middle East, the US does not need to lay out vast sums for the military defense of Central America: it's not threatened by anybody.
