Why Should America Honor Israel?

Pastor Dan was waiting with a sign adorned with two Israeli flags reading “AMERICA STANDS WITH ISRAEL” when I arrived. Thus my question, “For what noble act would you honor Israel?”

I asked Pastor Dan least a dozen times to give me one good reason why any follower of Christ would honor Israel while we stood holding opposing sign in front of his church. Christian Zionism is beginning to collapse, and disintegrate it must because the words of Jesus are anathema to the acts of political Israel. Pastor Dan did not tell me what scriptural course he sailed to arrive at the link between political Israel and Jesus Christ, but I am going to make a very good guess, and I will invite him to comment.

Pastor Dan will assert that his “salvation” depends exclusively upon his acceptance of Jesus Christ, and it is here his course becomes very confused. For Dan also believes he has an absolute responsibility to love political Israel but with slightly less reverently than Jesus. John Hagee contends America’s “blessings” come from our loving care for Israel. Word of Life Christian Center defended political Israel by holding up some thirty signs and an estimated 90 Israeli flags in front of its church when Project Strait Gate appeared. Secular thinkers might view Pastor Dan’s logic to be legally and historically topsy-turvy.

For by no stretch of logic can one credit a 60 years old political state that borrowed the name “Israel,” with the advent of Jesus 1900 years earlier. Some of our religious readers will be tempted to dismiss Pastor Dan as a harmless. But that is sadly wrong on both counts. Some 60 million Americans think much like him, and he is part of a group that is much better organized than their critics are.

This is reminiscent of the popular and catchy Nashville ditty of slight-of-hand genealogy of the 1950’s, “I Am My Own Grandpa.” Some of our a-religious readers will be tempted to dismiss Pastor Dan as a harmless. But that is sadly wrong on both counts. Some 60 million Americans think much like him, and he is part of a group that is much better organized than their critics are.

The long list of those who reject “Israel first” theology probably includes most of the professors at Bethel Seminary where Pastor Dan graduated in nearby St. Paul, which is associated with the old Baptist General Conference.Christian Zionism is a tool used by others, including the State of Israel, to engulf America in serial wars. It is up to those who understand it to expose it. And at the same time we need to remind the Mainline churches that they have timidly and politely allowed Jesus’ name to be rubbed in the filth of political Israel.