For years I have been in correspondence with an American ex-pat who shares my respect for Russia and Putin. I have appreciated this man for introducing me to information sources outside of the US/UK media bubble. By having learned about and regularly monitored these sources, I believe I am one of the better informed Americans on the Russian perspectives of the issues.
Unfortunately, this man has become increasingly hostile to Israel over this same period, and particularly scornful toward “Christian Zionists.” I’ve given up trying to reason with him on the matter because he’s become ideologically entrenched. Essentially, while I remain simply a truth-seeker anchored by a mature biblical worldview, he has become a “team player” for the Russian Federation which has responded to NATO aggression/sanctions by building alliances with the Islamic nations and Communist China. Its new worldview is thus laced with coalition-affirming arguments from Islamic and Communist perspectives in the same way US propaganda has traditionally included pro-Saudi themes for the same reason (even after 9/11).
Russia’s “marriage-of-convenience” geopolitical partnerships are ultimately incompatible with the Russian Orthodox theology at the core of post-Soviet Russia and will eventually produce schisms, but in the meantime the nascent anti-Semitic inclinations of Orthodox believers (rooted in the doctrine of supersessionism – or “replacement theology” – which it shares with Roman Catholicism and some Protestant denominations) has been rekindled by close relations with the Muslims. That has manifested in a strong and growing anti-Zionist sentiment among both Russian nationalists and Orthodox Christians (even here at home). It is made much worse by blatant anti-Torah perspectives and policies of the Israeli government, symbolically represented recently by its outrageous equation of hostility toward the morally reprobate George Soros with anti-Semitism.
More to the point, all authentic Christians and Torah-faithful Jews abhor the leftist Jews’ embrace and often sponsorship of the LGBT cult driving the larger leftist agenda globally, but the opposing “anti-Zionism” cult fails to distinguish and defend authentic Jews as a priority in their analysis and rhetoric — raising the distinction (if at all) only as a point of self-defense when accused of anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, two dangerous new developments affecting Israel have arisen on the world stage.
The first is the de-fragmentation of the Islamic world through the strategic maneuvers of Russia and China, breaking the barriers erected between Islamic factions by the British after WWI to prevent the resurgence of the Ottoman Empire (the last actual Caliphate). The Brits intentionally separated the Turk’s former empire into nation-states and fostered rivalries between them to prevent reunification: an age-old Imperial tactic which the Assyrians mastered in the ancient world and which the British modernized during their own long dominance of the world. After WWII the US took up the mantle and the strategy. And, of course, the Jews have always had a (biblically grounded) hand in this going all the way back to the Hebraic Movement in Christianity of the 16th and 17th Centuries in England (and Holland), evidenced by the world-changing (but now largely debunked) doctrine of British-Israelism that persisted from the early 1600s until just after WWI.
The second development is the recent, unprecedented ascension of Orthodox Jewish nationalists to power in Israel, triggering a low-level civil war with the fully secular and semi-secularized religious Jews who have ruled the modern Jewish state since it’s formation in 1948. These Ultra-Orthodox Israelis are the true “Zionists” as measured by the claims and aims of the formal establishment of the Zionist Movement in 1897. But not by the two house (British Israel) version of Zionism that had already been repatriating Jews to Israel since the early 1800s under the auspices of the Anglican Church.
The distinction between the two forms of Zionism holds the key to understanding both where these two new geopolitical developments place us in prophecy, and how remnant Christians can maneuver through the theological and political minefields that now exist. In short, the British Israel version of Zionism is grounded in the two house prophecy of the Bible in which the House of Judah (the Jews) and the House of Israel (Christianity) will be reconciled in the Holy Land during the Millennial Kingdom when Jesus Christ will physically rule the world from the Throne of David in Jerusalem. (My book The Prodigal Son Prophecy extensively explores this theme , but you can read a summary of it here.)
The later, now dominant form of Zionism is a Jewish political movement that ignores the long history of Jewish and Christian cooperation to reclaim the the Holy Land and asserts an exclusively Jewish claim to the territory. Importantly, however, this “selfishness” by the House of Judah is an essential part of end-time prophecy, according to Jesus in His Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24-25 (especially 24:32-34). He taught that the season of the end begins with budding of the “fig tree” (deeply symbolic of only Judah, see especially Jeremiah 24). It concludes with the fulfillment of Jacob’s prophecy over Judah from Genesis 49:8-12: “Judah…Your hand shall be on the necks of your enemies…The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes and the allegiance of the nations is his….He washes his garments in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes.”
Thus, modern Judah WILL hold power in the Holy Land “until Shiloh comes.” Shiloh (ancient capital of the House of Israel) is symbolic of Christ. “The allegiance of the nations” will be His only upon His second coming when “He washes his garments in wine, his robes in the blood of grapes” as described in detail in Revelation 19:13-15 “He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and His name is The Word of God….He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.” (Read all of Revelation 19 for clarity.)
Do the Jews have an outsized influence in the world? Of course they do, by God’s own design — which is not to say that influence is always benign. Indeed, in the last days it is the (Soros-like) Synagogue of Satan that brings in the Antichrist Kingdom: right before our eyes, while the remnant of true Yahweh worshipers, Christians and Jews (the two witnesses), suffer the wrath of the world, which drives them together on the very cusp of the transition from the Age of the Gentiles to the Millennial Kingdom. Christians WILL be welcomed back to Israel by the true Jews at that time, which gets closer every day.
Until then, which Zionism is actually Christian? BOTH! If you trust God’s plan. But between then and now God’s Holy Land (and all who support the House of Judah’s covenantal right to it) will suffer the severe consequences of rule by the wicked whose top leadership is even today orchestrating WWIII and all the Soros “sorrows” that brings.
