WND publishes my regular columns on Tuesdays. Today’s posting corresponds with the deeply solemn Ninth of Av on the Hebrew calendar – the anniversary of the Hebrews’ fatal failure to obey God’s command to invade the Holy Land from the south under Moses. There is a reasonable risk that Iran will choose today to retaliate against Israel for its recent presumed assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyehin in Tehran, and I urge prayer that any such attack will be thwarted or minimized. [Update: Iran has reportedly delayed it’s revenge pending U.S. talks … we’ll see.]
This is the third in a series that began with my article “Zionism and the ‘Last Days War’ for Israel” and continued with the sequel, “Islamo-Hebrew Relations from Hagar to Hamas.” In this article, I want to expand upon a point I made in the second piece. I wrote, “Most in Christendom who battle over ‘Zionism’ wrongly think the fight is about the ‘goodness’ or ‘evil’ of the modern House of Judah relative to its possession of the Holy Land.” However, Judah’s land rights (while subject in the longer term to the mandate of Leviticus 18:24-30) are not “merit based” in any short-term sense of the phrase.
I frequently debate anti-Zionists who erroneously characterize me as a “Christian Zionist” (a slur from their perspective). I am neither a Christian Zionist nor an Anti-Zionist. I consider myself a Two-House Millennialist, which means I believe the Bible’s prophecy, best summarized in Ezekiel 37:15-28, of a future earthy kingdom under Christ, exemplified by the reunification of the two Hebrew houses between which God’s covenant was divided under Jacob. As I explained in the first article, “Zionism” has been defined since it was formalized in Great Britain in 1897, by exclusive control of the Holy Land by the House of Judah. I happen to support the Jewish land claim but not the premise of one-house Zionism. And, incidentally, I don’t base my support upon the claim of moral right due to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and centuries of horrific pogroms – which persecutions I vigorously deplore.
My support is based almost entirely on Bible prophecy because prophecy reflects the will and plan of God, not the priorities and traditions of men. My first article addressed God’s eternal covenantal land grant to the descendants of Jacob, but here is the path of some additional proof-texts I follow:
God’s unbreakable and perpetual covenant promised Abraham that “Your descendants will possess the gates of their enemies” (Genesis 22:17b). This explains the phenomenon of outsized Hebrew influence in the affairs of the world throughout history. Its practical manifestation is clearly showcased in the Bible in the lives of Joseph (House of Israel) and Daniel (House of Judah per Daniel 1:6).
Joseph rose from suffering in prison to sit “second chair” to Pharaoh and controlled Egyptian domestic and foreign policy as it related to the priorities of the Hebrews. When the seven-year famine he had prophesied occurred, he used the crisis he had planned for to vastly enrich and empower the Pharaonic Dynasty, which he served as its de facto central banker/trade minister, while saving the entire region from starvation (Genesis 41-43).
Daniel rose from the role of Judean captive to sit “second chair” to King Nebuchadnezzar. “[T]he king promoted Daniel and gave him many generous gifts. He made him ruler over the entire province of Babylon and chief administrator over all the wise men of Babylon. And at Daniel’s request, the king appointed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to manage the province of Babylon, while Daniel remained in the king’s court” (Daniel 1-2, especially 2:48-49).
This is the same model we have seen during much of the Gentile Age – Jewish trade and banking powers aligned with Christian monarchies and steering domestic and foreign policies largely with benign effect for the empires in which they sit “second chair” (the best and most recent example being Great Britain). This well-documented historical truth is characterized as an anti-Semitic trope because of the violent reaction of supersessionist Christians who believe the Christian church fully supplanted the Hebrews at the First Advent of Christ, but it is in fact the outworking of the will of God and a fixed aspect of human civilization since Abraham that will only end at the Second Advent of Christ, when the Jews collectively do finally receive Him per Romans 11:25.
This is not to say the policy-steering Hebrew powers are always benign, because they’re not. They’ve always been a mixed bag (read Jeremiah 24). Indeed, as measured by the yardstick of Leviticus 18, we are presently in a season of malignancy and abominations – which will be punished by God as it was of old: with the desolation of the land in His perfect timing.
For Christian end-time prophecy (outlined by Christ Himself in Matthew 24:3-26:1) to be fulfilled, the House of Judah must be in possession of the Holy Land. It’s people must succumb to the deceptions of the false-Christ Antichrist that only the “elect” (defined in Romans 11:5-7 – essentially Messianic Jews saved by grace) will recognize as a fraud. And it must suffer the “time of Jacob’s trouble” as a consequence of rejecting Jesus Christ at His first coming. It is living under Christ’s curse of Matthew 23:37-39 until it finally bends the knee to Him in the events described in Zechariah 14 (note the exclusive mention of Judah in 14:14).
At the present time the House of Judah has full authority to represent all Hebrews in its naming of the Holy Land as Israel rather than Judea. Jacob himself prophesied that “Judah, your brothers shall praise you. 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.” That “scepter” prophecy of a Judean monarchy was begun with King David and continued despite the division of his kingdom under Rehoboam and Jeroboam. Indeed (right or wrong) the assertion of “British Israelism” that England’s monarchs were a modern continuation of that Judean monarchy was a centerpiece of that world-shaping doctrine.
The fact that the Northern Kingdom “House of Israel” was divorced by God (Hosea 1-3, Jeremiah 3:8) following Ahab and Jezebel’s sins, vested all remaining Hebrew authority in Judah … “until Shiloh comes and the allegiance of the nations is his.” Shiloh was for four centuries the House of Israel’s capital in the Holy Land, which house has been defined by Christianity since Jesus died on the cross to free it to remarry – making every believer in Him a “Bride of Christ” pending the “Wedding Feast of the Lamb.” Shiloh IS Christ in the Jacoban prophecy, bringing us full circle back to modern Israel where the “time of Jacob’s trouble” grows daily closer.
