True and False Reconciliation

Certain buzz words are guaranteed to tug at people’s hearts – words like ‘motherhood’ and ‘patriotism.’ Who could possibly stand against motherhood, or betray one’s true and native land? Obviously – only a villain!

The word ‘reconciliation’ has a similar strong pull. Who could conceivably be opposed to reconciliation? Only a warmonger or a racist, most would say.

Today in Israel the term ‘reconciliation’ is being used by a few small Christian groups to describe ministry which advocates a strong Replacement theology agenda coupled with a invalidation of Jewish restoration. This is a twisted use of the term ‘reconciliation’ and its outcome is twisted results.

This twisted understanding of reconciliation is confusing some Messianic Israeli believers, as well as some good friends of the Jewish people. It is leading to uncertainty and muddy thinking regarding God’s restoration of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It has caused some dear believers to hesitate and stammer concerning the biblical teaching on Israel’s irrevocable gifts and calling (Romans 11:28; 3:1-2). Some are even reconsidering their whole theology vis-à-vis the Jewish people’s national restoration.

Many believers want to be used as agents of reconciliation in Yeshua’s name, but are unsure as to what this would look like. Fruitful reconciliation – reconciliation in the truth – must be biblically based. And especially in the Middle East it is essential that it be illuminated by Scriptural teaching regarding God’s gifts and calling to the Jewish people.

Today a theologically skewed  distortion of reconciliation is making the rounds in some Middle Eastern circles. Only Spirit-led and biblically solid foundations will keep the elect from being fogged by it.

Peace is made between enemies

Reconciliation is something that happens between enemies. Enemies usually have a highly developed awareness of who their own adversaries are. But when God steps into the arena, something happens which radically transforms enemies into friends. Suddenly warring is substituted by peace, anger is replaced by love. But let’s not forget – reconciliation only begins between enemies.

“The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?’” (Acts 7:26)

Ephesians 2:14, 16 twice refers to hostility between Jews and Gentiles (“… the dividing wall of hostility; His purpose was … to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which He put to death their hostility”). Paul tells us in this context that Yeshua’s death on the cross has two purposes: one, to destroy the enmity between God and man; and two, to destroy the enmity between man and man. Paul is not generic here, but very specific. He says that God purposed to eliminate Gentile hatred of  Jews (and biblically speaking, Arabs are Gentiles), as well as to eradicate Jewish hatred of Gentiles. Reconciliation means taking God’s enemies and transforming them into friends of God and then friends of each other – through the power of the blood of Messiah.

Reconciliation does not mean “ignoring the enmity” or sidestepping it – it means facing that enmity “with eyes wide open,” and seeking a biblical solution.

Until enemies stop being enemies, reconciliation has not happened.

Talking heads on TV sometimes call on Israelis to surrender tangible land in exchange for flitting ‘declarations” (in English) of peace from Palestinian leaders. Usually another Palestinian declaration (in Arabic) comes out a few minutes later by other Palestinian leaders calling for continued armed struggle. Nevertheless, TV interviewers continue to lecture Israel, saying that one must remember that “peace is made between enemies.” This is true. But though peace can be made between enemies, every now and then one of the enemies does not want to make peace. In such an eventuality, of course, peace won’t be established.

One must remember that it is also true that war is made between enemies.

Real peace is not some fantasy-based sprinkling of magical  Hollywood stardust on ‘the bad guys.’ It does not mean being exceptionally polite or politically correct to someone you hate or fear, or being forced to call your enemy “friend.” It is not a name-change that is needed; it is a heart change.

Biblical reconciliation happens when God’s mighty power causes our hearts, thoughts and spirits to come into alignment with God’s own heart, purposes, strategies and Spirit.

Reconciled to God but not to each other?

A quick survey of the New Covenant Scriptures dealing with reconciliation shows that the primary biblical stress of reconciliation is that people get reconciled to God. In other words, reconciliation is when people who turn to Yeshua are changed from being God’s enemies into being His children (e.g., Romans 5:10; 2 Corinthians 5:18, 20; Ephesians 2:16; Colossians 1:20, 22). Real reconciliation begins with a change of heart and spirit toward God. When reconciliation is mixed with healthy obedience, it then percolates upward into relational fruit.

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10-11)

Not all believers walk in reconciliation all the time. Some people are reconciled to God, yet continue to nurse a degree of anger or bitterness in their hearts toward other people (Matt.18:21-35). This is not healthy, but it does happen. This can happen between nations too!

Not everyone walks in fullness of love all the time. Ideally, certain spiritual failures should not exist. Nevertheless, pastors find themselves working with this exact scenario – failing human beings – on a regular basis.

“With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be” (James 3:9-10)

What happens when a believer is my enemy?

During the American Civil War, Jewish people were soldiers in both the Union and Confederate armies. A document from that time describes a Confederate Jew who shouted out the Jewish ‘last rites’ – the Shma Yisrael (Deut. 6:4) prayer – every time he fired his musket. The logic was simple: perhaps his bullet would kill a Jew on the enemy side, one who would not have the time to utter the final prayer. So he prayed for his enemy even as he shot in his direction.

During times of war one has to shoot at enemies, and occasionally those enemies may also turn out to be brothers.

If Arab believers in Yeshua who live in Israel or on the West Bank stand with terror groups or organizations in their activities – whether by seeking approval from Islamist religious authorities by stressing one’s anti-Israel credentials; by allowing snipers to shoot at Israeli soldiers from atop Christian-owned buildings; by teaching Christians to abandon their love and biblically-based support for Israel and the Jewish people; or by campaigning among international believers for a Palestinian state (which would ultimately be ruled by terrorist dictators) – the uncomfortable fact must be stated without frills: these Arab believers are siding with active enemies of the Israeli people.

How are believers supposed to relate to believers who are at the same time enemies? Is it enough to declare that enemies aren’t really enemies because we are really all one in Messiah? Is it enough just to sing “Kumbaya” together and to ignore the malodorous detail that some of our Arab believing brothers and sisters are at the very least cooperating with the forces of Islamist jihad which call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people? Both the covenants of the PLO and of Hamas are unambiguous in this regard.

Here’s something worthy of even more serious consideration: one of the hidden agendas of this false message of reconciliation is to sow doubt among Israeli Messianic Jewish believers and in the larger body of Messiah as to the moral and theological rightness of Jewish restoration. This tactic, in military and strategic terms, is what is called a “fifth column” approach.

Biting the reconciliation bullet

“Pseudo-reconciliationists” sidestep the biblical teaching about God restoring the Jewish people back to their land (e.g., Isaiah 11:11-16; Jeremiah 30-31; etc). They teach that there are many differing views on eschatology, and that mature believers simply disagree on these points. What is needed, it is said, is not to defend “divisive viewpoints” but to sidestep the issue of Jewish restoration as a minor and nonessential detail.

According to the above scenario, Messianic Jews who believe that God is restoring the people of Israel to the land of Israel according to the prophetic Scriptures simply need to bite the bullet, and warmly embrace without reservation Arab believers who believe that Israel’s existence is a sin against humanity and God. This, it is said, is what true reconciliation is about.

Various conferences have been held in Israel by those influenced by false reconciliation teachings. I have seen Arab believers encouraged to get up and declare (often with great anger) how Israelis have sinned against them. Then a Jewish Israeli representative comes forward and confesses sin and asks for forgiveness. At that point everyone applauds and the conference moves on.

Certainly, since all have sinned, and since a war is going on between jihadi Palestinian groups and the Jewish people in Israel, there are undoubtedly sad instances of cruelty, racism and evil on all sides. But these conferences rarely witness any balancing statement that God is restoring the Jewish people to their own land, that jihadi goals are not biblical goals, and that believers must wrestle with the ramifications of God’s land promises to Israel. Rarely does an Arab brother get up and declare that hating the Jewish people is a sin, and that he repents of rejecting God’s gifts and calling to Israel.

How can it be called reconciliation when Jewish people repent for sins of their nation, while Arab believers are treated with kid gloves and given a wide berth regarding their rejection of God’s word and promises concerning Israel? Foreigners could serve as a helpful bridge here, and not allow such events to drift into cosmetic and ‘politically correct’ directions.

Both firefighter and arsonist deal with fire on a regular basis. But they are not morally on the same level. In the same way, those who side with a nationalistic Palestinian movement which legitimizes and uses terror, are not on the same moral level as those who are being restored to their own Promised Land by the hand of God.

Is Jewish restoration “just one more opinion?”

But is it really true that belief in Jewish restoration is simply one option of many on the theological smorgasbord? Not according to YHVH! Hear the word of the Lord to the Jewish people:

“I am with you and will save you, declares YHVH . Though I completely destroy all the nations among which I scatter you, I will not completely destroy you . . . But all who devour you will be devoured; all your enemies will go into exile. Those who plunder you will be plundered; all who make spoil of you I will despoil. But I will restore you to health and heal your wounds, declares YHVH, because you are called an outcast, Zion for whom no one cares” (Jeremiah 30:11, 16-17).

Those who would attempt to market a false reconciliation – one which invalidates or ignores Jewish restoration – are crossing the line and aligning themselves with the enemies of the Jewish people.

Who is my enemy?

Years ago Ezekiel was commanded to prophesy about the End of Days. He was given a message straight from God’s passionate heart which was enscripturated in Ezekiel 36. In this passage YHVH the God of Jacob looks across the sands of time and sees that Arab nations (including Edom and surrounding nations) would invade Israel with malice of heart – conquering and ravaging the land, and claiming it as an exclusively Arab possession. This process indeed reached a pinnacle in 637-38 AD when the armies of Mohammed invaded Israel, and then declared the whole Promised Land to be “waqf” or Muslim territory for all eternity. Read YHVH’s perspective on these Arab invasions:

Son of man, prophesy to the mountains of Israel and say, O mountains of Israel, hear the word of YHVH. This is what YHVH Adonai says: The enemy said of you, “Aha! The ancient heights have become our possession.”  Therefore prophesy and say, This is what YHVH Adonai says: Because they ravaged and hounded you from every side so that you became the possession of the rest of the nations and the object of people’s malicious talk and slander, therefore, O mountains of Israel, hear the word of YHVH Adonai: This is what YHVH Adonai says to the mountains and hills, to the ravines and valleys, to the desolate ruins and the deserted towns that have been plundered and ridiculed by the rest of the nations around you – this is what YHVH Adonai says: In My burning zeal I have spoken against the rest of the nations, and against all Edom, for with glee and with malice in their hearts they made My land their own possession so that they might plunder its pastureland. Therefore prophesy concerning the land of Israel and say to the mountains and hills, to the ravines and valleys: This is what the YHVH Adonai says: I speak in My jealous wrath because you have suffered the scorn of the nations. Therefore this is what YHVH Adonai says: I swear with uplifted hand that the nations around you will also suffer scorn (Ezekiel 36:1-7).

God laughs at ‘political correctness’ (Psalm 2:4). He calls these invaders “the enemy” – “those who ravage, plunder, ridicule, slander and scorn” the Jewish land and the Jewish people. From God’s perspective, it comes as no surprise that Muslim Arabs who see Mohammed as a true prophet would oppose the promised restoration of Israel.

Those who accept the Bible as God’s book know that the Muslim conquest and Arab occupation of the land of Israel are not a fait accompli. God will have the last word on the demographic makeup of the land of Israel. The effects of that jihadi invasion will one day be reversed, and the people of Israel will fully possess the land of Israel (Isaiah 62:4-5).

Believers cannot allow this very serious biblical issue to be swept under the carpet and to be blithely dismissed as “a simple theological disagreement among reconciled brothers.”

Love your enemies

Years ago Yeshua said “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:43-44). Part of the good news is that in Yeshua we can love our enemies. God promises to help us to love those who do us evil, even those who seek our destruction. Yet at the same time, we need to realistically remember that a time is coming when those who work for the destruction of the land of Israel and of the Jewish people will be decisively and forcibly stopped in their tracks.

True reconciliation between Jewish and Arab believers in Yeshua can never fly until both sides hit biblical bedrock. Both sides need to recognize that God has covenanted that land to the Jewish people alone, and that those who try to hold onto that land (the Arabic word for this attempt is summud) and establish a Palestinian state within the biblical borders of Israel are defined clearly by God’s prophet Ezekiel in chapter 36 as enemies.

Reconciliation in the truth between Jews and Arabs can only move forward when people repent for siding with the destroyers of Israel, and choose to no longer curse or do harm to God’s chosen people (Genesis 12:3).

Sad to say, but some Arab believers (although definitely not all!) are actually enemies of the Jewish people. When they stop being the enemies of the Jewish people, there will be room for new buds of reconciliation between us.

Some very good news today is that there are a growing number of Arab believers and former Muslim believers who grasp these truths, who stand with the Jewish people and with Jewish believers in blessing our restoration to the land. May their tribe increase!

Biblical reconciliation between Jewish and Arab believers in Yeshua really isn’t chanting ‘politically correct’ mantras with glazed-over eyes. Biblical reconciliation begins by calling things by their correct names. This means that we need to start calling an enemy “an enemy.”

But it moves way beyond that. It calls believers into repentance for racism and hatred of Jews (and hatred of Arabs too). It insists that believers embrace without reservation the biblical truth that God has a biblical priority with the Jewish people (Romans 1:16; 2:5-11; Number 23:8-9) and has granted the land of Israel by covenant to the Jewish people exclusively and eternally. Biblical reconciliation causes both Jewish and Arab believers to humbly looks for ways to bless that Jewish restoration process with the minimum of suffering created for all sides. And God has called Jew and Arab to be friends in truth – beloved participants in His community of reconciliation.

Yeshua has prophesied in Ezekiel 37:9-14 that He is calling the Jewish people back to their ancient homeland in order to make them into an exceedingly mighty army in Him.

Thanks for standing with us. Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do!

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN  37212-1971 USA

Donations can also be made on-line (by PayPal) through: www.davidstent.org

Aldersgate or Ichabod?

Charles Wesley (1707-1788), one of England’s most prodigious hymn writers (over 9,000 total) was the younger brother of John and Samuel Wesley (John and Charles together are considered the founders and spiritual forefathers of Methodism). Charles’ songs were the spiritual rails upon which the Methodist revival crossed Britain. His pen was used by God to author classics like “And can it be that I should gain,” “Christ the Lord is risen today,” “Come Thou long expected Jesus,” “Hark the herald angels sing,” “Jesus Lover of my soul,” “O for a thousand tongues to sing,” and “Rejoice the Lord is King.”

Truly an amazing legacy came through this man, who was known in his day as a “sweet singer of Israel” (https://www.stkimbrough.com/page_3a.htm). Some have said that people today are more familiar with Charles Wesley’s hymns that with John Wesley’s sermons!

Three of Charles Wesley’s bejeweled gifts to the body of Messiah are three intercessory hymns that touch upon God’s heart for the Jewish people and God’s many biblical promises to restore Israel to their own promised land. Here are excerpts from two of these hymns.

Calling the Hebrews home

“O that the chosen band might now their brethren bring
And gathered out of every land present to Sion’s King.
Of all the ancient race not one be left behind
But each impelled by secret grace his way to Canaan find!
We know it must be done for God hath spoke the word
All Israel shall their Saviour own to their first state restored.
Rebuilt by His command Jerusalem shall rise
Her temple on Moriah stand again, and touch the skies.
Send then Thy servants forth to call the Hebrews home
From west and east, and south, and north let all the wanderers come.
Where’er in lands unknown Thy fugitives remain
Bid every creature help them on Thy holy mount to gain”.

(Almighty God of Love, words & music Charles Wesley, 1762, based on Isaiah 66:19-20)
(https://www.ccel.org/w/wesley/hymn/jwg04/jwg0452.html)

Praying softly for Jerusalem

“Father of faithful Abraham, hear our earnest suit for Abraham’s seed!
Justly they claim the softest prayer from us…

Come then, Thou great Deliverer, come! The veil from Jacob’s heart remove;
Receive Thy ancient people home! That, quickened by Thy dying love,
The world may their reception find life from the dead for all mankind.”

(Father of faithful Abraham, words & music Charles Wesley, 1762, based on Romans 11:15-27)

(https://www.ccel.org/w/wesley/hymn/jwg04/jwg0451.html)

Methodism’s Jewish foundations

Wesley’s revelation concerning the last days restoration of the Jewish people to their patrimony in the land of Israel (including today’s West Bank and East Jerusalem) was coupled with an evangelical heart for Israel’s salvation. He boldly declared that “life from the dead” would come to all mankind as a result of Israel’s warm embrace of Messiah Yeshua.

Wesley therefore instructed his Methodist followers that they must “speak tenderly to” (the literal Hebrew reads “speak over the heart of”) the Jewish people (see Isaiah 40:1-2). The softest and gentlest prayers from Christians are the key, Wesley said, for God to bring life from the dead to Israel, and then through them both to the Church and to the entire globe.

The honorable Chairman of the Wesley Fellowship, Rev. Herbert McGonigle (commenting on Almighty God of Love) said “This hymn, which can be said to represent the views of both John and Charles Wesley, is well worth studying relative to how the Wesleys read scripture in terms of Israel’s future in God’s plans” Herbert McGonigle (https://www.wesley-fellowship.org.uk/Zionist_Hymn.html).

Apostolic warnings for a last days church

The Apostle from the tribe of Benjamin, Paul offers Gentile believers a prophetic warning in his revolutionary statement of Romans 11:18, 20-22, 29-32:

Do not boast over those (Jewish) branches. If you (Gentile believers) do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you… Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. For if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you either. Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God … For God’s gifts (to the Jewish people) and His calling (on Israel) are irrevocable. Just as you (Gentiles) who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their (Jewish) disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may nowreceive mercy as a result of God’s mercy to you. For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that He may have mercy on them all.

Paul warns generations of Gentile believers that their attitude to the Jewish people – their expressions of mercy, kindness and honor to Israel – all will affect, indeed have eternal ramifications on the very future of the worldwide body of Messiah, as well as on the ultimate spiritual state of all the nations of the world.

The apostolic teaching is plain: Christian attitudes and expressions of mercy to the Jewish people will bring divine mercy on the Church, while coldhearted Christian condemnation of Israel will bring quite coldhearted divine treatment on those who curse or disparage Israel.

“Utzu etza” (taking counsel) in Portsmouth (à la Isaiah 8:9-10)

The Methodist Conference for the United Kingdom was held June 24 – July 1 2010 in Portsmouth, England (https://www.methodistconference.org.uk/).  Though the Methodists represent a relatively small and declining community in Britain, they are considered to be the fourth largest English Protestant denomination. According to the conference website, “Methodist Conference first met in 1744 under John Wesley, who gathered together his assistants (both ordained ministers and itinerant lay preachers) to confer together about ‘what to teach, how to teach, and what to do, i.e. how to regulate our doctrine (ed.), discipline and practice.’ … The Conference is the body that agrees policy for the Methodist Church”.

At the conference, a vote was taken and passed on June 30 2010 to boycott Jewish goods and services produced in Judea and Samaria, on the other side of the Green Line – what modern media calls the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Up to this point, the Methodist Church has never boycotted any country; Israel has the distinction of being the first.

Islamo-fascist boycott history

Though the term “Islamofascist” has fallen into disrepute lately in America, this term is cutting edge in explaining a historical context for the “Portsmouth Putsch.”

The two outstanding examples of anti-Semitic boycott in the 20th century were, indeed,

Hitler began with a limited boycott – not of all Jews and not of all Jewish produce – merely of Jewish owned shops, banks, offices and stores in the territory of Germany.  The end result, however, was made clear from the beginning by Dr. Josef Goebbels (Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), “The boycott will be resumed … until German Jewry has been annihilated” (https://www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=230).

Hitler gradually moved to a total disenfranchising of all Jewish people from full citizenship in Nazi Germany, and declared on January 30 1939 that his primary goal was genocide of all European Jews: “Today I will once more be a prophet…the result will be … the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”

Goebbels later clarified that Hitler’s comments referred not just to Europe’s Jews but to the entire Jewish race: “None of the Führer’s prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the wiping out of the Jewish race” (https://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb37.htm). 

What began with a selective boycott of certain Jews in certain territories ended with a total anti-Christ onslaught against the Jews, known today as the Holocaust.

Boycotting Israel before it existed

The Arab boycott was formally declared on December 2, 1945 by the Arab League Council: “Jewish products and manufactured goods shall be considered undesirable to the Arab countries.” All Arab “institutions,  organizations, merchants, commission agents and individuals” are called upon  “to refuse to deal in, distribute, or consume Zionist products or manufactured goods” (https://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-gersten-f03.htm; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League_boycott_of_Israel).

Note that the terms “Jewish” and “Zionist” are used synonymously by the Arab League – their boycott was of all products produced by Jews – and all this in 1945, before the establishment of the State of Israel and while Jewish survivors of Hitler’s death camps were struggling to regain their broken health. 

Israel was being boycotted by the Arab world even before it ever became a nation. This Islamic boycott was up and running in 1945 when Jerusalem and the West Bank were still being occupied and patrolled by British paratroopers (and some of them were undoubtedly British Methodists)! Then, as now, the very existence of a Jewish state was anathema, and its stillbirth or destruction was the Arab boycott’s goal.

“Kairos Palestine” – Israel is a sin

In Portsmouth the Methodist conference was called upon to embrace the “Kairos-Palestine” (hereafter KP) document, a manifesto strongly influenced by both Liberation Theology and Replacement theology. Its Israeli Christian co-signors include the Catholic Patriarch, the Greek-Orthodox Archbishop, the Lutheran Bishop, the former Canon of the Anglican St George’s Cathedral and other non-Evangelical notables (https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/60512/sec_id/60512).

A bold one-sentence summation of the entire article by its authors is starkly clear: “In this historic document, we Palestinian Christians declare that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity” (https://kairospalestine.ps/?q=node/2).

The KP document condemns those who believe that the Scriptures champion the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient land. Of course, Charles and John Wesley ardently believed in that restoration.  Were they to have appeared at the Portsmouth conference like Dickens’ “the ghosts of Christmas past,” and attempted to sing “Almighty God of love”, they would have found themselves booed or shouted down, accused of violating democratically approved Methodist doctrine! “O tempora! O mores!” (“O, what times we live in! O, what customs we have developed” free translation of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Second Oration against Verres). Incidentally, the Latin word for ‘time’ is tempora, while the Greek word for time is kairos.

KP: Wesley’s views “bring death and destruction”

In KP’s own words, herein lies “precisely the error in fundamentalist Biblical interpretation that brings us death and destruction . . . This dead letter is used as a weapon in our present history in order to deprive us of our rights in our own land” (https://www.oikoumene.org/gr/resources/documents/other-ecumenical-bodies/kairos-palestine-document.html). Abandoning the biblical teaching of a Jewish return to a land promised to the Jewish people alone, one could say that the KP runs roughshod over the Hebrew prophets like a hit-and-run driver – and then reverses direction and backs up over the Wesleys for good measure!

The KP document does not even call for an end to terrorism. Indeed, it refuses to call terrorism by its unvarnished name. Instead, the document merely makes a blithe reference to the fact that Palestinians engage in armed attacks against Israelis (using the preferred Communist euphemism “struggle” to describe terrorism) while off-handedly admitting that Palestinians are also engaged in “peaceful struggle”. KP then describes the first Intifada (where Palestinians rioted, murdered and tortured their way into a cul-de-sac) as a wonderful example of peaceful struggle. “The Palestinian people has gone the way of the peoples, particularly in the first stages of its struggle with the Israeli occupation. However, it also engaged in peaceful struggle, especially during the first Intifada” (KP. ibid.).

For the authors of the KP document, it seems that rock-throwing and Molotov-cocktail-pitching Palestinian ‘peaceniks’ are an acceptable option, right along with the “first stages of its struggle” – which include (as a fact of history) sniping against soldiers and civilians, improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers in cafés and pizza parlors.

Showing an ideological numbness so prevalent among today’s “politically correct”, both the Methodist declaration and the KP document simplistically mouth the words “peace,” “justice” and “evil,” naively assuming that the God of Israel is on the side of the Palestinian ‘angels’ and against the Jewish state.

Indeed, KP’s declaration that the State of Israel “is a sin against God and humanity” is treacherously close to three of Adolf Hitler’s famous quotes:

The ox, the ass and the Methodist

Years ago the famed Messianic Yiddish writer Haim (Henry) Einspruch authored a wry book based on Isaiah 1:2-3 and titled “The Ox, The Ass and the Oyster.” His focus was on Yeshua as the Messianic Jewish pearl of great price. Isaiah’s emphasis in the 700’s BC was that the majority of his own Jewish people should have been listening to the prophetic promises and obeying them, but instead they had rebelled, running headlong into the wall of their God-given spiritual foundations.

“Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For YHVH has spoken: sons I have reared and brought them up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, My people do not understand” (Isaiah 1:2-3).

John Wesley commented on this verse in his “Explanatory Notes”: The Lord “directs His speech to those senseless creatures, that He might awaken (them…), whom He hereby proclaims to be so dull and stupid that they were past hearing, and therefore calls in the whole creation of God to bear witness against them”

(https://www.christnotes.org/commentary.php?com=wes&b=23&c=1).

Wesley’s comments (regarding those in Israel who were disobedient to YHVH in Isaiah’s day) have unfortunately come home to roost today among the flock that the Wesleys themselves once had reared. The recent vote at the Portsmouth conference would be absolutely anathema to the founders of that august denomination. Can it be truthfully said today that the Methodist Conference of England is the spiritual descendent of the Wesleys, especially as it concerns God’s heart and promises for Israel?

The Glory has departed

For centuries the saints of God have gazed upon the machinations and deceptions of world leaders and ruefully (and rightfully!) placed their ultimate hope in the justice and righteousness that Messiah Yeshua will bring when He returns to judge the earth in the Valley of Jehoshaphat (Zechariah 14:1-3).

Years ago Percy Bysshe Shelley composed a sonnet titled “Ozymandias.” In that poem the ruined statue of a once mighty king and empire now lay covered by swirling desert sands (https://www.online-literature.com/shelley_percy/672/).  The inscription on the king’s broken statue boasted that he was “king of kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and  despair!”  Yet in spite of the now-silent boasts, “round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away” (Ozymandias).

Fire once swept through Aldersgate. Under the ministry of the Wesley brothers (among others), trembling crowds of people came into the kingdom of God, weeping under heavenly conviction and crying out with joy. This amazing revival became known as the Methodist revival.

Today, some of God’s distant grandchildren from various Christian denominations, in cooperation with Middle Easterners straight out of Ezekiel 36:2-5, have arrogantly and methodically taken it upon themselves to aid in the dismantling of what God Himself is restoring – the Jewish people to their ancient Promised Land.

What began as a mighty flame and a strangely warming fire at a Moravian prayer chapel in the London Ward of Aldersgate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldersgate) seems now to be a barely flickering flame. Sometimes it even seems to be strange fire at that.

“And she named the child Ichabod, saying, ‘The glory is departed from Israel’ “ (1 Samuel 4:21). In John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes on 1 Samuel 4:21  it is written, “The glory – that is, the glorious type and assurance of God’s presence, the ark, which is often called God’s glory, and which wast the great safeguard and ornament of Israel, which they could glory in above all other nations” (https://www.christnotes.org/commentary.php?com=wes&b=9&c=4). What was once spoken over Israel in the days of Samuel is now being spoken over others.

Thanks for standing with us. Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do!

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES  

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN  37212-1971 USA

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