Don’t get tangled up in outcomes.
One of the biggest, most persistent and pernicious lies in Western society is that objectives or outcomes are the whole point of our striving. God’s Word says that it matters not how things turn out on the ground, but whether you have obeyed. There is nothing important to accomplish; there is only faithfulness. There is no objective or common result that matters; each of us individually before the Lord must give an account personally. There is no uniform code that fits every human.
Yes, I am aware of the way our brains are wired to seek satisfactory endings to things we do, and that we want the confirmation from others that we did it right. That’s part of the Curse of the Fall. It’s not that results don’t matter, but that they are secondary. Never let them move to the front. Results do not speak to us about how well we did something because we cannot possibly control all the factors. This is why we have this verse: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28 NKJV).
This is why we are warned not to make highly detailed plans with long-range goals, but to wait upon the Lord and grant to Him in your life the authority to change your plans without warning (James 4:13-16). The bicycle collision that shattered my kneecap almost a year ago did not affect the command from God to stay fit; it simply changed the particulars of how I go about the task. Outcomes do not determine our future choices. We should understand that God’s call has nothing to do with how it turns out, but we are expected to die trying to obey.
God grants us cause-and-effect reasoning only for administrative purposes. It’s that same fundamental question of why we have senses and reason in the first place. We are designed to structure and implement things we have no authority to decide about, and certainly no authority to judge the relative moral merits of big decisions. You cannot get moral discernment from the intellect; it’s not designed for that. Moral values are written by the finger of God into reality and it is necessary that we develop a moral sensitivity someplace outside the intellect.
This is part of the utter moral failure that keeps people confused about Jews and Zionism. We have a boatload of competing demands from pressure groups and all of them together are wrong. Each tries to use mere human reason (and appeals to emotion) to establish what is our proper moral duty in regards to the issue of what we should do with them.
Facts first: Let’s not ignore what can be verified according to God’s Word.
1. Israel was originally chosen by God to live out His moral character via a national covenant that applied to them alone as a nation on this earth. It was that people, that time and that place. However, the Covenant makes it clear the identity was not DNA, but clinging to the provisions of the Covenant as the means to proper feudal and personal loyalty to Jehovah. Anyone who wasn’t born into the nation could join the nation with very few exceptions. The whole point was not the privilege, but the mission to reveal the character of God through obedience to the Covenant demands and harvesting the Covenant promises.
2. Israel eventually walked away from this Covenant. In accordance with the provisions clearly stated, they moved so far away from it and the God who granted it that He was compelled to replace the whole thing. It’s not about the people, but the mission to reveal Him, and the culmination of the Covenant was in Jesus Christ. The people God chose rejected their own Messiah, so they lost everything. The veil in the Temple was torn in two by God’s own hand; the Covenant ritual system was gone. From the day of the Cross, the only acceptable sacrifice was His blood.
3. God no longer claims that nation, but Satan does. So after Christ we have a long history of Jews as a whole both giving and receiving offense. They have outraged Gentiles and the Gentiles have outraged back. Jews have treated the world with contempt and it was dumped on their heads in return. It has nothing to do with who started what; this is the part they play in God’s plans by turning them over to Satan.
4. Nothing mere men have ever proposed regarding the Jews has been morally right. Aside from the clear facts that the Holocaust is not what they claim, it was a bad experience that their persecutors cannot justify. Nor can anyone justify the perverted logic of giving parts or all of Palestine back to Jews in recompense for the Holocaust. There is no justice either way. You cannot morally defend the current situation from either side.
5. We know from Scripture that as long as Jews maintain their identity as somehow special people in one sense or another, they will always belong to Satan. The only way to break that curse is to turn back to God. While the Covenant of Moses is legally dead, it still points to the power to live by divine justice. Jews could at least find some measure of peace if they just lived up to Moses. The Talmud is a nasty perversion of Moses; they would have to live by the Law of Moses as taught by Jesus. Or, if they are genuinely Spirit-born and enter the Covenant of Christ individually, then they can escape the curse.
Review Isaiah 5:1-7 and John 15:1-17; Zechariah 4 and Romans 11:19:28 — Both the vineyard and the olive tress symbolize the revelation of God. The revelation was supposed to bring sustenance, joy and light. The identity of the vine and tree root are now in Christ; end of story. It was meant for the Jews to be God’s Firstfruit on the earth, but they rejected it as a whole. Now it’s all a matter of individual covenant, not a shared national covenant. There are Jews grafted back in already, and they are Christians with advantages — they are closer to shalom by nature. But it also means nothing to be a Christian if you aren’t rooted in that original purpose of revelation (that includes the whole business of heart-led and rejecting Western intellectual traditions).
Don’t get involved in the mess regarding Modern Israel and Zionism. That’s a big swamp of lies every way you approach it. Stay out of there; God will drain the swamp in His own time. Don’t be drawn into the debate because there is no earthly solution. You and I cannot fix the outcomes in any way.
Instead, stay faithful to the mission of making His name glorious.
