In this episode, I sit down with J.D. Hall to discuss the origins of Christian Zionism and its relationship with dispensationalism and covenant theology, and how they differ from one another in their understanding of the Bible.
00:07:28.920He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.0.99
00:07:32.800I mean, all the imagery is right there for the Jewish people to see
00:07:38.700That this is the moment that we've been waiting for. Jesus installs the new covenant in his blood. And by that, by God's grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, we are redeemed by faith in that. And then we become God's chosen people.
00:08:00.700And so a covenant theologian is going to tell someone that quotes Genesis chapter 12, verse 3,
00:08:07.740I will bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee.
00:08:11.540A Christian, a covenant theologian is going to quote to you Galatians chapter 3, which is a book
00:08:17.320of the New Testament in which the Apostle Paul is writing to the church in Galatia, and he tells
00:08:24.600them that if you have faith in Jesus, you are God's children. Actually, he says, you are the
00:08:33.520children of Abraham. It says it twice. So, by faith, we're adopted into God's covenant people.
00:08:41.920And then at the very end of Galatians chapter 3, not only does it tell us that we are
00:08:47.900the children of Abraham, those who believe, but also we are the heirs of the promises.
00:08:55.740And so, in fact, in Galatians chapter 3, verse 7, the Apostle Paul very clearly explains that
00:09:04.500that promise is not for the Jews. It never was for the Jews. The picture was, or rather,
00:09:11.820the mission of God was much bigger than that.
00:09:15.380And that's clear in the Old Testament, isn't it?
00:09:16.820Right. It's Old Testament, and God is preaching through the rites and rituals of the Old Testament, the gospel, before Jesus came, all right?
00:09:31.920so that they could understand concepts like grace and judgment and forgiveness and repentance,
00:09:39.840because it was never about the sacrifice of bulls and goats. It's not as though that bloodshed ever
00:09:48.120took away sin. It gave them a picture of the bloodshed that Jesus Christ would one day give
00:09:54.860for us so that they could believe in what we call types and shadows, putting their faith
00:10:01.460in the rituals that would one day be lived out in reality through the life and ministry of Jesus
00:10:10.120Christ. And the greatest, you know, the great mystery of the gospel, Paul calls it, is that
00:10:16.240Jesus was not just a Jewish Messiah. He was a global Messiah. He was everyone's Messiah.
00:10:24.160and that by faith, we become the children of Abraham. And by faith, we receive Abraham's
00:10:31.120promises. I was going to say a second ago, the very first part of Galatians chapter three,
00:10:37.640he says, you know, when the promise is given to Abraham and to Abraham's seed,
00:10:44.360Paul says, it doesn't say seeds plural. It says seed singular. The promise is not given to the
00:10:51.380Jews. The promise is a reference to Abraham's seed. That's Jesus Christ because Jesus was of
00:10:58.300the lineage of Abraham. So, the promise is not bless the Jews and God will bless you.1.00
00:11:05.860The promise is bless Christ and God will bless you. Furthermore, not only is that promise just
00:11:14.100for Christ, but by the end of the chapter in Galatians 3, the apostle Paul says,
00:11:19.160you are the heirs of the promise, meaning that promise is extended to us. And so the irony is
00:11:25.060you have these so-called Christian Zionists who believe that we have to bless Jews in order for0.84
00:11:31.220God to bless us, and they're actually giving away their own inheritance. That's our promise.0.97
00:11:38.340I'm a child of Abraham. If you're a Christian, you're a child of Abraham. We receive the heir,0.71
00:11:45.080or rather we receive the promises of Abraham because we inherit them by the virtue of adoption
00:11:53.520in Jesus Christ. That's what Christians have historically believed. And there are other
00:12:00.200supporting texts, you know, you got Romans chapter nine, where the apostle Paul says that
00:12:05.480Jews who do not believe in Jesus are not children of Abraham. You've got Romans chapter 11 that
00:12:14.280paints the picture of the tree of faith in which unbelieving Jews are branches on this tree that0.99
00:12:22.820have been cut off and severed from both Abraham and God and in their place are grafted in0.99
00:12:31.300believing Gentiles. And so, we are brought into the family of Abraham and in covenant with God0.99
00:14:55.780It doesn't make inherent sense, the theology that you're describing, dispensationalism.
00:15:04.520um and also before i ask about how it spread and why is it true or product of my bad memory that
00:15:12.980there are glimpses in the old testament that god plans to redeem the entire world that is not that
00:15:19.060god's mission on earth is not just to protect this one group of people but everybody right
00:15:22.860so uh what dispensationalists will do is they will look at verses in the bible about the end
00:15:29.060times, we call that eschatology. They'll look at these eschatological texts about what God will do
00:15:35.520with ethnic Jews, the children of Abraham physically. And they'll say, see, the Jews are0.72
00:15:42.760special to God in a way that other ethnicities are not. And it's unfortunate because three1.00
00:15:50.720different times in the New Testament, the scripture says, God is not a respecter of persons.
00:15:55.860and each and every time it's a reference to the Jewish people, but they have in their head,
00:16:02.280Jews are special. They look at a verse about what God is going to do one day in the eschaton or in
00:16:07.580the end days for Jews and walk away from that saying, therefore, we need to support the nation
00:16:14.060state of Israel. This must be a part of that grand plan that God has designed for the Jewish people.
00:16:21.140But Isaiah chapter 19, just to give you an example, tells us that the Egyptians and the Assyrians will be redeemed by God in the end days and be brought to Zion, to Jerusalem, or to the promised land.0.80
00:16:38.940It calls Egypt God's special people and says of Assyria that they are the work of his hands.0.93
00:16:46.180These are two nations that are adversarial to the ancient Israelites.0.89
00:16:52.080Right. And the Assyrians, you know, are constantly warfaring with them. These are bitter enemies, and yet the prophet Isaiah says that they will become special to God. He will call them his own and draw them to Zion.0.92
00:17:08.440Yeah, that's in the Torah. It's in Isaiah chapter 19, but that's not the only place.
00:17:13.380There are literally dozens of different scriptures throughout the text that tells us that every nation group in the end is going to be drawn to God through Jesus Christ.
00:17:25.000As a matter of fact, it's in the Abrahamic promise in Genesis chapter 12, verse 4 of that promise, right after it says,
00:17:34.300I'll bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee. It says every family of the earth
00:17:40.900will be blessed through Abraham. And so the Jews will tell you that it's because, you know,
00:17:49.160Israel is such a grand, wonderful place that all of the different nations of the world are being
00:17:54.100blessed, you know, by Israel. Unfortunately, the dispensationalists will tell you that too.
00:18:00.920I say unfortunately, because that's clearly a reference of Christ. Through Jesus Christ,
00:18:08.180God's saving love to sinners all around the world, every people group, every nation,
00:18:15.820every ethnos is going to be drawn to God in the end. That's our hope as Christians, that
00:18:22.920God wins, that salvation is secure ultimately for every nation under the sun, that God will
00:18:30.900bring unto himself one chosen nation, one holy people for God's possession. And so, yes, we can
00:18:38.920see places in the Bible where God has future plans for Israel, but we can also look to those very
00:18:44.460same prophets in those very same books and see that God has great things in store for Persia,
00:18:51.040for Iran. God has great things in store, you know, for Greece and for every nation, including,
00:19:00.000by the way, the ancient Philistines who are modern-day Palestinians. God has plans in store0.64
00:19:07.380for everyone. That is the good news of the gospel, that Jesus shed his blood for sinners and that by
00:19:14.540faith we can all become the children of God. And by virtue of that, children of Abraham. When I
00:19:22.360was a kid in church, there was a song that we sang, Father Abraham. And it says, Father Abraham
00:28:34.820So, and Jesus looks to the Pharisees, and he says, you're plotting to kill me. This is what
00:28:40.180you're trying to do. So the question would be, why does the Bible seem to blame Jews
00:28:46.380for the death of Jesus? Obviously, they're involved. But it was technically the Romans
00:28:52.360that, you know, nailed him to the cross. It was the Romans who killed him. And the answer is,
00:29:00.460and well, Jesus himself, by the way, I should say, while he's on the cross says,
00:29:05.620forgive them for they know not what they do. And he's speaking of the Romans, not the Jews.0.75
00:29:11.580He's talking about those who were actually doing that, the crucifixion. If you think about what0.54
00:29:17.140transpired after, before the crucifixion was done, the centurion recognizes that Jesus
00:29:24.320is the son of God. Pilate very clearly was remorseful by the time he was done handing
00:29:34.840Jesus over to be crucified. But within a few decades, you had mass conversions of the Roman0.99
00:29:43.160people and all throughout the Roman empire to Christianity. And by the third century,
00:29:50.560you had the full Christianization of Rome. That doesn't mean that every Roman on earth was0.60
00:29:58.160therefore a Christian by the virtue of being born in a Christian empire. We all have to have faith
00:30:04.600personal faith in Jesus Christ, death, burial, and resurrection. That's how we're justified
00:30:10.900before God. But you have the Roman people recognizing who Jesus is very quickly.
00:30:19.720The Jews who saw Jesus dead, buried, and resurrected, many of them followed after him,
00:30:25.940but many of them persisted to persecute him. And then within a very short time,0.62
00:30:32.100they're stoning Stephen to death. Stephen, as he's being crucified, points out to the Jews,0.84
00:30:38.980you've always killed God's prophets and you've killed Christ. And so the reason why I think1.00
00:30:46.600the scripture isn't throwing the Romans under the bus, so to speak, even though they obviously had
00:30:53.380a hand in Jesus' crucifixion is because they saw ultimately who it was that they crucified and then
00:31:01.180they repented and they believed. And the Jewish people, those who did not convert and follow0.94
00:31:08.280Christ, ended up having to make a new religion in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the temple.
00:31:17.120Because all of those rites and rituals that we discussed, you know, that God had given the
00:31:22.460Jewish people for them to see and understand who Jesus was, the festival of booths, Passover,
00:31:29.200However, all of those various rituals and the different kinds of sacrifices all required a temple, and it required an altar, it required blood, it required a priesthood to make that sacrifice.
00:44:56.520so then it comes to the united states where it really takes root um and that's about when this
00:45:02.840is pre-first world war that this hits the u.s yeah so it would have been uh what was it 1907
00:45:09.160i think schofield was published and so yeah it came to the united states very quickly and it
00:45:14.200just grew like wildfire because you've got baptists methodists congregationalists um you have the
00:45:20.060Azusa Street Revival, which is just starting to kick off charismaticism. So anybody in those
00:45:29.040circles, they're probably not going to a seminary. They're not mainstream Protestant that would have
00:45:36.260had the brick-and-mortar seminaries. You know, you're Presbyterians, you're Episcopalians,
00:45:41.240and so forth. And so, you know, good for them, they got to avoid most of the dispensationalism
00:45:48.080problem for quite a long time. But now today, they're ate up with dispensationalism, but it's
00:45:57.040really not theological for the mainstream Protestants. It's just, it's soaked in through
00:46:06.020culture, through various channels, but it didn't come through their seminaries and Bible colleges.
00:46:11.180As a matter of fact, Presbyterians, for example, they are the arch covenant theologians. Their doctrine should be hostile to dispensationalism, but you'll still find a lot of Presbyterians who will tell you that Jews are God's chosen people just because at this point, we're receiving this through osmosis as Christians.
00:46:36.880It's everywhere. As Christians, you're supposed to support Israel. With Carrie Prejean Bowler, if I'm pronouncing her name right, I think that she shocked a lot of people when at the Religious Liberty Council meeting, she had said, as a Catholic, we don't support Israel or we're not Zionists.0.69
00:47:02.540And that shocked a lot of people as though she's making that up.
00:47:06.580And they don't realize that the vast majority of Christendom has a confession of faith for their specific church that does not allow for the belief that the Jews are the chosen people of God.
00:47:22.600And so, most people these days aren't that aware of what their own doctrine is.
00:47:29.460So there's a sort of a doctrinal downgrade, so to speak. That's what Spurgeon would have called it. A theological dumbing down where Christians don't know what their own beliefs are supposed to be.
00:47:42.180interesting so there does even if you accept the precepts of dispensationalism as as just
00:47:53.300described by you it's still a jump to go from that to unlimited military aid to the modern
00:47:59.840secular state of israel right no no it's a it's a huge jump so it's on one hand we can acknowledge
00:48:07.820let's say I am a premillennialist and I believe that Jesus is going to literally
00:48:12.340come reign from Jerusalem one day. It's one thing to believe that, that one day a bunch of Jews1.00
00:48:21.900are going to get saved and become Christians. That would be wonderful if that happens. That's1.00
00:48:28.020great. What does that have to do with me supporting the state of Israel today? God may one day save
00:48:36.340the Jews. Great. Hope he does. The promises are in the Bible that he will, so I believe that that1.00
00:48:41.840will happen one day. But that does not imply that I, therefore, have to become part of a protectorate
00:48:49.580to protect a kingdom of Jews whose king is not welcome. And for me, that's the offensive part0.94
00:48:56.840as a Christian, being told that I have to support the Israeli state. Like, I support Jesus. Jesus
00:49:03.260is not welcome in the Israeli state. The right of return, for example, gives Jews the permission1.00
00:49:12.640to come back no matter their blood quantum. They don't have to be a certain portion Jewish,
00:49:18.880right? They have to be, if you have one grandparent out of four Jewish, you can come from anywhere
00:49:24.340in the world to Israel. They'll let you immigrate and become a citizen because the thought process
00:49:31.360is Jews need a safe place in the world, right? That's the philosophy. Unless you're a Christian.
00:49:39.620If you are a Jew who believes in Jesus, you're not welcome back.1.00
00:49:44.940Oh, that's absolutely true. Yeah. So the way that-
00:49:48.140You can be 100% Jewish by blood, but if you profess Jesus, you do not have the right to return?0.64
00:49:53.180You can be 100% Jewish by blood, you know, in terms of your ethnicity, but if you believe in Jesus, you cannot return, even if you're under persecution in your home country, hypothetically, if that were to happen.
00:50:09.140So, let's say they're persecuting Jews based on their ethnicity in some country somewhere.0.97
00:50:14.560They don't care if they're a Christian, they're ethnically Jewish, they're going to put them to death.0.97
00:50:19.360The right of return would not allow them to return. The right of return specifically is for Jews who either remain Jewish or have not, at the least, joined another religion. So, if you are an atheist Jew, they don't classify that as a religion, so you can come back. If you are an agnostic Jew, you can come back to Israel. If you're a Christian Jew, you cannot.1.00
00:50:46.020so you can affirmatively out loud reject the torah and the talmud and all religious expression0.88
00:50:53.500judaism i don't believe in judaism i think it's absurd you can be a non-practicing jew with the0.74
00:50:57.560right of return you can be anti-practicing jew like atheist literally atheist well you can be0.61
00:51:02.960a satanist as long as that is not organized satanism unless you are a member with your name0.88
00:51:11.120on the roll of an official church of Satan somewhere, let's just say you practice the
00:51:16.300occult, you can come in to Israel as long as you have not joined another religion like0.71
00:51:33.700Yeah, they're like, well, that can't be true.
00:51:35.760because, you know, they've been told, you know, that Jews and that Israelis love Christians
00:51:43.680and that we have this shared religious heritage, which of course is not true at all,
00:51:49.760and that they are, you know, they're friends of Christians. So it's like it boggles their mind.
00:51:56.400Well, that can't be true. Well, that is true. You know, Israel's not a friend of Christianity,
00:52:02.200Not at all. There are laws on the books in the state of Israel that forbid evangelism
00:52:10.620over the airwaves, that forbid evangelism to minors. As a matter of fact, Ron Cantor,
00:52:20.380I don't know if you know that name or not. Ron Cantor is a Christian celebrity in Israel,
00:52:29.540and he was on X one day talking about how loving and kind Israel is to him as a Jew who believes
00:52:37.800in Jesus. And they will phrase it that way on purpose so as to not imply that they're a Christian
00:52:46.020because if they say they're a Christian, they might have to leave. So, they'll say Jew who0.66
00:52:51.660believes in Jesus. They're trying to work the system. So, I look him up, Ron Cantor,0.68
00:52:59.620and he has a television station, a Christian television station in Israel. And in 2020,
00:53:06.060they took his broadcast license because they said that he was telling Jews that they needed Jesus.
00:53:12.960And so, he had to promise that he would not give the gospel to Jewish people, that he would not
00:53:20.260try to spread the name and the fame of Jesus over the radio waves so that they would give him his
00:53:26.000quote-unquote Christian station back. And there he is bragging about how great Israel treats
00:53:32.680Christians. They took away his broadcast license for sharing Christ. So there are these so-called
00:53:41.180Christian Jews in Israel that, again, they probably don't call themselves Christian Jews.
00:53:49.220it's jews who believe in jesus um there are some that are there like him whose purpose it is
00:53:56.200is to tell christians how great it is in israel listen to listen to this person tell you about
00:54:02.720how great christians are treated in israel um but you and i both know that christians are not
00:54:08.040treated well in israel at all no no they're not in fact they're they're the subject of a lot of
00:54:15.180hostility and in a lot of cases, violence. And it's interesting how many Christians were expelled
00:54:20.480from their lands and their homes in 1948 with the foundation of the formation of the state of
00:54:26.920Israel. Well, the church there is still having their property confiscated to this day for
00:54:32.320settlement. You know, with the Orthodox Church, Israel closed their bank or froze their bank
00:54:38.980account because they didn't pay their tax. It was a tax that they just suddenly threw on them.
00:54:45.160All this time, they've not had to pay that tax. Israel throws it on them. They couldn't afford it0.57
00:54:51.980because it was years worth and they confiscated their bank account and threatened to take their
00:54:57.320property. The Ottomans didn't charge churches tax. And so when the Ottomans were in control
00:55:06.720of the promised land for 400 years in the millet system. They didn't charge churches tax. Israel
00:55:13.880started just a few years ago. And, you know, so that Christians have pressure applied to them.
00:55:20.620I mean, native believers, the ones whose churches have been there longer than Israel has been a
00:55:26.200state, they're the ones that are facing the pressure that it's very hard to get Christians
00:55:31.700in America to care about at all. And their Muslim rulers didn't do that during the Ottoman period.
00:55:36.720Okay, so the answer is no. The Muslim rulers didn't tax churches during the Ottoman period. They were very kind to Christians. As a matter of fact, they took care of our holy sites. They had rebuilt Islamic authorities, rebuilt the Church of the Sepulchre three different times over the centuries.
00:56:00.220they had a law protecting Christian pilgrims
01:02:21.000But that had to cover essentially five continents0.92
01:02:23.820because the Soviet Union was everywhere, right?
01:02:26.920It was a bipolar world, had to cover most of the world, and it was through that program that they did their common turn exercises in infiltrating communist propaganda into education and religion and all these different avenues where it could affect Americans and also people from all over the world.
01:02:50.620So $3.5 million is what the Soviets spent at the height of it for their active measures.
01:02:56.920The public diplomacy unit under the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a quarter of that, right? It's about a quarter of that. But that's all spent on the United States. They're not spending that on other nations on different continents and different countries that can't benefit them politically.
01:03:23.860Israel just has to have the United States as an ally. It doesn't have to work hard to gain
01:03:29.640Brazil as an ally, right? Or anyone else. We are the ones with the veto power at the UN and
01:03:38.960the Security Council. All they need is us. So, we're the ones that are the nice recipients of
01:03:46.820that $145 million affecting even what our AI says and our search engine results. All that is
01:03:55.300affecting us, how we view Israel. But on top of that, you see the religious infiltration,0.98
01:04:05.660which I know you've had other guests on to talk about that recently. But through the
01:04:39.020and i think it was clock tower x and then also show faith by works and then a couple more
01:04:47.340and the geofencing thing i know that you've discussed basically they're outlining outlining
01:04:54.280churches on a map invisibly so that when you go there and you leave it'll ping your phone
01:05:01.160with different types of propaganda yes right assuming that you went to church there so maybe
01:05:07.940you would be more susceptible to some, you know, dispensational advertisement about why it's your
01:05:13.740duty as a Christian to support Israel. But there's a lot that hasn't been discussed. That really has
01:05:20.560the geofencing campaign. And I think that once it got exposed, they had maybe said at some point,
01:05:26.940Brad Parscale had taken a step back and said, maybe we won't do the geofencing thing. That
01:05:34.000was just a suggestion, or we wanted to do that. It was a $4 million, it was the same group, $4
01:05:40.500million sending a bus with basically an Israeli, it's an Israeli propaganda bus with VR headsets
01:05:52.080and things for, it was targeting young men ages 16 to 24. So it would roll into church parking
01:06:00.020lots, and it would have a multimedia display for the young men to watch the IDF in action.
01:06:09.620And it would show what happened on October 7th and then how heroic the IDF is in church parking
01:06:17.400lots so that they would leave not learning anything more about Jesus, right, or God or
01:06:23.860scripture or the Torah. It wasn't theological. It was purely political. But it's being done in
01:06:33.020church parking lots. With the knowledge of the pastor of the church? I would assume so. So when
01:06:39.220they did their Farrah filing, they didn't say, we're going to these specific churches. They did
01:06:44.000say, we're going to churches in these states. But yeah, you can bet your bottom dollar that if they
01:06:49.440have permission to roll into a megachurch parking lot and set up shop with their bus for young men
01:06:56.260to come out and see the videos about how great and heroic the IDF is, I'm sure that the pastor
01:07:03.800would give them permission to do that. I mean, Christians oppose abortion probably for a bunch
01:07:10.040of reasons, but fundamentally because it's the murder of innocents. The baby didn't do anything0.99
01:07:13.320wrong. You can't kill the innocent. And Christians know that and they stand on that. This is the
01:07:19.640most, the IDF is the most brutal military in the world, which is globally renowned for murdering
01:07:24.620innocents at scale. How could any Christian pastor allow pro-IDF propaganda on his property?
01:07:32.380You know, I wonder how many of those pastors understand that it is propaganda. Keep in mind,
01:07:38.360They're not going out of their way to consume media that is outside of the ecosystem, the news ecosystem of that which is controlled by pro-Israel or, if not pro-Israel, pro-neocon, pro-war programming.
01:08:00.180I mean, they're getting pro-war ideology from places like Fox News.
01:08:04.880I mean, I'm sure that if you took a sample of 100 megachurch pastors and asked where are you getting your source, your news source, probably all of them are going to put Fox News as number one.
01:08:20.180You know, when you talk to these pastors about Israeli war crimes, you're like, you know, did you know that they got caught, the IDF, on camera sodomizing a prisoner so badly, his large intestine fell out, he went into critical condition, and they almost, you know, he almost died in the hospital.
01:08:41.300And then they just let him go back to Gaza and said he couldn't return.
01:08:47.180That way they couldn't, you know, charge.
01:08:49.960They couldn't have the trial of the IDF soldiers who did that because the victim can't come back to testify.
01:08:57.980And the pastors, Christians, whoever you talk to about this will say, that doesn't sound right.0.67
01:09:03.500That must be Hamas, you know, propaganda.
01:09:06.400It's like when you talk to them about the death stats in Gaza and you say, do you realize that almost eight people out of 10 that are being killed in Gaza, at least that, are civilian noncombatants?
01:09:26.980It's really easy to look at you and just say, that's propaganda. That's clearly from the Gaza Ministry of Health.
01:09:36.400And when Israel admitted those figures in February, then that doesn't make the news,
01:09:44.480and they don't see it. And it's really hard to convince someone who believes that Israel
01:09:50.940is chosen by God and special in a way that you're not special. It's really hard to get that person
01:09:58.000to then evaluate what's happening in light of biblical ethics, because who am I? I'm not special.
01:10:03.880Who am I to question God's special chosen people over here? And so that notion of God
01:10:13.460playing favorites, God having a special people based on ethnicity, that clouds their judgment
01:10:22.880from start to finish. It almost beats down mentally the person who holds that view.
01:10:31.060it it it dismantles their ability to look objectively at what's happening in the middle0.99
01:10:38.280east it's almost like a spell that way yeah it's a self-loathing because you're just a gentile
01:10:44.720these people these are the chosen people and god yeah god's loving he's kind he let you in0.52
01:10:53.880to their religion, but you're never going to be Jewish. They're special. And it's so infuriating
01:11:01.600because the scripture teaches the exact opposite message. I'm God's chosen. I'm the child of
01:11:09.460Abraham, according to the scripture, very explicitly in Galatians 3. In 1 Peter 2,
01:11:16.820the apostle Peter says that we are God's chosen nation and royal priesthood and people for
01:11:23.860God's own possession. He's talking about the Christian church, which is chock full of Gentiles.1.00
01:11:30.880He's not talking about Jews. We're the chosen nation. They're a desert war cult who's murdering0.99
01:11:38.240a lot of innocent people. It's okay to judge them. God's not going to be hostile with you1.00
01:11:44.880because you've looked at what's happening over there and said, you know what? It's not okay to
01:11:50.680bomb an apartment building because there might be a terrorist in apartment 3G. And there's so
01:11:57.120many different things about the IDF that Christians need to know, but they don't have a frame of
01:12:03.760reference because there's not an effective news source breaking through to evangelicals who are
01:12:11.200all pigeonholed in like this neocon-influenced news environment. And so it's like, you know,
01:12:19.040their targeting program their ai targeting program that is designed to i think maximize
01:12:26.280civilian damage is called the gospel that's what the idf named it there's two of them well there's
01:12:35.480there's three there's um daddy's home you've heard of this one no oh daddy's home okay this is uh
01:12:43.600astoundingly inhumane so their ai targeting program that lets them know when a target
01:12:55.880comes within a specific location essentially geofencing but instead of church it's their home
01:13:02.940it will notify essentially skynet when to send the missile when to drop the bomb
01:13:11.120And it's called Daddy's Home because it waits for the terrorist, alleged terrorist. Keep in mind, these aren't people who've been tried or anything. There's no trial for them. The alleged terrorist gets home and then it pings Daddy's Home. Daddy's Home then sends the missile to kill them.
01:13:34.480They would say that that is a target, and the target used some human shields, and if human shields die in the process, that's on the terrorists.
01:13:45.480But it's called Daddy's Home because it's waiting for them to get home.
01:13:50.400That's not something that the American military does.
01:13:53.080We don't wait for targets to get home before we bomb them, but the IDF does.
01:13:58.220So it is about 90%, 85% to 90% of the people dead in Gaza are civilian noncombatants. That's not from trying to miss civilian noncombatants, right? That's like you targeting them.
01:14:15.160It's like doctors testifying that more than 400 kids that they've seen in the last remaining hospital in Gaza that's still open, 400 kids dead with a sniper wound, a sniper round caliber in the head.
01:19:07.240He will wipe the land free of them.1.00
01:19:10.940And he created a religion that would be temporary.0.78
01:19:15.100It all revolves around the temple, and they weren't free to change that religion either.
01:19:23.820I'll give you an example. There's a story in the Old Testament of two guys that were left behind
01:19:30.560to essentially guard the altar as Moses and the elders go up on the mountain. Their names were
01:19:39.020Nadab and Abihu. They took their own light and decided to light the altar with their own fire.
01:19:50.120King James calls it strange fire because it wasn't native to the altar. It was their own light. They
01:19:55.420used their own Zippo, in other words. And God destroyed them. He killed them. Those two guys,
01:20:01.920The ground swallowed them up and ate them, destroyed them in fire, because the faith of the Old Testament was given, the cultic religion, to Israel very specifically.
01:20:15.360It had to be observed a very specific way through the specific means that God gave.
01:20:21.940They weren't supposed to deviate at all.
01:20:24.520It's like the guy that reached out to grab the Holy of Holies before it hit the ground and God killed.
01:20:29.980Well, God didn't tell him to touch it.
01:21:11.140So when people say Jesus was a Jew, it's like, well, yes, in a sense, he was. He was a physical descendant of David and of Abraham. But if you're implying that Jesus was a rabbinic Jew, no, he wasn't. That was a completely different religion.0.81
01:21:50.300They call some things the same words, but it's a fundamentally different religion.
01:21:56.720So most Americans are not aware of that.
01:21:59.180you would think that ordained ministers would be aware of, that Mike Huckabee is an ordained
01:22:04.260minister. He had a church for years in Arkansas. Well, I mean, you would think that Mike Huckabee
01:22:09.820would know, as he quotes Genesis 12, 3, that Galatians 3 specifically says that's not for
01:22:16.100Jews. So then you're left with one of two options. The first one is Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister,
01:22:24.360knows his Bible. The Bible says in Galatians 3, Paul says, I'm not talking about Jews. It's not
01:22:31.240about Jews. That verse is about Jesus. And the promises are for Christians. They're the heirs
01:22:36.420of the promise. That's option A. He knows that, but he's lying. The other option is he genuinely
01:22:44.140doesn't know that. He's totally ignorant. He's never, ever read Galatians in his life.1.00
01:22:50.600I don't think that's really plausible. I would suspect he has read it. I don't know what he
01:22:56.420does with it other than at a certain point, we have to start asking ourselves if there's
01:23:01.640active concealment. If you know what the scripture says, that these are promises for
01:23:08.000Christians, but you are applying it to Jews in direct contradiction to what the apostle Paul
01:23:16.000said in terms of how that should be interpreted, at what point do we start looking at them as0.71
01:23:20.500the bad guys well i definitely look at them as bad guys i'll say that as to motive though it's a
01:23:26.460little muddier i think i mean i look at someone like huckabee and it feels to me unknowable of
01:23:32.300course but it feels like he really believes what he says but it's so obviously in contradiction of
01:23:37.740what he says his faith is that that there seems to be like a delusion or something going on
01:23:43.760Huckabee is a weird one because, yeah, he's a Baptist. Most Baptists are dispensationalists. But with Huckabee, you see things that I can only characterize as deceit.0.51
01:24:00.880for example um huckabee saying that the uh with jonathan pollard he acted in your interview as
01:24:15.700though he was vaguely familiar with pollard yeah i had him he came by he stopped he stopped by the
01:24:22.060embassy and i let him he just wanted to say thank you as though i could just do that right just stop
01:24:58.680you know has he been that much of a hardcore dispensationalist this the whole time that as
01:25:03.560he was governor of arkansas or even before he sees a spy who stole our nuclear secrets to give them
01:25:12.120uh to israel who would then give them to russia
01:25:19.000did he even back then love the jews so much he was trying to get a spy
01:25:23.400sprung from an American prison? Because that's so hardcore dispensationalist. I don't really0.71
01:25:34.300think that's a spiritual thing. In other words, I think that's a political corruption. I don't
01:25:39.240think that's a spiritual corruption. I think that the political corruption is using spirituality
01:25:46.060and Christianity as a shield to do evil and wicked things. And I think that that's a lot0.72
01:25:54.160of what you see in the dispensational marketplace of ideas, so to speak. You're seeing a lot of good,
01:26:01.300honest, God-fearing Christians that we go to church with and we may work with, good folks,
01:26:07.680our neighbors, who have this mindset that, well, I have to support Israel because the Bible tells0.96
01:26:14.800me too yes but the people at the top that are spreading that message the mike huckabees of the0.87
01:26:21.840world they do know better than that they know better and they're you know they're defending
01:26:30.620things that cannot be defended and they're doing so in the in the name of christ is that i i should
01:26:38.280say for people who haven't followed your career that you've been writing about kind of intra
01:26:44.060protestant disputes for a very long time and you're one of the american experts on this topic
01:26:49.660so like you know what's going on in protestant christianity in the u.s i think is that changing
01:26:55.180is what changing this reflexive commitment to a non-christian theology that has resulted in
01:27:04.420very weird political positions absolutely christians supporting genocide how could that
01:27:11.180happen well this is how so i would say at at insight to insight i have the average age of
01:27:16.720my audience probably over 50 it's a pretty old audience and it is every single day that i have
01:27:24.640people say i never knew that genesis chapter 12 the abrahamic promise is specifically reserved
01:27:33.080for Christians. Or I never knew that Romans 11 says that Jews without faith in Jesus are cut off
01:27:42.120from God and Abraham. And they're coming to these conclusions for the first time. And a lot of that
01:27:49.120is because of the internet. The internet's been around, I mean, what, a long time at this point.
01:27:53.740But these discussions on theological polemics, that has not been readily available online.
01:28:03.360Polemics is a field of theological study like apologetics, but it deals with those who claim to be Christians but are not, as opposed to apologetics, which deals with other religions.
01:28:16.920polemics is more internal for example mike lee says uh a couple weeks ago that mormons are
01:28:25.560christians it would be polemics it would be the field of theological study where you'd come along
01:28:31.080and say well let's evaluate the claims of joseph smith and compare that to the bible and see whether
01:28:37.420or not that's christian so that may be be more of a polemical um you know thing to do that as
01:28:46.540opposed to apologetic. That's new. And so there's a lot more Christians, I think, at least this is
01:28:52.440my finger on the pulse of evangelical Christianity online, a lot more Christians desiring to be
01:29:00.380discerning, where they're actually looking at what people say in the name of God and comparing that
01:29:06.280to the word of God to determine whether or not what they're being told is accurate.
01:29:12.020And the first thing that they're discovering is, you know what, the Bible actually doesn't say I have to, you know, defend Israel no matter what it is that they do.
01:29:23.220So it sounds like there's a kind of second Reformation going on within Protestant Christianity.
01:29:31.780Yeah, the reason I hesitate at Reformation is I would like it to see a little bit more robustly theological.
01:29:39.760political so it's still on israel it's still political at this point i think right now
01:29:45.520evangelicals are are kind of angry that they've been lied to about what israel is and
01:29:52.800one of the reasons why i think they're freaking out on their side when they look over and they
01:30:00.080say look at all of this anti-semitism they're seeing people that are mad at israel for the
01:30:06.560vast majority of people for Christians who have finally figured out that Israel is not the chosen
01:30:15.280people of God, irrespective of denying Christ. It's that for the first time in their life,
01:30:22.580they figured out that they've been lied to about something and they're kind of mad right now.
01:30:26.980I think most people will calm down if you give them a little bit of time. So societally,
01:30:33.340There are a lot of people whose eyes have been opened to,
01:30:37.860hey, you know what they taught me in Sunday school
01:30:39.860for 20 years, 30 years, 50 years is nonsense.
01:31:02.640Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any popular Protestant American Christian leader who is rejecting, explicitly rejecting dispensationalism and all that, its political implications?
01:31:20.220So what's happening in evangelicalism is a complete fracturing of the movement as a whole so that the big name leaders like your John MacArthur's and your R.C. Sproul's, those guys are dead, basically, is what's happening.
01:31:40.120so there's a balkanization that's basically happening in american protestantism and
01:31:45.320evangelicalism um you have a lot of people flocking to eastern orthodoxy and roman catholicism
01:31:51.680um which you know as a protestant i never thought that i'd live to see that but evangelicals are
01:32:00.880responding to their i didn't know what it was eastern orthodoxy i had no idea what that was
01:32:06.280Catholicism without the Pope, you know, that's what most people think. They wear black instead
01:32:11.420of white. Yeah, it's the Eastern church. And so they are Catholic-like. If you're a Protestant,
01:32:22.160you're looking through Protestant eyes, they both have incense. Their priests look like they wear0.95
01:32:27.680dresses. They say words, we don't know what they mean, and they speak in different languages.
01:32:32.620it all looks like hocus pocus when you're a protestant yeah but but yeah you know there's
01:32:37.500a lot of difference between the the eastern and the western church um protestant evangelicals
01:32:45.060are balkanizing though even um in american evangelicalism because we recognize that there
01:32:56.040is a sickness among protestants that have decided to cater to worldliness by that i mean doing what
01:33:09.860is popular in the culture as opposed to what is scriptural yes and so there is i think
01:33:16.200hell to pay for mega churches and for your your big box evangelical super center churches
01:33:25.580because for so many years, their church growth methodology or their church growth policy was
01:33:35.080just to see how big they could get. Almost growing a church the way Rome satisfied
01:33:42.440the Romans there at the end, just bread and circuses. I used to joke about churches shooting
01:33:50.460midgets out of cannons just to get a crowd on sunday you know pastors were coming in on zip1.00
01:33:56.520lines and there's it's always something attractional and that's really great until the
01:34:03.020first time in your life you hit a real crisis or you have something that that is deeply troubling
01:34:10.260you you have an issue in your life that a good time on sunday morning doesn't help you overcome
01:34:16.280you need something deeper and people are right now i think fighting almost resisting
01:34:25.560the big box megachurch experience in the united states which is good and they should and i hope
01:34:33.860that many of those big churches um not not because they're big but if they're big because they were
01:34:41.220trying to water down the doctrine and just see how many warm bodies they could put into a room0.96
01:34:49.760at the same time and call the church, they should die because that's not actually biblically what a0.98
01:34:55.900church is. So anyways, with the balkanization, you have Christians going their own way. So you0.97
01:35:02.380don't see a lot of those huge names anymore. The big ones like Greg Laurie, he's got his own
01:35:10.800scandal right now. They're all scandalized and going away. But there are some mid, I call them
01:35:18.360mid-tier names of guys that are not bending the knee to Israel. And they're going to be in the0.69
01:35:28.680camp that you would call covenantal or reformed. But they exist. And so I work with, for example,
01:35:37.020nxr joel webin i do a sub stack for him and he's been very good on this topic there are a couple
01:35:47.580of guys in ogden utah with what's called new christendom press that have been very good on
01:35:53.820this issue too so they're out there you have to look a little bit harder you're not going to see
01:35:58.700anytime soon a church marquee that says we do not stand with israel that's not going to happen
01:36:06.080But I know for a fact that there are a lot of people inside American evangelical churches
01:36:11.900that are approaching the pastor privately saying, can we talk about Israel?
01:36:31.380And make them wrestle through those important issues.
01:36:34.580Yeah, because the point is not just that it's inspired American Christians to support genocide, which it has, or the Netanyahu government, the buffoonish criminal government of Netanyahu, but that it diminishes Jesus within Christianity, and it corrupts the Christian faith.0.59
01:36:55.620I mean, that's the real cost, it seems to me.0.61
01:37:00.260And it's frustrating, too, because you see the very people whose alleged ancestors crucified Jesus almost using him as a mascot for genocide, where they don't believe in Jesus, but they will look at you as a Christian and they'll say, you know, your Messiah is Jewish.
01:37:25.620I'm like, well, yeah, and your ancestors killed him.
01:38:08.360The new covenant that Jesus installed, the difference is now, you know, the parents eat sour grapes and the children's teeth is not set on edge.
01:38:18.760That we're not paying for what our parents did.
01:38:22.280And so the eternal moral debt thing is just like an affront to what Jesus actually accomplished.
01:38:30.240But you have people who don't believe in Jesus try to take property and ownership of Jesus.
01:38:36.520And that's why we push back on them sometimes over the Jesus is Jewish thing.
01:38:42.480Like, you'll see some of us troublemakers push back on that.0.66
01:38:47.460We don't mean to say he's not an ethnic descendant of Abraham, but he's not rabbinically Jewish, and you don't own him. No one owns him. He's a son of man. He belongs to the entire world, that he came from the Jews, that's true, but he came for the nations.0.69
01:39:07.720He came for everyone. And frankly, anyone who believes in Jesus is more an authentic child of
01:39:17.320Abraham than any Jew who doesn't. So, at the end of the day, that's, frankly, that's my promised0.96
01:39:23.480land. Because the scripture says, I'm a joint heir with Jesus Christ. Not them. I'm the joint
01:39:30.520air. Jesus is entitled to all of the Middle East. He owns everything. And the frustrating part of
01:39:40.620listening to the dispensationalists is that they get too caught up on who has the keys to the
01:39:47.060desert trailer park. Who has ownership of this little strip of land in the Middle East? And it's0.90
01:39:56.080like, let me get this right. God, the Son, became an embryo and planted himself into the womb of a
01:40:04.700virgin, lived a life on earth that we should have lived, and then he died a death on our behalf.
01:40:13.440God, the Father, imputing sin to him, he died as a substitute in our place, vicariously on our
01:40:21.760behalf, and then proving that his sacrifice was accepted and that he truly is the Son of God. He
01:40:29.680rose again from the dead, 40 days later ascended into heaven, and he's coming back again. And what
01:40:36.900you're worried about is who has the keys to the West Bank and Gaza? Like, the Christian message0.96
01:40:44.700is that Jesus is the owner and operator
01:40:48.480of every square inch of God's creation,