A War of Narratives

Whose report will you believe? (Isaiah 53: 1)

The prophet Isaiah asked rhetorically, “Who has believed the report of the Lord?”

We pray for the Church to wake up to understand the times and to believe the Lord’s report on all matters.

Wise Church leaders will not be found resisting the regathering of Israel, which God himself has been orchestrating. Instead, we must resist end-time deceptions demonizing the Jews!

Jeremiah 32 reports the stance of the LORD on the matter:

“I will faithfully plant them in this land with all My heart and with all My soul. For thus says the LORD, ‘Just as in the past I brought great disaster on this people, so I will bring on them all the good that I have promised them.”

Even Charles Spurgeon, a 19th Century British preacher, clearly understood from the many prophecies in the Bible that first there would be a political restoration of the Jews to their own land and nationality. And then, secondly, he foresaw that there would be a spiritual restoration of Israel according to Bible prophecy. Based solely upon his knowledge of the Word of God, Spurgeon wrote in 1864 that Israel is to be restored "as from the dead." Yet despite the clear report of the Lord, a new narrative is being pushed, even within the churches, that the state of Israel has nothing to do with the Bible.

In a time of many false narratives going around the world, we will believe the report of the Lord. 

One of my favorite truth-tellers, columnist Melanie Phillips, published this important headline, “Western opinion is naive about hatred of Israel.” Melanie wrote:

The Palestinian Authority (PA) claimed . . . that “Israeli helicopters” had bombed Israeli participants [at the music festival] after an Israeli decision to kill them all.

This abhorrent conspiracy theory . . . was demonstrably contradicted by the testimony of survivors, the video evidence. . . . Given that the Hamas pogrom that day constituted the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the PA’s claim was on a par with Holocaust denial. This wasn’t surprising; the PA leader, Mahmoud Abbas, received his doctorate from the Soviet Academy of Sciences for a 1982 thesis in which he questioned not only the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust but whether the gas chambers even existed.

Yet the Biden administration wants Abbas’s PA to take over the running of Gaza when the war finally ends, with the speedy creation of a Palestine state alongside Israel. . . . But officials in both the PA and its dominant Fatah party have responded to October 7 by urging more slaughter of Jews, calling for the end of Israel and expressing excitement over the Hamas atrocities as “a source of pride, heroism, and honour for the Palestinian people”.

Should Israel really be coerced into accepting another terrorist state in her God-given heartland?

Here’s a theological question that must be addressed:  

Is the modern state of Israel the same as biblical Israel? Below is an Internet screenshot of the Holy Land:

The Bible teaches that modern Israel is a continuation of biblical Israel—this is not a personal opinion, and it is not a political opinion!  

If we don’t know the Word of God from cover to cover, we can be duped in this hour of global confusion.  

As antisemitism and Jew hatred have shockingly increased, there is also an increasing narrative that is being pushed even in the churches that the modern state of Israel is not the Israel of the Bible. That is a deceptive lie crafted by enemies of the Jewish people to try to delegitimize them.

God not only promised to provide for the chosen descendants of Abraham — He swore to bring them back to their own Promised Land in the fullness of time.

Despite their failings, God swore that He would never forsake the Jewish people.

In 1948, varying numbers of Orthodox Jews were repulsed by a Jewish state emerging on the world stage without the government of the Messiah. This sentiment still persists today but is also diminishing.

Since the barbaric Hamas pogrom on a sabbath October 7, more and more Orthodox Jews are recognizing the need of the State of Israel as a refuge for Jews, and they’re signing up for the Israel Defense Forces!

These religious Jews are recognizing that God has indeed created modern Israel as the only safe haven for Jews.

Against all odds, after 2,000 years of exile, the Jewish people have once again miraculously returned to the Land of Israel as the biblical prophets foretold.

But throughout church history, the restoration of the Jews to their Land seemed so unlikely that the majority of professing Christians unfortunately through, unbelief sinned, against God by not anticipating a literal fulfillment of his biblical promises to restore Israel.

Therefore, many Christians misinterpreted hundreds of Bible prophecies about Israel’s return and instead wrongfully claimed those promises for the Church.

However, some believers in the 19th Century did start to take literally God’s promise of Jewish return. Thus, Christian or biblical Zionism, was birthed at the same time or even earlier than modern Jewish aspirations promoted by Theodore Herzl.

Professing Christians who reject modern Israel have made the mistake of trying to put the proverbial cart before the horse ….but an Israeli national acceptance of Jesus as Messiah is NOT the biblical prerequisite for God’s initial plans to bring the Jewish people home.

In fact, the Hebrew prophets prophesied that the Jewish people will turn to the Messiah only AFTER becoming re-established in the Land of Israel!

In Ezekiel 36 God stated,

“For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land.” The passage continues, “Then [after I have regathered you] I will sprinkle clean water on you …. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

So let’s note the order of events as outlined in Ezekiel 36-39 and other Bible prophecies:

First there will be the physical restoration of the Jewish people to the Land, and this has been occurring in various waves of immigration from the 1880s until the present time. Then afterwards their spiritual regeneration will follow.

We witnessed a spiritual paradigm shift in progress when one of the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas was rescued. The captive’s name was Ori, and her mother’s prayers for her return were like something right out of Bible days.

To the surprise of even secular Israelis the petitioning mother was not angry at God but cried out, like King David in Psalm 18: 1, “O God I love you,” and she prayed fervently asking for a Torah scroll to be marched through her home with prayers asking for “kapara” [atonement covering].

A secular member of the Israeli Parliament expressed jealousy over this mother’s faith, and there have been many such examples of the Israeli nation turning back to God as a result of the horrific Hamas atrocities.  Soldiers have been dancing with Torah scrolls, there’s been a national day of prayer, and on and on.

Regathered, Israel will turn in faith toward the promised Messiah.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that the Bible predicts Israel’s redemption in the last days will be progressive in stages.

Ezekiel 37 contains the stark vision of a valley of dry bones which come back to life in stages. God told the prophet Ezekiel, “these bones are the whole house of Israel.” 

The above photo is documentation in public domain of the Holocaust. Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones represented Israel in exile, without hope.

After modern Israel’s re-emergence in 1948, an estimated one million European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returned to Israel, followed by 800,000 Jewish people from Arab countries who were kicked out of their homes.

In my lifetime 1.5 million Jewish people fled the former Soviet Union to Israel, and I’ve also been an eye witness to waves of Ethiopian Jews coming home. And now after the Hamas atrocities and because of the current epidemic of Jew hatred reminiscent of the 1930s in Nazi Germany, more Jews are returning.

In Ezekiel Chapter 37 they are restored but not regenerated until the ruach, the Holy Spirit, breathes life into their bodies.

Whether people want to recognize it or not, the Bible is playing out before our eyes.

Every new day seems to be a new page in an ongoing Book of Acts of the Holy Spirit! Keep watching with me! These are tremendous days prior to the Rapture of the Church!

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