Wars and Rumors of Wars?

In Matthew 24 Jesus said, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars.”  The problem is — no one appears to have believed him. I don’t mean literally everyone, of course. Israelis know we are in the middle of a war. I live 45 minutes from Gaza and I will never forget the events of October 7, 2023. I’m here to tell you - this is a real war.

Just like everyone else in southern and central Israel, Elinor and I were awakened by the sound of a wailing siren at 6:30 in the morning. We lay there in a state of complete denial for about 15 seconds – and then realized that we didn’t have that many seconds to waste. We jumped out of bed, threw some clothes on and ran to take shelter in our building stairwell. And there we stood, holding hands, as rockets exploded over our heads.

The sound of one explosion was incredibly loud. Our building shuddered. We turned on the television after the attack was over and discovered the rocket had smashed into a car and set an apartment building on fire, literally two minutes away from our front door.

Between rocket attacks – there were seven or eight on Rishon LeZion that day, we kept watching the news and waiting for alerts from the Home Front Command to scroll down the right-hand side of our television screen.  The moment the little orange tab with the name of our city appeared on the screen, we bolted for the stairwell because we knew the siren and the rockets were not far behind.

More explosions. This time we heard the “whoosh” of the rockets overhead. We have already been through three or four rocket wars but we had never heard that sound before.  Our hearts were pounding out of our chests. We squatted down low and covered our heads to shield ourselves from whatever was coming.

Of course, we now know that we got off easy. The first hours of the rocket attack were just a diversion to cover the invasion of 3000 Hamas terrorists from Gaza. Oh, don’t get me wrong — they really were trying to kill us, but the barrage of rockets was just a smoke screen designed to conceal the military operation unfolding on the ground.

Hamas’s surprise attack worked.  A brigade-strength force of 3,000 well-trained terrorists, armed with assault rifles, RPGs, and other weapons, broke through the Gaza security fence and invaded southern Israel.  Waves of Gazan civilians, giddy with excitement, began to pour through the breach and joined the ground assault.  Hamas fighters simultaneously attacked 22 locations. These included military outposts as well as towns and settlements. Assault teams penetrated at least 15 miles into Israel.

During the invasion, terrorists murdered 1,500 Israelis and kidnapped 245 hostages. Over 1,500 people were wounded. This was by far the worst tragedy to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It was not just the numbers, however. It was the shear barbarity with which Hamas carried out the operation. The army of terrorists violently gang-raped women and teen-aged girls and mutilating their bodies while they were doing it. They burned and beheaded the living and the dead, including babies. Their mission was to kill as many Israelis as possible.  Even more importantly, they wanted to slaughter Jews, humiliate their victims and commit out-and-out genocide.

And all of that was just the first wave of the operation.  We now know that during a second phase of the operation Hamas planned to link up with militants in the West Bank, attack larger cities, and trigger a much larger war. How can any rational person deny Israel’s need to defend itself militarily and destroy the enemy under these circumstances? And yet, that is exactly what is happening.

The United Nations, the European Union – and even the current US administration, are in denial about the fact that the State of Israel is engaged in a real war with an enemy which seeks to wipe it and the Jewish people of the face of the earth.  For Israel, the events of October 7th 2023 are no less significant than the events of December 7th, 1941 for the USA. No one demanded the United States ceasefire during the middle of that war. Why do they now?

There was, of course, a sudden outpouring of sympathy for Israel and the Jewish people immediately following the massacre.  World leaders expressed shock and revulsion and asserted Israel’s right to defend itself. For a brief moment, the world cared about Israel. However, when the Israel Defense Force rapidly called up 300,000 reservists and declared war on Hamas, that support evaporated. Overnight, the Jewish State went from victim to villain. 

The world loves Jews, you see – but only when they are suffering. When Jews fight back, that’s another story – the antisemitism and the animus rises to the top.  Despite the fact that Hamas massacred, raped and kidnapped Israelis, despite the fact that absolutely everyone everywhere knows Hamas uses civilians as human shields, despite the fact that Gazans participated in the attack, and despite the fact that the IDF has bent over backwards to protect civilians, Israel is the one accused of committing genocide.  Ireland, Spain and Norway, in contrast, rewarded Hamas for its war crimes by officially recognizing the State of Palestine.  

Well, what can you expect from people that refuse to believe this is a “real” war? Let’s be clear: by every legal definition, the invasion of the State of Israel’s sovereign borders by Hamas on October 7th was an act of war. And yet the rest of the world pretends — and demands that Israel behave, as though it was something much less: “Yes, of course, Hamas is an Iranian-sponsored terrorist organization (Sort of, it depends who you ask…) and yes, of course, they committed horrific acts of violence against the Jewish people (can you really blame them?), but, come on, it’s Israel …”   So, at last, let us pull back the veneer of compassion the world had for Israel and the Jewish people. Below it is a thick layer of antipathy which enables the world to minimize the massacre, make Israel’s invaders the victims and deny that Israel is facing a genuine existential threat.

Unfortunately, much of the Christian world is no different.

Despite the fact that the Catholic Church officially absolved Jews of any collective guilt for the death of Jesus (thanks for the favor, by the way), there are still organizations within the church that are blatantly antisemitic. Trocaire, an official development agency of the Catholic Church of Ireland, is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.  The Vatican (or more correctly, Vatican City) is actually a sovereign country. In 2015, the Vatican signed an agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and officially recognized “the State of Palestine” – and did so according to pre-1967 borders.[1]

Many major protestant denominations would do the same, if they could.  The Church of Sweden, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran community, continues to post the Kairos Palestine document, an antisemitic open letter that endorses replacement theology, on its official website.[2]  The document is essentially the official manifesto of the “BDS movement”, which calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel and denies the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel in theological terms.

The presence of Israel, on what the Kairos document labels “Palestinian land” (but what the Bible calls Judea and Samaria) is described as “a sin against God and humanity.” The Church of Sweden, a semi-state church, urges its congregations to follow the Kairos Palestine document’s admonition to impose sanctions and boycotts against Israel. Little wonder that the website’s statement about the war suggests that while Hamas provoked the war, Israel also must be held accountable and brought to justice.

Christendom in the United States appears to be equally unimpressed by Jesus’ warning. The Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), the United Church of Christ (UCC), and the United Methodist Church (UMC) have all divested from Israel in support of Palestine and now call upon Israel to accept a permanent cease-fire, which would leave Hamas in power and the clear victor of October 7th.  Despite their claims to the contrary, each of these denominations have drunk deeply for the well of Christian antisemitism.

While on the one hand these progressive denominations claim to reject antisemitism and replacement theology, they functionally embrace them on the other.  Like the Church of Sweden, they have aligned themselves with the BDS movement and Kairos document which champions replacement theology and attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel.

The Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church issued a statement in which they declared that Israel had trapped Palestinian women and children in Gaza and denied them access to “food, water, shelter and healthcare” and afterward planned “to murder them.”  The statement demanded that the United States “immediately withdraw all funding and other support from Israel” and accused Israel of committing “mass genocide.”[3]

Yes, conservative evangelicals like those in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) have stood by Israel. The SBC issued a statement in support of Israel’s right and duty to defend itself just days after the Hamas massacre. The letter is posted on the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission website.[4] Its signatories are a Who’s Who of important leaders mostly from within the denomination. Unfortunately, however, almost all of those individuals are over the age of forty, and if current trends are any indicator, that support will not pass to the next generation of leaders. 

A recent study by Motti Inbari and Kirill Brumin has yielded some stunning results. Support for Israel dropped by half among young evangelicals under the age of 30 – from 69% in 2018 to 33.6% in 2021.[5] By half – and those statistics are just three years old. I can only image what those numbers look like today, after eight months of fighting and an unrelenting media campaign against Israel.

When Jesus warned his disciples that they would hear of wars and rumors of wars he was referring to those things as harbingers of greater and more terrible things to come in the physical land of Israel during the Great Tribulation in the End Times. Does the crisis triggered by Hamas’s invasion of Israel count as one of those “real” wars Jesus was referring to in Matthew 24? Get back to me after you ask the Israel-haters.

I think Jesus would be shocked to learn how few people — especially Christians, took his admonition seriously.  When the End Times do finally get here, I think the world — and especially Christians, will wish they had paid more attention.

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[1] The agreement is entitled a “Comprehensive Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Palestine.” The text of the agreement is not available on the Vatican’s website. See, however, Leonard Hammer, “The 2015 Comprehensive Agreement Between the Holy See and the Palestinian Authority: Discerning the Holy See’s Approach to International Relations in the Holy Land,” OJLR (2017): 162-179.

[2] “Kairos Palestina dokumentet,” Svenska kyrkan, www.svenskakyrkan.se/kairospalestina.

[3] “Council of Bishops Calls for Immediate Withdrawal of Financial Support from Israel, ” The Christian Recorder,  https://mailchi.mp/6640b1d7ce56/council-of-bishops-calls-for-immediate-withdrawal-of-financial-support-from-israel.

[4] Evangelical Statement in Support of Israel,” The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention,  https://erlc.com/policy-content/israel/.

[5] Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin, Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century: American Evangelical Public Opinion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 125.