Genocide and White Evangelicals

 

 

 

Genocide does not begin with knives and bullets but with words. It is proceeded with the continuous stream of defamation against a people group, which becomes a tsunami of cultural bias and hatred.

 

Genocide is one-sided. It will train its focus on a negative trait to the exclusion of anything positive, whatever might produce compassion for this defamed people. The genocide of abortion has been made possible by reducing the baby to a collection of cells, just a part of the mother’s own body, almost like an unwanted cancer.

 

Anti-Semitism has thrived historically by reducing the Jewish people to big noses and bloodsuckers and has been fueled by jealousy. However, the mainstream media and the universities have adopted another target. Fueled by a militant political agenda, they have made another form of racism highly acceptable, even fashionable. Without shame or any hesitation, this group is even highlighted in the titles of their articles: “White Evangelicals Made a Deal With (sic) the Devil. Now What?” (New York Magazine, Dec. 5, 2020)

 

This is a favorite ploy - to transform their targets into hypocrites. This has the effect of nullifying all the good things that evangelicals have traditionally done. Consequently, it is all hypocritical. Instead, we are in league with the Devil. Sarah Jones, therefore, began by charging, “In the end, white Christian America stood by its man.” This has become a capital offense.

 

Even now, we are experiencing the severe consequences of this diatribe in terms of employment, vandalism, arson, intimidation, and even the shooting of Christians. Why then is the media unwilling to connect the dots!

 

What is this terrible thing that we have done, our unpardonable sin? We have voted for Donald Trump, a man who has stood against abortion and in favor of our traditional values – the values that had built American into the model for the rest of the world. Has his administration been scandal-ridden, as others have been? Hardly! Had there been just one indictable scandal, the opposition would have gladly used it to hang Trump.

 

However, all their attempts have failed. Nevertheless, we are still in league with the Devil for voting for Trump, even though 20% of white evangelicals didn’t vote for him. Nevertheless, the entire group is indicted, and the media still persists in their racist attempt to lynch us as a group. This is no different from attempts to lynch Asians for their successes in the university and in the business world or to lynch blacks for the overriding incidence of black on white crime or dependence on the welfare system.

 

Instead, justice has always been about convicting individuals based on their behavior, not on their skin color or beliefs. Do Sarah Jones and the NYM no longer believe in this? They do not say so explicitly. However, they hypocritically act as if they do not believe in this once honored principle of justice. Instead, we are all guilty being as members of a disdained group of people. Jones concludes her diatribe with her indictment of the republican party and the white evangelical:

·       A party out of step with most voters must either reform, or it must cheat. This, too, is something the modern GOP has in common with the Christian right. Democracy is the enemy. People can’t be trusted with their own souls. Leave them to their own devices, and they make the wrong choices, take the easy way out, threaten everything holy. They need a savior, whether they like it or not.

 

These obviously absurd set of charges are not even worth addressing. Instead, they stand as a testimony to the power of the lie and the readiness of our elite institutions to make use of them, even if they are not true and cause hatred, racial division, and class warfare.

A PLEA TO MY JEWISH BRETHREN

We said, “Never again,” but it’s happening once again before our very eyes. If there was anything we should have learned from Adolph Hitler, it is to listen to what our enemies are saying.

For years, Hitler had said that he wanted to get rid of the Jews. Yet, we refused to listen. There were even Jewish groups in Germany who had supported Hitler, despite his threats.

However, the Muslims are speaking even more directly about the extermination of the Jews than had Hitler, but we are not listening. Unbelievably, there are Jewish groups in the USA who are still supporting Islamic rights to speak their hatred on College campuses. Meanwhile, they refuse to hear their threats or look at what they are doing, even as tens of thousands of Jews are fleeing Islamic violence in Western Europe.

Do we not know? Have we not heard? When I warn Jewish groups about the encroaching genocide, they respond, “This is not our focus.” When I warn individuals, they treat me as if I am an Islamophobe.

Well, perhaps there is a legitimate threat. Perhaps, in some sense, we are responsible for our own impending sorrows. Our ears are shut. We refuse to listen to the warnings, both from our G-d and from our enemies. We have even turned our backs on God, the very thing that the Prophets of Israel had continually warned Israel against. Moses had warned:

·       Deuteronomy 8:15-18 Beware that you don’t forget the God who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with the dangerous snakes and scorpions, where it was so hot and dry. He gave you water from the rock! He fed you with manna in the wilderness (it was a kind of bread unknown before) so that you would become humble and so that your trust in him would grow, and he could do you good. He did it so that you would never feel that it was your own power and might that made you wealthy. Always remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you power to become rich, and he does it to fulfill his promise to your ancestors.

However, we no longer trust in G-d. We have willfully forgotten Him. We have closed our ears to Him as we have towards our enemies. Instead, we have placed our hope in our own resources – our successes and abilities, albeit given to us by G-d. However, through Moses, G-d promises:

·       Deuteronomy 4:27-31  And the LORD will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the LORD will drive you… But from there you will seek the LORD your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the LORD your God and obey his voice. For the LORD your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.

WHAT DOES CHRISTIAN MATURITY INVOLVE?

For one thing, it involves submission to the Words of God. Jesus had finished His prayer emphasizing the revelation of God:

·       “I made known to them your name [You Yourself], and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (John 17:26)

Experiencing the love of God (and our unity in Him) depends upon our knowledge of God. It is this love that is essential to our unity, and our unity is essential to our witness, as Jesus had just prayed:

·       “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” (John 17:20-23)

Love, unity, and oneness are not optional. They can only be achieved as we allow the Word of God to judge us – all of our inclinations, thoughts, and desires.

Having experienced tons of anti-Semitism, I hated Whites and actually thought they had a nauseating odor. (I had been raised in an area of just Whites and Jews.) Even after the Lord had revealed Himself to me, the idea of entering a church was traumatic, and when I started to attend, I was convinced that these Whites were all hypocrites.

However, I had to submit my thoughts and impulses to the Word of God – a long and painful process. However, I knew Scripture required this of me.

He has brought me a long way in 40 years. I recently wrote an essay I entitled “Why I Call Myself a “Christian” and not a “Messianic Jew,” where I argued that we must not divide the Body of Christ. It disturbed some of my Jewish brethren, but, for Christ’s sake, I thought it had to be said.

WHY I AM A CHRISTIAN AND NOT A “MESSIANIC JEW”

A name is more than just a name. It represents a commitment, an identity, and a focus. Yes, Messianic Jews are Christians. They believe in the atoning work of Jesus and in the entire biblical revelation including the New Testament.

Why then do I not call myself a “Messianic Jew?” Before Christ came into my life, I had been an ardent Zionist and had lived in Israel for two years with no intention of ever returning to the States. These were my people and Israel was my nation. In the States, I had also experienced a surplus of anti-Semitism and hated everything to do with Christianity.

If anyone should resonate with Paul Liberman’s new book, Don’t Call Me Christian, it should be me! The Jews for Jesus highlights this book in their Issues magazine (Vol. 21-2) and quote Liberman:

• By the early 1970’s, a number of us young Jewish believers… refused to identify ourselves as all as “Christian” or even “Hebrew Christian.” My personal conviction was that to do so would be the same as taking out an ad in the Jerusalem Post: “Paul Liberman is no longer Jewish! He is now a Gentile.” (p. 222-23) 

Perplexing? Yes and no! Wouldn’t the term “Hebrew Christian” make it clear that Liberman was not rejecting his Jewish heritage? It should have! However, when you grow up thinking that Christians are your enemies, it becomes hard to identify with the Gentile Church. I had experienced so much anti-Semitism, that, without distinguishing between the true believers in Christ from the nominal, I began to hate all Christians. In fact, my hatred became so deep that I actually felt that Christians had a nauseating odor.

Liberman had “a great aversion to stepping into a church.” I can certainly identify. The idea of walking into a church filled me with nausea. It was opposed to everything with which I identified. Entering a church was like bowing down before my enemy, even like repudiating myself.

In an interview within the same magazine, Liberman helps to clarify his rationale:

• “We’re not just Jews for evangelism; we’re Jewish people because we are glad to have a relationship with the God of Israel. We tell people, ‘Look, it is possible, even today, to have a personal relationship with God the way Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did.’” 

While these Patriarchs did have a personal relationship with God, their relationship with God does not rival what we have received through the Messiah:

• How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance--now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. (Hebrews 9:14-15)

• Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. (Hebrews 10:19-22)

While Liberman does well to emphasize our identification with the Patriarchs, he should instead be stressing our identification with Jesus the Christ. Instead, he is placing an unbiblical emphasis upon actively retaining our Jewish identity, something that bypasses our New Testament calling (Gal. 3:28):

• “Inwardly, there is a God-instilled desire to be Jewish no matter what. Now sometimes Jewish people will squelch it and just go off and be in a church and become a classical Christian. But even then, it’s a troubling thing, very often, what to do with this sense of Jewishness. It’s an inner resolve that seems to be implanted there by God.”

Admittedly, I retain a very strong Jewish identity. I cannot watch a documentary about Israel without being reduced to a fit of tears. Even the word “Israel” breaks me up. However, my Jewishness is not anything that I pursue. It’s just something that I am! Consequently, I am not trying to become more Jewish or to retain my Jewish identity. It’s just part of me! Instead, I hunger and thirst after Jesus and to become conformable unto Him, not to the Patriarchs.

Jesus had taught His disciples:

• "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:34-35) 

I fear that underlying some segments of Messianism is a desire to remain apart from the rest of the Church. Such separatism violates Jesus’ command to “Love one another.” It also divides the Body of Christ against our Savior’s teachings.

Instead, we are to maintain the unity of the Spirit:

• Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit-- just as you were called to one hope when you were called-- one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:2-6) 

There is no theological basis for maintaining a Messianic apartness. Paul explicitly instructs us:

• There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

I therefore advise my Jewish believing friends to not introduce me as a “Messianic Jew.” This is conveying the wrong message. Instead, I refer to myself as a Christian – a follower of Christ. I want to be at one with the entire Body of Christ, as Jesus had prayed:

• "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)

Jesus calls upon us to show the world our oneness, our love for one another across racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic lines. It is through this demonstration “that the world may believe” and “know.” Sadly, this has been lacking.

I wasn’t always this way. It required much time and great suffering for the Lord to burn out of me the Jewish pride that I had been trying to retain. It had been a drug that enabled to get up in the morning. I had used it to remind me that I was a member of a great people – a chosen race – that had produced that greatest of the world’s geniuses and 30% of the Nobel Prize winners. The drug had served to compensate for the bad feelings I had carried about myself, and I clung to it with my life. Consequently, I couldn’t consider anything that might sever me from this connection.

Yes, I am still Jewish, but I am now buried with Christ:

• I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

This identity is of surpassing value. In comparison, I consider everything else as manure:

• What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. (Philippians 3:8-9)

Who is your Friend?

A highly respected Messianic Jewish leader recently announced that anti-Semitism is just Satanic, meaning that the Jewish people played absolutely no role in anti-Semitism.

I challenged him claiming that the Jews did play a part. Moses and all the Hebrew Prophets had warned the Jews that if they continued to turn their back on God, God would turn His back on them, and they would be hated by the nations.

Understandably, my words were offensive, but who is a friend of the Jews? The one who absolves them of all guilt or the one who calls them to confess their sins and find healing? Many regard their friend as the one who speaks comforting words. However, our Lord sees things differently:

• The visions of your prophets were false and worthless; they did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity. The oracles they gave you were false and misleading. (Lamentations 2:14)

The false prophets always spoke comforting and popular words. Had Israel’s shepherds confronted Israel with their sins, they might have repented and averted death and captivity.

I am certainly not suggesting that my Messianic friend is a false prophet, but this faithful leader is making the same mistake as the false prophets. Instead, the good shepherd must expose sin and not gloss over it, according to God’s instructions to Ezekiel:

• "Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. When I say to the wicked, 'O wicked man, you will surely die,' and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood.” (Ezekiel 33:7-8)

A friend will confront his people with their sins. Instead, the politician will tell them what they want to hear to get what he wants. In contrast, the faithful servant will seek the best for his friend and will not draw back from speaking painful but necessary words.

For many, Jason Riley’s words will be painful. He will even be called an “Uncle Tom” and a traitor, but in Please Stop Helping Us, Riley writes words we all need to hear:

• The intentions behind welfare programs, for example, may be noble. But in practice they have slowed the self- development that proved necessary for other groups to advance. Minimum-wage laws might lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they also have a long history of pricing blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education was intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates— particularly in the fields of math and science— than we’d have in the absence of racial preferences. And so it goes, with everything from soft-on-crime laws that make black neighborhoods more dangerous to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low- income students attend. 

Conservatives have oft spoken against the negative effects of the welfare system. For this, they have been labeled “racist.” The church has been widely criticized for betraying their mandate to care for the poor. However, if the entitlement programs have done more to hurt the poor than to help, there may be sound reasons for the church’s opposition.

Opposition to the welfare system is not merely anecdotal. It is both empirical and logical, according to Riley:

• Time and again the empirical data show that current methods and approaches have come up short. Upward mobility depends on work and family. Social programs that undermine the work ethic and displace fathers keep poor people poor, and perverse incentives put in place by people trying to help are manifested in black attitudes, habits, and skills. Why study hard in school if you will be held to lower academic standards? Why change antisocial behavior when people are willing to reward it, make excuses for it, or even change the law to accommodate it?

Conservative and Liberal alike can agree that the Black community continues to suffer. However, they differ greatly in their analysis. While Liberals blame the system for the fact that there is a disproportionate percentage of Blacks behind bars, Riley writes:

• Although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it’s been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior— behavior too often celebrated in black culture.

If black behavior is the cause, then black behavior must be addressed and not the alleged racist system. Meanwhile, the disparity is growing worse in many areas. Riley writes:

• In September 2011 white unemployment was 8 percent, versus a unemployment rate of 16 percent. For black men it was 18 percent, and for black teens the jobless rate topped 44 percent. Nor was employment the only area where blacks as a group had regressed economically under Obama. According to the Census Bureau, black homeownership rates in 2011 had fallen to a point where the black- white gap was the widest since 1960, wiping out more than four decades of black gains.

• When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk- show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.” 

Many ascribe the problems to underlying racism and its determination to exclude blacks from society. Sometimes it is called “systemic racism,” a sinister and unseen master-plot to keep blacks in their place. Why do the Leftists invoke this imaginary conspiracy? Since it is an incontrovertible fact that there is no longer legal racism! All of the racist laws of the USA have been over-turned. Therefore, the blame-spinners must re-envision racism in another way. Even black-on-black crime is a product of this conspiracy. However, Riley resists the blame-game:

• Race consciousness helps cohere the political left, and black liberalism’s main agenda is keeping race front and center in our national conversations. That’s why, for example, much more common black-on-black crimes take a back seat to much less common white-on-black crimes. The last thing that organizations like the NAACP want is for America to get “beyond” race. In their view, racial discrimination in one form or another remains a significant barrier to black progress, and government action is the best solution. 

Is Riley a friend to his black people? Not according to most Leftists who instead regard him as an “Uncle Tom!” However, Riley wants to protect his people from certain destructive notions – namely, the belief that there is a plot against them. It is this kind of belief that will inevitably keep them down.

Such a belief might be comforting – the white man can be blamed instead of engaging in painful self-examination – but it will prove costly. What white employer will seek to hire a black youth after watching the Ferguson riots!

Truly, the human race will never reach a place where we will all regard our fellow humans as equals. There will always be racism - both black and white. However, we have made massive strides. Meanwhile, the attempt to spread the idea that blacks are still the victims of a massive, covert, and systemic plot to exclude them from society can only engender bitterness, resignation, and violence – the very things that we are seeing today in growing numbers.

How then should we be a friend? John and Charles Wesley prayed to the Lord about their disintegrating society, where the preaching of the Gospel was often accompanied by violent reactions. Nevertheless, by the grace of their Savior, they were able to organize new believers and seekers into home-fellowships where they studied the Bible, prayed, confessed their sins, and committed themselves to follow Jesus.

What was the impact? Charles White, professor of Christian Thought and History at Spring Arbor University, writes:

• The Methodists made such an impact on their nation that in 1962 historian Elie Halevy theorized that the Wesleyan revival created England’s middle class and saved England from the kind of bloody revolution that crippled France. Other historians, building on his work, go further to suggest that God used Methodism to show all the oppressed peoples of the world that feeding their souls on the heavenly bread of the lordship of Christ is the path to providing the daily bread their bodies also need. (Mission Frontiers, Sept-Oct 2011, 6)

• Coming to Christ through the Methodist movement changed the lives of a million people in Britain and North American in the eighteenth century….most of these people and their children moved from the desperation of hand-to mouth poverty to the security of middle-class life as they made Christ their Lord and experienced the impact of His power on their economic lives. As these people moved up the social ladder, they began to influence the political life of their nation. They helped to transform Britain from as eighteenth-century kleptocracy – where the powerful fueled their lives of indulgence by exploiting the poor into a nineteenth century democracy – which abolished slavery and used its empire to enrich the lives of every subject of the crown. (9)

This is what it means to be a friend!