Top journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costas have written a book about ex-President Donald Trump, the third Trump book for Woodward, entitled Peril. It will be released next week. They claim to have interviewed 200 people who had insight into Trump and his presidency. Advance copies were given to a few publications this week, and they have been publishing many of the sordid and shocking details from the book.
One detail regards the final political rally called “Unite the Right” which was held at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, 2017. Only seven months into Trump’s presidency, this rally turned into a deadly riot. White supremacists, including Neo-Nazis, marched at this rally, often chanting. Some video of it was shown on television at the time.
One of the White nationalists’ rallying chants was, which was uttered repeatedly, “Jews will not replace us.” President Trump afterward made public remarks about this rally, saying, “there were good people, on both sides,” thus approving of White nationalist behavior. Yet most Americans thought it was absolutely deplorable. Not Trump.
Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was the Speaker of House of Representatives at the time. Woodward and Costas apparently interviewed him for this book or else they got some information from him second-hand. They claim Ryan then got on the phone with President Trump, telling him he needed to restate publicly what he said about the rally, backing off of his main remark about the White supremacists and Neo-Nazis being “good people.”
Trump reportedly got irritated and screamed at Ryan, saying, “These people love me. These are my people. . . . But there’s some of those people who are for me. Some of them are good people.” That reveals Trump’s classic narcissism. I alleged this about him dozens of times on my blog throughout his presidency.
Peril then relates that after that phone encounter between Ryan and Trump, Ryan did serious research of narcissism. He concluded that Donald Trump is a narcissist. It worried Ryan because of what narcissists are capable of doing under stress and rejection. The president of the USA has control of the codes to release nuclear weapons and thus start a war that could be worse than anything the world has ever seen.
What did these White supremacists mean by, “Jews will not replace us”? It is a popular White supremacist slogan that refers to their belief that Jews are controlling non-Whites in order to make them supreme and thereby extinguish White supremacy.
Another form of this White supremacist slogan is, referring to non-Whites in general, “You will not replace us.” White supremacists in Europe have used this slogan in recent years to refer especially to Arab-Muslim immigration from the Middle East and North Africa replacing White culture in Europe.
Jews are actually a small ethnic group in the world. They constitute only about 15 million people. That is 0.2% of the world’s population, which is now nearly 8 billion people. Yet Jews have a very strong religious heritage even though they have quite a high percentage of atheists compared to other ethnicities around the world.
Interestingly, Christianity–which grew out of the Jewish religion and is almost entirely Gentile, meaning non-Jews–has been the largest religion in the world for the past almost seventeen centuries. Christianity is based on the belief that Jesus of Nazareth, who was a Jew, is the Messiah of Israel who is promised in the Jewish Bible. Yet the Christian Bible, which includes the New Testament added to the Jewish Bible (=Old Testament), narrates that Jews were most responsible for pressuring Roman Governor Pontius Pilate into condemning Jesus and having him crucified.
For this, I believe the Jewish people have suffered. This belief was widely held in the history of Christianity. But it was terrible that some professing Christians, especially the Catholic Church, became somewhat anti-Jewish about this and greatly persecuted Jews. Even Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation, was very anti-Jewish in the last years of his life, even writing about his despicable hatred of Jews.
Christians should be just the opposite about the Jewish people. That is, Christians, who are almost all Gentiles, should love Jewish people because it is the Jews who gave them their Lord and Savior Jesus of Nazareth, who gave them the Old Testament to become the major portion of the Christian Bible.
The apostle Paul–a former, zealous, rabbinically-trained Pharisee Jew who persecuted Christians and then converted to become one of them–became the greatest Christian missionary perhaps the world has ever seen. He took the Christian gospel–the good news about Jesus being Israel’s Messiah (=Christ) and rising from the dead–into much of the Roman world. In his famed treatise to the Christians at Rome, he instructs them in the right attitude to have toward the Jewish people. He says of the Jews’ unbelief in Jesus as the Messiah/Christ, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh” (Romans 9.1-3) NRSV).
Paul further explains, “understand this mystery: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved: as it is written, ‘Out of Zion will come the Deliverer [Jesus]; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob [Israel].’ ‘And this is my [God’s] covenant with them, when I take away their sins'” (Romans 11.25-27). Paul here quotes from the Jewish Bible. He means what Jesus said about when “the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled,” which will be at the end of the age (Luke 21.24).
The Hebrew prophets proclaim in the Jewish scriptures that sometime in the future, God will drastically intervene in the affairs of humankind by bringing to an end Gentile supremacy in the world. This is laid out most clearly in the most apocalyptic book in the Jewish Bible–the book of Daniel. He writes repeatedly about “the end of days.” He doesn’t mean that 24-hour days will come to an end; rather, he refers to the end of the days of Gentile supremacy, which will be at the end of the age. That is what those White supremacists at the Charlottesville rally referred to when they chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”
Oh yes they will! Jews are destined by the God of the Bible, by the God of Creation, by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to rule the world. That is what the Hebrew prophets proclaim, and they are right! What do I mean by “rule the world”? We’ve had some wrong teaching about this in the history of Christianity.
If you asked Christians throughout the ages, What is going to happen to you when you die? almost all, regardless of whether they are Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, or whatever would have answered,”I’m going to heaven to be with Jesus.” And even though they correctly believed that Jesus arose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and will literally return to earth someday, their rather murky view of the future after that would be that they think they will spend eternity in heaven.
That is not the teaching of the Bible. Rather, the Bible teaches that the resurrected people of God will spend eternity in the city of God. It will come down from heaven toward earth at Jesus’ second coming (Revelation 21-22). How this city of God relates to earth is not made very clear. I believe this city–with its 1,500 hundred-mile, square circumference (Revelation 21.15)–will hover above earthly Jerusalem. (See my book Warrior from Heaven, pp. 210-16.) We read of this, “the throne of God and of the Lamb,” who is Jesus, “will be in it” (22.3). Yet the kingdom of God, which will be brought by Jesus at his second coming, will also exist on the earth.
The New Testament reveals that Jesus will be “king of kings and Lord of lords” on the earth (Revelation 19.16). Jesus said of this, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels [of God] with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory” (Matthew 25.31). It will be at earthly Jerusalem. For Isaiah says of the end of days, when great chaos will occur in the cosmos, “Then the moon will be abashed, and the sun ashamed; for the LORD of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem” (Isaiah 24.23). He will do it by installing Jesus there to sit on “the throne of David.”
Zechariah vividly tells more than any of the other Hebrew prophets about the nations joining together to attack and destroy Jerusalem at the end of days (Zechariah 12.2-3; 14.1-4). Then Messiah will come from above and set his feet on the Mount of Olives (v. 4). That is just what the two angels, who appeared on the Mount of Olives when Jesus ascended to heaven, said will happen (Acts 1.9-11). These armies of the nations will be destroyed, seemingly by Messiah Jesus (cf. Revelation 19.11-16). Zechariah then concludes, “Then all who survive of the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 14.16). They will do this by paying tribute to God’s installed king at Jerusalem, who will be Jesus as God’s agent par excellence.
Then will be fulfilled God’s promise in Torah to Abraham (then Abram), “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12.2-3). Then will be fulfilled God’s promise to Israel, “the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth; all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, . . . The LORD will make you the head, and not the tail; you shall be only at the top, and not at the bottom” (Deuteronomy 28.1-2, 13). AMEN!
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