Yesterday, the Republican-dominated US House of Representatives elected its party member Mike Johnson, a 51-year old lawyer from Louisiana, as its Speaker of the House. Johnson is a strong evangelical Christian. He and his wife, who have four children together, have a podcast in which they broadcast their religious and political views. It includes Christian Zionism. So, Johnson has made it clear that US financial and military aid to Israel is a top priority for him.
My book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient of Philistia, published in 1990, has a chapter entitled “The Church and Christian Zionism.” Here are some excerpts from it (pp. 143, 149-150):
- “A new religious term came into vogue in the 80s. ‘Christian Zionism’ identifies those Christians who give uncritical support to the State of Israel and who ignore the plight of the Palestinians. Thus, Christian Zionists, who consist mostly of some dispensationalists and some Charismatics, deny Palestinians an equal right to a state in Palestine. Furthermore, they usually approve of Israeli armed expansionism to acquire the remaining Promised Land.”
- “Like other premillennialists, Christian Zionists are convinced that modern Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecies written thousands of years ago. Such fulfillments of prophecy increase one’s faith in the God of the Bible. But related particulars of their eschatology cause Christian Zionists to be insensitive to the Palestinians. Their views are bringing disrepute on the literal interpretation of biblical prophecy and of Christ’s second coming, but more importantly on the very gospel of Jesus Christ.”
- “Christian Zionists are a clanging noise that deafens Israel’s ear and hardens its heart. If they continue giving uncritical support to Israel, strengthening its intransigence toward the Palestinians, they could unwittingly be paving the way for a resurgence of anti-Semitism.”
The primary error that Christian Zionists make in interpreting biblical prophecies is that they cite God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis 12.3), which includes the promised land (15.7, 18-20), but they ignore God’s law that he afterwards attached to the covenant through Moses. This law soon involved God no longer giving the Israelites any more promised land due to their disobedience. For we read that after Joshua brought the Israelites into the land of the Canaanites, to take it, “Now these are the nations that the LORD left to test all those in Israel … the five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon, from Mount Baal-hermon as far as Lebo-hamath. They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the LORD, which he commanded their ancestors by Moses” (Judges 3.1-4).
Notice that God withheld giving the Israelites Lebanon to the north and the land of the Philistines in the southwest. The latter was the coastal plain south of Joppa (today’s Tel Aviv). Today, it would represent a very expanded Gaza Strip. That is where I propose in my book that a Palestinian state should be established and will be according to Bible prophecy (esp. Isaiah 11.14), with Israel annexing the entire West Bank. That is a truly “side-by-side” arrangement, as President Joe Biden expressed yesterday as a two-state solution, whereas the traditional two-state solution–the separated territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank–is not side-by-side.
[Click here at my website, kermitzarley.com, to see a brief presentation of my book and the progress of its proposal for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which has occurred since this book was published 33 years ago. And click “short version” to read for free the most important half of the book, which regards this proposal.]
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