Once upon a
time, back when he was one of the House managers of the Clinton impeachment
trial, we thought highly of Lindsey Graham.
But over the years he has taken some positions that have changed our
attitude – famously following John McCain’s footsteps in ‘walking across the
aisle’ to try to pass amnesty legislation for illegal aliens with Senate
Democrats (earning him one of Rush Limbaugh’s best epithets – Lindsey
Grahamnesty). And more recently being
the promoter of the US’s ‘forever wars’ overseas.
The new
disaster unfolding in the Holy Land brings new reasons to distrust him. On Oct. 13th, he met with
Christian leaders in South Carolina where
the following statements were made:
COLUMBIA, SC
(WOLO) — A group of mostly Baptist and Presbyterian ministers from around the
state came together at the Columbia Chamber of Commerce to declare their
support for Israel and have an open discussion with Senator Lindsey Graham
about the conflict.
“I have a simple
message. I have chosen sides. Israel has nothing to apologize for. Israel did
not cause this,” says Graham.
At a press
conference after the roundtable, Senator Graham outlined how he believes the
U.S. should move forward regarding the Israel-Hamas war, also calling for
a statewide day of prayer this Sunday, October 15th.
“Hamas has
declared today, Friday, the ‘Day of Rage.’ I am seeking South Carolinians
declare this coming Sunday a day of prayer. To all houses of worship in the state
of South Carolina, please pray for Israel this Sunday. They want rage, I want
prayer. They seek destruction, we seek peace. They seek a one state solution —
Hamas — the destruction of Israel. I see a world where Palestinians can live in
dignity and in peace with Israel,” says Graham.
. .
.
Should the war
continue to escalate, Graham believes America should go after Iran, who he says
continues to fund Hamas and provide them with weapons.
“The desire to
not engage evil seldom works out well. Iran is evil. I don’t want a war with
Iran, but I am tired of Iran financing terrorism all over the globe. We have 24
dead Americans, families destroyed and others held captive because of Iran’s
support for Hamas. So to the American people, it is long past time we dealt
with the Ayatollah and his henchmen,” says Graham.
A pastor present at the meeting gave the religious underpinning for the sentiments of Sen. Graham:
Tony Beam,
Interim Pastor at Five Forks Baptist Church in Simpsonville, attended the
roundtable.
“I definitely
will be encouraging the church where I’m Interim Pastor, to enter in to that
day of prayer and to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, which is what the Bible
calls us to do, and to pray that God will protect his people of Israel, and
that the evil of Hamas will be destroyed, and that innocent life will be
protected as much as humanly possible,” says Beam.
Beam also says,
“For me, as a Christian, war means making sure that we’re on the side of those
who are right, not the aggressors, and making sure that innocent life is
protected as much as humanly possible.”
What is at
the back of all these statements and actions and promised actions is the
doctrine of Dispensationalism taught by John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield,
that, despite the founding of the Christian Church by Jesus Christ, the Jews
remain a chosen people by God, to whom He will always show special favor.
There are
problems with this teaching.
Historically, it is an outlier.
It was never accepted by the Church; only in the last several decades
has it become fashionable in certain circles, mainly in what are called the ‘evangelical’
Protestant churches (which makes it particularly problematic for the South,
which is where most of those kinds of churches are located). Most others – Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and
other Protestant churches – do not accept its tenets. The Orthodox priest Fr.
John Whiteford, a good ol’ Texas fellow, goes
into further detail:
St. Paul's teaching in Romans
11 is clear that those Jews who rejected Christ are like branches cut off
from the olive tree, which represents the people of God -- and that gentile
converts are like wild olive branches that have been grafted on to that same
tree. The Church is the Israel of God (Galatians
6:16), the Israelites formed the Church of the Old Testament, but the New
Testament Church is in continuity with the old. However, Romans 11 is equally
clear that there is still a future in God's providence for those who are the
physical descendants of the Old Testament Israel, who rejected Christ and so
have been cut off from the Church, but who will one day be saved. And so we do
speak of the Church as the new Israel, but this does not mean there is no sense
in which we can still speak of the Israel according to the flesh.
We do not accept the notion of some
Protestants that teach that there is still a separate covenant for the Jews,
and that they may be saved by the Old Covenant, while Christians are saved by
the New. Nor do we believe that the descendants of those who rejected Christ
have some special claim on the Holy Land that entitles them to steal land from
Arab speaking Christians, many of whom are no doubt descended from those Jews
that embraced Christ. Christians are children of Abraham in the truest sense,
and as such are the true heirs of God's promise to him:
"Know ye therefore that they which are
of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing
that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel
unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which
be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham" (Galatians
3:7-9).
Because we do not equate the modern state
of Israel with the Israel of the Old Testament, some Protestants attempt to
argue that this constitutes antisemitism, but we reject this claim.
Furthermore, I would argue that this abuse of the label of antisemitism in an
attempt to defend even the most indefensible actions of the state of Israel
only cheapens the term, and has the effect of providing greater credibility for
real antisemitic voices.
The
intensity of the Dispensationalist voices over the attack on Israel is
striking. Not one of these folks, to our
knowledge, have voiced even the smallest syllable of protest over the unremitting, violent persecution
of the Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine by the Zelensky regime. But they have gone histrionic over the Hamas
attack on Israel, likening it to the 9-11 attacks on the US ‘times seven or
eight,’ as we heard repeated a number of times on American Family Radio
recently.
We do not
condone at all what Hamas has done, but why do the Dispensationalists have far,
far greater sympathy for the Jewish people of Israel than they do for their
fellow Christians? The distortions
caused by their belief system lead to this sort of thing, which if we are not
careful will drag us into another horrible war in the Middle East.
All the 9-11
references at this point become rather ominous.
As credible investigators have shown from a number of different angles,
the official narrative, that the jet impacts and their resulting fires brought
down the World Trade towers, and then WTC Building 7, is not
believable. It appears that the attack
was a deliberate standdown by the US deep state in order to allow it to
initiate the plans it had drawn up by a think tank called the Project for a New
American Century. The Guardian reported
in 2003,
. . .
The rest is
at https://thehayride.com/2023/10/garlington-bad-theology-leads-to-bad-foreign-policy/.
***
To send aid
to the Christians of Gaza, visit this page:
https://orthochristian.com/156722.html
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
No comments:
Post a Comment