Jamin Bradley

Despite having spent my whole life in the church, I was fortunate to not grow up in circles where much of anything was taught about Israel and the end times. For this reason, I was often baffled by other Christians and their surprising knowledge of everything going on in the Middle East. They seemed to talk as though the end was approaching anytime anything happened there.

Here I am, a few decades later, as a pastor and a theologian, and I still don’t understand the church’s obsession with this subject. Why? Because this theological system isn’t really found in the Bible. Sure, you can take a bunch of verses out of context and hodgepodge them together to create a construct that looks like Christian Zionism, but if the construct hasn’t been offered to you beforehand, you won’t generally see it in Scripture. This fairly recent eschatological belief is too obscure and forced to come naturally.

This conversation is more important than you might think, because bad theology kills. What happens when Israel taking their land back becomes a God-ordained theological paradigm of prophecy? Christians lean into a false prophecy in which Israel can do no wrong and should always be supported, even though at this point in the war, around 1,700 Israelis have been killed and an estimated 55,000 Palestinians have been killed. The word “genocide” has been used to describe this war for a reason.

This is not anti-semitic rhetoric. What Hamas did to Israel to start this war was atrocious and should be acknowledged as such. But what Israel has done in retaliation is also atrocious and should also be acknowledged as such. We have gone from atrocity to atrocity, and the Christian who lets their Bible approve or ordain such atrocity has ripped the teachings of Christ out of their Scriptures. Remember, Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophets and the summary of all prophetic teaching is simply to do to others what you would have them do to you. Americans have to own up, for we have played a part in this war through our actions, and American Christian eschatology has numbed our hearts to the incredible pain we’ve assisted in creating.

May our hearts break for both Palestine and Israel, for they both carry immense pain. But may our theology not justify, ordain, assist with, or celebrate war. Christians are supposed to be abundant life people. It is the work of Satan to steal, kill, and destroy.